A terse, dramatic volume that provides a definitive overview of how Cosa Nostra obtained a stranglehold on the infrastructure of New York City and held it for much of this century. Jacobs (Law/New York Univ.; Busting the Mob, not reviewed) and his co-authors (both lawyers in private practice) expose the Mob’s tactics in a clearly organized narrative. Six sections in Part I delineate the —mobbing up— of NYC (as the Mafia gained control of the Fulton Fish Market, JFK Airport, waste hauling, construction, the garment district, etc.); Part II contains corresponding chapters detailing how the forces of order managed to —liberate— the city. All chapters are loaded with a plethora of specific information regarding the shadowy mobsters of the —Five Families,— their internecine ties, and the cartels and —front— businesses they assembled at the expense of competitors. This attention to details, gleaned from both mainstream and highly obscure sources, is prodigious and makes a forceful, persuasive case for the authors— contention that the core of Mob activities was, in fact, —industrial racketeering.— Eschewing post-Godfather stereotypes of the Mafia as a nest of lovable yet violent —Goodfellas,— Jacobs et al. address such arcane subjects as the Mob’s decades-long stranglehold on NYC labor unions and the apparent —rationalizing effect— of its involvement on industry (it flourished with the tacit support of key business and political figures). Not until the 1980s did federal, state, and local law enforcement sustain success in a coordinated war on the Mob, aided by the controversial 1970 RICO statute and changes in surveillance laws. The tale concludes with the Giuliani era, in which stringent regulatory measures largely finished off the specter of —industrial racketeering.— Of equal interest to academics and lay enthusiasts, this serious yet highly readable book addresses Mafia reality more succinctly and clearly than any similar work in recent memory.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1999
ISBN: 0-8147-4246-7
Page Count: 328
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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