"While the Cosa Nostra does not embrace all organized crime, it is its dominant force, virtually a state within a state—a 'second government' as Valachi puts it—painstakingly structured, an intricate web of criminal activity stretching across the nation, bound together in a mystic ritual that sounds like a satire on college fraternity initiations and at the same time caught up in a continual swirl of brutality, savage intrigue, kangaroo courts and sudden death." (Chapter 1, p. 2)

"'Where the hell is Omaha?' — Joseph Valachi" (Chapter 1, p. 24)

"The picture is an ugly one. It shows what has been aptly described as a private government of organized crime, a government with an annual income of billions, resting on a base of human suffering and moral corrosion." — AG Robert Kennedy (Chapter 2, p. 36)

"I came home with an education. I didn't learn much in that school, but...