Saturday,
September 16, 2006
Book: "SuperMob": Jewish Lawyers ran "Mafia"
The
ANNOTICO Report
Russo,
an investigate reporter who has written about the Chicago Outfit in depth
before, sets out here to tell the story of the mostly Jewish lawyers who were
recruited by Italian mobsters and eventually came to surpass their original
paymasters in money and power.
I
always thought it was Meyer Lansky that was the "brains" of the
Underworld. Author Gus Russo claims it was Sidney Korshak,
Korshack was from the
Korshak assembled a team of men such as entertainment mogul Lew Wasserman, tax lawyer Abe Pritzker
and real estate speculator Paul Ziffren, Korshak represented the clean face of a dirty business,He was the bridge between Mafia hoodlums and the
white-collar world.
The Mafia's Shadow Men
The San Francisco
Chronicle
Reviewed by
Trey Popp
Sunday, September 17, 2006
"SUPERMOB"
How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became
By Gus Russo ;
In
their quest to assemble fragments of the past into a coherent explanation for
why things happened as they did, historians tend to take one of two paths. Some
stick to the deeds of kings, presidents and famous military commanders,
agreeing with Thomas Carlyle that "the history of the world is but the
biography of great men."
Others
contend that the engines of history are really to be found in the anonymous
multitudes, whose collective needs and capabilities determine the overarching
economic, technological and social realities that shape the world and its
future.
And
then there is a third notion, usually discredited but always seductive, that
history is the product of a different breed of great men: the kind who plot their schemes in dark shadows and keep their
identities secret. Such a man was Sidney Korshak.
For someone who
never got convicted of so much as jaywalking and evaded public notice for
nearly his whole life, Korshak had serious clout with
powerful men. Having launched his legal career by representing the heirs to the
Capone mob in
His preternatural
abilities as a
Russo, an investigate
reporter who has written about the Chicago Outfit in depth before, sets out
here to tell the story of the mostly Jewish lawyers who were recruited by
Italian mobsters and eventually came to surpass their original paymasters in
money and power. He begins in
Thus they worked
surreptitiously, choosing to focus on the substrata of a business or
event." In an era when Jews were barred from the white-shoe firms, where
they might otherwise have made lucrative careers, these often brilliant men
became integral parts of the Mafia's attempts to extend their westward reach
into legitimate enterprises, ranging from casinos to hotel chains to real
estate to the
Drawing heavily
from FBI case files and countless interviews, Russo opts for thoroughness
rather than a breezy prose style to make his case. The weight of evidence can
make the book slow going at times, but it adds up to a compelling picture of
the exercise of power in the 20th century. As a labor negotiator who eschewed
written notes and mysteriously solved seemingly intractable problems with one
or two phone calls from the table of his favorite
And while it can
be hard to work up much outrage over the details of labor racketeering, stock
swindles and real estate fraud, the human costs of such things can be
heartbreaking. Russo's chapter on the shameless plundering of the assets of
imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II, presided over by a bevy of Korshak's associates, is particularly stirring.
As an exercise in
history, "Supermob" is a worthwhile
contribution to our understanding of the "American century." Holding
back from wild-eyed conspiracy theories, Russo documents unsettling connections
between yesterday's underworld and a corporate oligarchy that has never been
more ascendant than it is today, partly because it has adopted some of the same
schemes with a still greater degree of sophistication.
The conditions
that spawned Korshak and his ilk have changed
considerably, but only to be replaced by the likes of Enron and WorldCom. How
many new Korshaks are thriving among us now, taking
care to leave behind no paper trail? People like to say that history is written
by the victors. What happens when the real winners have burned all their notes?
Trey Popp is a
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
The
ANNOTICO Reports
Can
be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico
Email: annotico@earthlink.net