Glossary entry
Beef
BEEF
Definition
BEEF
A dispute between members, or between a member and another family. Also, separately, a criminal charge — a man can have a beef with a capo and a beef with the government in the same week.
“A beef between two crews goes to a sit-down before it goes anywhere else, and taking it anywhere else first is itself an offence.”
The double meaning is useful and probably deliberate. Both senses describe a problem that has to be answered formally rather than ignored.
The internal sense is the more revealing one. A made man could not simply act against another made man; the grievance had to be raised, heard and decided, and the machinery for doing that — the sit-down, the capo, and above him the Commission — is most of what distinguished these organisations from the street gangs they grew out of.
What the record also shows is how often the machinery failed. Every war in this archive began as a beef that the procedure was supposed to contain.