Word: nostras
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...