What does the word Mafia mean and what does the word Cosa Nostra mean?
In Italian, Mafia means “beauty, excellence, bravery”.
Cosa Nostra means “our thing.”
A Chicago overcoat is a 1920s underworld term for a coffin.
Borrowing from eighteenth-century English penal procedures, southern states began using chain gangs before the Civil War and continued the practice for nearly a hundred years. Georgia became the last state to outlaw this method of punishment in the late 1940s. The decline of chain gangs was due as much to automation as to public protest:…
A black act is slang for picking a lock in the dark.
Kim Philby was recruited by the Russians in the early 1930s. He entered the British Secret Service in 1939 and remained a double agent until 1962, when he escaped to the Soviet Union. His orders, he said, were to penetrate British Intelligence and “it did not matter how long I took to do the job.”…
The throat-slashings of six prostitutes in London’s East End occurred between August and early November 1888. The identity of Jack the Ripper was never verified.
An air dance is an execution by hanging. Other slang terms for hanging: air jig, air polka, and air rumba.