Protected from such an end by 200 Federal marshals, Joseph M. Valachi made history in language as well as crime in 1963 when he added Cosa Nostra to the world’s vocabulary. Valachi, a convicted murderer who sang about the inner workings of the mob, told U. S. Senate investigators that his crime brothers never said mafia among themselves but called it la cosa nostra (`our thing’). This was news in Italy where cosa can signify just about anything and has multiple idiomatic couplings–cosa pubblica the `State or government’; far le sue cose `go to the toilet’–but where cosa nostra had not theretofore been synonymous with mafia. Italians nevertheless instantly accepted the term as meaning the mafia in America, and it is so identified to this day in the Italian press. Cosa Nostra indeed may qualify as a peculiar American hybrid, U. S. mobsters of Italian extraction having possible antecedents in the Neapolitan Camorra or Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta as well as the mafia. A coincidence, but in U. S. gangland’s hall of fame, Al Capone, was by origin a Neapolitan, Charles “Lucky” Luciano a Sicilian, and Frank Costello (born Francesco Castiglia) a Calabrian.

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