Word: valachi
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Joseph Michael Valachi looks a bit like a Damon Runyon gangster-the tough guy who really is all heart. Short (5 ft. 6 in.) and bandy-legged, he could pass as one of those middle-aged truck drivers who spend their days oiT lifting weights at the local gym, then go home and cook up a dinner for the wife and kids-"Joe's Special Recipe for Spaghetti Sauce and Meatballs...
...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...
Subjects and Predicates. Over the course of 13 months, Valachi outlined his life and crimes in 300,000 words. The Justice Department gave Maas permission to edit the Valachi papers, then reneged, the author claims, under pressure from Italian-American groups that were anxious to avoid perpetuating the ethnic stereotype of the Italian hood. As an alternative, Maas smoothed down Valachi's story into a somewhat conventional piece of journalism...
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...