Word: nostra
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These are difficult times for the 25 families, or "brugads," that make up America's Cosa Nostra (rough translation: our thing). During the 1980s, some 1,200 Mafia operatives were convicted, including the leaderships of New York City's five brugads and 11 smaller Italian gangs in cities ranging from Denver to Kansas City to New Orleans. The bloodletting has decimated two major New York City families (Colombo and Bonanno) and enabled Gambino family boss John Gotti, a flamboyant newcomer, to rise up overnight as America's leading media mobstar...
...that kind of support." But evidence of the Teamsters' pact with the devil was known well before 1980. As the report of the President's Commission on Organized Crime points out, "Jackie Presser had . . . an extensive record of organized-crime associations through organizations that were infested with La Cosa Nostra associates and convicted felons...
...toward explaining its strengths. The book is spectacularly well-documented, with almost every sentence of the text scrupulously foot-noted. And anyone with more than a passing interest in the Mafia will want to scour Scheim's bibliography, which includes a vast range of writings about La Cosa Nostra, an organization that guards its secrets with deadly jealousy...
...Scheim asserts, was Lee Harvey Oswald, whose uncle was a member of La Cosa Nostra. Oswald, shooting from a book depository building, would take the fall for Kennedy's death. But, following an old theory, Scheim writes that the angle at which the bullet hit Kennedy indicates that it came from behind a stockade fence on Kennedy's right slightly ahead of his limousine--meaning that Oswald was not responsible for the deadly shot...
Some law enforcement officers have said we are entering a critical phase in the country's battle with drugs. Just as the Costra Nostra became entrenched from the profits of illegal alcohol sales during prohibition, police warn that the national and regional networks of drug gangs may become entrenched in the next few years...