Word: cosa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...than two decades the Mafia managed to keep its board of directors hidden from the outside world, until November 1957, when police staged a celebrated raid on a national mobsters' convention in Apalachin, N.Y. In 1963 former Mafia Soldier Joseph Valachi told a Senate investigating subcommittee all about La Cosa Nostra, the previously secret name under which the brotherhood had operated. After the Mafia had been romanticized in books and movies like The Godfather, some mobsters became brazen about their affairs. In 1983 former New York Boss Joseph Bonanno even published an autobiography about his Mafia years...
Brought to bay in a courtroom, the Mafia bosses have adopted an unusual defense: rather than fight the Government's efforts to prove the existence of La Cosa Nostra, they admit it. "This case is not about whether there is a Mafia," thundered Defense Attorney Samuel Dawson. "Assume it. Accept it. There is." Nevertheless, he told the jury, "just because a person is a member of the Mafia doesn't mean he has committed the charged crime or even agreed to commit the charged crime." Dawson depicted the Commission as a sort of underworld businessmen's round table that approves...
...shuttle prisoners from the adjacent L'Ucciardone Prison into a succession of holding pens in the enormous courtroom. The scene is Palermo, Sicily, where for seven months a Mafia trial that dwarfs the various legal proceedings in New York has been under way. In the homeland of the Cosa Nostra, 474 alleged Mafiosi, whose ranks range from the reputed "Boss of Bosses," Luciano Liggio, to a corps of picciotti, or soldiers, are in the dock for crimes as high as assassination and as low as auto theft...
...Mafia's tradition of omerta, the code of silence, is explicit: betray the family and pay with your life. But beginning with the televised confessions of Cosa Nostra Songbird Joseph Valachi in 1963, that code has been repeatedly violated. At the racketeering trial of reputed Mafia Boss John Gotti last week in Brooklyn federal court, omerta suffered one of its rudest shocks...
...School in 1962 and going to work as an assistant district attorney, he began to moonlight as legal counsel for some of his acquaintances from the neighborhood. When the D.A. ordered him to abandon his private practice in 1969, Light instead quit to work full time for the Cosa Nostra. He said he received 80% to 90% of his fees in cash--"the best way to get paid...