Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement

Nowhere in the world has organized crime infiltrated the labor movement as thoroughly as in the United States. Mobsters, Unions, and Feds is the first book to document organized crime’s exploitation of organized labor and the massive federal clean-up effort. A renowned criminologist who for twenty years has been assessing the government’s attack on the Mafia, James B. Jacobs explains how Cosa Nostra families first gained a foothold in the labor movement, then consolidated their power through patronage, fraud, and violence and finally used this power to become part of the political and economic power structure of twentieth-century urban America. Mobsters, Unions, and Feds is the most comprehensive study to date of how labor racketeering evolved and how the government has finally resolved to eradicate it.