Word: cosa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Look at Organized Crime, he fearlessly exposes the blood code of the Mafia ("Death is one of the worst things that can happen to a Cosa Nostra member, and many prefer simply to pay a fine"). In this, and in most of his other recent pieces, Allen displays a debt to the creator of the Blind Explanation, Robert Benchley ("There is no such place as Budapest"). "Benchley has become a new idol for me," Allen says today. "Perhaps because everybody else also imitates Perelman's complicated style, I've tried to get simpler, like Benchley, and to write...
...quarrels of husband and wife, random slaughter in delicatessen holdups and bar brawls, and the other killings that constitute the vast majority of murders in the U.S. Instead, the Mafia practices a drama of implacable tribal will: just as Clausewitz defined war as foreign policy by other means, La Cosa Nostra regards murder as an instrument of business-often conducted with a vengeance. The peculiar vogue that the Mafia is now enjoying in films and books may spring from a kind of stylish atavism that Americans recognize in a brute feudal system that allows swift retribution with no red tape...
...ironic that the bloodletting should erupt now. Until last summer, many Americans were half-persuaded that the Mafia was chimerical. In New York, Mobster Joseph Colombo organized the Italian-American Civil Rights League, using many law-abiding Italian-Americans as a shield for the Syndicate. The Mafia and La Cosa Nostra, the league argued, were anti-Italian figments of the FBI'S imagination. Colombo even succeeded in embarrassing the producer of The Godfather into deleting the two names from the script. Then, at a "Unity Day" celebration in Manhattan's Columbus Circle last June, a black gunman named...
...prison for extortion, he allied himself with black prisoners and once organized a protest against white prison barbers who refused to cut blacks' hair. After he got out early last year, Gallo said he wanted to bring blacks into the Syndicate, an idea that infuriated older Mafiosi. La Cosa Nostra, after all, is the most exclusive men's club in the world...
Already the Gambinos are so strong that none of the 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...