Word: mob
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that prosecution is easy under the best of circumstances. The gangsters' well-paid legal corps takes full advantage of the Bill of Rights. The Mob's muscle often takes care of potential witnesses. It takes a brave citizen to call the police. Also, most of the evidence gathered by the FBI, until recently, was not admissible in court...
...upstate Apalachin. The authorities were able to find out who the mobsters were and, more important, that they were together. In 1962, Joe Valachi, the Cosa Nostra soldier-turned-informer, confirmed and explained what the FBI had been hearing from its bugs for months. Though he looked at the Mob from the bottom up, Valachi's remarkable memory nonetheless provided invaluable insights into its organization. From January 1961 to December 1968, the Government indicted 290 members of Cosa Nostra and obtained 147 convictions, with many cases still pending. Some of the bosses themselves have been jailed, while many have found...
Most of the surveillance has come from electronic bugs and telephone taps, which have supplied something like 80% of the information the Government has on the Mob. While bugging is still the subject of considerable controversy?and can be a serious danger to civil liberties if misused?a law passed by Congress last year at least clarifies the Government's powers and gives the Justice Department broader jurisdiction. For the time being, electronic snooping seems to be a necessary, if risky weapon...
Tolerating the Mob...
...large measure, the modern Mob lacks the traditional justification for crime?the bitter spur of poverty. It also lacks the occasional, near-heroic dimension of defying law and the established order for the sake of rebellion. It is by and large a middle-class sort of Mob, more or less tolerated by the affluent. Among the public there is often a certain psychological hypocrisy. Rage is great over conspicuous criminal acts, but there is less anger over the far more harmful depredations that are the specialty of organized crime. Until there is a popular revolt, La Cosa Nostra will probably...