vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
It’s amazing that after five years of Pulp Intl., a site partially dedicated to b-movies, we’ve only mentioned Laura Gemser once or twice before and have never featured one of her films. Probably, that’s because they’re all so bad, but we’ll take care of the omission pretty soon anyway. In the meantime here’s Gemser in a great promo shot from the Italian magazine l’Espresso, circa 1979. She was born in Surabaya, Indonesia 62 years ago today.
Italian police carried out a large raid today against organized crime figures suspected of having links to gangster Matteo Messina Denaro. Denaro, along with other aspirants, is vying to be the first to rebuild the Sicily-based Cosa Nostra, which collapsed after the 2006 arrest of then-boss Bernardo Provenzano, and the 2007 arrest of heir apparent Salvatore Lo Piccolo.
Altogether, police made around 100 arrests in the Sicilian capitol of Palermo, and on the Italian mainland in the Tuscany region. The operation, nicknamed Perseus after the mythical Greek hero who killed Medusa, was carried out with the backing of helicopters and police dogs, and was the culmination of a nine-month investigation. Those jailed will be charged with variety of offences, including extortion of arms and drug trafficking.
Anti-Mafia prosecutor Pietro Grasso said at a press conference that, “While the 2006 operation had brought Cosa Nostra to its knees, Perseus prevented it from rearing its head again.” Meanwhile Denaro, who is sometimes described as a playboy and is famous enough to have earned a L’Espresso cover and an infamous Warhol-style tribute from an anonymous Italian graffiti artist, remains at large.
In the U.S., eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts. The skillful execution of the crime, with only a bare minimum of clues left at the scene, results in the robbery being billed as “the crime of the century.” Despite this, all the members of the gang are later arrested.
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending a ten-year moratorium on Capital punishment in the United States. Gilmore’s story is later turned into a 1979 novel entitled The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and the book wins the Pulitzer Prize for literature.
American actress Carole Lombard, who was the highest paid star in Hollywood during the late 1930s, dies in the crash of TWA Flight 3, on which she was flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after headlining a war bond rally in support of America’s military efforts. She was thirty-three years old.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. Freikorps was a term applied to various paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. Members of these groups would later become prominent members of the SS.
The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with between 20,000 to 30,000 people in attendance, their purpose being to promote their ideals of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological preservation, and higher consciousness. The event is considered the beginning of the famed counterculture Summer of Love.
