Corruption and Racketeering in the New York City Construction Industry - by Ronald Goldstock (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This book, Corruption and Racketeering In The New York City Construction Industry: The Final Report of the New York State Organized Task Force, lays out in close and compelling detail the intricate patterns of currupt activities and relationships that for the better part of a century have characterized business as usual in the construction industry in America's largest metropolis.
The book is the end product of more than five years' worth of investigation, prosecutions, and research by the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, a unique agency that has set a national example for marrying law enforcement initiatives with comprehensive and exhausting analysis of the causes and dynamics of industrial racketeering. This is a sobering analysis of the construction industry, one of New York City's largest industries, and in effect, one of the city's most significant economic sectors. In any given year during the 1980s, billions of dollars of construction were being carried out at any one time. The industry regularly employs more than 100,000 people in the city, involving some one hundred union locals and many hundreds of general and specialty contractors as well as a large number of architects, engineers, and materials suppliers. The book shows--in great and provocative detail--how organized extortion, bribery illegal cartels, and bid rigging characterize construction in the city. The basis for much of this crim is labor racketeering, controlled or orchestrated by organized crime. It reveals how this world of corruption affects not only the private sector but the city's vast public works program, and it spells out the ways in which both organized crime and official corruption each sustain the dynamics of ongoing criminality.
Wrong-doing on a massive scale is documented at length. But this book is more than a recitation of extensive and systematic criminality. The book recommends a number of plausible options for genuine reform. Necessarily these are profound and radical solutions, but everyone who reads this book will conclude that only profound and radical solutions could hope to solve such an entrenched and intractable crime problem.

Review Quotes

"Framed by an audacious pairing of 'presidential bookends' (Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama), "Representing the Race" forces us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the putative political value of African American literature. Jarrett draws our attention away from the legacy of Black Arts in the 1960s to a richly historicized set of case studies from the colonial era to the present."-Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University, and author of "The Practice of Diaspora"

"In this tour de force, Jarrett offers us a strikingly fresh and powerfully cogent paradigm for African American literary history and historiography more generally. An exemplary model of interdisciplinary inquiry, "Representing the Race" deftly engages fierce historic and contemporary debates about the relationship between literature, culture and politics to bring us to new and nuanced understandings of them all. This latest scholarship of Jarrett's is not only field-defining; it stunningly redefines altogether what we think of as the field of African American Studies." -Michele Elam, author of "The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics"