Nobody will listen. Nobody will believe. You know what I mean? This Cosa Nostra, it's like a second government. It's too big.
—Joe Valachi
AT the beginning of the decade, even J. Edgar Hoover denied its existence. Its structure was a mystery, and if it had a name, no one on the outside was sure of what it was. Yet, almost unnoticed, it exerted a profound impact on American life. It still does. Small wonder that Valachi, the thug-turned-informer, doubted that anybody would believe or care when he talked about an organization called La Cosa Nostra.
Today people do care. Organized crime is suddenly a high-priority item in Congress. The Nixon Administration and several key states are striving to improve law-enforcement efforts. The Justice Department is sending special anti-Mob "strike forces" into major cities, more money is being spent by police forces, and more men are being thrown into the battle. Hollywood makes movies about it (The Brotherhood), and readers have put it on the top of the bestseller list (Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather and Peter Maas's The Valachi Papers). Organized crime is no longer quite the mystery that it was. It is a vast, sprawling underground domain impossible to trace fully; but there is no longer any doubt that its most important part, its very nucleus, is La Cosa Nostra (LCN), otherwise known as the Mafia.*
Its reality borders on fantasy. Many Americans still find it difficult to fully believe that their nation harbors an evil entity capable of stealing billions while destroying the honor of public officials, the honesty of businessmen and sometimes the lives of ordinary citizens. The evidence that it does these things and more has become all too credible. The image persists of the colorful gambler who speaks quaint Runyonesque, or the romantic loner — Jay Gatsby, say — who has his own somehow justifiable morality, or of the paternalistic despot who challenges society by his own peculiar code.
The Multiplier Effect
There are bits of truth in all the impressions, but all fall short. The biggest and most important truth is that La Cosa Nostra and the many satellite elements that constitute organized crime are big and powerful enough to affect the quality of American life. LCN generates corruption on a frightening scale. It touches small firms as well as large, reaches into city halls and statehouses, taints facets of show business and labor relations, and periodically sheds blood. It has a multiplier effect on crime; narcotics, a mob monopoly, drives the addicted to burglaries and other felonies to finance the habit. Cosa Nostra's ability to flout the law makes preachment of law and order a joke to those who see organized crime in action most often: the urban poor and the black. Says Milton Rector, director of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency: "Almost every bit of crime we study has some link to organized crime."
Yet La Cosa Nostra itself, the Italian core of organized crime, consists of only 3,000 to 5,000 individuals scattered around the nation in 24 "families," or regional gangs, each headed by a boss and organized loosely along military lines. There is no national dictator or omnipotent unit giving precise direction on all operations. Rather, the families constitute a relatively loose confederation under a board of directors