Word: nostra
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According to Valachi the Cosa Nostra is ruled by a board made up of nine to twelve capi. The group became big business as far back as Prohibition. Though there have been ambitious capi since the time of Salvatore Maranzano, who in the 1920s filled a room with books about Julius Caesar, no single boss has ever really taken over-with the possible exception of Charles ("Lucky") Luciano. The Cosa Nostra now operates through 25 to 30 "families," totaling about 5,000 members. Five families and about one-third of the total troops are based in New York City, where...
Valachi's career coincides with the rise of the Cosa Nostra itself and reads like a kind of how-to-succeed manual for middle-echelon mobsters. At 18, Valachi was already a veteran "wheelman" (getaway driver), but he made the mistake of joining an "Irish gang." That move so displeased the Italian underworld that while Valachi was serving time for theft, he received as chastisement a knife wound that ran under his heart and around to his back, requiring 38 stitches...
Blood Oath. When he came out of Sing Sing in 1928 (it was his second jail term), he promptly began to repair bridges with the Cosa Nostra. In 1930, after passing his initiation-successful participation in a gangland assassination -Valachi went before Capo Maranzano ("Gee, he looked just like a banker"). Joe took his oaths with blood from his trigger finger and with flaming paper ("This is the way I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra...
Second Government. A number of Cosa Nostra families, including Valachi's, outlawed drug trafficking because it brought too many federal agents around. Still, Joe found the profits irresistible. When he began importing heroin from France (purchase price-$2,500 per kilo, U.S. selling price-$11,-000), he brought down on his head both the Cosa Nostra and the Bureau of Narcotics...
...Valachi Papers does not always rise above its detail. But for those who still dismiss the Cosa Nostra as the fanciful creation of ambitious D.A.s and over-imaginative hoodlums, the detail serves a purpose. Out of all the dates and curiously businesslike statistics, there finally emerges the dark outline of a state within a state-"a second government," as Valachi calls it. In the words of a member of the Justice Department: "He showed us the face of the enemy...