Word: nostrae
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...organization that could capitalize on the potential of bootlegging. Only they lived among people who already operated home stills that could quickly be converted into commercial distilleries. With fantastic profits, little crooks became big crooks, and the peculiar society of petty outlaws became the all-powerful Cosa Nostra...
...medieval hocuspocus. Flanked by the boss and his lieutenants, the initiate and his sponsor may stand in front of a table on which are placed a gun and, on occasion, a knife. The boss picks up the gun and intones in the Sicilian dialect: "Niatri representam La Cosa Nostra. Sta famigghiaè La Cosa Nostra [We represent La Cosa Nostra. This family is Our Thing]." The sponsor then pricks his trigger finger and the trigger finger of the new member, holding both together to symbolize the mixing of blood. After swearing to hold the family above his religion, his country...
With Maranzano's death, a kind of peace did settle over Cosa Nostra. There have been skirmishes and murders aplenty since then, but never anything like the Castellammarese War. In place of the Capo di Tutti Capi, the mobsters formed a Commission made up of nine to twelve family bosses to guide the organization and settle disputes. While its powers have never been precisely spelled out, the Commission seems to be roughly analogous to the governing body of a loose confederation. It must approve each family's choice of boss, and it can, if it wants to, remove...
Often, the Commission's chief function seems to be preservation of the balance of power, making sure that no one boss gains too much power. In Cosa Nostra's terms, as in nations', that is guns. Theoretically, at least, the 24 families have not been allowed to increase their numbers since the '30s. They vary greatly in size now, as they did then, from Carlo Gambino's army of 1,000 in New York to James Lanza's tiny, ineffectual squad of twelve in San Francisco. Currently, several families are open to recruits, offering...
EVICTED from the Mob's top hierarchy in 1964, Joe Bonanno of New York-one of the bloodiest killers in Cosa Nostra's history-eventually retired to Tucson, Ariz., where, amid his fig and orange trees, he now lives modestly, reflecting on his days of power and plotting his comeback. His life is not entirely normal, however. The FBI tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit his confidant and all-round handyman, David Hill, 21, as an informer. Once a bomb landed in Bonanno's backyard. He thinks that an FBI agent may have prompted two young thugs to throw...