Word: bosse
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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 a Newark city detective as a bodyguard...
...extort 50% of his six-figure take. As DiPiazzo related the story, he was forced to go before a committee in Chicago, where he haggled the bite down to a mere $35 a day. His big bargaining point was that he cooperated with "the Little Man," Louisiana Family Boss Carlos Marcello...
Ostentatious living has gone out as well, despite the fact that even the lowliest members are often millionaires. The Government provides one good reason. If a man spends much more than he shows on his income tax return, the IRS can nail him for tax fraud. Few of the bosses thus claim or openly spend much more than would a moderately successful businessman. The ancient, somewhat puritanical code of the Mafia, which dislikes display, provides another reason for simple style. The late New York boss Vito Genovese, for example, used to drive a two-year-old Ford, spent little more...
...loyalty. It is not always honored, to be sure, but it nevertheless remains a powerful binding force within the organization. Indeed, the very human characteristics of respect and loyalty, together with the organization's dynastic structure, offer some clues to its remarkable durability. Son follows father, underboss follows boss, and the line continues over the decades...
...memory. There, amid poverty and foreign intrusion, survival and prosperity depended on one's own immediate group and one's own rules. Does the younger generation have any qualms about what it is doing? It would seem not. In The Godfather, the Dartmouth-educated son of a New York boss gives his bride what is probably the typical rationale. Members of Cosa Nostra, he reasons, are no worse than any other Americans. "In my history course at Dartmouth, we did some background on all the Presidents, and they had fathers and grandfathers who were lucky they didn't get hanged...