Word: bigs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Nobody will listen. Nobody will believe. You know what I mean? This Cosa Nostra, it's like a second government. It's too big...
There are bits of truth in all the impressions, but all fall short. The biggest and most important truth is that La Cosa Nostra and the many satellite elements that constitute organized crime are big and powerful enough to affect the quality of American life. LCN generates corruption on a frightening scale. It touches small firms as well as large, reaches into city halls and statehouses, taints facets of show business and labor relations, and periodically sheds blood. It has a multiplier effect on crime; narcotics, a mob monopoly, drives the addicted to burglaries and other felonies to finance...
...billion-to-$10 billion range. Though he meant it as a boast, Meyer Lansky, the gang's leading financial wizard, was actually being overly modest when he chortled in 1966: "We're bigger than U.S. Steel." Measured in terms of profits, Cosa Nostra and affiliates are as big as U.S. Steel, the American Telephone and Telegraph Co., General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Electric, Ford Motor Co., IBM, Chrysler and RCA put together...
...President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice simply threw up its hands at the prospect of estimating the crime conglomerate's full penetration. "The cumulative effect of the infiltration of legitimate business in America cannot be measured," it said. Robert Kennedy, who began the first big push against the Mafia when he became Attorney General, warned that "if we do not on a national-scale attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own, they will destroy us." No one now disputes its potential for destruction...
...POLITICAL FIX takes many forms, but the most important, from LCN's view, is obtaining the cooperation of the policeman and the politicians. East of the Mississippi, particularly, it is the rare big-city government that is completely free of the fix. In Newark, corruption is rampant. One ganster recently confided to another that $12,000 a month flows to police superiors for protection? which sometimes goes beyond a shield for illicit activities. When he vacationed on the West Coast last Spring, for example, Thomas Pecora, a boss of Teamsters Local 97 as well as a Mafia man, took along...