2 Quotes by Andrew Weissmann

Within eighteen months, we had numerous cooperating witnesses—and not just lower level associates. Soldiers and captains turned. Even Carmine Sessa, the family’s consigliere, cooperated. One prominent mob defense lawyer wisecracked to me that there was so much flipping going on, the Colombo family was now being referred to among defense attorneys as the House of Pancakes.

But the true delights of mobspeak, I found, stretched much further. The mobsters we dealt with were adept at casually twisting English into streetwise poetry and hilarious malapropisms. A cooperating witness, Joey Ambrosino, once told me his captain hadn’t directly come out and admitted a crime to him. “It was more of an insinnuendo,” he explained.