From Publishers Weekly
In this true-crime memoir, former Chicago mob attorney Cooley engagingly recounts his role in sparking Operation Gambat, a sweeping federal corruption probe into Chicago's political and judicial arenas. Operation Gambat succeeded in documenting the extensive ties between the mob and local government, thanks largely to Cooley's cooperation and courage. The author doesn't spare himself in recounting his descent into the world of crime, despite his loving family and policeman father; and his transformation from fixer and operator into avenging angel is plausibly rendered. Cooley does a nice job of taking the reader inside an undercover investigation, with its glitches, ego clashes and inevitable setbacks. Although his extensive involvement in graft makes Cooley less than fully sympathetic, his risk-taking to expose the crooked system goes a long way toward redeeming him. While the writing is more workmanlike than memorable, this is a nice counterpart to Gus Russo's
The Windy City Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America, and Cooley's achievements deserve the wide acclaim this book should garner. Fans of
Serpico, Prince of the City and
The Informant, as well as those of Scott Turow's fiction, will enjoy this unfamiliar story.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Fans of insider Mob books should thrill to this account (midwifed by veteran writer and magazine editor Levin) of a guy who wore a wire against the Chicago Outfit and lived (in greatly reduced circumstances in the Witness Protection Program and in constant danger) to tell the tale. Cooley was a lawyer who "got bent." In Chicago, that means a lawyer who sells out by defending the hit men and functionaries of the Mob, while greasing the wheels for them with Mob-connected politicians and police. Cooley begins the story with autobiography, from his upbringing through his slide into Mob lawyering to his walk into the Organized Crime Strike Force office in 1986 with an offer to wear a wire against the mobsters he represented for years. The book also offers a revealing analysis of how the Mob was able to gain a stranglehold over Chicago's government, court system, and police. And it takes a revealing peek into Mob rituals, like the "last suppers" held on the eve of a mobster's execution. And it's a thriller, as readers accompany Cooley on sweat-raising stings and meets. The result of Cooley's return to values was his becoming a star witness in nine federal trials that crippled the Chicago Outfit. Levin's notes at book's end offer more details from various sources on Cooley's assertions. A mesmerizing treatise on organized crime.
Connie FletcherCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved