Review: Bringing Down the Mob

Normally, I’m not into the whole “true crime” thing. I’m not sure why; it’s just another form of history, my longtime paramour. Maybe it’s because I like to read more about things long in the past so I can get a broader picture of the impacts, or maybe I’m just more interested in sociopolitical and religious structures than single, small aberrations of morality.

Anyway, after a short junket of watching Scarfaceand a half-day of mob-themed shows on the History Channel before I left for Japan, not to mention surfing onto some organized crime pages on Wikipedia (I’m pretty sure I started out by looking up the name of Odin’s son in Norse mythology; wish I had the browser history so I could see how I ended up on La Cosa Nostra), I decided to check out a few books on the Mob. The first one I picked up, the only one Borders had at the time, was Thomas Repetto’s Bringing Down the Mob.

This book doesn’t cover the “Golden Age” of the mob, during prohibition and the like. Rather, this covers the period after the Apalachian Meeting in 1957, which ended in a police raid and proof of an organized crime syndicate operating in the USA. Repetto covers a history of the last 50 years of war against the Mafia, including topics like: the FBI’s pioneering “bug” operations, Bobby Kennedy’s crusade against organized crime, Jimmy Hoffa and his disappearance, establishment of the RICO act,  and other significant events, even up to current (as of 2006) movers and shakers on both the side of the law and the mob.

The book is well written, and Repetto knows how to keep things flowing and interesting. For a subject like this, I can imagine it must be hard to get a lot of details from both sides of the conflict, but the author manages to work more than enough hard info into this lengthy overview. I would have liked a few more details at some point, but perhaps they’re just not available. He splits a roughly equal amount of time between the movements of the mob, and the actions of law enforcement, so you get a good picture of what was going on at all times. And the author manages to keep things tied together, so in an underworld where change was often sudden and violent, you can see the downstream effects of major events. How the mob set up its structures and how the cops tried to tear them down receives some basic exposition, but the book is mostly focused on the personalities involved.

The people in this real-life drama are presented pretty much as they were, with little of the romanticism that many mob stories fall prey to. There is fair criticism of some law enforcement personnel, but mostly they are shown as men just doing their jobs. The mobsters are described pretty much as they were, some brutal and vicious, some outlandish, some still clinging to old-world traditions, but all well aware of their criminal enterprise. There’s a small photo section as well, mostly filled with B&W shots of important mob and police figures, as well photos of a few of the more famous (and gruesome) mob killings. It really helps to be able to put a face to many of these men.

I probably should have started with Repetto’s first book, American Mafia, but I think it bears mentioning that before I’d even finished Bringing Down the Mob, I’d already picked up the precursor and was planning to read it. So yeah, I really enjoyed it, and it’s a good read even if you don’t have any background.

Link to Amazon.