Word: cosa
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Under the Diem regime, Minh gained renown as a brave "soldier's soldier" in the campaign he led in the 1950s against the notorious Binh Xuyen bandits, a kind of Vietnamese Cosa Nostra (also known as the "whorehouse gang") that pillaged the countryside and controlled vice in Saigon. Blunt, athletic and honest, he was given the sobriquet "Big" by U.S. military advisers because he was unusually large for a Vietnamese-nearly 6 ft. tall and 200 Ibs. Minh impressed Diem and in 1958 was appointed the first boss of a field-operations command that coordinated the mounting war against...
...unquestionably the greatest observer of the real world in his time, and the breadth of his inquiries would be inconceivable in ours; but this is the same Leonardo who, on cutting a pen, scribbled as his customary test sentence some variant on the melancholy words, "Dimmi, dimmi se maifufatta cosa alcuna "- "Tell me, tell me if anything ever got done...
...addition, he was nothing if not a veteran Mafia soldier, so there is ample opportunity to poke around glumly tasteless mansions inhabited by sundry god-fatherly types. And there they are, nibbling- their ethnic viands as they order up colorful executions of errant associates. Such sequences should satisfy Cosa Nostra buffs, who seem to form a significant portion of the movie audience today. Finally, as every tabloid reader must remember, Crazy Joe contracted toward the end a loose alliance with black mobsters - also outsiders as far as the Mafia leadership was concerned - who are sufficiently cheeky toward the white establishment...
...while waiting for a combat command, Herbert made powerful enemies executing his office of Inspector General. He investigated every scandal right up to its embarrassing conclusions. (One of Herbert's investigations was finally concluded last Wednesday, when the Sergeant Major of the Army pleaded guilty to running the "khaki cosa nostra" in Vietnam.) The two most powerful were Colonel Ross Franklin and General John W. Barnes, who became his immediate superiors when he was given command of the 2nd Batallion of the 173rd Air-borne. Herbert shrugged them off, confident that he was safest in sticking to Army regulations...
...Valachi, it will be recalled, was a Brooklyn hood of the lower echelon who sang arias for the McClellan Committee in the fall of 1963, giving the general public its first peek into the intricacies of the Cosa Nostra. Peter Maas's bestselling Valachi Papers was based largely on the testimony, and the movie, if we are to believe the screen credits, is based upon Maas's book, although it could just as easily have been lifted from Dick Tracy's Crimestoppers Textbook. The entire cast, in fact, look as if they were drawn by Chester Gould...