Word: cosa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...Cosa Nostra itself, the Italian core of organized crime, consists of only 3,000 to 5,000 individuals scattered around the nation in 24 "families," or regional gangs, each headed by a boss and organized loosely along military lines. There is no national dictator or omnipotent unit giving precise direction on all operations. Rather, the families constitute a relatively loose confederation under a board of directors
...when New York state police happened upon a meeting of the Commission and its lieutenants at the estate of Joseph Barbara in upstate Apalachin. The authorities were able to find out who the mobsters were and, more important, that they were together. In 1962, Joe Valachi, the Cosa Nostra soldier-turned-informer, confirmed and explained what the FBI had been hearing from its bugs for months. Though he looked at the Mob from the bottom up, Valachi's remarkable memory nonetheless provided invaluable insights into its organization. From January 1961 to December 1968, the Government indicted 290 members of Cosa...
...more or less tolerated by the affluent. Among the public there is often a certain psychological hypocrisy. Rage is great over conspicuous criminal acts, but there is less anger over the far more harmful depredations that are the specialty of organized crime. Until there is a popular revolt, La Cosa Nostra will probably endure...
...Mafia," literally, means swank, or dolled up, but it probably derives from a Sicilian term meaning beauty or pride. In the context of crime, Mafia applies to the older, strictly Sicilian element of the Mob. "La Cosa Nostra," or Our Thing, is a broader term that means the modern American-born organization...