To report this week's cover story on the Mafia, our third in eight years, TIME correspondents in five major cities interviewed local federal authorities, talked with gangsters and followed their elusive tracks into casinos, pizza parlors, skyscraper offices and political hangouts. Covering the Mob casts the reporter in the role of sleuth--cultivating sources, comparing notes and collating data into hypotheses. Among the correspondents doing this detective work were New York Bureau Chief Laurence Barrett and John Tompkins, who are no strangers to the machinations of the Mob. Barrett edited TIME's first Mafia cover in 1969; Tompkins is a co-author of The Crime Confederation, a book on organized crime in America. "Gathering Mafia intelligence," says Tompkins, "is something like covering mainland China from Hong Kong; you get a hazy picture constructed from bits and pieces of information that may or may not be true."

According to Tompkins, the police and gangsters in New York City often "look the same, talk the same and come from the same backgrounds." At one lunch with a detective, Tompkins saw his source exchanging wary greetings ("How's the wife?") with some men at a nearby table. They were members of the Mob. Both sides are reluctant to talk: the Mafiosi fear exposure, and the police hesitate to divulge information that might cripple prosecutions. "Occasionally, a criminal thinks the reporter will be a future help and comes to us," says Barrett.

"But our primary sources are court records and the people on the right side of the law." Even interviews with the good guys can be delicate. Barrett recalls an organized-crime investigator who suggested dinner at a well-known gangster hangout, explaining, "That's the kind of place where people make a very serious effort not to hear what's being said at the next table. It's safer to be deaf."

After weeks of digging, our correspondents developed some new perceptions of the Mafia. Says Tompkins: "The morality of the Mob is somewhat closer to the morality of the average American citizen than it used to be. The Mafiosi always said they were no more corrupt than anyone else, and today more and more people might agree." Barrett notes some disturbing reasons for the Mafia's increasing success: "The public is a willing victim of organized crime--buying black-market cigarettes and participating in illegal gambling. It's also difficult for people to think of some racketeer--who lives in a nice house, has a nice car and sends his kid to Harvard--as the enemy."

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