Word: costelloism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Street was a hard place to live. It was harder to leave. The palaces of Manhattan's power and wealth rose up only a few blocks to the south, but to the poor of Italian Harlem, they were as remote and incredible as the palaces of India. Frank Costello escaped to live in them by a process as devious and dangerous as an escape from Devil's Island. He became a rumrunner, a slot-machine king, a gambler and intimate of killers, a political fixer-and a man of riches and influence...
...only boy from a slum who got rich in the rackets: in his day the U.S. had become as much a land of opportunity for the graduate of Dannemora as for the graduate of Dartmouth. But Frank Costello had the brains, luck and jungle caution to stay rich-rich, alive and free as air-while Al Capone went raving to his grave, while bullets cut down Dutch Schultz and Dion O'Banion, while Lepke Buchalter burned in the electric chair, while Lucky Luciano went off to exile and a hundred minor hoodlums rotted in prison...
Last week, greying, hoarse-voiced, 58-year-old Frank Costello was fast becoming a figure of U.S. legend. Millions of newspaper readers considered him a kind of master criminal, shadowy as a ghost and cunning as Satan, who ruled a vast, mysterious and malevolent underworld and laughed lazily...
...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...