Eckybloke was sitting reading a newspaper in Vegas sipping a freshly made espresso when with a cough and a splutter he sat up, realising he'd spilt some down his white shirt.  Leaving $10 on the table he got up leaving the newspaper behind.  It was left open and anyone noticing the headline couldn't help but read it.

Diva Dons?

Celebrity Culture Comes To The Mafia

Major road upheaval anticipated

Written by Albert Hack

City planners and architects around the country have taken part in a series of meetings to gain agreement on a national strategy for dealing with localised overcrowding of the city streets.

Ordinary citizens have been complaining to their local officials that the roads around certain parts of town are virtually impassable at times of the day when the local mafia families are carrying out their business.

A special report commissioned by unidentified reporters for this very newspaper highlighted that when in an unspecified city, the local godfather and his RHM and LHM took to the streets a vast quantity of bodyguards are required to accompany these individuals.  While being unable to identify numbers it appeared that there may have been over 150 bodyguards servicing these three individuals.  Anecdotal reports seem to suggest that if the heads/RHM/LHM of the subsidiary families in that city were to get together, over 500 bodyguards are required.

The street layout when the cities were designed was not anticipated to cope with such large numbers of pedestrians and indeed large areas of the city are turned into virtual pedestrianised areas as enormous gangs of bodyguards make their way like obedient puppies alongside their masters.

A post-office submistress near to these offices who wished to remain anonymous commented that when these groups walk by, traffic grinds to a halt, not in deference to the individual but to allow these large groups to walk past.  While she acknowledged that a certain amount of crime in a neighbourhood was unavoidable what she objected to most was the collateral damage caused when any of these obscenely and insanely well protected individuals robbed her post office.  With it being quite a compact establishment she showed me where shelving had been damaged and the doors had to be widened to allow the farcical scenes of over 50 people getting in and out of her shop quickly.  She did wonder whether they really needed so many.

The local tourist information department had a different take on the situation.

“These people are like celebrities.  In fact celebrities are harder to spot in these parts.  We quite often get tourists saying how easy it is to spot the important members just because the large groups are conspicuous.   The tourists love it.  They think it’s a caricature of how mafia families are meant to be.  They’ve seen the movies where the Don has a few key individuals protecting him and certainly view it as a parody of mafia life today”

The upshot of the national strategy is expected to be the deployment of wider pavements and sidewalks, more one way traffic systems to cope with the narrowing of the streets and also perhaps individuals employed by the city council to stop and re-route traffic as these groups make their way through the streets.

After a few minutes the waitress clears the newspaper and wipes the table, leaving the paper on the counter for everyone to read