Word: capi
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...other 19 Mafia clans across the nation dare to challenge them. If the Gambino family literally buried its opposition in New York, then Carlo Gambino could, if he wished, control the entire national rackets combine of La Cosa Nostra. He might become what the Mafia calls capo di tutti capi -boss of all bosses. The job has been vacant since Salvatore Maranzano was assassinated...
Brilliant as Maranzano's plan was, it had one major flaw: Maranzano himself. Like his hero Caesar, Maranzano suffered from overweening ambition. Above the family bosses, there was, under his scheme, to be a Boss of All Bosses, a Capo di Tutti Capi, by the name of Salvatore Maranzano. When several of the family bosses found out that he was plotting to kill them, they worked up an assassination scheme. Five months after he took power, Il Capo di Tutti Capi was murdered. The same day, Sept. 10, 1931, 40 leaders allied with him were slain across the country...
With Maranzano's death, a kind of peace did settle over Cosa Nostra. There have been skirmishes and murders aplenty since then, but never anything like the Castellammarese War. In place of the Capo di Tutti Capi, the mobsters formed a Commission made up of nine to twelve family bosses to guide the organization and settle disputes. While its powers have never been precisely spelled out, the Commission seems to be roughly analogous to the governing body of a loose confederation. It must approve each family's choice of boss, and it can, if it wants to, remove...
According to Valachi the Cosa Nostra is ruled by a board made up of nine to twelve capi. The group became big business as far back as Prohibition. Though there have been ambitious capi since the time of Salvatore Maranzano, who in the 1920s filled a room with books about Julius Caesar, no single boss has ever really taken over-with the possible exception of Charles ("Lucky") Luciano. The Cosa Nostra now operates through 25 to 30 "families," totaling about 5,000 members. Five families and about one-third of the total troops are based in New York City, where...
Repealing the Toll. Singer arrived at Scripto during a crisis year in which profits plummeted 49%. Sluggish capi tal spending, vacillating management and a reluctance to diversify were taking a heavy toll. Singer, who tried his hand briefly as a guard for a profession al basketball team after dropping out of William and Mary in 1936, had just completed four years as president of Chicago's mattress-making Sealy Inc., where he boosted annual sales from $56 million to $81 million. As he saw it, Scripto's problem was divided into two parts. First he concentrated on management...