New Book: Mobsters, Unions, and Feds – The Mafia and the American Labor Movement
-By Warner Todd Huston
James Jacobs has released his latest in a series of exposes on Organized Crime in the USA. This time in “Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement,” he focuses on how the Mob has infiltrated and distorted the labor movement in the U.S. to its own illegal, violent ends.
Jacobs meticulously chronicles the connections between the Mob and unionism and makes those connections irrefutable. Several reviews out there praise Jacobs for his effort, but a few complain that he isn’t “sensitive” enough to the ostensible goal of unionism, the workers. Of course, worrying about the supposed plight of the workers was NOT the goal of this book. The purpose of this book was to chronicle the Mob’s ties to unions. The “plight” of workers is a wholly other subject.
Check it out at Amazon.com.
From Publishers Weekly
NYU law professor Jacobs further burnishes his reputation for advancing the study of organized crime in America with his latest work of scholarship, billed by the publisher as “the only book to investigate how the mob has distorted American labor history.” This worthy successor to Gotham Unbound and Busting the Mob is an exhaustive, albeit sometimes repetitive, survey of the grip La Cosa Nostra has exerted on the country’s most powerful unions. While many will be familiar with the broad outlines of the corruption that riddled the Teamsters, which is recounted by the author, his summary of some lesser-known examples of pervasive labor corruption help illustrate his thesis that the entire American union movement has suffered from the intimidation and fear the mob used to gain and maintain control of unions. Especially valuable is Jacobs’s examination of the relatively recent use of the RICO law to bring dirty unions under the control of a federally appointed independent trustee, and the book’s posing of hard questions about the mixed success those monitorships have had. (Jan.)
From Booklist
Jacobs, legal scholar and expert on the Mafia, sets out to show how the Mob has distorted American labor history, explaining the relationship between organized crime and organized labor, as well as recent federal efforts to clean up unions. Unions are susceptible to organized crime because they receive a constant flow of funds from members automatically deducted by employers; AFL-CIO rules prohibit challenges to representation once a union has been recognized; and oversight of unions is difficult for both insiders and outsiders because few union members are interested in governance and because violence, intimidation, and control of information make monitoring costly and risky. Jacobs insists the book is prolabor and notes that unions do not have exclusive claim to fraud and corruption, given the well-known examples in corporations and the government. Jacobs concludes that union problems are difficult to solve because “the most distinctive feature of corruption in the labor movement is its association with the infiltration and exploitations of the Cosa Nostra organized crime families.” Mary Whaley
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Posted by Warner Todd Huston on October 21, 2008 9:45 am
» Filed Under Communism, Democrats, Domestic Enemies, Liberal Media/Bias, News, Union Mafias/Thugs
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2 Responses to “New Book: Mobsters, Unions, and Feds – The Mafia and the American Labor Movement”
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Syndicate Me
Not surprising since many of these unions like the AFL/CIO,TEAMSTERS,UNITED AUTO WORKERS and many many others are connected with the mafia and organized crime
I have to disagree. It was not the mafia that infiltrated the union but the union that infiltrated the criminal enterprises just like they infiltrated other businesses. Why do you think Disney, GM, and other businesses are so liberal.