Word: cosa
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...found your article on the Italian-American Civil Rights League [April 5] an insult to all our people. You portray our defensive organizations as fronts for "La Cosa Nostra" but ignore "La Causa Nostra" (Our Cause). We are sick of being discriminated against, stigmatized, degraded and oppressed in this country, sick of being called Mafiosi, greasers, dumb dagos, guineas and wops. We will not be scapegoats of the WASP gangster establishment, which sees a cure-all for Yankee problems in the persecution of Italian-Americans...
...Italian-American, I say a special thank you to Joe Colombo; what he may be is not certain, but that he is proud of his heritage is. Perhaps TIME will stop printing the words that I have been associated with all my life yet know very little about: La Cosa Nostra and Mafia...
...federal prison near El Paso, Texas, where he was serving a life sentence for murder. During public hearings before a Senate subcommittee in 1963, Valachi revealed details of the operations and membership of the crime syndicate popularly called the Mafia. He argued that the organization was actually called "La Cosa Nostra" (Our Thing), a fact that some insiders doubted, but Valachi's testimony gave currency to the term and stimulated the Government's campaign against organized crime...
...picketing continued into June, and the Italian-American Civil Rights League was formed. On June 29, a massive Italian-American Unity Day Rally brought thousands to Columbus Circle in Manhattan, including virtually every politician in the city. The next month, Attorney General John Mitchell announced that "Mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" were no longer to be used in Justice Department and FBI reports and releases; a similar edict from Governor Nelson Rockefeller affected New York State releases...
...sight seems ready to capitulate. Last week Al Ruddy, producer of The Godfather, a film based on the bestseller about the head of a Mafia family, which is currently being shot on location in New York, attended a press conference at league headquarters to announce that "Mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" would not be part of the dialogue because they made "no difference in the art'stic meaning of the film." Then the league released a letter from Ford Motor Co. President Lee lacocca promising that the television series The FBI, which Ford sponsors, would avoid those terms in next...