Word: costelloe
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...reaching this comfortable estate, Frank Costello had also achieved a peculiar but significant place in U.S. society. The rackets, like college football, the labor movement, and the care and breeding of Christmas trees, had inevitably become big business. The brain had replaced the muscle, the injunction had become more potent than the Tommy gun, and surviving warriors of prohibition upheld the status quo. Frank Costello, "legitimate businessman," dramatically typified the change...
...from Craps. The twisting road which led Frank Costello to a tower apartment on Central Park West began in Cosenza, Italy, where, in 1891, he was born Francesco Castiglia, sixth child of a debt-burdened farmer. He was brought to New York when he was four; his father opened a hole-in-the-wall grocery on East 108th Street, and he was exposed early.to the neighborhood heroes: the torpedoes who worked for Giro Terranova, red-handed boss of the Unione Siciliana in Harlem and The Bronx...
Kewpies & Creditors. Frank Costello, businessman extraordinary, was born after that. The tale of his ventures and triumphs emerged only in jerky scenes, badly lighted and often confused. But each time he appeared, momentarily in the light, Frank Costello looked bigger, sharper, more assured-and richer...
...with speakeasies running in a thousand Manhattan basements, Frank Costello threw his bankroll into the rum trade. It was an enormous and complex business which involved the systematic bribery of thousands of policemen, the timed dispatching of speedboats and trucks, the direction of sales and bookkeeping staffs, the printing of fake labels, the operation of cutting plants and the purchase of fortunes in whisky. To the tough hoodlums who were its soldiers, it was also extremely hazardous...
Nobody shot at Frank Costello, and he fired no shots himself; he had long since quit packing a gun. He was a big shot from the start-a fixer, conniver, ship operator and financier-who did his work in an office at 405 Lexington Avenue, made business trips to Montreal to buy liquor from Canadian and European exporters, took enormous risks and made enormous profits. He also kept himself so shadowy and unobtrusive a figure that when U.S. Attorney Emory Buckner made a desperate but unsuccessful effort to smash the liquor racket, Costello was erroneously charged with being an accomplice...