Dark Quadrant

Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of American Democracy

De: Jonathan Marshall

Narrado por: Graham Rowat

From Truman to Trump, the deep corruption of our political leaders unveiled.

Many critiques of the Trump era contrast it with the latter half of the 20th century, when the United States seemed governed more by statesmen than by special interests. Without denying the extraordinary vigor of President Trump's assault on traditional ethical and legal norms, Jonathan Marshall challenges the myth of a golden age of American democracy. Drawing on a host of original archival sources, he tells the shocking story of how well-protected criminals systematically organized the corruption of American national politics after World War II.

Marshall begins by tracing the extraordinary scandals of President Truman, whose political career was launched by the murderous Pendergast machine in Missouri. He goes on to highlight the role of organized crime in the rise of McCarthyism during the Cold War, the near-derailment of Vice President Johnson's political career by two mob-related scandals, and Nixon's career-long association with underworld figures. The book culminates with a discussion of Donald Trump's unique history of relations with the traditional American Mafia and newer transnational gangs like the Russian mafiya - and how the latter led to his historic impeachment by the House of Representatives.

©2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. (P)2021 Tantor

Enjoying the narrative but the narrator is killing me

Narrator has no variation and just stays in an excited, rather annoying zone. Very hard to follow given the lack of variation

Catnip for Mob-politics scandal junkies, but ...

Top names in Cold-War politics are everywhere here (Presidents all down the line, Senators, etc.), alongside all the top Mob names. In between these "stars," are armies and echelons of fixers, lobbyists, goons, etc., with names and places and times named, and plenty of suitcases of cash, along with dispensations of other favors. It paints a constantly lurid and fascinating picture, especially if the reader already has some background in the overall history. This book is so breathless with so much to tell. It all goes in fast-forward, somewhat in harmony with the constantly over-wrought narrator's old-school sensationist-announcer style. I understand a dilemma the author faced: so much story, so many scandals, so many personalities, and a constrained space (popular book format) in which to tell it. The balance goes toward just spilling out stories at a high pace. After awhile the reappearance of names begins to paint a wider picture. One biog value-add here is a portrait of Mob and corruption activities on a higher plane than the typical popular lurid street-level stuff that is related in other Mob history.

There are plenty of facts, in a stew of quick journalistic splices that are thick in innuendo and maybe a bit of a tone of gossip. This was claimed, then this, this, this. Often, no item in the sequence may have been any more verified, than being brought up in a subcommittee hearing and dropped, or someone (sometimes unnamed) was merely quoted as having commented about it. So, one could say it leans toward the "journalistic" side (and style), somewhat less toward the meticulously-verified academic side. My thought was, with this staccato presentation, item-item-item, every sentence deserves its own footnote, to source it. I looked in Amazon's book preview and there were a lot of footnotes, though not for every sentence. But these are not present in the audio book, and could not be viewed in the Amazon preview (they have chopped their previews, to just a few opening pages. 10 years ago you could look up individual words and quotes from the whole book in those previews., and the books' indexes were all there). So, a scholarly check is impossible or difficult. Yet, there are cascades of allegations here, in some sharp detail, each. That said, if one is looking for entertaining scandal stories, this book has hundreds upon hundreds. It adds up to paint quite a picture. It is rich and colorful, and doubtless many parts are true, but it is shallow, in the sense that I described here. I enjoyed it, but could not swear to the truth any part of it.