Glossary entry
The books
thuh BOOKS
Definition
thuh BOOKS
The membership roll of a family, spoken of as open when new members may be inducted and closed when they may not.
“The books had been closed since the war, and there were soldiers in their fifties still waiting.”
There is no ledger. The books are a way of talking about whether a family is admitting members, a decision that belonged to the Commission rather than to any single boss.
They were closed nationally in 1957 and stayed closed for roughly two decades. The reasoning was defensive: Apalachin had just demonstrated how much the government could learn in an afternoon, and every new member was a new person who could be arrested, followed, or turned.
The cost was a generation of associates who did the work without ever becoming members, and an average age at the top that kept climbing. When the books reopened in the late 1970s the families admitted men who had been waiting twenty years, several of whom later cooperated.