I spent my life with that guy, and he deserted me. ‘It was a slip-up,’ he says. But I know Sam, and there ain’t no slip-ups.’” So, what was the Mafia, also called La Cosa Nostra, this “thing of ours”? Where did it start? How much power did it really wield? These were the questions Elliot asked himself as he became as entrenched in this underworld society that he’d discovered in the Bronx backies as a boy, as he was in the world of New York society owing to his position at Mount Sinai and the family into which he’d married. Clearly, there were many stories that related to the first question, but the best he’d heard regarding the formation of the Mafia came during a conversation with Frank Silvio one evening over a glass of Chianti at the “21” Club in Manhattan. “D’you ever see the movie, Patton?” Silvio asked. “When Patton pulls into Palermo standing on that tank with thousands of troops behind him and all the townspeople cheering, he turns to Omar Bradley.
