This is very, very well-researched, but it is also dull as paint. When I start thinking about this book, it reminds me more than anything of my grad school experience with science communication. Which seems totally irrelevant for a book about unions and the mob, but bear with me. The main key to getting people to understand science, we were told, was story. And there is a story here - one of labour movements and corruption and organised crime - and I think it's an interesting story, or at least it is in parts. But mostly it's buried under an absolute welter of detail. Flip open to any page and it's acronym soup. Now maybe, when this book was published, it was referring to organisations and people so familiar to the reader that they could easily absorb it, but this is all happening in another time and another country from my perspective, so it can be very hard to follow. In all fairness, things do pick up some in Part Two, which does have marginally more sense of story for me to follow, but mostly it is a hard and often tedious slog.

It does make me want to read a more generalist book on the topic, though. And the total willingness of the upper echelons of the Teamsters union to gouge the rank and file for their own benefit, and to get in bed with the mob, is frankly disturbing. I know the history of labour movements isn't all sunshine and roses, but it seems like half the people in here, given the slightest opportunity, are throwing (literal) sticks of dynamite at each other. And at each other's families, which is worse.