Cosa Nostra News

Of the many Mafia rules publicized over the years, one of the more interesting ones is the well-known ban on the use of explosives. Y ou can strangle, stab, shoot, drown, poison, ice-pick him ...  just don't blow him up... Sam the Plumber's wiretaps are the origins of countless mob revelations. This is one thing about which the American and Sicilian Mafias disagree entirely. Throughout their history, Sicilian gangsters have shown a preference for bombs, using them precisely for the "dramatic mileage" they afford. In fact, bombs are so common over there, they reportedly are sometimes used to cover up the real cause of death. Why the American Mafia would take such a collective step against explosives isn't difficult to imagine. By moving to ban bombs, unlike their Sicilian cohorts, American Cosa Nostra members and affiliates reduced the risk of  collateral damage. And with post-9/11 hindsight, it was a brilliant tactical move that gave the organizati...

This was published on Aug. 18 by the New Yorker magazine under its  Daily Shouts  rubric with the headline: FBI Report on Mafia Decline Caused by Group Text and E-mail Chains : INTERNAL/CLASSIFIED A fter extensive investigation, our specialized team, the F.B.I. New-Media Task Force, has determined that organized-crime syndicates are being increasingly hampered by an inability to communicate effectively through text messages and e-mails. Agents have found that the Mafia and other large criminal groups are having difficulty planning crimes as a result of overly long strings of messages that are derailed by unrelated jokes and gifs. Our investigators are pleased to report that this pattern has led to a decrease in crime and an increase in criminal organizations’ cellular overage charges. The bulk of this investigation involved the interception and analysis of Mafia members’ text messages. It was observed that poor texting habits led to many issues. For instanc...

Excerpted from I Pity the Poor Immigrant: A Novel  by Zachary Lazar (Fiction; April 8, 2014). The Bomb magazine published this first proof. Lazar is the author of three books, most recently the novel Sway , about the Rolling Stones' early days, and the memoir Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder , which may be of interest to regular readers.  When he was just six years old, Zachary Lazar's father, Edward, was shot dead by hit men in a Phoenix, Arizona parking garage. The year was 1975, a time when, according to the Arizona Republic, "land-fraud artists roamed the state in sharp suits, gouging money from buyers and investors." How did his father fit into this world and how could his son ever truly understand the man, his time and place, and his motivations? In Evening's Empire, Zachary Lazar brilliantly attempts to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to his father's murder. Lazar's writing has appeared in t...

From the Providence Journal : BOSTON MOB: The Rise and Fall of the New England Mob and Its Most Notorious Killer,” by Marc Songini. St. Martin’s Press. 369 pages. $27.99. This is a colorful, even gleeful, account of murder, mayhem and corruption during the heyday of the New England Mafia. As you can imagine, despite the title, a lot of it is about Rhode Island and Raymond L.S. Patriarca, who ran the “Office,” as it was called , from the Coin-O-Matic office on Atwells Avenue in Providence. Three strains run through the book by Boston-area journalist Marc Songini. The fast-reading narrative begins and ends with the turbulent history of Joseph Barboza, or Joseph Barboza Baron after he changed his name. Of Portuguese descent and from New Bedford, he worked with many of the other figures in the book.