Word: mafiosi
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...Jersey was for years the domain of the late Vito Genovese, and since his death its rackets have been under the suzerainty of Gerardo ("Jerry") Catena. Nearly two years ago, the office of Essex County Prosecutor Joseph Lordi began to study the relationship between city officials and Mafiosi. In January, the Federal Government got into the act. A strike force of investigators from several agencies descended upon the state. Working with state officials and information developed by Lordi and the Essex County probe, it secured bribery and conspiracy indictments against two IRS officials, the head of a local contracting company...
...clothes, led a double life. Although police records show that he was arrested 23 times in 48 years for fraud, confidence schemes and burglary, they also show that he was a valuable undercover man for the Federal Government. He helped trap some of the late Vito Genovese's mafiosi for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He also posed as a buyer for the FBI, luring thieves into selling him stolen paintings and jewelry and then testifying against them in court...
When the patrol commander squeezed off some warning shots, most of the Mafiosi melted into the mountain woods. The rest, taking cover behind rocks or in the scraggy Calabrian underbrush, opened up with pistols, shotguns and hunting rifles, wounding seven cops and taking two injuries of their own in a half-hour firefight. When it was all over, the police gathered up a sackful of weapons, 35 cars that had been abandoned on goat paths, and 21 gunmen aged 19 to 75. But the pezzi grossi (big shots) got away...
Power Struggle. Why all the artillery? As the cops figure it, the thugs were less afraid of a police bust than of each other. The meeting in the mountains was apparently called to settle a power struggle between the younger Mafiosi, who are keen on such things as dope smuggling, kidnaping and other urban crimes, and their extortion-oriented elders, who have been taking a pounding from the police lately. Over the past two years, Calabrian officials, using special legislation, have sent 274 Mafiosi into "enforced residence" in Northern Italy, threatened another 789 with similar exile, put 198 under surveillance...
...without precedent" in Calabria. The hoods did, however, steal a few lines from some distant cousins. After the famous 1957 raid at Apalachin, N.Y., the 60 mobsters who were seized there explained that they had assembled for nothing more sinister than a friendly cookout. To a man, the Montalto Mafiosi insisted that they were just "gathering mushrooms...