Synopses & Reviews
Life in the city can be both liberating and oppressive. The contemporary city is an arena in which new and unexpected personal identities and collective agencies are forged and at the same time the major focus of market forces intent on making all life a commodity. This book explores both sides of the urban experience, developing a perspective from which the contradictory nature of the politics of the city comes more clearly into view.
Dialectical Urbanism discusses a range of urban issues, conflicts and struggles through detailed case studies set in Liverpool, Baltimore, New York, and Los Angeles. Issues which affect the quality of everyday life in the citygentrification and development, affordable rents, the accountability of local government, the domination of the urban landscape by new corporate giants, policingare located in the context of larger political and economic forces. At the same time, the narrative constantly returns to those moments in which city dwellers discover and develop their capacity to challenge larger forces and decide their own conditions of life, becoming active citizens rather than the passive consumers. Merrifield draws on a wide range of sourcesfrom interviews with activists and tenants fighting eviction to government and corporate reportsand uncovers surprising connections, for example, between the rise of junk bonds in the 1980s and urban improvement schemes in a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore. This lively and many-sided narrative is constantly informed by broader analyses and reflections on the city and engages with these analyses in turn. It fuses scholarship and political engagement into a powerful defense of the possibilities of life in the metropolis today.
Review
“It has long been clear that criminal prosecutions alone cannot remedy systemic organizational corruption. Criminologists, policymakers, prosecutors, and investigators will find much of interest in this well-written and important analysis of the government's use of the civil provisions of the RICO statute to purge organized crime's influence from the Teamsters Union. This invaluable case study demonstrates the advantages and pitfalls in using civil RICO to implement large-scale organizational reform.”-Ronald Goldstock,Commissioner, NYS Waterfront Commission, and former Director, NYS Organized Crime Task Force
Review
“I salute Jacobs and Cooperman for this scholarly yet gripping study of a long-drawn-out, multi-front effort, both private and governmental, to promote democracy and root out corruption within the Teamsters Union. They not only tell an exciting story about a colorful cast of characters--good and bad and in-between. They also ask all the hard questions: Do rank-and-file members really care about union democracy? Does the most effective reform come from the inside or the outside? And, ultimately, what is the role of a labor organization like the Teamsters in our postindustrial society?” -Theodore J. St. Antoine,Degan Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Michigan
Review
"This is a stunning book not only for what it says about the dramatic battle against corruption in the nation's most powerful labor union, but as well for what it says about the role of courts in effecting changes in large-scale private organizations in modern America. It is a ‘must read for all law and politics scholars.” -Malcolm M. Feeley,Claire Sanders Clements Dean's Professor, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berk
Review
“In Breaking the Devils Pact, Jacobs and Cooperman persuasively show that the Teamsters could be freed from the tentacles of mob bosses only by an imaginative use of the civil remedies of RICO; as Congress rightly foresaw, criminal prosecutions alone were not enough.”-G. Robert Blakey,Notre Dame Law School, principal architect of RICO
Review
“This book is a very important addition to the already most impressive series of studies Jacobs published in the last decades on the manifold ways organized crime can get embedded in core institutions, key industries and black markets and on the huge long-term efforts it takes to liberate societies to a certain extent from such a parasitical phenomenon. For European readers the overwhelming lesson is that competent, experienced and dedicated prosecutors, police officers, and judges are an equally strategic precondition for any successful campaign against organized crime as an appropriate legal framework to contain its most damaging societal manifestations."-C. J. C. F. Fijnaut,Tilburg University
Review
"The definitive legal and political account of this piece of [Teamsters] history." -Library Journal,
Review
"This book should be of interest to all those interested in racketeering law, organized crime, and the role of the government in addressing entrenched organized crime and corruption in private organizations."-Jay Albanese,Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Review
Review
"[A] meticulous study...richly detailed."-A.B. Cochran,CHOICE
Synopsis
In 1988, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani brought a massive civil racketeering suit against the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), at the time possibly the most corrupt union in the world. The lawsuit charged that the mafia had operated the IBT as a racketeering enterprise for decades, systematically violating the rights of members and furthering the interests of organized crime. On the eve of trial, the parties settled the case, and twenty years later, the trustees are still on the job.
Breaking the Devil's Pact is an in-depth study of the U.S. v. IBT, beginning with Giuliani's lawsuit and the politics surrounding it, and continuing with an incisive analysis of the controversial nature of the ongoing trusteeship. James B. Jacobs and Kerry T. Cooperman address the larger question of the limits of legal reform in the American labor movement and the appropriate level of government involvement.
Synopsis
An in-depth study of the U.S. v. the International Brotherhood of Teamsters
In 1988, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani brought a massive civil racketeering suit against the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), at the time possibly the most corrupt union in the world. The lawsuit charged that the mafia had operated the IBT as a racketeering enterprise for decades, systematically violating the rights of members and furthering the interests of organized crime. On the eve of trial, the parties settled the case, and twenty years later, the trustees are still on the job.
Breaking the Devil's Pact is an in-depth study of the U.S. v. IBT, beginning with Giuliani's lawsuit and the politics surrounding it, and continuing with an incisive analysis of the controversial nature of the ongoing trusteeship. James B. Jacobs and Kerry T. Cooperman address the larger question of the limits of legal reform in the American labor movement and the appropriate level of government involvement.
Synopsis
In 1988, despite powerful Congressional opposition, U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani brought a massive civil racketeering (RICO) suit against the leaders of the behemoth International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and more than two dozen Cosa Nostra (LCN) leaders. Intending to land a fatal blow to the mafia, Giuliani asserted that the union and organized-crime defendants had formed a devils pact. He charged the IBT leaders with allowing their organized-crime cronies to use the union as a profit center in exchange for the mobsters political support and a share of the spoils of corruption. On the eve of what would have been one of the most explosive trials in organized-crime and labor history, the Department of Justice and the Teamsters settled.
Breaking the Devils Pact traces the fascinating history of
U.S. v. IBT, beginning with Giulianis controversial lawsuit and continuing with in-depth analysis of the ups and downs of an unprecedented remedial effort involving the Department of Justice, the federal courts, the court-appointed officers (including former FBI and CIA director William Webster and former U.S. attorney general Benjamin Civiletti), and the IBT itself. Now more than 22 years old and spanning over 5 election cycles,
U.S. v. IBT is the most important labor case in the last half century, one of the most significant organized crime cases of all time, and one of the most ambitious judicial organizational reform efforts in U.S. history.
Breaking the Devils Pact is a penetrating examination of the potential and limits of court-supervised organizational reform in the context of systemic corruption and racketeering.
About the Author
Andy Merrifield teaches in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester, Massachussets. He is co-editor of The Urbanization of Injustice (NYU Press, 1997). His writings have appeared in The Nation, Monthly Review, Rethinking Marxism and New Left Review. He recently moved from London to New York City.