How well do you know your mob bosses and gangsters? Take our organized crime quiz.

Crime groups including the Mafia have long provoked both fear and fascination. Sometimes mob bosses have risen to wield extraordinary power – seemingly out of reach of the law – in cities in the US and beyond. And often they fall just as spectacularly. Here's a quiz that will test (and elevate) your street smarts in the world of "wise guys."

21. No group is so famously associated with organized crime as the Mafia. Which of the following statements about the Mafia is true?

Abbot Genser/HBO/AP/File
Vincent Curatola (l.) who plays New York mob boss Johnny Sack, and James Gandolfini, who plays Tony Soprano, appear in the season finale of HBO's 'The Sopranos,' in this undated photo.

It's known in the US as La Cosa Nostra ("our thing").

It originated on the Italian island of Sicily.

It traces its roots back to at least the mid-19th century.

All of the above.

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About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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