Kwitny, Jonathan. Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. 422 pages.
Jonathan Kwitny, who died of cancer in 1998 at the age of 57, became an
excellent investigative journalist after joining the Wall Street Journal in
1971 (the good old days -- before transnational hegemony, monoculture, and
prime-time spin). This book is an impressive example of the sort of thing
that no longer gets published. It is name-intensive, well-researched, and
deals with a topic that required a lot of adventurous legwork in the 1970s,
before keyboards had search engines behind them. Equally remarkable, editors
and publishers of that era had power and supported good journalism, while
today they usually defer to their legal and marketing departments.
Kwitny describes a piece of American history that isn't found in
textbooks. It's about Mafia influence in U.S. business: trucking, garbage,
the meat industry, lunch-wagon businesses, pizzas, cheese processing,
garment factories, banking and finance, and in unions such as teamsters,
butchers, and longshoremen. It's also about cops who spend thirteen years
building a case, whereupon judges let the mobsters off with light sentences.
Most of the events described in this book are from the mid-1970s, and deal
only with the American (mostly Italian immigrants) Mafia operating in
America. During the next two decades, federal efforts against the American
Mafia were successful, even as organized crime on a global scale expanded.
ISBN 0-393-01188-7
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