Word: cosa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Made in America seems at first blush an odd title for a novel about the Mafia, but Peter Maas should be forgiven his irony. Sicily's best-known export has, of course, become as American as frozen pizza. As Maas has shown in The Valachi Papers and Serpico, Cosa Nostra reaches far below the imperial realms of The Godfather into virtually every working-class neighborhood where cash is short and the Mob's loan sharks cruise...
...official. TIME has learned that the manuscript reflects Bonanno's scorn for the Mafia's current commissioners, scalawags who were mere car thieves and moonshiners when Bonanno and four others established the Mafia ruling commission in 1931. They are unworthy of association with a royal Bonanno, writes Cosa Nostra's foremost snob, who claims to have had an audience with a Pope and a handshake with President Roosevelt...
They usually don't sing in the Cosa Nostra, so who would expect an entire opêra bouffe-from one of the godfathers no less? That's pretty much what Arizona agents orchestrated at the modest ranch house of Joseph ("Joe Bananas") Bonanno, 74, in Tucson. For three years and more, undercover snoopers sniffed Bonanno's garbage and found enough evidence to obtain an indictment against Bonanno last week for conspiracy to obstruct justice. In a basement closet they also discovered a 250-page life story, detailing Bonanno's rise to leadership...
...giving various mob leaders the impression that the Communist Party was criticizing "La Cosa Nostra," the FBI hoped for some kind of retaliation. The FBI carefully avoided specifying the exact nature of the retaliation it hoped for in bureau communications...
OTHER DOCUMENTS recently obtained by The Crimson delineate agent F.J. Baumgardner's memorandum of October 4, 1966, which recommended "a long-range counterintelligence program designed to provoke a dispute between the Communist Party, USA, and La Cosa Nostra' under the code name of Hoodwink...