LCN is the official FBI designation for “our thing,” a phrase that popped into view when the first Mafia turncoat outed secrets of the Sicilian brotherhood in testimony. Joe Valachi, a solidier in the New York Genovese Family got paranoid in prison and killed another inmate because he thought the hapless man was fulfilling a contract hit on Valachi ordered by Don Vito Genovese.
A year later, in exchange for a plea deal thanks to some kind words from Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, he sang like a canary before the Senate.
Here’s how the FBI website tells it:
Recruited by FBI agents, he appeared before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on September 27, 1963 and testified that he was a member of a secret criminal society in the U.S. known as La Cosa Nostra. He revealed to the committee numerous secrets of the organization, including its name, structure, power bases, codes, swearing-in ceremony, and members.
In 1969, several years after Valachi began cooperating with the FBI, Vito Genovese died in his prison cell.
We learned the daily newspaper craft in a mob town, Las Vegas, at a time when Sinatra sang at the Sands and the mob skimmed every major casino in town.
So when we chanced on a column by Erin Aubry Kaplan in today’s Los Angeles Times comparing the Trump administration to a mob family, we had to laugh because it rang so damn true:
When pundits started labeling the GOP a cult in the last year or so, I nodded. But “cult” connotes an isolated, marginal phenomenon. Now I see “mob” as the more accurate description — and more chilling. After all, the Mafia was never crazy, or detached from the mainstream; they went after the good life like the rest of us. The mob was quintessentially American that way, they just had an extrajudicial, unapologetically violent way of acquiring and maintaining their lifestyle. Fans related to them but also understood they were theoretically different from us.
Now, for too many people, that difference has disappeared. Predictably, Trump supporters have made no apologies for their side’s threats of violence and general thuggishness that are still roiling the country since the election of Joe Biden and will probably roil it for some time to come. America, the mob version, will never back down. Concession, a hallmark of democracy, is for suckers.
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Whether it’s war and peace or public relations and gardening, sorting out the truth is a complicated endeavor when it relates to Donald Trump. Everyone involved in anything, no matter the size, no matter how stupid, seems to lie as a first resort, or to know very little, or to lie about knowing very little, or to know just enough to send blame in another direction, and the person in that direction seems to lie also, or to know very little, or to lie about knowing very little, but perhaps they have a theory that sends blame someplace else, and over there, too, you will find more liars, more know-nothings, and before long, a whole month will have passed, and you still haven’t filed your story about how the president’s attorney wound up undermining democracy in a parking lot off I-95 on a strip of cracked pavement in a run-down part of a city that ordinarily would command no consideration from the national political class or the very online public or the equally online mainstream media, which, when forced to look, found lots of reason to laugh.
eats shoots 'n leaves 