Word: nostra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Valachi's case, appearances are deceptive; gourmet skills plainly take second place to adeptness as an all-round hood. A "soldier" in the Cosa Nostra for more than 30 years, Valachi has, by Justice Department count, a murder to show for every year. Most recently, on a June morning in 1962, he beat a fellow convict to death with a two-foot length of iron pipe at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta. By then, Valachi was fighting for his own life. He had received the "kiss of death" from his capo (boss) and cellmate Vito Genovese...
...subject is less conventional: the Cosa Nostra ("this thing of ours"). Quite a thing it is, too. The Justice Department estimates that organized crime in the U.S. grosses better than $40 billion a year. "If the Cosa Nostra's illegal profits were reported," Maas says, the U.S. could afford "a 10% tax reduction instead of a 10% surcharge...
Bonanno is better known as "Joe Bananas," the gangster overlord of a New York Cosa Nostra "family." A Sicilian-born Mafioso who entered the U.S. illegally in 1924, Bonanno rose to a seat on the twelve-man "Grand Council" of organized crime. Though he has been semiretired as an active hoodlum since 1964, he is now embroiled in what has come to be known as "the Bananas war" -a death struggle between rival gangs that reaches from Joe's Brooklyn turf to Tucson's tree-lined pleasances. Open hostilities in the battle to succeed Joe as head...
...July 20, somebody fired a shotgun at the Tucson home of Anthony Tisci, a son-in-law of Sam ("Momo") Giancana, commander of the 300-man Cosa Nostra army in Chicago. Then dynamite destroyed a shed at the Grace Ranch, the property of Pete Licavoli, aging chieftain of Detroit's Mafia. On the night of July 22, a bomb thrown onto Joe Bananas' patio blew out part of a wall. All the buildings that have been attacked belong to Bonanno henchmen and acquaintances...
...Bananas was apparently ordered to retire by his underworld peers. Instead, he has attempted to retain control of his narcotics, numbers and loan-sharking rackets by transforming his Brooklyn-based fief into a hereditary barony and installing his son Salvatore ("Bill") Bonanno, 35. In retaliation, the four other Cosa Nostra families in the New York area, according to the theory, have been letting Joe Bananas know of their displeasure...