title: Lina Medina

text: There was widespread interest in the case. The "San Antonio Light" newspaper in Texas reported in its 16 July 1939 edition that a Peruvian obstetrician and midwife association had demanded she be admitted to a national maternity hospital, and quoted reports in the Peruvian paper "La Crónica" that an American film studio had sent a representative "with authority to offer the sum of $5,000 to benefit the minor" in return for filming rights, but "we know that the offer was rejected". The article noted that Lozada had made films of Medina for scientific documentation and had shown them while addressing Peru's National Academy of Medicine. Some of the films had fallen into a river on a visit to the girl's hometown, but enough remained to "intrigue the learned savants".


title: Lina Medina

text: Six weeks after the diagnosis, on 14 May 1939, Medina gave birth to a boy by caesarean section. She was 5 years, 7 months, and 21 days old, the youngest person in history to give birth. The caesarean birth was necessitated by her small pelvis. The surgery was performed by Lozada and Dr Busalleu, with Dr Colareta providing anaesthesia. The doctors found she had fully mature sexual organs from precocious puberty. Dr. Edmundo Escomel reported her case in the medical journal "La Presse Médicale", including that her menarche had occurred at eight months of age, in contrast to previous reports that she had had regular periods since the age of three or two and a half.


title: Lina Medina

text: Medina's son weighed at birth and was named Gerardo after her doctor. He was raised believing Medina to be his sister before finding out at age 10 that she was his mother. After initially remaining with the family, Lozada was allowed to take custody of the son at Lozada's home in Lima. Subsequently, he employed Lina at his clinic in Lima (where she also resided), though Lina was only able to see her son occasionally. Her son grew up healthy, but died in 1979 at the age of 40 from bone marrow disease.


title: Lina Medina

text: According to Peruvian law, the mere fact of Medina's pregnancy meant that she had been raped at some point before her fifth birthday. Medina has never revealed the identity of the father nor the circumstances of her impregnation. Escomel suggests that she might not know herself, as she "couldn't give precise responses". Lina's father was arrested on suspicion of child sexual abuse but released due to lack of evidence.


title: Lina Medina

text: In young adulthood, Medina worked as a secretary in the Lima clinic of Lozada, which gave her an education and helped put her son through high school. She married and had a second son in 1972. In 2002, she refused an interview with Reuters, just as she had turned away many reporters in years past.


title: Lina Medina

text: Although it was speculated that the case was a hoax, a number of doctors over the years have verified it based on biopsies, X rays of the fetal skeleton "in utero", and photographs taken by the doctors caring for her.


title: Lina Medina

text: There are two published photographs documenting the case. The first was taken around the beginning of April 1939, when Medina was seven and a half months into pregnancy. Taken from her left side, it shows her standing naked in front of a neutral backdrop. It is the only published photograph taken during her pregnancy. Hers is a rare, well-documented case of extreme precocious pregnancy in a child under six.


title: Rocky

text: Rocky is a 1976 American sports drama film directed by John G. Avildsen and written by and starring Sylvester Stallone. It is the first installment in the "Rocky" franchise and stars Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, and Burgess Meredith. In the film, Rocky Balboa (Stallone), an uneducated, small-time club fighter and debt collector gets an unlikely shot at the world heavyweight championship held by Apollo Creed (Weathers).


title: Rocky

text: "Rocky" entered development in March 1975, after Stallone wrote the screenplay in three days. It entered a complicated production process after Stallone refused to allow the film to be made without him in the lead role; United Artists eventually agreed to cast Stallone after he rejected a six figure deal for the film rights. Principal photography began in January 1976, with filming primarily held in Philadelphia; several locations featured in the film, such as the Rocky Steps, are now considered cultural landmarks. With an estimated production budget of under $1 million, "Rocky" popularized the rags to riches and American Dream themes of sports dramas which preceded the film.


title: Rocky

text: "Rocky" was premiered in New York City on November 21, 1976, and was theatrically released in the United States by United Artists on December 3. Rocky became the highest-grossing film of 1976, earning approximately $225 million worldwide. The film received critical acclaim toward Stallone's writing, performance and the story; among other accolades, it received ten Academy Award nominations and won three, including Best Picture.


title: Rocky

text: It has been ranked by numerous publications as one of the greatest films of all time, as well as one of the most iconic sports film ever made. "Rocky" and its theme song have become a pop-cultural phenomenon and an important part of 1970s American popular culture spawning a film series as well as a series of video games and merchandise.


title: Rocky

text: In 2006, the Library of Congress selected "Rocky" for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Rocky

text: In 1975, the heavyweight boxing world champion, Apollo Creed, announces plans to hold a title bout in Philadelphia during the upcoming United States Bicentennial. However, he is informed five weeks from the fight date that his scheduled opponent Mac Lee Green is unable to compete due to an injured hand. With all other potential replacements booked up or otherwise unavailable, Creed decides to spice things up by giving a local contender a chance to challenge him.


title: Rocky

text: Creed selects Rocky Balboa, an Italian American journeyman southpaw boxer who fights primarily in small gyms and works as a collector for a loan shark. Rocky meets with promoter George Jergens assuming that Creed is seeking local sparring partners. Reluctant at first, Rocky eventually agrees to the fight which will pay him $150,000. Rocky undergoes several weeks of unorthodox training, such as using sides of beef as punching bags.


title: Rocky

text: Rocky is later approached by Mickey Goldmill, a former bantamweight fighter who turned trainer and whose gym Rocky frequents, about further training. Rocky is not willing initially, as Mickey has not shown much interest in helping him before and sees him as a wasted talent, but eventually Rocky accepts the offer.


title: Rocky

text: Rocky begins to build a romantic relationship with Adrian Pennino, who is working part-time at the J&M Tropical Fish pet shop. Adrian's brother and Rocky's best friend, Paulie, helps Rocky get a date with his sister and offers to work as a corner man with him for the fight. Paulie becomes jealous of Rocky's success, but Rocky placates him by agreeing to advertise the meat packing business where Paulie works as part of the upcoming fight. The night before the fight, a sleepless Rocky visits the Philadelphia Spectrum and begins to lose confidence. He confesses to Adrian that he does not believe he can win, but strives to go the distance against Creed, which no other fighter has done, to prove himself to everyone.


title: Rocky

text: On New Year's Day, the fight is held with Creed making a dramatic entrance dressed as George Washington and then Uncle Sam. Taking advantage of his overconfidence, Rocky knocks him down in the first round—the first time that Creed has ever been knocked down. Humbled and worried, Creed takes Rocky more seriously for the rest of the fight, though his ego never fully fades. The fight goes on for the full fifteen rounds, with both combatants sustaining various injuries. Rocky, with hits to the head and swollen eyes, requires his right eyelid to be cut to restore his vision. Apollo, with internal bleeding and a broken rib, struggles to breathe. As the fight concludes, Creed's superior skill is countered by Rocky's apparently unlimited ability to absorb punches and his dogged refusal to go down. As the final bell sounds, with both fighters embracing each other, they promise each other there will be no rematch.


title: Rocky

text: After the fight, the sportscasters and the audience go wild. Jergens announces over the loudspeaker that the fight was "the greatest exhibition of guts and stamina in the history of the ring", and Rocky calls out repeatedly for Adrian, who runs down and comes into the ring. As Jergens declares Creed the winner by virtue of a split decision, Rocky and Adrian embrace and profess their love for each other, not caring about the outcome of the fight.


title: Rocky

text: Sylvester Stallone wrote the screenplay for "Rocky" in three and a half days, shortly after watching the championship match between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner that took place at Richfield Coliseum in Richfield, Ohio, on March 24, 1975. Wepner was TKO'd in the 15th round of the match by Ali, with few expecting him to last as long as he did. Despite the match motivating Stallone to begin work on "Rocky", he has denied Wepner provided any inspiration for the script. Other inspiration for the film may have included characteristics of real-life boxers Rocky Marciano and Joe Frazier, as well as Rocky Graziano's autobiography "Somebody Up There Likes Me" and the movie of the same name. Wepner sued Stallone, and eventually settled for an undisclosed amount.


title: Rocky

text: Henry Winkler, Stallone's co-star in "The Lords of Flatbush" who then broke out as Arthur Fonzarelli on ABC's "Happy Days", said he had taken the script to executives at the network. They expressed interest in turning it into a made-for-television movie and actually bought the script but insisted that someone else re-write it. Upon hearing the news, Stallone begged Winkler not to let ABC change writers, so Winkler went back to the executives and offered to return the money in exchange for the rights. While ABC refused at first, Winkler said he was able to use his status as one of its biggest stars at the time to convince them to sell the rights back.


title: Rocky

text: At the time, Film Artists Management Enterprises (FAME), a joint venture between Hollywood talent agents Craig T. Rumar and Larry Kubik, represented Stallone. He submitted his script to Rumar and Kubik, who immediately saw the potential for it to be made into a motion picture. They shopped the script to various producers and studios in Hollywood but were repeatedly rejected because Stallone insisted that he be cast in the lead role. Eventually, they secured a meeting with Winkler-Chartoff productions. After repeated negotiations with Rumar and Kubik, Winkler-Chartoff agreed to a contract for Stallone to be the writer and also star in the lead role for Rocky.


title: Rocky

text: United Artists liked Stallone's script and viewed it as a vehicle for a well-established star like Robert Redford, Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds, or James Caan. Stallone's agents insisted that Stallone portray the title character, to the point of issuing an ultimatum. Stallone later said that he would never have forgiven himself had the film become a success with somebody else in the lead. He also knew that producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff's contract with the studio enabled them to "greenlight" a project if the budget was kept low enough. The producers also collateralized any possible losses with their big-budget entry, "New York, New York" (whose eventual losses were covered by "Rocky" success). The film's production budget ended up being $1,075,000, with a further $100,000 spent on producers' fees and $4.2 million on advertising costs.


title: Rocky

text: Although Chartoff and Winkler were enthusiastic about the script and the idea of Stallone playing the lead character, they were hesitant about having an unknown headline the film. The producers also had trouble casting other major characters in the story, with Apollo Creed and Adrian cast unusually late by production standards. Real-life boxer Ken Norton was initially sought for the role of Apollo Creed, but he pulled out and the role was ultimately given to Carl Weathers. Norton, upon whom Creed was loosely based, fought Muhammad Ali three times. According to "The Rocky Scrapbook", Carrie Snodgress was originally chosen to play Adrian, but a money dispute forced the producers to look elsewhere. Susan Sarandon auditioned for the role but was deemed too pretty for the character. After Talia Shire's ensuing audition, Chartoff and Winkler, and director John Avildsen, insisted that she play the part.


title: Rocky

text: Boxer Joe Frazier has a cameo appearance in the film. Outspoken boxer Muhammad Ali, who fought Frazier three times, influenced the character of Apollo Creed. During the 49th Academy Awards ceremony in 1977, Ali and Stallone staged a brief comic confrontation to show the film did not offend Ali. Some of the plot's most memorable moments—Rocky's carcass-punching scenes and Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of his training regimen—are taken from the real-life exploits of Joe Frazier, for which he received no credit.


title: Rocky

text: Because of the film's comparatively low budget, members of Stallone's family played minor roles. His father rings the bell to signal the start and end of a round; his brother Frank plays a street corner singer, and his first wife, Sasha, was stills photographer. Other cameos include former Philadelphia and then Los Angeles television sportscaster Stu Nahan playing himself, alongside radio and TV broadcaster Bill Baldwin; and Lloyd Kaufman, founder of the independent film company Troma, appearing as a drunk. Diana Lewis, then a news anchor in Los Angeles and later in Detroit, has a minor scene as a TV news reporter. Tony Burton appears as Apollo Creed's trainer, Tony "Duke" Evers, a role he would reprise throughout the entire "Rocky" series, though the character is not named until "Rocky II". Michael Dorn, who would later gain fame as the Klingon Worf in "" and "", made his acting debut, albeit uncredited, as Creed's bodyguard.


title: Rocky

text: Principal photography for "Rocky" began on January 9, 1976. Filming took place primarily throughout Philadelphia, with a few scenes being shot in Los Angeles. Inventor Garrett Brown's new Steadicam was used to accomplish smooth photography while running alongside Rocky during the film's Philadelphia street training sequences and the run up the Art Museum's flight of stairs, now colloquially known as the Rocky Steps. It was also used for some shots in the fight scenes and can be seen at the ringside during some wide shots of the final fight. "Rocky" is often erroneously cited as the first film to use the Steadicam, although it was actually the third, after "Bound for Glory" and "Marathon Man".


title: Rocky

text: Certain elements of the story were altered during filming. The original script had a darker tone: Mickey was portrayed as racist, and the script ended with Rocky throwing the fight after realizing he did not want to be part of the professional boxing world after all.


title: Rocky

text: Both Stallone and Weathers suffered injuries during the shooting of the final fight; Stallone suffered bruised ribs and Weathers suffered a damaged nose, the opposite injuries of what their characters had.


title: Rocky

text: The first date between Rocky and Adrian, in which Rocky bribes a janitor to allow them to skate after closing hours on a deserted ice skating rink, was shot that way only because of budgetary pressures. This scene was originally scheduled to be shot in a skating rink during regular business hours. However, the producers decided they could not afford to hire the hundreds of extras that would have been necessary for that scene.


title: Rocky

text: The poster seen above the ring before Rocky fights Apollo Creed shows Rocky wearing red shorts with a white stripe when he actually wears white shorts with a red stripe. When Rocky points this out, he is told that "it doesn't really matter, does it?" According to director Avildsen's DVD commentary, this was an actual mistake made by the props department that they could not afford to rectify, so Stallone wrote the brief scene to ensure the audience did not see it as a goof. Conversely, Stallone has said he was indeed supposed to wear red shorts with a white stripe as Rocky, but changed to the opposite colors "at the last moment". Similarly, when Rocky's robe arrived far too baggy on the day it was needed for filming, Stallone wrote in dialogue where Rocky points this out.


title: Rocky

text: Bill Conti composed the musical score for "Rocky". He had composed a score for director John G. Avildsen's "W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings" (1975) that the studio ultimately rejected. David Shire (then-husband of Talia Shire) was the first to be offered the chance to compose the music for "Rocky" but had to turn it down because of prior commitments. Avildsen reached out to Conti without any studio help because of the film's relatively low budget. Avildsen said, "The budget for the music was 25 grand. And that was for everything: The composer's fee, that was to pay the musicians, that was to rent the studio, that was to buy the tape that it was going to be recorded on."


title: Rocky

text: The main theme song, "Gonna Fly Now", made it to number one on "Billboard" magazine's Hot 100 list for one week (from July 2 to July 8, 1977) and the American Film Institute placed it 58th on its AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs. United Artists Records released the soundtrack album on November 12, 1976. EMI re-released the album on CD and cassette.


title: Rocky

text: Frank Stallone's song "Take It Back" is also on the soundtrack, and he also sings the song in the movie with other friends around a trash can fire.


title: Rocky

text: The movie was released on Sunday, November 21, 1976, by United Artists at Cinema II in New York City.


title: Rocky

text: "Rocky" grossed $5,488 on its opening day at Cinema II, a house record. When it was released nationally, it grossed $5 million during its first wide weekend and consistently performed well for eight months and eventually reached $117 million at the North American box office. Adjusted for inflation in 2018, the film earned over $500 million in North America alone. Overseas, "Rocky" grossed $107 million, for a worldwide box office total of $225 million. With its production budget of just under $1 million, "Rocky" is notable for its worldwide percentage return of over 11,000 percent. It was the highest-grossing film released in 1976 in the United States and Canada and the second highest-grossing film of 1977, behind "Star Wars".


title: Rocky

text: "Rocky" received positive reviews at the time of its release. Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave it 4 out of 4 stars and said that Stallone reminded him of "the young Marlon Brando." "Box Office Magazine" claimed audiences would be "touting Sylvester 'Sly' Stallone as a new star". Frank Rich liked the film, calling it "almost 100 per cent schmaltz", but favoring it over the cynicism that was prevalent in movies at that time, although he referred to the plot as "gimmicky" and the script "heavy-handed". Several reviews, including Richard Eder's (as well as Canby's negative review), compared the work to that of Frank Capra.


title: Rocky

text: The film, however, did not escape criticism. Vincent Canby, of "The New York Times", called it "pure '30s make believe" and dismissed both Stallone's acting and Avildsen's directing, calling the latter "none too decisive". Andrew Sarris found the Capra comparisons disingenuous: "Capra's movies projected more despair deep down than a movie like "Rocky" could envisage, and most previous ring movies have been much more cynical about the fight scene"; commenting on Rocky's work for a loan shark, Sarris says the film "teeters on the edge of sentimentalizing gangsters". He found Meredith "oddly cast in the kind of part the late James Gleason used to pick his teeth".


title: Rocky

text: In modern times, the film enjoys a reputation as a classic and still receives nearly universal praise; "Rocky" holds a 91% "Certified Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 69 reviews, with an average rating of 8.30/10. The site's consensus states: "This story of a down-on-his-luck boxer is thoroughly predictable, but Sylvester Stallone's script and stunning performance in the title role brush aside complaints." One of the positive online reviews came from the BBC Films website, with both reviewer Almar Haflidason and BBC online users giving it 5/5 stars. In Steven J. Schneider's "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", Schneider says the film is "often overlooked as schmaltz".


title: Rocky

text: In 2006, the Library of Congress selected "Rocky" for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Rocky

text: The Directors Guild of America awarded "Rocky" its annual award for best film of the year in 1976, and in 2006, Sylvester Stallone's original screenplay for "Rocky" was selected for the Writers Guild of America Award as the 78th best screenplay of all time.


title: Rocky

text: In June 2008, AFI revealed its "Ten top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. "Rocky" was acknowledged as the second-best film in the sports genre, after "Raging Bull".


title: Rocky

text: In 2008, "Rocky" was chosen by British film magazine "Empire" as one of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time". In contrast, in a 2005 poll by "Empire", Rocky was No. 9 on their list of "The Top 10 Worst Pictures to Win Best Picture Oscar".


title: Rocky

text: In 2015, "The Hollywood Reporter" polled hundreds of Academy members, asking them to re-vote on past controversial decisions. Academy members indicated that, given a second chance, they would award the 1977 Oscar for Best Picture to "All the President's Men" instead.


title: Rocky

text: The film's success led to eight more sequels, Beginning with "Rocky II" in 1979. Followed by "Rocky III" in 1982, "Rocky IV" in 1985, "Rocky V" in 1990, "Rocky Balboa" in 2006, "Creed" in 2015 and "Creed II" in 2018. Another sequel, titled "Creed III", will be released in 2023; however, Stallone announced in April 2021 that he will not appear in the film.


title: Rocky

text: In July 2019, Stallone said in an interview that there have been ongoing discussions about a prequel to the original film based on the life of a young Rocky Balboa.


title: Rocky

text: The famous scene of Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has become a cultural icon, with the steps acquiring the vernacular title of "Rocky Steps". In 1982, a statue of Rocky, commissioned by Stallone for "Rocky III", was placed at the top of the Rocky Steps. City Commerce Director Dick Doran claimed that Stallone and Rocky had done more for the city's image than "anyone since Ben Franklin".


title: Rocky

text: Differing opinions of the statue and its placement led to a relocation to the sidewalk outside the Spectrum Arena, although the statue was temporarily returned to the top of the steps in 1990 for "Rocky V", and again in 2006 for the 30th anniversary of the original "Rocky" (although this time it was placed at the bottom of the steps). Later that year, it was moved permanently to a spot next to the steps.


title: Rocky

text: The scene is frequently parodied in the media. In the 2008 movie "You Don't Mess with the Zohan", Zohan's nemesis, Phantom, goes through a parody training sequence finishing with him running up a desert dune and raising his hands in victory. In the fourth-season finale of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", as the credits roll at the end of the episode, Will is seen running up the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; however, as he celebrates after finishing his climb, he passes out in exhaustion, and while he lies unconscious on the ground, a pickpocket steals his wallet and his wool hat. In "The Nutty Professor", there is a scene where Sherman Klump (Eddie Murphy) struggles to, and eventually succeeds at, running up a lengthy flight of steps on his college campus, victoriously throwing punches at the top.


title: Rocky

text: In 2006, E! named the "Rocky Steps" scene number 13 on its 101 Most Awesome Moments in Entertainment list.


title: Rocky

text: During the 1996 Summer Olympics torch relay, Philadelphia native Dawn Staley was chosen to run up the museum steps. In 2004, Presidential candidate John Kerry ended his pre-convention campaign at the foot of the steps before going to Boston to accept his party's nomination for president.


title: Rocky

text: Upon the film's release, a paperback novelization of the screenplay written by Rosalyn Drexler under the pseudonym Julia Sorel and published by Ballantine Books was released.


title: Rocky

text: Several video games have been produced based on the film. "Rocky" was released in 1987 for the Sega Master System. A game titled "Rocky" was released in 2002 for the Nintendo GameCube, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, and Xbox, and a sequel, "Rocky Legends", was released in 2004 for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. In 2016, Tapinator released a mobile game named "ROCKY" for the iOS platform, with a planned 2017 release for Google Play and Amazon platforms.


title: Rocky

text: A musical was written by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (lyrics and music), with the book by Thomas Meehan, based on the film. The musical premiered in Hamburg, Germany in October 2012. It began performances at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway on February 11, 2014, and officially opened on March 13, 2014.


title: Rocky

text: The 2016 film "Chuck" depicts Chuck Wepner and his 1975 title fight with the heavyweight champion, Muhammad Ali, and the fight's influence on the screenplay for "Rocky".


title: Rocky

text: "Rocky" is featured in the 2017 documentary "John G. Avildsen: King of the Underdogs" about Academy Award-winning "Rocky" director John G. Avildsen, directed and produced by Derek Wayne Johnson.


title: Rocky

text: Stallone later hand-picked Johnson to direct and produce a documentary on the making of the original "Rocky", entitled "40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic", which was released in 2020. The documentary features Stallone narrating behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the film.


title: XML

text: Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.


title: XML

text: The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability across the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, the language is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures such as those used in web services.


title: XML

text: Several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages, while programmers have developed many application programming interfaces (APIs) to aid the processing of XML data.


title: XML

text: The main purpose of XML is serialization, i.e. storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. For two disparate systems to exchange information, they need to agree upon a file format. XML standardizes this process. XML is analogous to a lingua franca for representing information.


title: XML

text: As a markup language, XML labels, categorizes, and structurally organizes information. XML tags represent the data structure and contain metadata. What's within the tags is data, encoded in the way the XML standard specifies. An additional XML schema (XSD) defines the necessary metadata for interpreting and validating XML. (This is also referred to as the canonical schema.) An XML document that adheres to basic XML rules is "well-formed"; one that adheres to its schema is "valid."


title: XML

text: IETF (which supersedes the older ), provides rules for the construction of media types for use in XML message. It defines three media types: codice_1 (codice_2 is an alias), codice_3 (codice_4 is an alias) and codice_5. They are used for transmitting raw XML files without exposing their internal semantics. RFC 7303 further recommends that XML-based languages be given media types ending in codice_6, for example, codice_7 for SVG.


title: XML

text: Further guidelines for the use of XML in a networked context appear in , also known as IETF BCP 70, a document covering many aspects of designing and deploying an XML-based language.


title: XML

text: XML has come into common use for the interchange of data over the Internet. Hundreds of document formats using XML syntax have been developed, including RSS, Atom, Office Open XML, OpenDocument, SVG, and XHTML. XML also provides the base language for communication protocols such as SOAP and XMPP. It is the message exchange format for the Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) programming technique.


title: XML

text: Many industry data standards, such as Health Level 7, OpenTravel Alliance, FpML, MISMO, and National Information Exchange Model are based on XML and the rich features of the XML schema specification. In publishing, Darwin Information Typing Architecture is an XML industry data standard. XML is used extensively to underpin various publishing formats.


title: XML

text: The material in this section is based on the XML Specification. This is not an exhaustive list of all the constructs that appear in XML; it provides an introduction to the key constructs most often encountered in day-to-day use.


title: XML

text: XML documents consist entirely of characters from the Unicode repertoire. Except for a small number of specifically excluded control characters, any character defined by Unicode may appear within the content of an XML document.


title: XML

text: XML includes facilities for identifying the "encoding" of the Unicode characters that make up the document, and for expressing characters that, for one reason or another, cannot be used directly.


title: XML

text: XML 1.1 extends the set of allowed characters to include all the above, plus the remaining characters in the range U+0001–U+001F. At the same time, however, it restricts the use of C0 and C1 control characters other than U+0009 (Horizontal Tab), U+000A (Line Feed), U+000D (Carriage Return), and U+0085 (Next Line) by requiring them to be written in escaped form (for example U+0001 must be written as codice_25 or its equivalent). In the case of C1 characters, this restriction is a backwards incompatibility; it was introduced to allow common encoding errors to be detected.


title: XML

text: The Unicode character set can be encoded into bytes for storage or transmission in a variety of different ways, called "encodings". Unicode itself defines encodings that cover the entire repertoire; well-known ones include UTF-8 (which the XML standard recommends using, without a BOM) and UTF-16. There are many other text encodings that predate Unicode, such as ASCII and various ISO/IEC 8859; their character repertoires are in every case subsets of the Unicode character set.


title: XML

text: XML allows the use of any of the Unicode-defined encodings and any other encodings whose characters also appear in Unicode. XML also provides a mechanism whereby an XML processor can reliably, without any prior knowledge, determine which encoding is being used. Encodings other than UTF-8 and UTF-16 are not necessarily recognized by every XML parser (and in some cases not even UTF-16, even though the standard mandates it to also be recognized).


title: XML

text: XML provides "escape" facilities for including characters that are problematic to include directly. For example:


title: XML

text: All permitted Unicode characters may be represented with a "numeric character reference". Consider the Chinese character "中", whose numeric code in Unicode is hexadecimal 4E2D, or decimal 20,013. A user whose keyboard offers no method for entering this character could still insert it in an XML document encoded either as codice_35 or codice_36. Similarly, the string "I <3 Jörg" could be encoded for inclusion in an XML document as codice_37.


title: XML

text: codice_38 is not permitted because the null character is one of the control characters excluded from XML, even when using a numeric character reference. An alternative encoding mechanism such as Base64 is needed to represent such characters.


title: XML

text: Comments may appear anywhere in a document outside other markup. Comments cannot appear before the XML declaration. Comments begin with codice_39 and end with codice_40. For compatibility with SGML, the string "--" (double-hyphen) is not allowed inside comments; this means comments cannot be nested. The ampersand has no special significance within comments, so entity and character references are not recognized as such, and there is no way to represent characters outside the character set of the document encoding.


title: XML

text: XML 1.0 (Fifth Edition) and XML 1.1 support the direct use of almost any Unicode character in element names, attributes, comments, character data, and processing instructions (other than the ones that have special symbolic meaning in XML itself, such as the less-than sign, "<"). The following is a well-formed XML document including Chinese, Armenian and Cyrillic characters:


title: XML

text: The XML specification defines an XML document as a well-formed text, meaning that it satisfies a list of syntax rules provided in the specification. Some key points in the fairly lengthy list include:


title: XML

text: The definition of an XML document excludes texts that contain violations of well-formedness rules; they are simply not XML. An XML processor that encounters such a violation is required to report such errors and to cease normal processing. This policy, occasionally referred to as "draconian error handling," stands in notable contrast to the behavior of programs that process HTML, which are designed to produce a reasonable result even in the presence of severe markup errors. XML's policy in this area has been criticized as a violation of Postel's law ("Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept").


title: XML

text: The XML specification defines a valid XML document as a well-formed XML document which also conforms to the rules of a Document Type Definition (DTD).


title: XML

text: In addition to being well-formed, an XML document may be "valid". This means that it contains a reference to a Document Type Definition (DTD), and that its elements and attributes are declared in that DTD and follow the grammatical rules for them that the DTD specifies.


title: XML

text: XML processors are classified as "validating" or "non-validating" depending on whether or not they check XML documents for validity. A processor that discovers a validity error must be able to report it, but may continue normal processing.


title: XML

text: A DTD is an example of a "schema" or "grammar". Since the initial publication of XML 1.0, there has been substantial work in the area of schema languages for XML. Such schema languages typically constrain the set of elements that may be used in a document, which attributes may be applied to them, the order in which they may appear, and the allowable parent/child relationships.


title: XML

text: Two peculiar features that distinguish DTDs from other schema types are the syntactic support for embedding a DTD within XML documents and for defining "entities", which are arbitrary fragments of text or markup that the XML processor inserts in the DTD itself and in the XML document wherever they are referenced, like character escapes.


title: XML

text: A newer schema language, described by the W3C as the successor of DTDs, is XML Schema, often referred to by the initialism for XML Schema instances, XSD (XML Schema Definition). XSDs are far more powerful than DTDs in describing XML languages. They use a rich datatyping system and allow for more detailed constraints on an XML document's logical structure. XSDs also use an XML-based format, which makes it possible to use ordinary XML tools to help process them.


title: XML

text: RELAX NG (Regular Language for XML Next Generation) was initially specified by OASIS and is now a standard (Part 2: "Regular-grammar-based validation" of ISO/IEC 19757 – DSDL). RELAX NG schemas may be written in either an XML based syntax or a more compact non-XML syntax; the two syntaxes are isomorphic and James Clark's conversion tool—Trang—can convert between them without loss of information. RELAX NG has a simpler definition and validation framework than XML Schema, making it easier to use and implement. It also has the ability to use datatype framework plug-ins; a RELAX NG schema author, for example, can require values in an XML document to conform to definitions in XML Schema Datatypes.


title: XML

text: Schematron is a language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in an XML document. It typically uses XPath expressions. Schematron is now a standard (Part 3: "Rule-based validation" of ISO/IEC 19757 – DSDL).


title: XML

text: DSDL (Document Schema Definition Languages) is a multi-part ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 19757) that brings together a comprehensive set of small schema languages, each targeted at specific problems. DSDL includes RELAX NG full and compact syntax, Schematron assertion language, and languages for defining datatypes, character repertoire constraints, renaming and entity expansion, and namespace-based routing of document fragments to different validators. DSDL schema languages do not have the vendor support of XML Schemas yet, and are to some extent a grassroots reaction of industrial publishers to the lack of utility of XML Schemas for publishing.


title: XML

text: Some schema languages not only describe the structure of a particular XML format but also offer limited facilities to influence processing of individual XML files that conform to this format. DTDs and XSDs both have this ability; they can for instance provide the infoset augmentation facility and attribute defaults. RELAX NG and Schematron intentionally do not provide these.


title: XML

text: A cluster of specifications closely related to XML have been developed, starting soon after the initial publication of XML 1.0. It is frequently the case that the term "XML" is used to refer to XML together with one or more of these other technologies that have come to be seen as part of the XML core.


title: XML

text: Some other specifications conceived as part of the "XML Core" have failed to find wide adoption, including XInclude, XLink, and XPointer.


title: XML

text: The design goals of XML include, "It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents." Despite this, the XML specification contains almost no information about how programmers might go about doing such processing. The XML Infoset specification provides a vocabulary to refer to the constructs within an XML document, but does not provide any guidance on how to access this information. A variety of APIs for accessing XML have been developed and used, and some have been standardized.


title: XML

text: Stream-oriented facilities require less memory and, for certain tasks based on a linear traversal of an XML document, are faster and simpler than other alternatives. Tree-traversal and data-binding APIs typically require the use of much more memory, but are often found more convenient for use by programmers; some include declarative retrieval of document components via the use of XPath expressions.


title: XML

text: XSLT is designed for declarative description of XML document transformations, and has been widely implemented both in server-side packages and Web browsers. XQuery overlaps XSLT in its functionality, but is designed more for searching of large XML databases.


title: XML

text: Simple API for XML (SAX) is a lexical, event-driven API in which a document is read serially and its contents are reported as callbacks to various methods on a handler object of the user's design. SAX is fast and efficient to implement, but difficult to use for extracting information at random from the XML, since it tends to burden the application author with keeping track of what part of the document is being processed. It is better suited to situations in which certain types of information are always handled the same way, no matter where they occur in the document.


title: XML

text: Pull parsing treats the document as a series of items read in sequence using the iterator design pattern. This allows for writing of recursive descent parsers in which the structure of the code performing the parsing mirrors the structure of the XML being parsed, and intermediate parsed results can be used and accessed as local variables within the functions performing the parsing, or passed down (as function parameters) into lower-level functions, or returned (as function return values) to higher-level functions. Examples of pull parsers include Data::Edit::Xml in Perl, StAX in the Java programming language, XMLPullParser in Smalltalk, XMLReader in PHP, ElementTree.iterparse in Python, System.Xml.XmlReader in the .NET Framework, and the DOM traversal API (NodeIterator and TreeWalker).


title: XML

text: A pull parser creates an iterator that sequentially visits the various elements, attributes, and data in an XML document. Code that uses this iterator can test the current item (to tell, for example, whether it is a start-tag or end-tag, or text), and inspect its attributes (local name, namespace, values of XML attributes, value of text, etc.), and can also move the iterator to the next item. The code can thus extract information from the document as it traverses it. The recursive-descent approach tends to lend itself to keeping data as typed local variables in the code doing the parsing, while SAX, for instance, typically requires a parser to manually maintain intermediate data within a stack of elements that are parent elements of the element being parsed. Pull-parsing code can be more straightforward to understand and maintain than SAX parsing code.


title: XML

text: Document Object Model (DOM) is an API that allows for navigation of the entire document as if it were a tree of node objects representing the document's contents. A DOM document can be created by a parser, or can be generated manually by users (with limitations). Data types in DOM nodes are abstract; implementations provide their own programming language-specific bindings. DOM implementations tend to be memory intensive, as they generally require the entire document to be loaded into memory and constructed as a tree of objects before access is allowed.


title: XML

text: XML data binding is the binding of XML documents to a hierarchy of custom and strongly typed objects, in contrast to the generic objects created by a DOM parser. This approach simplifies code development, and in many cases allows problems to be identified at compile time rather than run-time. It is suitable for applications where the document structure is known and fixed at the time the application is written. Example data binding systems include the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB), XML Serialization in .NET Framework. and XML serialization in gSOAP.


title: XML

text: XML has appeared as a first-class data type in other languages. The ECMAScript for XML (E4X) extension to the ECMAScript/JavaScript language explicitly defines two specific objects (XML and XMLList) for JavaScript, which support XML document nodes and XML node lists as distinct objects and use a dot-notation specifying parent-child relationships. E4X is supported by the Mozilla 2.5+ browsers (though now deprecated) and Adobe Actionscript, but has not been adopted more universally. Similar notations are used in Microsoft's LINQ implementation for Microsoft .NET 3.5 and above, and in Scala (which uses the Java VM). The open-source xmlsh application, which provides a Linux-like shell with special features for XML manipulation, similarly treats XML as a data type, using the <[ ]> notation. The Resource Description Framework defines a data type codice_45 to hold wrapped, canonical XML. Facebook has produced extensions to the PHP and JavaScript languages that add XML to the core syntax in a similar fashion to E4X, namely XHP and JSX respectively.


title: XML

text: The versatility of SGML for dynamic information display was understood by early digital media publishers in the late 1980s prior to the rise of the Internet. By the mid-1990s some practitioners of SGML had gained experience with the then-new World Wide Web, and believed that SGML offered solutions to some of the problems the Web was likely to face as it grew. Dan Connolly added SGML to the list of W3C's activities when he joined the staff in 1995; work began in mid-1996 when Sun Microsystems engineer Jon Bosak developed a charter and recruited collaborators. Bosak was well connected in the small community of people who had experience both in SGML and the Web.


title: XML

text: XML was compiled by a working group of eleven members, supported by a (roughly) 150-member Interest Group. Technical debate took place on the Interest Group mailing list and issues were resolved by consensus or, when that failed, majority vote of the Working Group. A record of design decisions and their rationales was compiled by Michael Sperberg-McQueen on December 4, 1997. James Clark served as Technical Lead of the Working Group, notably contributing the empty-element codice_46 syntax and the name "XML". Other names that had been put forward for consideration included "MAGMA" (Minimal Architecture for Generalized Markup Applications), "SLIM" (Structured Language for Internet Markup) and "MGML" (Minimal Generalized Markup Language). The co-editors of the specification were originally Tim Bray and Michael Sperberg-McQueen. Halfway through the project Bray accepted a consulting engagement with Netscape, provoking vociferous protests from Microsoft. Bray was temporarily asked to resign the editorship. This led to intense dispute in the Working Group, eventually solved by the appointment of Microsoft's Jean Paoli as a third co-editor.


title: XML

text: The XML Working Group never met face-to-face; the design was accomplished using a combination of email and weekly teleconferences. The major design decisions were reached in a short burst of intense work between August and November 1996, when the first Working Draft of an XML specification was published. Further design work continued through 1997, and XML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on February 10, 1998.


title: XML

text: XML is a profile of an ISO standard SGML, and most of XML comes from SGML unchanged. From SGML comes the separation of logical and physical structures (elements and entities), the availability of grammar-based validation (DTDs), the separation of data and metadata (elements and attributes), mixed content, the separation of processing from representation (processing instructions), and the default angle-bracket syntax. The SGML declaration was removed; thus XML has a fixed delimiter set and adopts Unicode as the document character set.


title: XML

text: Other sources of technology for XML were the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), which defined a profile of SGML for use as a "transfer syntax"; and HTML, in which elements were synchronous with their resource, document character sets were separate from resource encoding, the codice_47 attribute was invented, and (like HTTP) metadata accompanied the resource rather than being needed at the declaration of a link. The ERCS(Extended Reference Concrete Syntax) project of the SPREAD (Standardization Project Regarding East Asian Documents) project of the ISO-related China/Japan/Korea Document Processing expert group was the basis of XML 1.0's naming rules; SPREAD also introduced hexadecimal numeric character references and the concept of references to make available all Unicode characters. To support ERCS, XML and HTML better, the SGML standard IS 8879 was revised in 1996 and 1998 with WebSGML Adaptations. The XML header followed that of ISO HyTime.


title: XML

text: Ideas that developed during discussion that are novel in XML included the algorithm for encoding detection and the encoding header, the processing instruction target, the xml:space attribute, and the new close delimiter for empty-element tags. The notion of well-formedness as opposed to validity (which enables parsing without a schema) was first formalized in XML, although it had been implemented successfully in the Electronic Book Technology "Dynatext" software; the software from the University of Waterloo New Oxford English Dictionary Project; the RISP LISP SGML text processor at Uniscope, Tokyo; the US Army Missile Command IADS hypertext system; Mentor Graphics Context; Interleaf and Xerox Publishing System.


title: XML

text: The first (XML 1.0) was initially defined in 1998. It has undergone minor revisions since then, without being given a new version number, and is currently in its fifth edition, as published on November 26, 2008. It is widely implemented and still recommended for general use.


title: XML

text: The second (XML 1.1) was initially published on February 4, 2004, the same day as XML 1.0 Third Edition, and is currently in its second edition, as published on August 16, 2006. It contains features (some contentious) that are intended to make XML easier to use in certain cases. The main changes are to enable the use of line-ending characters used on EBCDIC platforms, and the use of scripts and characters absent from Unicode 3.2. XML 1.1 is not very widely implemented and is recommended for use only by those who need its particular features.


title: XML

text: Prior to its fifth edition release, XML 1.0 differed from XML 1.1 in having stricter requirements for characters available for use in element and attribute names and unique identifiers: in the first four editions of XML 1.0 the characters were exclusively enumerated using a specific version of the Unicode standard (Unicode 2.0 to Unicode 3.2.) The fifth edition substitutes the mechanism of XML 1.1, which is more future-proof but reduces redundancy. The approach taken in the fifth edition of XML 1.0 and in all editions of XML 1.1 is that only certain characters are forbidden in names, and everything else is allowed to accommodate suitable name characters in future Unicode versions. In the fifth edition, XML names may contain characters in the Balinese, Cham, or Phoenician scripts among many others added to Unicode since Unicode 3.2.


title: XML

text: Almost any Unicode code point can be used in the character data and attribute values of an XML 1.0 or 1.1 document, even if the character corresponding to the code point is not defined in the current version of Unicode. In character data and attribute values, XML 1.1 allows the use of more control characters than XML 1.0, but, for "robustness", most of the control characters introduced in XML 1.1 must be expressed as numeric character references (and #x7F through #x9F, which had been allowed in XML 1.0, are in XML 1.1 even required to be expressed as numeric character references). Among the supported control characters in XML 1.1 are two line break codes that must be treated as whitespace characters, which are the only control codes that can be written directly.


title: XML

text: There has been discussion of an XML 2.0, although no organization has announced plans for work on such a project. XML-SW (SW for skunkworks), which one of the original developers of XML has written, contains some proposals for what an XML 2.0 might look like, including elimination of DTDs from syntax, as well as integration of XML namespaces, XML Base and XML Information Set into the base standard.


title: XML

text: The World Wide Web Consortium also has an XML Binary Characterization Working Group doing preliminary research into use cases and properties for a binary encoding of XML Information Set. The working group is not chartered to produce any official standards. Since XML is by definition text-based, ITU-T and ISO are using the name Fast Infoset for their own binary format (ITU-T Rec. X.891 and ISO/IEC 24824-1) to avoid confusion.


title: XML

text: Mapping the basic tree model of XML to type systems of programming languages or databases can be difficult, especially when XML is used for exchanging highly structured data between applications, which was not its primary design goal. However, XML data binding systems allow applications to access XML data directly from objects representing a data structure of the data in the programming language used, which ensures type safety, rather than using the DOM or SAX to retrieve data from a direct representation of the XML itself. This is accomplished by automatically creating a mapping between elements of the XML schema XSD of the document and members of a class to be represented in memory.


title: XML

text: Other criticisms attempt to refute the claim that XML is a self-describing language (though the XML specification itself makes no such claim).


title: XML

text: JSON, YAML, and S-Expressions are frequently proposed as simpler alternatives (see Comparison of data serialization formats) that focus on representing highly structured data rather than documents, which may contain both highly structured and relatively unstructured content. However, W3C standardized XML schema specifications offer a broader range of structured XSD data types compared to simpler serialization formats and offer modularity and reuse through XML namespaces.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: Matthew Ryan Phillippe (; born September 10, 1974) is an American actor. After appearing as Billy Douglas on the soap opera "One Life to Live", he came to fame in the late 1990s with starring roles in films including "I Know What You Did Last Summer", "Cruel Intentions", and "54". In the 2000s, he appeared in several films, including "Gosford Park" (2001), "Crash" (2004), "Flags of Our Fathers" (2006), "Breach" (2007), "Stop-Loss" (2008), "MacGruber" (2010), and "The Lincoln Lawyer" (2011). In 2010, Phillippe played photographer Greg Marinovich in "The Bang Bang Club", and then in the lead role of Bob Lee Swagger in the USA Network thriller drama "Shooter" (2016–2018).


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: Phillippe was born in New Castle, Delaware. His mother, Susan, ran a day care center in the family's house; his father, Richard Phillippe, was a chemist. Phillippe has three sisters, and is of part French descent. He graduated from Barbizon in Wilmington, Delaware.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: Phillippe's acting career began after being signed to Cathy Parker Management in Voorhees, New Jersey. Shortly after, he made an appearance in the ABC daytime drama "One Life to Live". His character Billy Douglas, whom he played from 1992 to 1993, was the first gay teenager on a daytime soap opera. After leaving the show, Phillippe moved to Los Angeles, where he appeared in a number of small parts in various television series including "Matlock", "Due South", the TV miniseries "The Secrets of Lake Success", and movies, including the 1995 film "Crimson Tide" and the 1996 film "White Squall".


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: He was cast in the 1997 horror film, "I Know What You Did Last Summer". The film was a success, and led to Phillippe gaining wider renown and being cast in a few more high-profile films, including "54" in 1998. In 1999, he starred in "Cruel Intentions", a modern retelling of the Choderlos de Laclos novel "Les Liaisons dangereuses", which also starred Phillippe's future wife Reese Witherspoon. It was a success among its intended teenage audience, cementing Phillippe's ability to play characters that require sex appeal. Phillippe can also be seen in the Marcy Playground music video "Comin' Up From Behind", which appears on the film's soundtrack.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In the years following, he appeared in the crime drama "The Way of the Gun", starred as a famed software engineer in the thriller "Antitrust", and co-starred in Robert Altman's "Gosford Park", which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. Subsequently, Phillippe had supporting parts in the films "Igby Goes Down" (2002) and "Crash" (2005), which won the Oscar for Best Picture. His 2003 film "The I Inside" premiered on cable.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In 2006, Phillippe played real-life Navy corpsman John Bradley in the war film "Flags of Our Fathers", directed by Clint Eastwood and following the journey of the United States Marines who lifted the flag at the Battle of Iwo Jima. Phillippe has said that the film was the "best experience" of his career because of its "personal meaning" to him, and that he would have "given [his] life" to fight in World War II, noting that both of his grandfathers fought in the war. His performance was positively received by film critic Richard Roeper, who thought it was Phillippe's best performance to date. Phillippe's next role was in the thriller "Breach", in which he played FBI investigator Eric O'Neill opposite Chris Cooper. He has since commented that he believes Cooper to be "the best actor America has to offer". He then starred in "Chaos", in which he plays a police officer; "Five Fingers", a drama set in Morocco; Kimberly Peirce's Iraq war film "Stop-Loss"; and the futuristic "Franklyn".


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: Next up for Phillippe was a rare comedic role as Lt. Dixon Piper in "MacGruber", a film based on the "Saturday Night Live" (SNL) skit of the same name. It was released in the US and Canada on May 21, 2010. As part of the film's promotion, Phillippe made his SNL hosting debut on April 17, 2010. Two days later, on April 19, 2010, Phillippe co-hosted WWE Raw, also in support of "MacGruber".


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: That same year, Phillippe starred in the Canadian / South African production "The Bang-Bang Club", which tells the real-life story of the Bang-Bang Club, four South African photographers whose images documented the bloody end of apartheid. Phillippe stars as Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Greg Marinovich. Filming for the movie took place in South Africa, beginning in March 2009. Phillippe described the filming process as "really run-and-gun. There were no comforts, and I actually appreciate that." He noted that the experience affected him, explaining that "we were shooting during the day in Soweto, and it was an endless procession of funerals—death is so common. Kids there have no quality of life. It has made me want to get more involved in Africa-based charities." An early cut of the film was shown at Cannes Film Festival in May 2009, with the final version shown at Cannes in May 2010. The film officially premiered in September 2010 at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival. The US rights to the movie were picked up by Tribeca Film, which premiered the movie at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival and opened the movie in limited release on April 22, 2011.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In mid-2010, Phillippe began filming the adaptation of popular crime novel "The Lincoln Lawyer", taking on the role of Louis Roulet, a wealthy Los Angeles playboy accused of a crime for which his culpability is unclear. The movie opened on March 18, 2011, and was generally well received by critics, scoring 82% on Rotten Tomatoes as of late March 2011. Phillippe filmed his next project, the heist action film "Setup", in December 2010 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The movie focuses on a group of young men from Detroit whose attempt at a diamond heist goes awry and brings them into conflict with a mob boss. The movie had a straight-to-DVD release on September 20, 2011.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: Phillippe next filmed the dramatic dark comedy "Revenge for Jolly!" in mid-2011. The movie, which tells the story of a man set on finding his dog's murderer, premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. Phillippe subsequently began work on another movie, "Straight A's", in August 2011. Filmed in Shreveport, Louisiana, the movie stars Phillippe as a man who has been in and out of rehab for years and is now haunted by his mother's ghost.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: Starting in November 2011, Phillippe spent several months filming a 10-episode arc on the fifth and final season of the critically acclaimed TV show "Damages". Playing Channing McClaren, a Julian Assange–like character, it was his first regular TV role since his breakout part on "One Life to Live". The season aired from July to September 2012.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In 2012, Phillippe focused on his directorial debut, "Catch Hell", an indie thriller in which Phillippe stars as a fading film actor who must devise a creative escape after he is kidnapped and tortured while making a movie in Shreveport, Louisiana. In addition to directing, co-producing, and starring in the film, Phillippe also co-wrote the script with Joe Gossett. Phillippe has said that the film is based partly on the life experiences of himself and his friends (including the filming of "Straight A's" in Shreveport in 2011), but is partly meant to be "a fun scary movie in the vein of "Misery"". Filming took place on location in Shreveport in the fall of 2012. The movie was released on October 10, 2014.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In October 2013, Phillippe began filming the action thriller "Reclaim" in Puerto Rico. The movie features Phillippe as an American man who travels to Puerto Rico with his wife to adopt an orphan from Haiti. After a confrontation with a local, the child vanishes. "Reclaim" was released on September 19, 2014.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In May 2014, ABC picked up the pilot for "Secrets and Lies", which was shot in Charlotte, North Carolina in early 2014. The 10-episode mystery series debuted on March 1, 2015, as a midseason entry in the 2014–15 season. It is based on the Australian series of the same name and stars Phillippe as a family man who becomes a prime murder suspect after he discovers the body of a child.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: Phillippe was also attached to a number of possible future film roles, including "Chronicle", a film to be directed by Jay Alaimo that would have seen him in a story "about two childhood friends who reunite to launch the biggest marijuana dealership in New York City".


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: Phillippe, Breckin Meyer, Seth Green and David E. Siegal run a production company called Lucid Films. In 2010, Phillippe and Meyer began "getting a show going for Showtime", serving as executive producers. The comedy, "Heavy and Rolling", tells the story of a Manhattan towncar driver who assumes different identities as he moves towards madness. Phillippe also served as executive producer and narrator on "Isolated", a documentary that follows five surfers as they travel to remote New Guinea in search of untouched waves. The documentary premiered in January 2013 at the 2013 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In 2015, Phillippe was cast in the lead role of Bob Lee Swagger on the USA Network thriller drama series "Shooter", which premiered in November 2016.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In February 2020, Phillippe was announced in the role of Cody Hoyt in the ABC crime drama series "Big Sky" which was created by David E. Kelley.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In 2021, Phillipe starred in the movie "One Shot", a British action thriller film directed by James Nunn.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In 1997, Phillippe met actress Reese Witherspoon at a party for her 21st birthday. The following year, the pair starred together in "Cruel Intentions". Phillippe and Witherspoon married on June 5, 1999, in a small ceremony at Old Wide Awake Plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, when Witherspoon was six months pregnant. Their daughter was born in 1999 and their son was born in 2003.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: On October 30, 2006, Phillippe and Witherspoon released a statement announcing that they were formally separating. Witherspoon filed for divorce on November 8, 2006, citing irreconcilable differences as the cause. In light of the couple's lack of a prenuptial agreement, she requested that the court refuse to grant spousal support to Phillippe, and asked for joint legal custody and sole physical custody of the pair's two children. Phillippe filed for joint physical custody of the children on May 15, 2007, and did not seek any spousal support. The couple's marriage officially ended on October 5, 2007, with final divorce arrangements settled on June 13, 2008, according to court documents. Phillippe and Witherspoon share joint custody of their children.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: Phillippe began dating model and actress Alexis Knapp in May 2010; they ended their relationship in September that same year. After their breakup, Knapp discovered that she was pregnant by Phillippe and gave birth to a daughter in 2011.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: Phillippe began dating law student Paulina Slagter in 2011. They became engaged in 2015 but ended their relationship in 2016. In March 2017, Slagter filed a harassment report with the LAPD after Phillippe had been harassing her via text messages.


title: Ryan Phillippe

text: In September 2017, Elsie Hewitt, an ex-girlfriend of Phillippe, filed a lawsuit against him for allegedly punching, kicking, and throwing her down stairs. Hewitt was granted an Emergency Protective Order by the LAPD stating Phillippe could not come within of her. In October 2019, the case was settled.


title: American Mafia

text: The American Mafia, commonly referred to in North America as the Italian American Mafia, the Mafia, or the Mob, is a highly organized Italian American criminal society and organized crime group. The organization is often referred to by its members as Cosa Nostra (, "our thing" or "this thing of ours") and by the American government as La Cosa Nostra (LCN). The organization's name is derived from the original "Mafia" or "Cosa nostra", the Sicilian Mafia, with "American Mafia" originally referring simply to Mafia (or "Cosa nostra") groups from Sicily operating in the United States, as the organization initially emerged as an offshoot of the Sicilian Mafia (known also as "Cosa nostra" by its members) formed by Italian immigrants in the United States. However, the organization gradually evolved into a separate entity partially independent of the original Mafia in Sicily, and it eventually encompassed or absorbed other Italian immigrant and Italian-American gangsters and Italian-American crime groups (such as the American Camorra) active in the United States and Canada that were not of Sicilian origin. In North America, it is often colloquially referred to as the Italian Mafia or Italian Mob, though these terms may also apply to the separate yet related Sicilian Mafia or other organized crime groups in Italy or ethnic Italian crime groups in other countries.


title: American Mafia

text: The Mafia in the United States emerged in impoverished Italian immigrant neighborhoods or ghettos in New York's East Harlem (or Italian Harlem), the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn; also emerging in other areas of the East Coast of the United States and several other major metropolitan areas (such as New Orleans and Chicago) during the late 19th century and early 20th century, following waves of Italian immigration especially from Sicily and other regions of Southern Italy. It has its roots in the Sicilian Mafia but is a separate organization in the United States. Campanian, Calabrian and other Italian criminal groups in the U.S., as well as independent Italian-American criminals, eventually merged with Sicilian Mafiosi to create the modern pan-Italian Mafia in North America. Today, the American Mafia cooperates in various criminal activities with Italian organized crime groups, such as the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra of Campania and the 'Ndrangheta of Calabria. The most important unit of the American Mafia is that of a "family," as the various criminal organizations that make up the Mafia are known. Despite the name of "family" to describe the various units, they are not familial groupings.


title: American Mafia

text: The Mafia is currently most active in the Northeastern United States, with the heaviest activity in New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and New England, in areas such as Boston, Providence and Hartford. It also remains heavily active in Chicago and has a significant and powerful presence in other Midwestern metropolitan areas such as Kansas City, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Outside of these areas, the Mafia is also very active in Florida, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Mafia families have previously existed to a greater extent and continue to exist to a lesser extent in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Dallas, Denver, New Orleans, Rochester, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Tampa. While some of the regional crime families in these areas may no longer exist to the same extent as before, descendants have continued to engage in criminal operations, while consolidation has occurred in other areas, with rackets being controlled by more powerful crime families from nearby cities. At the Mafia's peak, there were at least 26 cities around the United States with Cosa Nostra families, with many more offshoots and associates in other cities. There are five main New York City Mafia families, known as the Five Families: the Gambino, Lucchese, Genovese, Bonanno, and Colombo families. The Italian-American Mafia has long dominated organized crime in the United States. Each crime family has its own territory and operates independently, while nationwide coordination is overseen by the Commission, which consists of the bosses of each of the strongest families. Though the majority of the Mafia's activities are contained to the Northeastern United States and Chicago, they continue to dominate organized crime in the United States, despite the increasing numbers of other crime groups.


title: American Mafia

text: The word "mafia" () derives from the Sicilian adjective "mafiusu", which, roughly translated, means "swagger", but can also be translated as "boldness" or "bravado". In reference to a man, "mafiusu" ("mafioso" in Italian) in 19th-century Sicily signified "fearless", "enterprising", and "proud", according to scholar Diego Gambetta. In reference to a woman, however, the feminine-form adjective "mafiusa" means 'beautiful' or 'attractive'. In North America, the Italian-American Mafia may be colloquially referred to as simply "The Mafia" or "The Mob." However, without context, these two terms may cause confusion; "The Mafia" may also refer to the Sicilian Mafia specifically or Italian organized crime in general, while "The Mob" can refer to other similar organized crime groups (such as the Irish Mob) or organized crime in general.


title: American Mafia

text: The first published account of what became the Mafia in the United States dates to the spring of 1869. The "New Orleans Times" reported that the city's Second District had become overrun by "well-known and notorious Sicilian murderers, counterfeiters and burglars, who, in the last month, have formed a sort of general co-partnership or stock company for the plunder and disturbance of the city." Emigration from southern Italy to the Americas was primarily to Brazil and Argentina, and New Orleans had a heavy volume of port traffic to and from both locales.


title: American Mafia

text: Mafia groups in the United States first became influential in the New York City area, gradually progressing from small neighborhood operations in poor Italian ghettos to citywide and eventually national organizations. The Black Hand was a name given to an extortion method used in Italian neighborhoods at the turn of the 20th century. It has been sometimes mistaken for the Mafia itself, which it is not. The Black Hand was a criminal society, but there were many small Black Hand gangs. Black Hand extortion was often (wrongly) viewed as the activity of a single organization because Black Hand criminals in Italian communities throughout the United States used the same methods of extortion.


title: American Mafia

text: Giuseppe Morello was the first known Mafia member to emigrate to the United States. He and six other Sicilians fled to New York after murdering eleven wealthy landowners, the chancellor and a vice chancellor of a Sicilian province. He was arrested in New Orleans in 1881 and extradited to Italy.


title: American Mafia

text: From the 1890s to 1920 in New York City the Five Points Gang, founded by Paul Kelly, were very powerful in the Little Italy of the Lower East Side. Kelly recruited some street hoodlums who later became some of the most famous crime bosses of the century such as Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Frankie Yale. They were often in conflict with the Jewish Eastmans of the same area. There was also an influential Mafia family in East Harlem. The Neapolitan Camorra was also very active in Brooklyn. In Chicago, the 19th Ward was an Italian neighborhood that became known as the "Bloody Nineteenth" due to the frequent violence in the ward, mostly as a result of Mafia activity, feuds, and vendettas.


title: American Mafia

text: New Orleans was also the site of the first possible Mafia incident in the United States that received both national and international attention. On October 15, 1890, New Orleans Police Superintendent David Hennessy was murdered execution-style. It is still unclear whether Italian immigrants actually killed him, or whether it was a frame-up by nativists against the reviled underclass immigrants. Hundreds of Sicilians were arrested on mostly baseless charges, and nineteen were eventually indicted for the murder. An acquittal followed, with rumors of bribed and intimidated witnesses. On March 14, 1891, the outraged citizens of New Orleans organized a lynch mob after the acquittal, and proceeded to kill eleven of the nineteen defendants. Two were hanged, nine were shot, and the remaining eight escaped.


title: American Mafia

text: On January 16, 1919, prohibition began in the United States with the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution making it illegal to manufacture, transport, or sell alcohol. Despite these bans, there was still a very high demand for it from the public. This created an atmosphere that tolerated crime as a means to provide liquor to the public, even among the police and city politicians. While not explicitly related to Mafia involvement, the murder rate during the Prohibition era rose over from 6.8 per 100,000 individuals to and within the first three months proceeding the Eighteenth Amendment, a half-million dollars in bonded whiskey was stolen from government warehouses. The profits that could be made from selling and distributing alcohol were worth the risk of punishment from the government, which had a difficult time enforcing prohibition. There were over 900,000 cases of liquor shipped to the borders of U.S. cities. Criminal gangs and politicians saw the opportunity to make fortunes and began shipping larger quantities of alcohol to U.S. cities. The majority of the alcohol was imported from Canada, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest where stills manufactured illegal alcohol.


title: American Mafia

text: In the early 1920s, fascist Benito Mussolini took control of Italy and waves of Italian immigrants fled to the United States. Sicilian Mafia members also fled to the United States, as Mussolini cracked down on Mafia activities in Italy. Most Italian immigrants resided in tenement buildings. As a way to escape the poor lifestyle, some Italian immigrants chose to join the American Mafia.


title: American Mafia

text: The Mafia took advantage of prohibition and began selling illegal alcohol. The profits from bootlegging far exceeded the traditional crimes of protection, extortion, gambling, and prostitution. Prohibition allowed Mafia families to make fortunes. As prohibition continued, victorious factions went on to dominate organized crime in their respective cities, setting up the family structure of each city. The bootlegging industry organized members of these gangs before they were distinguished as today's known families. The new industry required members at all different employment levels, such as bosses, lawyers, truckers, and even members to eliminate competitors through threat/force. Gangs hijacked each other's alcohol shipments, forcing rivals to pay them for "protection" to leave their operations alone, and armed guards almost invariably accompanied the caravans that delivered the liquor.


title: American Mafia

text: In the 1920s, Italian Mafia families began waging wars for absolute control over lucrative bootlegging rackets. As the violence erupted, Italians fought Irish and Jewish ethnic gangs for control of bootlegging in their respective territories. In New York City, Frankie Yale waged war with the Irish American White Hand Gang. In Chicago, Al Capone and his family massacred the North Side Gang, another Irish American outfit. In New York City, by the end of the 1920s, two factions of organized crime had emerged to fight for control of the criminal one led by Joe Masseria and the other by Salvatore Maranzano. This caused the Castellammarese War, which led to Masseria's murder in 1931. Maranzano then divided New York City into five families. Maranzano, the first leader of the American Mafia, established the code of conduct for the organization, set up the "family" divisions and structure, and established procedures for resolving disputes. In an unprecedented move, Maranzano set himself up as boss of all bosses and required all families to pay tribute to him. This new role was received negatively, and Maranzano was murdered within six months on the orders of Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Luciano was a former Masseria underling who had switched sides to Maranzano and orchestrated the killing of Masseria.


title: American Mafia

text: As an alternative to the previous despotic Mafia practice of naming a single Mafia boss as "capo di tutti capi", or "boss of all bosses," Luciano created The Commission in 1931, where the bosses of the most powerful families would have equal say and vote on important matters and solve disputes between families. This group ruled over the National Crime Syndicate and brought in an era of peace and prosperity for the American Mafia. By mid-century, there were 26 official Commission-sanctioned Mafia crime families, each based in a different city (except for the Five Families which were all based in New York). Each family operated independently from the others and generally had exclusive territory it controlled. As opposed to the older generation of "Mustache Petes" such as Maranzano and Masseria, who usually worked only with fellow Italians, the "Young Turks" led by Luciano were more open to working with other groups, most notably the Jewish-American criminal syndicates to achieve greater profits. The Mafia thrived by following a strict set of rules that originated in Sicily that called for an organized hierarchical structure and a code of silence that forbade its members from cooperating with the police (Omertà). Failure to follow any of these rules was punishable by death.


title: American Mafia

text: The rise of power that the Mafia acquired during prohibition would continue long after alcohol was made legal again. Criminal empires which had expanded on bootleg money would find other avenues to continue making large sums of money. When alcohol ceased to be prohibited in 1933, the Mafia diversified its money-making criminal activities to include (both old and new): illegal gambling operations, loan sharking, extortion, protection rackets, drug trafficking, fencing, and labor racketeering through control of labor unions. In the mid-20th century, the Mafia was reputed to have infiltrated many labor unions in the United States, most notably the Teamsters and International Longshoremen's Association. This allowed crime families to make inroads into very profitable legitimate businesses such as construction, demolition, waste management, trucking, and in the waterfront and garment industry. In addition they could raid the unions' health and pension funds, extort businesses with threats of a workers' strike and participate in bid rigging. In New York City, most construction projects could not be performed without the Five Families' approval. In the port and loading dock industries, the Mafia bribed union members to tip them off to valuable items being brought in. Mobsters would then steal these products and fence the stolen merchandise.


title: American Mafia

text: Meyer Lansky made inroads into the casino industry in Cuba during the 1930s while the Mafia was already involved in exporting Cuban sugar and rum. When his friend Fulgencio Batista became president of Cuba in 1952, several Mafia bosses were able to make legitimate investments in legalized casinos. One estimate of the number of casinos mobsters owned was no less than 19. However, when Batista was overthrown following the Cuban Revolution, his successor Fidel Castro banned U.S. investment in the country, putting an end to the Mafia's presence in Cuba. Las Vegas was seen as an "open city" where any family can work. Once Nevada legalized gambling, mobsters were quick to take advantage and the casino industry became very popular in Las Vegas. Since the 1940s, Mafia families from New York, Cleveland, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Chicago had interests in Las Vegas casinos. They got loans from the Teamsters' pension fund, a union they effectively controlled, and used legitimate front men to build casinos. When money came into the counting room, hired men skimmed cash before it was recorded, then delivered it to their respective bosses. This money went unrecorded, but the amount is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.


title: American Mafia

text: Operating in the shadows, the Mafia faced little opposition from law enforcement. Local law enforcement agencies did not have the resources or knowledge to effectively combat organized crime committed by a secret society they were unaware existed. Many people within police forces and courts were simply bribed, while witness intimidation was also common. In 1951, a U.S. Senate committee called the Kefauver Hearings determined that a "sinister criminal organization" known as the Mafia operated in the nation. Many suspected mobsters were subpoenaed for questioning, but few testified and none gave any meaningful information. In 1957, New York State Police uncovered a meeting and arrested major figures from around the country in Apalachin, New York. The event (dubbed the "Apalachin Meeting") forced the FBI to recognize organized crime as a serious problem in the United States and changed the way law enforcement investigated it. In 1963, Joe Valachi became the first Mafia member to turn state's evidence, and provided detailed information of its inner workings and secrets. More importantly, he revealed the Mafia's existence to the law, which enabled the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin an aggressive assault on the Mafia's National Crime Syndicate. Following Valachi's testimony, the Mafia could no longer operate completely in the shadows. The FBI put a lot more effort and resources into organized crime activities nationwide and created the Organized Crime Strike Force in various cities. However, while all this created more pressure on the Mafia, it did little to curb their criminal activities. Success was made by the beginning of the 1980s, when the FBI was able to rid Las Vegas casinos of Mafia control and made a determined effort to loosen the Mafia's stronghold on labor unions.


title: American Mafia

text: By the late 1970s, the Mafia were involved in many industries, including betting on college sports. Several Mafia members associated with the Lucchese crime family participated in a point shaving scandal involving the Boston College basketball team. Rick Kuhn, Henry Hill, and others associated with the Lucchese crime family, manipulated the results of the games during the 19781979 basketball season. Through bribing and intimidating several members of the team, they ensured their bets on the point spread of each game would go in their favor.


title: American Mafia

text: One of the most lucrative gains for the Mafia was through gas-tax fraud. They created schemes to keep the money that they owed in taxes after the sale of millions of dollars' worth of wholesale petroleum. This allowed them to sell more gasoline at even lower prices. Michael Franzese, also known as the Yuppie Don, ran and organized a gas scandal and stole over $290 million in gasoline taxes by evading the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and shutting down the gas station before government officials could make him pay what he owed. Franzese was caught in 1985.


title: American Mafia

text: Labor racketeering helped the Mafia control many industries from a macroeconomic scale. This tactic helped them grow in power and influence in many cities with big labor unions such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and many others. Many members of the Mafia were enlisted in unions and even became union executives. The Mafia has controlled unions all over the U.S. to extort money and resources out of big business, with recent indictments of corruption involving the New Jersey Waterfront Union, the Concrete Workers Union, and the teamster union.


title: American Mafia

text: Restaurants were yet another powerful means by which the Mafia could gain economic power. A large concentration of Mafia-owned restaurants was in New York City. Not only were they the setting of many killings and important meetings, but they were also an effective means of smuggling drugs and other illegal goods. From 1985 to 1987, Sicilian Mafiosi in the U.S. imported an estimated $1.65 billion worth of heroin through pizzerias, hiding the cargo in various food products.


title: American Mafia

text: Another one of the areas of the economy that the Mafia was most influential was Las Vegas, Nevada, beginning just after World War II with the opening of the first gambling resort "The Flamingo". Many credit the Mafia with being a big part of the city's development in the mid-20th century, as millions of dollars in capital flowing into new casino resorts laid the foundation for further economic growth. This capital didn't come from one Mafia family alone, but many throughout the country seeking to gain even more power and wealth. Large profits from casinos, run as legitimate businesses, would help to finance many of the illegal activities of the Mafia from the 1950s into the 1980s. In the 1950s more Mafia-financed casinos were constructed, such as the Stardust, Sahara, Tropicana, Desert Inn, and Riviera. Tourism in the city greatly increased through the 1960s and strengthened the local economy.


title: American Mafia

text: However, the 1960s was also when the Mafia's influence in the Las Vegas economy began to dwindle. The Nevada State government and Federal government had been working to weaken Mafia activity on the Strip. In 1969, the Nevada State Legislature passed a law that made it easier for corporations to own casinos. This brought new investors to the local economy to buy casinos from the Mafia. The U.S. Congress passed the RICO Act a year later. This law gave more authority to law enforcement to pursue the Mafia for its illegal activities. There was a sharp decline in mob involvement in Las Vegas in the 1980s. Through the RICO law, many in the Mafia were convicted and imprisoned.


title: American Mafia

text: When the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO Act) became federal law in 1970, it became a highly effective tool in prosecuting mobsters. It provides for extended criminal penalties for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. Violation of the act is punishable by up to 20 years in prison per count, up to $25,000 in fines, and the violator must forfeit all properties attained while violating the RICO Act. The RICO Act has proven to be a very powerful weapon because it attacks the entire corrupt entity instead of individuals who can easily be replaced with other organized crime members. Between 1981 and 1992, 23 bosses from around the country were convicted under the law while between 1981 and 1988, 13 underbosses and 43 captains were convicted. Over 1,000 crime family figures were convicted by 1990. While this significantly crippled many Mafia families around the country, the most powerful families continued to dominate crime in their territories, even if the new laws put more mobsters in jail and made it harder to operate.


title: American Mafia

text: A high-profile RICO case sentenced John Gotti and Frank Locascio to life in prison in 1992, with the help of informant Sammy Gravano in exchange for immunity from prosecution for his crimes. Aside from avoiding long prison stretches, the FBI could put mobsters in the United States Federal Witness Protection Program, changing their identities and supporting them financially for life. This led to dozens of mobsters testifying and providing information during the 1990s, which led to the imprisonment of hundreds of other members. As a result, the Mafia has seen a major decline in its power and influence in organized crime since the 1990s.


title: American Mafia

text: On January 9, 2003, Bonanno crime family boss Joseph Massino was arrested and indicted, alongside Salvatore Vitale, Frank Lino and capo Daniel Mongelli, in a comprehensive racketeering indictment. The charges against Massino himself included ordering the 1981 murder of Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano. Massino's trial began on May 24, 2004, with judge Nicholas Garaufis presiding and Greg D. Andres and Robert Henoch heading the prosecution. He now faced 11 RICO counts for seven murders (due to the prospect of prosecutors seeking the death penalty for the Sciascia murder, that case was severed to be tried separately), arson, extortion, loansharking, illegal gambling, and money laundering. After deliberating for five days, the jury found Massino guilty of all 11 counts on July 30, 2004. His sentencing was initially scheduled for October 12, and he was expected to receive a sentence of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. The jury also approved the prosecutors' recommended $10 million forfeiture of the proceeds of his reign as Bonanno boss on the day of the verdict.


title: American Mafia

text: Immediately after his July 30 conviction, as court was adjourned, Massino requested a meeting with Judge Garaufis, where he made his first offer to cooperate. He did so in hopes of sparing his life; he was facing the death penalty if found guilty of Sciascia's murder. Indeed, one of John Ashcroft's final acts as Attorney General was to order federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Massino. Massino thus stood to be the first Mafia boss to be executed for his crimes, and the first mob boss to face the death penalty since Lepke Buchalter was executed in 1944. Massino was the first sitting boss of a New York crime family to turn state's evidence, and the second in the history of the American Mafia to do so (Philadelphia crime family boss Ralph Natale had flipped in 1999 when facing drug charges, though Natale was mostly a “front” boss while the real boss of the Philadelphia Mafia used Natale as a diversion for authorities.)


title: American Mafia

text: In the 21st century, the Mafia has continued to be involved in a broad spectrum of illegal activities. These include murder, extortion, corruption of public officials, gambling, infiltration of legitimate businesses, labor racketeering, loan sharking, tax fraud schemes and stock manipulation schemes. Although the Mafia used to be nationwide, today most of its activities are confined to the Northeast and Chicago. While other criminal organizations such as the Russian Mafia, Chinese Triads, Mexican drug cartels and others have all grabbed a share of criminal activities, the Mafia continues to be the dominant criminal organization in these regions, partly due to its strict hierarchical structure. Law enforcement is concerned with the possible resurgence of the Mafia as it regroups from the turmoil of the 1990s, although FBI and local law enforcement agencies now focus more on homeland security and less on organized crime since the September 11 attacks. To avoid FBI attention and prosecution, the modern Mafia also outsources a lot of its work to other criminal groups, such as motorcycle gangs.


title: American Mafia

text: The American Mafia operates on a strict hierarchical structure. While similar to its Sicilian origins, the American Mafia's modern organizational structure was created by Salvatore Maranzano in 1931. He created the Five Families, each of which would have a boss, underboss, capos, soldiers—all only full-blooded Italian Americans—while associates could come from any background. All inducted members of the Mafia are called "made" men. This signifies that they are untouchable in the criminal underworld and any harm brought to them will be met with retaliation. With the exception of associates, all mobsters within the Mafia are "made" official members of a crime family. The three highest positions make up the administration. Below the administration, there are factions each headed by a "caporegime" (captain), who leads a crew of soldiers and associates. They report to the administration and can be seen as equivalent to managers in a business. When a boss makes a decision, he rarely issues orders directly to workers who would carry it out but instead passes instructions down through the chain of command. This way, the higher levels of the organization are insulated from law enforcement attention if the lower level members who actually commit the crime should be captured or investigated, providing plausible deniability.


title: American Mafia

text: There are occasionally other positions in the family leadership. Frequently, ruling panels have been set up when a boss goes to jail to divide the responsibility of the family (these usually consist of three or five members). This also helps divert police attention from any one member. The family messenger and street boss were positions created by former Genovese family leader Vincent Gigante.


title: American Mafia

text: The Mafia initiation ritual to become a made man in the Mafia emerged from various sources, such as Roman Catholic confraternities, Masonic Lodges in mid-19th century Sicily. At the initiation ceremony, the inductee would have his finger pricked with a needle by the officiating member; a few drops of blood are spilled on a card bearing the likeness of a saint; the card is set on fire; finally, while the card is passed rapidly from hand to hand to avoid burns, the novice takes an oath of loyalty to the Mafia family. The oath of loyalty to the Mafia Family is called the Omerta. This was confirmed in 1986 by the pentito Tommaso Buscetta.


title: American Mafia

text: A hit, or murder, of a made man must be approved by the leadership of his family, or retaliatory hits would be made, possibly inciting a war. In a state of war, families would "go to the mattresses"—means to prepare for a war or be prepared in a war-like stance. It was mainly derived from the film, "The Godfather" as the origin of the phrase, is unknown. Omertà is a key oath or code of silence in the Mafia that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders; non-cooperation with authorities, the government, or outsiders. Traditionally, to become a made man, or full member of the Mafia, the inductee was required to be a male of full Sicilian descent, later extended to males of full Italian descent, and later further extended to males of half-Italian descent through their father's lineage. According to Salvatore Vitale, it was decided during a Commission meeting in 2000 to restore the rule requiring both parents to be of Italian descent. It is also common for a Mafia member to have a mistress. Traditionally, made members were also not allowed to have mustaches—part of the Mustache Pete custom. Homosexuality is reportedly incompatible with the American Mafia code of conduct. In 1992, John D'Amato, acting boss of the DeCavalcante family, was killed when he was suspected of engaging in homosexual activity.


title: American Mafia

text: The following is a list of Mafia families that have been active in the U.S. Note that some families have members and associates working in other regions as well. The organization is not limited to these regions. The Bonanno crime family and the Buffalo crime family also had influence in several factions in Canada including the Rizzuto crime family and Cotroni crime family, and the Luppino crime family and Papalia crime family, respectively.


title: American Mafia

text: U.S. Naval Intelligence entered into an agreement with Lucky Luciano to gain his assistance in keeping the New York waterfront free from saboteurs after the destruction of the "SS Normandie".


title: American Mafia

text: This spectacular disaster convinced both sides to talk seriously about protecting the United States' East Coast on the afternoon of February 9, 1942. While it was in the process of being converted into a troopship, the luxury ocean liner, "SS Normandie", mysteriously burst into flames with 1,500 sailors and civilians on board. All but one escaped, but 128 were injured and by the next day the ship was a smoking hull. In his report, twelve years later, William B. Herlands, Commissioner of Investigation, made the case for the U.S. government talking to top criminals, stating "The Intelligence authorities were greatly concerned with the problems of sabotage and espionage…Suspicions were rife with respect to the leaking of information about convoy movements. The "Normandie", which was being converted to war use as the Navy auxiliary "Lafayette", had burned at the pier in the North River, New York City. Sabotage was suspected."