Though his focus was business, he didn’t shy away from calling hits, especially when it came to his daughter, Constance. Known as the “The Howard Hughes of the Mob,” Constantino Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano used his business savvy to bring the Gambino crime family to its financial apex by turning the family away from illegitimate business like drug trafficking towards the comparatively safer practices (for the mob at least) of money laundering and extortion. Reputed mafia boss Paul Castellano leaves Federal Court after posting $2 million bail. (Warning: Some of the photos are a little gruesome.) Paul Castellano
Here are some of the most notable mob murders of the last century. Last week, Frank Cali, head of New York’s Gambino crime family, was murdered outside his Staten Island home, according to The New York Times, making this the first time a mafia family boss has been whacked since former Gambino don Paul Castellano was shot in 1985.īut in the first half of the 20th century, when the mob reigned supreme and was a staple of front-page news, high-profile killings were far more common and just as graphic, inspiring the gory imaginations of the American public. They trace skeevy back to the Italian verb schifare, which means “to disgust or sicken” and the Italian noun schifo, which is related to schifare and which means “disgust.” Our written evidence indicates that skeevy first showed up in places with a high population of Italian-Americans, like New Jersey, New York City, and Philadelphia, so the trip from Italian into English isn’t entirely improbable.Onlookers watch as police remove the bodies of the victims of an execution-style murder from the scene at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago. Slang like skeevy can be difficult to track down, but in this case, we have a pretty good guess where it came from, courtesy of Philadelphia Magazine in 1976: “The word ‘skeevie’ used by South Philadelphians to indicate something disgusting is from Italian ‘schifare’, to loathe.”Īnd etymologists tend to agree. Carol Evan, Glad and Sorry Seasons, 1970 Skeevy, originally spelled skeevie, first showed up in print as a noun-a 1955 article in American Weekly notes that skeevie is youth slang for a disgusting person, as in “He’s a skeevie.” Sometime between the 1950s and the 1970s, skeevy moved from noun to adjective, originally to describe something that’s morally questionable:Ĭarefully holding on to every dirty, skeevy piece of information he collected, he used it in his own best interests to ferret his way into a Vice Presidency at one of the television networks at an early age. 'Skeevy' was originally a noun, as in "He's a skeevie."
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