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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good Pile of Research Notes but not a Book, January 12, 2007
Russo's huge discombobulated collection of random research notes is a nice example of how difficult it is to figure out who really runs anything in America. He has clearly investigated the Chicago Mob and its connection to the growth of the Los Angeles and the Las Vegas economies with the greatest diligence.
But he has made little sense of it all. His notes go from topic to topic, more or less in chronological order, but there are gaping holes in every story where he could not find out what happened because no one wrote anything down ( on purpose....you don't leave trails of your law breaking....), and where he just gets lost and confused.
Time and again, he tells the same stories, with facts that differ a bit each time, probably because the FBI files, or trial transcripts, or oral histories, differ --- to his credit, he 'sources' everything, so you know where each alleged "factoid" came from, but knowing how inaccurate FBI files can be about anything, reporting every ridiculous rumor an agent hears, and knowing how peoples' memories can 're-shape' events recalled decades later, one is left with more questions than answers about just how the Chicago Mob 'washed' their money by first investing in the Democrats in California, and then later in Ronald Reagan and the Republicans.
Perhaps someone will one day take all these notes and try to figure out what they mean. In other words, perhaps someone will take the next step of sifting through this pile, separate the rumors, legends, and just good stories from real facts, the chaff from the wheat, and analyze just why we should know all this and how/why it may matter to us now.....
Sidney Korshak was obviously a guy who could "fix" a lot of problems, but there's no real insight into his role in modern labor history, his role in Kevin Starr's California history, his real role even in Hollywood history....he's a good subject still waiting for a good biographer.
Or perhaps the point of this whole pile of notes is that no one can ever tell the story because the players are gone now, and they covered up their story so well that this is the best we can get--- half stories not well told with big holes in them.
(For example, ---- he suggests that Circuit Court Judge David Bazelon had something to do with Japanese farms being expropriated by the government and then by white California farmers after Japanese internment, but then he just tells about 2 or 3 pieces of property, mostly German/Axis property, and we really learn nothing about 99.5% of the Japanese land and what actually happened to it and what Bazelon really did or didn't do...this stuff is all available in property records etc...but Russo didn't go the length...
etc...Obviously this could go on and on. The point is simple --- interesting bits and pieces lying in a heap don't equal any kind of edifice worth walking thru.
Think twice before even starting into this --- read it as a collection of somewhat collected anecdotes, not as a tightly woven well reasoned analysis of much of anything....
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16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worth the wait?, September 19, 2006
It's 490 years since Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia, a model for any society desiring to live rightly. The Utopians have little interest in money or the false pleasures of jewelry and high fashion. They disdain gambling and the pursuit of "empty and worthless honors," and anybody arrogant enough to run for public office can never gain it. The legal profession is absolutely banned, as is private property. Everybody works for the greater good of all. There is no "conspiracy of the rich," in which a few prey on the many and amass wealth through crooked schemes.
America is not a utopia, but it continues to be a magnet for those who seek to prosper. Gus Russo's latest book, which was scheduled for release last spring, details the rise of a group of first-generation Americans who strove to fulfill the new land's promise. Focusing on some members of the Chicago Jewish community, he initially uses laudatory language about their energetic escape from Old World oppression and the fervor with which they sought to flourish in the U.S. He must hope the spare praise will insulate him against charges of anti-Semitism. And he's safe from libel suits, as his main subjects have passed on to the Great Country Club in the Sky.
These folks were unabashed capitalists who followed Al Capone's dictum to "give people what they want." For Korshak, Ziffren, Wasserman, Pritzker, and Stein, it was Las Vegas and other luxury resorts, the movie industry and labor peace. They backed Democratic candidates for whom most working people voted, and they were ascendant when unions weren't the pale shell that they are today. Despite Russo's negative spin, I finished the book with some respect for Sidney Korshak. A longtime supporter of United Farm Worker boycotts, I was delighted to learn that Korshak facilitated the UFW's first contract with a grower and later got the Teamsters off their backs.
Russo is meticulous to a fault; people are reintroduced numerous times, facts and figures are repeated, and some early quotes reappear later in the book. Another sour note is Russo's moral outrage at the end of the book over Joe Six-Pack patriotically paying his taxes while these alleged tax dodgers went unpunished -- even after millions were spent on FBI surveillance -- for bilking the government out of billions. Why was Korshak never charged with anything? Russo's easy answer is that the fix was always in. ... Convicted swindler Robert Vesco, who makes a brief appearance in this book, once dubbed American democracy "mob rule." Is it any better now, with sweetheart deals going to companies profiting from the blood-sucking, tax-wasting, budget-busting misadventure in Iraq? The Dow may be skyrocketing but so are housing, health care, and fuel costs; Joe Six-Pack's manufacturing jobs are going offshore and he never had it so bad.
The four stars reflect my interest in the subject matter more than my appraisal of the writing and editing. My parents came from the Chicago community featured in the book. They knew people who knew people who knew these people, and they were rarely happier than after an evening at the allegedly mob-controlled Chez Paree nightclub.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Peek Under the Covers, November 13, 2007
America loves mob melodramas, guys getting whacked because they crossed somebody or other. No one much cares whether the culprits get caught since it's all part of the underworld game. No one in authority much cares either, that is, until some hoodlum tries to beat his income tax after the gov't has demanded its cut. Then the bloodhounds of the IRS come calling and the careless capo gets a federal number.
Economists call the early stages of capital accumulation "primitive accumulation". Few academics may call 20's style bootlegging primitive accumulation, but illegal whiskey sure raised a lot of money for the Capone-led Chicago gang. And like most rising business ventures, much of that money was used by astute managers such as Murray "The Camel" Humphreys to buy influence into the over-world of politics and law. What does it matter if the money's dirty, since it's still money, as any number of corrupted Illinois officials shows.
But what happens when even a big city like Chicago becomes too small for the sums flowing into gangster coffers. Well. if you're a wizard like Humphreys, you start looking for new opportunities, especially where there is little or no competition. You also look for somebody who can pass for respectable, since you're past the primitive stage and now have the money to go legit. Enter attorney Sidney Korshak, discreet, smooth, and, above all, a protege of Jake Arvey, Chicago's master ward healer and political go-between. As Russo's lengthy account shows, the mob could not have made a better choice.
Horace Greeley's famous directive was to, "Go West, young man," and that's just where Korshak took the mob money and contacts, helping to turn dusty Las Vegas into the underworld's Glitter Gulch, and Los Angeles real estate into a permanent citadel of mob influence. Along the way, he picked up such powers in their own right as MCA's talent impresario Lew Wasserman and Democratic party power-broker Paul Ziffren, along with numerous union bigshots. Together, theirs was an underworld shadow cast across two big states with a network of contacts reaching all the way to the nation's capital.
But muscling in at the top means knowing how to cut deals with others at the top. Here Korshak proves to be the guy to go to whether the public knows his name or not. Want top talent for your TV show, see Sid; want no union trouble at the studios, see Sid; want a good deal on a tax scam, see Sid; want a big donation for a charity fund-raiser, yeah, see Sid. And all the time, there's the whispering in the background about the guy's connections with other guys, guys with guns. But then, isn't Sinatra's Rat Pack a really cool bunch of Hollywood swingers. Yeah, just ask the public or even President Kennedy.
To me, it's not a pretty picture, all the way from the yawning silence of the LA Times to the hobnobbing with Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan, plus a Hollywood establishment that could apparently care less. Scattered investigations go nowhere, while whistle-blowers like Steve Allen get black-balled for their civic duty. But then, maybe this is just another success story of primitive accumulation working its way to the top and learning to get along, even as the top learns to get along with them. I believe it was Victor Hugo who said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Maybe then, the Chicago mob was just more obvious than those others like old Joe Kennedy, an Irish bootlegger reborn into the white-collar world despite the sinister origins. Disturbing or not, the book is well worth the read.
As a general reader, I'm in no position to gainsay any of Russo"s facts, so I try to keep an open mind toward detractors. It's vital, however, that critics not simply denounce the work in unsubstantiated fashion. Chapter and verse should be cited in order to gain credibility. Of course, the text casts aspersions onto a number of prominent and reputable people, which places a heavy load on both the book and its detractors. Nonetheless, if Russo has to follow the rules, so should the critics.
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