A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a left or right bracket or, alternatively, an opening paired bracket or closing paired bracket depending on the directionality of the context. Specific forms of the mark include rounded brackets, square brackets, curly brackets, angle brackets, as well as various less common pairs of symbols; as well as signifying the overall class of punctuation, the word bracket is used to refer to a specific form of bracket, which varies from region to region. In North America, an unqualified'bracket' refers to the square bracket. Chevrons, ⟨ ⟩, were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English. Desiderius Erasmus coined the term lunula to refer to the rounded parentheses, recalling the shape of the crescent moon; some of the following names are contextual. – parentheses, parens, round brackets, first brackets, or circle brackets – braces are "two connecting marks used in printing".

– square brackets, closed brackets, hard brackets, third brackets, crotchets, or brackets ⟨ ⟩ – pointy brackets, angle brackets, triangular brackets, diamond brackets, tuples, or chevrons < > – guillemets, inequality signs, pointy brackets, or brackets. Sometimes referred to as angle brackets, in such cases as HTML markup. Known as broken brackets or "brokets". ⸤ ⸥. The characters ‹ › and « », known as guillemets or angular quote brackets, are quotation mark glyphs used in several European languages. Which one of each pair is the opening quote mark and, the closing quote varies between languages; the corner-brackets ｢ ｣ are quotation marks used in East Asian languages. In English, typographers prefer not to set brackets in italics when the enclosed text is italic. However, in other languages like German, if brackets enclose text in italics, they are also set in italics. Parentheses contain material, aside from the main point. A milder effect may be obtained by using a pair of commas as the delimiter, though if the sentence contains commas for other purposes, visual confusion may result.

That issue is fixed by using a pair of dashes instead. In American usage, parentheses are considered separate from other brackets, calling them "brackets" is unusual. Parentheses may be used in formal writing to add supplementary information, such as "Sen. John McCain spoke at length", they can indicate shorthand for "either singular or plural" for nouns, e.g. "the claim". It can be used for gender neutral language in languages with grammatical gender, e.g. "he agreed with his/her physician". Parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in informal writing and stream of consciousness literature. Examples include the southern American author William Faulkner as well as poet E. E. Cummings. Parentheses have been used where the dash is used in alternatives, such as "parenthesis) educational testing

The 116th Street Crew known as the Uptown Crew, is a powerful crew within the Genovese crime family. In the early 1960s, Anthony Salerno became one of the most powerful capos in the family. Salerno based the crew out of the Palma Boys Social Club located 416 East 115th Street in East Harlem, Manhattan. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the 116th Street Crew had absorbed and initiated many former members of the vicious East Harlem Purple Gang, an Italian-American murder for hire and drug trafficking gang operating in 1970s Italian Harlem and acting independent of the Mafia. In the early 1890s, a group of four brothers arrived in New York City from Sicily; the Morello-Terranova brothers soon started taking over the growing Little Italy in East Harlem, by using the black hand technique of extorting small business and running illegal gambling operations. The group became known as the 116th Street Mob. With their increasing power the Morello's sought to control Lower Manhattan's Little Italy; the Little Italy in lower Manhattan was under the control of Ignazio "Lupo the Wolf" Saietta, Before a gang war erupted, the two sides decided on joining forces.

Giuseppe Morello became the Capo di tutti capi, but before long he and Ignazio Saietta were arrested and charged with counterfeiting in 1910. Nicholo Morello became embroiled in the Mafia-Camorra War; this conflict was between the Sicilian Morello-Terranova family and Brooklyn Camorra gangs led by Pellegrino Morano. Each side wanted to control all the Italian gangs in New York City and across the United States. On September 7, 1916 Nicholas Terranova was murdered; the next leaders of the Morello family were Ciro. They within months police began arresting top members of the Camorra gangs; this allowed the Sicilians to maintain dominance and control over New York City and the remaining Camorra gangs joined forces with Sicilian gangs. Vincent continued operating from Brooklyn, Ciro continued expanding his operations in East Harlem and The Bronx. Ciro "The Artichoke King" Terranova controlled the 116th Street Crew during the prohibition era. In his years, after being "encouraged" by younger gangsters to retire in 1935 and subsequently declaring bankruptcy and losing his Pelham Manor home to foreclosure and his wife moved into the building long owned by the Morello-Terranova family at 338 East 116th Street.

Michael "Trigger Mike" Coppola, was a top lieutenant in the 116th Street Crew of Ciro Terranova. He took over the crew sometime between 1932 and 1936, after Terranova was "put on the shelf" by the new Luciano-Genovese-Costello regime of the Luciano crime family. Coppola was supervising the illegal numbers racket, once controlled by Dutch Schultz before his murder; the numbers racket controlled bookmaking and illegal gambling throughout Harlem and The South Bronx, making thousands of dollars a year. When boss Vito Genovese was imprisoned in the late 1950s, various influential members began running the crime family through a ruling panel/committee; the panel consisted of acting/front boss Thomas "Tommy Ryan" Eboli, underboss Gerardo "Gerry" Catena and consigliere Michele "Big Mike" Miranda, while others served in the advisory capacity. Mike Coppola, an influential capo helped the panel. In the early 1960s, Mike Coppola was imprisoned on tax evasion charges and followed in the footsteps of his predecessor Ciro Terranova, being put on the shelf after his release from prison in 1963.

Coppola moved to South Florida and retired. His crew, with his vast illegal interests went to Anthony Salerno. Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, started as a soldier in the 1930s under Michael Coppola; as years went by, Salerno worked his way up the ranks of the crew and the crime family, controlling his own lucrative gambling and loansharking operations. In the early 1960s, his capo Coppola was demoted in rank; the crew split, allowing Coppola's top lieutenants to break up his vast illegal interests that included his numbers empire. Salerno based the 116th Street Crew from the Palma Boys Social Club located at 416 East 115th Street in East Harlem. Salerno, his brother Cirino led the crew, operating in Italian Harlem and the Bronx; the Salerno brothers oversaw a multimillion-dollar gambling racket based in East Harlem that expanded into the South Bronx. Salerno's gambling empire included numbers and floating dice games; when the East Harlem neighborhood went from a predominantly Italian to a predominantly black neighborhood, Salerno managed to hold onto their interests and employ over 200 people in their street rackets.

Salerno was a respected and feared gangster, a well-known New York Mafia powerhouse who continued to rise through the ranks of the Genovese crime family becoming consigliere from 1972–75, underboss in 1975, the acting–front boss from 1981-86. In the late 1970s, the FBI managed to place a listening device in his East Harlem headquarters, the Palma Boys Social Club. By the early 1980s, Salerno had been caught on the bug discussing crime family affairs and business with various members, including top underlings such as capo Matthew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello, Salerno driver and right-hand-man Vincent "Fish" Cafaro, Lucchese crime family boss Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo, whose own Jaguar, where Corallo conducted much of his affairs had been bugged. In February 1985, the information obtained through the FBI bug was used t

Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson was an American social worker and author. She received national recognition in 2009 when, at 105 years old, she travelled to Washington D. C. to attend the inauguration of U. S. President Barack Obama. Johnson was born Ella Mae Smith on January 13, 1904, in Texas, she never met her father, she became an orphan when her mother died of tuberculosis when she was four years old. She was raised by the Davis family, she was the salutatorian of Dallas Colored High School. Johnson was able to attend college through several scholarships and a job as a waitress at a YMCA tearoom, enrolling at Fisk University in 1921; as a student, she attended a commencement speech by W. E. B. Du Bois, she received a bachelor's degree in French from Fisk University, though she graduated six months than expected after participating in a semester boycott of the school led by Du Bois. After graduation, Smith moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she worked for the Congregational Church. In 1926, she relocated again to Cleveland, Ohio, to pursue her master's degree in social work at the Western Reserve University’s School of Applied Social Science, now called Case Western Reserve University.

Smith was one of just two African American students which were admitted to the school's social work graduate program each year. She married her first husband, Elmer Cheeks, an electrical engineer with Cleveland Municipal Light, in 1929; the couple had two sons and Paul Cheeks, during their 12 year marriage, which ended in his death. She married her second husband, Raymond Johnson, who worked as a probation officer at the Cleveland Municipal Court, she was widowed from her second marriage. Johnson worked for both the Cuyahoga County Department of Welfare and Associated Charities of Cleveland, in a program that merged with the Aid to Dependent Children, an American federal government program, her job involved finding scholarships for low-income students and distributing financial payments to single mothers. Among the people she helped were her young sons, Carl Stokes and Louis Stokes, she retired in 1961 and began travelling visiting more than 30 countries, including Egypt, Ghana, Israel, Japan, Kenya and Syria.

She moved to the Judson at University Circle, an assisted living facility, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, in 1975. Johnson gained national attention in 2009, when at the age of 105, she attended the inauguration of President Barack Obama in Washington D. C. Covered in a sleeping bag and heavy clothes to guard against cold temperatures, Johnson attended the inauguration with a ticket provided by Ohio U. S. Senator Sherrod Brown. In several interviews, Johnson said of President Obama, "I found him so interesting and brilliant" and predicted a future female American president: "God wouldn't give African-American men what he wouldn't give to the women." Johnson died at Judson Park in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 22, 2010, at the age of 106. She was survived by James Cheeks and Paul Cheeks, she was the oldest living African American alumna of Case Western Reserve University at the time. Johnson's autobiography, It Is Well with My Soul: The Extraordinary Life of a 106-Year-Old Woman, which she co-wrote with author Patricia Mulcahy, was published posthumously by Penguin Books.

Johnson's 203-page memoir, scheduled to be released in May 2010, was moved up to a new release date of March 31, 2010, due to her death