Word: capo
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...Julius Caesar's military command, Maranzano laid down the patterns that still, with minor modifications, hold today. To stop the killing, said Maranzano, the gangs that then existed would henceforth be recognized as families, each with its own territorial limits. Heading each family would be a boss, or Capo. Under him would be an underboss, or Sottocapo, and beneath the underboss would be any number of lieutenants, or Caporegimes, leading squads of soldiers, or "button men." One advantage of the scheme was the insulation it provided the men at the top. In the ordinary course of events, they would...
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...
...Vito Genovese, 71, vice lord and Mafia chieftain who reputedly directed a multibillion-dollar underworld empire from federal prisons for the past nine years; of heart disease; in Springfield, Mo., Penitentiary. Arriving in the U.S. from Italy in 1913, Genovese proved himself a tough and shifty "soldier" and then "capo" (officer) in the Mafia ranks. Over the years he was indicted 13 times, including a conspiracy-to-murder rap he beat when the state's key witness was found poisoned. In 1957, Genovese assumed the Cosa Nostra throne after the barbershop slaying of rival Albert Anastasia (no indictment returned...
...every year. Most recently, on a June morning in 1962, he beat a fellow convict to death with a two-foot length of iron pipe at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta. By then, Valachi was fighting for his own life. He had received the "kiss of death" from his capo (boss) and cellmate Vito Genovese. In the end, Valachi did what the Cosa Nostra presumed he had done already. He became the first man to confess his membership in the shadowy organization and spilled his story to the Bureau of Narcotics...
Blood Oath. When he came out of Sing Sing in 1928 (it was his second jail term), he promptly began to repair bridges with the Cosa Nostra. In 1930, after passing his initiation-successful participation in a gangland assassination -Valachi went before Capo Maranzano ("Gee, he looked just like a banker"). Joe took his oaths with blood from his trigger finger and with flaming paper ("This is the way I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra...