Fifty years ago, on March 10, 1969, Mario Puzo published a novel that pulled back the curtain on the inner workings of a Mafia family. “The Godfather”—and its movie adaptation three years later by Francis Ford Coppola—would introduce the public to a raft of Italian-American mobster lingo. Readers learned of “omertà,” the Mafia’s code of silence, and the “Cosa Nostra,” the mafioso’s oblique name for the world of organized crime, “this thing of ours.” Perhaps most notable was the terminology for different positions in the crime...

Source: Wall Street Journal March 07, 2019 22:18 UTC