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third in line. He is effectively a family’s chief-of-staff. Beneath them are the ‘Capos’, some of whom, specialising in arranging murders, are known as ‘Enforcers’. Some Enforcers are also under-bosses.
    Soldiers have specialities too. A hitman will be known as a ‘Torpedo’ or ‘Buttonman’ (as in ‘pressing the button’ on someone). The chief hitman (or sometimes bodyguard) will be known as a ‘Caporegima’.
    Police make no distinction, calling them all Hoodlums, ‘Hoods’ for short, or ‘Goons’.
    Godfathers of most of the Mafia families make up a kind of criminal board of directors, which is known as ‘The Commission’. The existence of this body was denied for decades and was only noticed by accident in 1957. Members ofthe Commission have since been tried in court, charged with the very offence of being members of it.
    There is also a group of Mafia bosses known as ‘The Club’, and this one involves those who participate in trade union racketeering in the construction industry.
    Other descriptions of wider groupings of gangsters can be confusing. The word ‘Mob’ is often used synonymously with ‘Mafia’. But the Mob is a looser description of a group of gangsters. During the formative years of US organised crime between the world wars, ‘the Mob’ was usually taken to mean Jewish-dominated racketeers, while ‘the Mafia’ admitted only Sicilians. When ‘Lucky’ Luciano forged his way to ultimate power in New York, however, his Syndicate included such nefarious non-Sicilians as Frank Costello, ‘Dutch’ Shultz, Joe Adonis, Louis Lepke, and Meyer Lansky. Luciano even toyed with the idea of dropping the Syndicate’s Mafia affiliation. He was dissuaded by Lansky, who felt that the spectre of the Mafia would help them keep people in line, even though at one point the Jewish members outnumbered the Sicilians.
    The activities the gangs got up to in those early days had their own vernacular too. ‘Bootlegging’ referred to illicit booze, a boot being best hiding place for a bottle. ‘Hijack’ was literally the phrase ‘Hi Jack’, the supposed greeting in a bootleg booze hold-up. And a ‘Speakeasy’ was an illegal bar, not to be spoken of loudly. All very logical.
    Not so explicable is ‘Vigorish’, a very important word in the Mafia language. The hoods call it ‘vig’ and it stands for the exorbitant interest the thugs collect every week on a loan. Which leads us to ‘loan-sharking’. This is a commonly used word that describes the business of illegal lending, at murderous rates, in which every branch of the Mafia is engaged.
    Murder has many names in the Mob – to waste, blow away, hit, terminate, retire, rub out, take care of, remove, or (Jimmy The Weasel’s favourite) to ‘clip’. Ordering a hit, a Mafioso will still utter the old Sicilian phrase:
‘Livarsi na petra di la scapa’
– Take the stone out of my shoe.
    Carlos ‘Little Man’ Marcello, head of the Mafia’s New Orleans branch, shouted this curse at the Kennedy brothers, John and Robert. They were both gunned down. But a Godfather will often say nothing to snuff out a life – a nod or a motion of the hand is enough.
    When a rubout is ‘sanctioned’, or approved at the top, the killing is quite often sub-contracted to a third party, perhaps even someone from a different crime family. A friendly Mafia clan in another town will provide the killers, making it more difficult for police to trace them. This practice, which dates back to the Twenties, is known as ‘importing’. Alternatively, a ‘contract’ is put out on someone. This can take two courses – a trusted man can be handed the contract specifically, or it can be posted generally, like a bounty, for anyone to fill.
    They don’t talk about ‘concrete overcoats’ any more for encasing a victim’s corpse in a cement block; they just call it ‘dressing’. Nor are words like ‘drill’ and ‘plug’ used for killing. They just ‘take care