Glossary entry
The administration
ad-min-i-STRAY-shun
Definition
ad-min-i-STRAY-shun
The three senior positions of a family taken together — boss, underboss and consigliere. The term used in indictments and by members alike.
“The Commission case reached the administration of three families in a single trial, which is what made it different from everything before it.”
The word is bureaucratic and that is not an accident. These organisations described themselves in the language of legitimate business because they thought of themselves that way — as concerns with an executive, a middle management of capos and a workforce of soldiers.
Prosecutors adopted the term because it identified precisely the layer that racketeering law was written to reach: the men who decided rather than the men who acted.