Word: valachi
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...VALACHI PAPERS, by Peter Maas, recounts one man's career in the Mafia. The tale is made all the more fascinating by the author's observation: "If the Cosa Nostra's illegal profits were reported, the country could meet its present obligations with a 10% tax reduction instead of a 10% surcharge increase...
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...
Starting out as a bodyguard and chauffeur, Valachi survived shifts in power as tricky as ups and downs under the Borgias. He and a partner made $2,500 a week from the slot-machine business. Valachi also ran a numbers racket, a "classy horse room" in White Plains, N.Y., and a loan-shark operation. He bought his own race horses. During World War II, Valachi worked the gasoline black market, earning about $200,000 in three years from finagling with ration stamps. Even at that, he says, "I wasn't so big." After the war, he muscled into jukeboxes...
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...