Word: nostra
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...likely to employ the sadistic methods that Cosa Nostra still finds useful. Despite the more businesslike image of the younger gang leaders, many mobsters are still animals in fedoras. If Sam Giancana moves, as he has, with Frank Sinatra on one level, his henchmen move on another. One of the most chilling conversations that the FBI has overheard involved two of Giancana's hoods telling a third, "Jackie," about the murder of one of their colleagues, a 350-pounder by the name of William Jackson...
Despite Cosa Nostra's obvious frightening strengths, new problems and challenges are coming at it from several sides. In the slums, for instance, its control of gambling and vice is being contested, sometimes successfully, by the blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans who want a share of the action. In Buffalo, the blacks at first worked a bargain with Magaddino by which they would control the numbers racket, giving him only a 10% tribute. Later, when he ran into trouble with the authorities, they stopped the 10% entirely. That was nothing compared to the trouble that Ruggiero Boiardo...
There are, in addition, internal disputes, like the messy slaying of New York Boss Albert Anastasia in 1957. Even though he has never been east of Flatbush, a Cosa Nostra man still looks upon himself as a Sicilian or a Neapolitan, distrusting the other. Nor is the Commission itself what it once was. Two places, vacated by death, have not been filled. Two of the commissioners, Philadelphia's Angelo Bruno and New York's Joe Colombo, command little respect; Detroit's Joe Zerilli rarely attends meetings. A former commissioner, New York's Joe Bonanno, was kicked...
Where is the law? Why, despite some troubles, does Cosa Nostra survive and thrive? Beyond its own inherent strength and tradition is its ability to corrupt civil officials. Probably no other group in history has made such a fine art of corruption. Without the fix, Cosa Nostra would not last out the year. Nor are local cops the only ones who yield to temptation. Three days after a report on skimming in Las Vegas was sent to the U.S. Attorney General's office in 1963, a complete copy was in the hands of the criminals cited in the report...
CENTURIES before La Cosa Nostra was heard of in the U.S., the Mafia operated-even as it does today-as a brigand government in much of Sicily. Though many Italian immigrants had come to the U.S. to avoid just such oppression as the Mafia offers, a few among them formed a new Mafia in the new country. In the crowded "Little Italys" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the thugs found easy prey among people who had been taught to dread the terrorists' Black Hand...