Word: valachi
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...Mafia's tradition of omerta, the code of silence, is explicit: betray the family and pay with your life. But beginning with the televised confessions of Cosa Nostra Songbird Joseph Valachi in 1963, that code has been repeatedly violated. At the racketeering trial of reputed Mafia Boss John Gotti last week in Brooklyn federal court, omerta suffered one of its rudest shocks...
...long as six months. Defense attorneys will assail Buscetta's credibility, and are expected to charge that he is singing in an effort to avoid prosecution for Mob murders in Sicily. But to date, Buscetta has provided the most revealing glimpse into the Mafia since ( American Mobster Joseph Valachi first outlined the structure and the secret name of the Cosa Nostra...
...series of conversations lasting through the summer and covering 3,000 pages, he offered a history of the Sicilian Mafia's operations going back, in some cases, to 1950. He volunteered details that authorities had long suspected but never been able to prove. Not since Joseph Valachi, a soldier in New York's Lucky Luciano family, spilled what he knew to a U.S. Senate committee in 1963 has anyone provided such a comprehensive picture of the Mafia and its operations. Said Judge Schiacchitano: "Buscetta has offered confirmation for many, many things that we had learned elsewhere but could...
Made in America seems at first blush an odd title for a novel about the Mafia, but Peter Maas should be forgiven his irony. Sicily's best-known export has, of course, become as American as frozen pizza. As Maas has shown in The Valachi Papers and Serpico, Cosa Nostra reaches far below the imperial realms of The Godfather into virtually every working-class neighborhood where cash is short and the Mob's loan sharks cruise...
DIED. John L. McClellan, 81, Democratic Senator from Arkansas, whose investigations of labor unions and organized crime led to the imprisonment of Teamster Bosses Jimmy Hoffa and Dave Beck, and to Mobster Joseph Valachi's televised exposes of the Mafia; of a heart ailment; in Little Rock. Elected to the Senate in 1942, he soon became known as a cotton-country conservative-defending military expenditures, opposing the "socialistic" measures of F.D.R., advocating strict penalties for criminals. One of the first Senators to speak out against Joseph McCarthy, in 1955 he replaced the Wisconsin Senator as chairman of the Permanent...