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Capone, Alphonse, 1899 - 1947




Cagliostro, Alessandro, 1743 - 1795

Guess the name of the character.

According to the Bible, he was the first murderer. The story is told in Genesis, Chapter Four He was a tiller of the soil and his brother Abel was a shepherd. They were both sons of Adam and Eve. When the Lord accepted Abel's offerings and rejected those of his, he was very "wroth and his countenance fell". He tell upon his brother Abel and killed him. When the Lord asked him where his brother was, he asked the famous question "am I my brother's keeper?". For his crime, he was banished to be a wanderer over the earth, but to prevent him being killed, God put a mark upon him to protect him. According to the Bible, he went to live in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

Count Cagliostro's real name was Guiseppe Balsamo, and he became famous as a charlatan or confidence trickster, as we would call him today. As a young man he learned a little about chemistry and medicine and then left Sicily in 1769. After getting some knowledge of the supernatural, he appeared in Malta as the great Count Cagliostro, specialist in medicine, magic and all kinds of strange arts. He was soon fleecing the rich of Europe, selling them an elixir of youth and love potions. Finally he was condemned to death in Rome for setting up a secret society and died in prison at San Leone.

Find in the text the words that correspond to the following definitions.

- a person, who claims to have more skill, knowledge or ability than he really has;

- a person, who cheats sb. out of his money by some fraudulent scheme which seems to be honest;

- to cheat sb. and take his money;

- to sentence a criminal to death.

13.Guess the name of the character^

This Roman Emperor will always be remembered for his great cruelty and love of bloodshed. On one occasion, at one of the famous games, at which the gladiators performed, he is said to have remarked that he wished that the Roman people had only one neck so that he could kill them all with one blow. There is little doubt this his extreme cruelty was due to madness, as he started his reign in a very reasonable way. However, after a strange illness, he began to act as though insane and declared himself a god and even gave his horse a high public office. In the end he was murdered by a member of his own bodyguard as he left the games on 24th January A.D. 41.

"Al" Capone is possibly the best-known of all American gangsters, though by no means the most important. His home ground was Chicago. He was brought into the rackets by Johnny Torrio and Tome's uncle "Big Jim" Colosimo. Capone seized his chance when prohibition was declared in 1920, which made the manufacture and sale of alcohol illegal in America. He soon rose to control a large part of the illegal liquor market in Chicago and the Middle West. A fierce and vicious man, he was responsible for many gangland killings, including the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre, in which seven rival "bootleggers" (men selling illicit liquor) were trapped by gunmen dressed as police and machine-gunned to death. He was imprisoned in 1931 on income tax charges, became a model prisoner and was released in 1939.

Explain the meanings of the following words and expressions.

- gangster;

- racket;

- "prohibition law";

- "bootlegger".




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