THE EXPANDING THESAURUS OF MOBSTER SLANG

It is often claimed, wrongly it seems, that Inuit have 50 different words for snow, signifying how important weather is to northern people. When it comes to the Mafia, however, mobsters easily have 50 different words for a snitch.

The critical importance within the underworld of identifying someone who is revealing criminal secrets spawns evocative and often amusing slang for people who co-operate with police.

Among the expansive lexicon of mob slang, expressions for breaching omertà, the Mafia’s code of silence, would form a lengthy entry.

There are common terms, equally used in the schoolyard as on the street, such as “rat,” “fink,” “snitch,” “narc.”

There are old-timey terms such as “stoolie,” “stool pigeon,” “canary,” “singing,” “chirping,” “squealing,” “grass” and derivatives.

More common these days, when someone is a snitch they “went bad”, “turned,” “flipped,” “gone over,” “no good,” “gone outside” or simply “talking.” Snitches are said to be “turning state” or having “rolled” or “dropped a dime,” an archaic reference to using a pay phone to call the cops.

Someone suspected of being indiscreet is described as “loose” or “can’t hold water” (as in he leaks); to snitch on someone is to “give them up,” “finger,” “burn” or “bury” them.

There are, however, more oblique expressions.

“Jittari i virmiceddi” is an old Sicilian Mafia slang that loosely translates as “vomit the pasta,” meaning someone who reveals secrets regurgitates his meal. It cuts deeper than the English slang “spilling his guts,” as it is imbued with moral rebuke for rejecting the sustenance the criminal life gave him.

While members of every close group of people develop their own jargon, mobsters almost turn it into a complete language.

Joseph Pistone had to decipher fast-talking wiseguys when he was undercover for the FBI, infiltrating the Bonanno crime family of New York under the pseudonym Donnie Brasco.

“Wiseguys take it to a whole other level. Maybe half of everything a wiseguy says will be in wiseguy lingo,” Pistone said in The Way of the Wiseguy. “For me to make a decent undercover mafioso, I had to soak up a f---ing dictionary full of wiseguy sayings.”

When a mobster says “I got to get back in shape, go lift some weights,” he doesn’t mean he is joining a fitness club; it means he is going to prison, Pistone said. That’s where a mobster suddenly has time to do things he normally doesn’t get around to.

I was recently convincing a gangster to meet with me. He told me to “bring a couple of browns.”

What did he want? I recalled my frequent chats with a former mob driver, Marvin “The Weasel” Elkind — himself a professional snitch — who talked about having a “walk around.” That’s a large, showy roll of cash a mobster carries made up of “browns and reds,” Elkind said, referring to the colours of Canadian $100 and $50 bills.

So the gangster wanted me to pay him $200 for the interview. I pretended I didn’t understand and offered him two coffees.