Word: nostra
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...Illinois, La Cosa Nostra exerts major influence in a dozen Chicago wards and dictates the votes of as many as 15 state legislators. Known as the West Side Bloc, a newspaper euphemism to avoid libel suits, the Mob opposes anticrime bills in the state legislature, forces gangsters onto the payroll of Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago machine, and corrupts the city police department. Salvatore ("Momo") Giancana may be hiding in Mexico, but his stand-ins, Tony ("Big Tuna") Accardo and Paul ("The Waiter") DeLucia still pack influence. Example: When a Justice Department report charged 29 Chicago policemen with being grafters...
Ralph Salerno, co-author of an upcoming book on the Mob, The Crime Confederation, estimates that the votes of about 25 members of Congress can be delivered by mob pressure. New Jersey Congressman Cornelius Gallagher was an associate of Joe Zicarelli, a Cosa Nostra power in New Jersey. Zicarelli's command over Gallagher was strong enough, in fact, to bring Gallagher, whom Zicarelli calls "my friend the Congressman," off the floor of the House of Representatives to accept Zicarelli's telephone calls. Although Gallagher has denied the allegation with varying degrees of indignation, he has never bothered to sue LIFE...
...race track, for example ?and puts down as little as 250 or as much as $1. In some places $10 bets are allowed. The bet taker himself, called the policy writer, is too small?and too vulnerable?to be a formal member of La Cosa Nostra. He works instead under contract as a "sharecropper...
General affluence and increasing public interest in sports such as football and basketball hike the stakes and make the potential for corrupting athletes great. Even if he does not succeed in fixing a game, the Cosa Nostra agent finds information about a team's morale or physical condition priceless in helping him to set odds. On just such an information hunt, a scout for Chicago Handicapper Burton Wolcoff wangled his way into the clubhouse of the Los Angeles Dodgers a few years back. Learning that Sandy Koufax, who was scheduled to pitch that day, was having even more arm trouble...
...Cosa Nostra's most profitable gambling operations was at one of the few places in the U.S. where most kinds of gambling are legal: Las Vegas. The Mob's technique there, known as "skimming," was as simple as larceny and as easy as shaking the money tree: a part of the cash profits from six LCN-controlled casinos was simply diverted before the figures were placed in the ledger books. How much cash was spirited away in this manner, eluding both state and federal taxes, no one can say precisely. After the Government became aware of mob influence and forced...