Passing Time

Check out this gem in Michael Brick's story on plea bargain: Carmine Carini had a decision to make. He was 47 years old. Nearly half that time he had spent in prison for the murder of a Brooklyn record shop owner, a man shot three times to the head and dumped from a car in the watermark style of a Mafia execution.



In those 23 years, Mr. Carini's infant son had grown to a young man. His cousins, well-known Mafia assassins, had been murdered for bungling a job. Vigorous prosecution had diminished the city's organized-crime families. Halley's Comet had passed the Earth, a Democrat had held the White House for eight years and several new methods had been invented for the packaging of…