Word: nostra
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What emerged was a complicated tale of cooperation between the Sicilian Mafia and its American counterpart, the Cosa Nostra. Tons of morphine base were smuggled from Turkey to Sicily, processed into 1,650 lbs. of heroin, then sneaked through airports and distributed by pizza parlors in the Northeast and Midwest. More than $40 million in profits went back to Sicily in a laundering scheme involving banks in New York, Switzerland, Bermuda and the Bahamas...
...verdict, the first against the Mafia as a criminal enterprise, was the most damaging blow to La Cosa Nostra struck by the Justice Department in its highly successful crusade to disorganize organized crime. "The Mob," exulted Chertoff, "has been decapitated...
...decades the Mafia managed to keep its board of directors hidden from the outside world, until November 1957, when police staged a celebrated raid on a national mobsters' convention in Apalachin, N.Y. In 1963 former Mafia Soldier Joseph Valachi told a Senate investigating subcommittee all about La Cosa Nostra, the previously secret name under which the brotherhood had operated. After the Mafia had been romanticized in books and movies like The Godfather, some mobsters became brazen about their affairs. In 1983 former New York Boss Joseph Bonanno even published an autobiography about his Mafia years...
Brought to bay in a courtroom, the Mafia bosses have adopted an unusual defense: rather than fight the Government's efforts to prove the existence of La Cosa Nostra, they admit it. "This case is not about whether there is a Mafia," thundered Defense Attorney Samuel Dawson. "Assume it. Accept it. There is." Nevertheless, he told the jury, "just because a person is a member of the Mafia doesn't mean he has committed the charged crime or even agreed to commit the charged crime." Dawson depicted the Commission as a sort of underworld businessmen's round table that approves...
...shuttle prisoners from the adjacent L'Ucciardone Prison into a succession of holding pens in the enormous courtroom. The scene is Palermo, Sicily, where for seven months a Mafia trial that dwarfs the various legal proceedings in New York has been under way. In the homeland of the Cosa Nostra, 474 alleged Mafiosi, whose ranks range from the reputed "Boss of Bosses," Luciano Liggio, to a corps of picciotti, or soldiers, are in the dock for crimes as high as assassination and as low as auto theft...