Word: cosa
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...with the Mafia or crime. Harnessing their honest sentiments, Colombo had helped Italian Americans to achieve new pride?and managed to do a few things for the narrower cause as well, like embarrassing the Justice Department and The Godfather film makers into dropping the words Mafia and Cosa Nostra from their vocabulary...
Until Joe Colombo burst into headlines more than a year ago, the pattern of silence had never been broken. In an America now angrily aware of the Cosa Nostra, Colombo wanted to return to the omerta of turn-of-the-century Little Italys, where Mafia was a whispered word and bosses were not bad gered by grand juries, tax investigators and wiretaps. To accomplish his goal, Colombo tapped deepseated, legitimate grievances among Italian Americans and ? shocking editorial writers and Mob capos alike?jumped into press conferences and picket lines. He sought to make Cosa Nostra private once more...
...American of Italian and Hungarian heritage. I am sick of the "oppressing minority." I don't believe you cure a cancer within by denying it exists. There is a Mafia and/or Cosa Nostra...
...history's roster of metaphysicians must now be added the Italian-American Civil Rights League. By a bloodless coup-metaphysics instead of machine guns-the league recently declared: The Mafia doesn't exist. In effect, the league lined Cosa Nostra up against the wall and stared right through...
...league's first convert. Attorney General John Mitchell agreed to deport the Mafia-as a word, that is. In a confidential memo the Mitchell kiss of death was to be reserved not for the Mob, but for all Justice Department employees who used the terms Mafia and Cosa Nostra officially. The league subsequently persuaded the film makers of The Godfather, which is about practically nothing but the Mafia, to excise the hated term from their screenplay. That was a feat roughly comparable to composing a history of World War II without mentioning Nazis...