#cosa nostra

[cantcatchmeee]

[los-sanchos]

[hannamichelle-seraf]

[takeitdaybyday]

[fuchinobe]

Beatmania Club Mix Original Soundtrack (2000, SMEJ Associated Records, AICT 1227-1228)

[daily-spanish-word]

thing la cosa

Remember the name of the Sicilian Mafia: ‘Cosa Nostra’, it means: ‘Our Thing’.

Think about your most costly thing.

“ .. and God created Eve from one thing, one costa (rib) of Adam’s body.”

Imagine loosing your things in the sand of the beach at the coast (‘la costa’).

These things aren’t mine! ¡Estas cosas no son mías!

Picture by srgpicker on Flickr

[severeprincesheep]

Before we started shooting, I got together with Little Al Lettieri, who was going to play Sollozzo. He just said to me, “You should meet this guy. It’s good for what you’re doing.” I sort of knew what he meant by that, so I went along with him. One day we took a drive to a suburb just outside the city.

Little Al brought me to a traditional, beautiful, well-kept home. He took me inside and introduced me to the head of the household, a guy who looked like a normal businessman. I shook his hand and said hello, and he was very welcoming. He had a loving family. He had a wife who served us drinks and light snacks on fine porcelain. He had two young sons around my age. I was just some crazy actor who had come into his house, trying to absorb as much as I could. Our conversation remained polite and at the surface level. I never asked Little Al why he had brought me here, but I thought about what he had said before we came, how this visit would be helpful for what I was working on. Little Al knew some guys. Some real guys. And now he was introducing me to one of them.

I was being given a taste of how this thing looked and operated in reality, not how it was shown in the movies. Not that our host was going to get into any of those details with us. As a matter of fact, we ended up drinking and playing games. Many moons later, photos from that night surfaced, showing me in a sweatshirt, laughing away with a drink in my hand, while Little Al showed me a gun. A boys’ night out.

I was a kid from the South Bronx. I am an Italian. I am a Sicilian too. I knew what it was to always be assumed that you had at least a connection to organised crime. Any name that ended with a vowel was scrutinised for having possible connections to that world. Instead of being compared to Joe DiMaggio, you were associated with Al Capone.

Most of us will never experience crime, let alone perpetrate it. And yet we’re fascinated with these people who are determined not to live within the rules of society, who are finding another way to go. The outlaw is a particularly American kind of character. We grew up pretending to be Jesse James and Billy the Kid. These were folk heroes. They became part of our lore. The history of the mafia is part of that lore too.

[wiserebeltiger]

Being corrupt in Rhode Island is too easy. It is like playing tennis with the net down. This works against our criminals; they are not in shape. Here, knife doesn’t sharpen knife, only makes a show of it. The result is a poorly rehearsed parody of corruption, which we allow to pass for reality.

[patart-illustrations-stuff]

Murder inc.

[italian-mafia-boss]

8 Rules for Life by Italien Mafia Boss

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[mrgrim]

[cantcatchmeee]

[rottingbibliophile]

I will cradle him and his evil.

Nicci Harris, His Pretty Little Queen

[cloud3francois]

How did Vito know that Fanucci had no real connections?

[rei-the-head-shaker]

Another day, another coffee!

Trying to get back on track with my studies in the hope life got the memo and will stop being so fucking hectic and leave me to my things for a little bit...