Now Mr. Maranzano said to everybody around the table, "this is Joe Cago," which I must explain is what most of the guys know me by ["Cago" was a corruption of "Cargo," his nickname as a boy). Then he tells me to sit down in an empty chair on his right. When I sit down, so does the whole table. Someone put a gun and a knife on the table in front of me. I remember the gun was a .38, and the knife was what you would call a dagger. After that, Maranzano motions us up again, and we all hold hands and he says some words in Italian. Then we sit down, and he turns to me, still in Italian, and talks about the gun and the knife. "This represents that you live by the gun and the knife," he says, "and you die by the gun and the knife." Next he asked me, "which finger do you shoot with?" I said, "this one," and I hold up my right forefinger. I was still wondering what he meant by this when he told me to make a cup of my hands. Then he put a piece of paper in them and lit it with a match and told me to say after him, as I was moving the paper back and forth, "this is the way I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra." All of this was in Italian .... [The Cosa Nostra] comes before everything—our blood family, our religion, our country.

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 716