As I was growing up in the suburban San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s, organized crime seemed like a very distant thing, confined to the densely-populated cities of the East Coast or to America’s past, much like the corrupt political machines with which it was usually associated.

I never heard any stories of ballot-box stuffing or political precinct captains controlling a swath of no-show city jobs or traffic tickets being “fixed” by a friend at City Hall. The notion of local grocery stores paying protection money or taking numbers bets from their clientele on behalf of bookies would have seemed quite outlandish to me.

All these personal impressions were strongly reinforced by the electronic media that so heavily shapes our perceptions of reality. A couple of the popular shows I sometimes watched in reruns were the police procedural dramas Dragnet and Adam-12, both set in Southern California, and although each episode focused on one or more serious crimes, these were almost never of the “organized” variety. The same was true for Perry Mason episodes, although those longer courtroom dramas would have been naturally suited to the plotting of Syndicate members. The popular Rockford Files of the late 1970s did sometimes feature mobsters, but these individuals were almost always temporary visitors to LA from New York or Chicago or Las Vegas, with the plotlines sometimes humorously treating these gangsters as struggling fish out of water in the very different world of sunny Southern California. By contrast, a contemporaneous detective show set in New York like Kojak seemed to feature mafioso characters in every third or fourth episode.

The offerings of the Silver Screen generally followed the same pattern. Gangster films, ranging from the crudest B-flick to the Academy Award-winning Godfather masterpieces, were almost never set on the West Coast. And although a film like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown might be focused on the deadly criminal intrigues of the 1930s Los Angeles financial elitess, the villain was just a ruthless businessman, employing a couple of murderous hired thugs.

Children soon become aware that the dramatic concoctions of Hollywood are not necessarily accurate, but when everything we see on screens big and small so closely matches our direct personal experience, that amalgamation of images and daily life produces a very firm sense of reality.

Even the occasional exception seemed to support the general rule. In the 1970s, I remember once watching a local television news crew interview an elderly Jewish man named Mickey Cohen on a local park bench, breathlessly describing him as having once been the reigning mobster king of Los Angeles. While I didn’t doubt that in bygone days the crotchety little fellow had once been a hardened criminal, I remained somewhat skeptical that LA had ever contained enough gangsters to warrant having a king, let alone that such a figure would have been drawn from our notoriously law-abiding Jewish community.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s crime became a steadily rising problem in the once-quiet suburbs of Los Angeles, but virtually none of those incidents seemed much like a Francis Ford Coppola epic. The Crips and Bloods of South-Central regularly killed each other and innocent bystanders, while burglaries and robberies—as well as occasional rapes and murders—sometimes spilled over the Hollywood Hills into the Valley. Terrifying serial killers like the Hillside Strangler provoked widespread fear as did the horrible deeds of the Manson Family, while the fiery final shootout of the Symbionese Liberation Army near Inglewood drew national headlines; but none of this seemed much like activities of the Gambinos or Columbos of NYC. Indeed, I and my friends would sometimes joke that since the Mafia was supposedly so effective at keeping street crime away from its New York neighborhoods, perhaps LA would have been better off if it had had a sizeable Sicilian population.

When I sometimes gave the matter a little thought, the utter lack of any organized crime in California seemed fairly easy to explain. East Coast cities had been settled by waves of foreign immigrants, impoverished newcomers who spoke no English, and their total ignorance of American ways left them quite vulnerable to criminal exploitation. Such situations were an ideal breeding ground for corruption, political machines, and crime syndicates, with the centuries-old secret societies of Sicily and Southern Italy providing the obvious seeds for the last of those. Meanwhile, most of California had been settled by longstanding American citizens, often relocating from the placid Midwest, with Iowans who spoke perfect English and whose families had been voting in U.S. elections for six generations being far less vulnerable to political intimidation or criminal exploitation.

Since organized crime obviously did not exist in California, I was never quite sure how much to believe about its supposed size and power elsewhere in the country. Al Capone had died in prison decades before I was born and with the end of Roaring Twenties, violent gangsterism seemed to have mostly disappeared as well. Every now and then the newspapers might carry the story of an Eastern Mafia chieftain killed by his rivals, but those occasional events provided little indication about the power those individuals had wielded while alive. In 1977, teenage members of an obscure Chinese immigrant street gang in San Francisco used automatic weapons to attack their rivals at a local restaurant, leaving sixteen dead or wounded, a body-count that seemed comparable to the total number of traditional Mafia killings nationwide over a period of several years.

During the 1970s I also starting hearing lurid tales that the Mafia had stolen the 1960 election for President John F. Kennedy and might even have been involved in his subsequent assassination, but the respectable media seemed to treat those claims with enormous scorn, so I tended to regard them as National Enquirer type nonsense, not much different than ridiculous UFO stories. Growing up when I did, the Kennedys had seemed like America’s own royal family, and I was very skeptical that control of the White House at the absolute height of the American Century had been swung by Mafia bosses. There were stories that Old Joe Kennedy, the family patriarch, had dabbled in bootlegging during the 1920s, but that had been during Prohibition, a very different era than the aftermath of the quiet and prosperous Eisenhower years of the 1950s.

Twentieth century American history had never been of much interest to me, so I am not entirely sure at what point my understanding of these issues began to change. I think it may have been just a few years ago, when I was absolutely shocked to discover that there was overwhelming evidence that the JFK Assassination had indeed been part of a large conspiracy, a revelation absolutely contrary to what I had always been led to believe by the media throughout my life. But when a highly-regarded national journalist such as David Talbot gathered the copious evidence in his book Brothers, and his conclusions were endorsed by an eminent presidential historian such Alan Brinkley writing in the pages of the august New York Times, such a shift became unavoidable. And it seemed clear that elements of organized crime had been heavily involved in that presidential assassination.

My awakening to the reality of the JFK Assassination took some time to digest, but a year or so later I began investigating that era more carefully, and decided to finally read The Dark Side of Camelot, a huge 1997 bestseller by Seymour Hersh, perhaps our most renowned investigative journalist. Although it focused primarily on the long-suppressed misdeeds of the Kennedy Administration and only lightly touched upon the assassination that ended it, nearly all of the material seemed very consistent with what I had recently read in the other books centered entirely upon the 1963 events in Dallas. And the longtime relationship between the Kennedys and organized crime, sometimes hostile and sometimes friendly, was absolutely eye-opening for what it revealed about the immense hidden power of that latter social institution.

When several highly-regarded journalists come to identical conclusions and back their shocking claims with copious credible evidence, we must accept the reality of what they have presented.

For example, it seems absolutely undeniable that the Chicago Syndicate helped steal the 1960 election for Kennedy, using their control over the election machinery of that extremely corrupt city to carry the Illinois’s crucial 27 electoral votes and place JFK in the White House instead of his opponent Vice President Richard Nixon.

That outcome had been accomplished through the intense personal lobbying of top mob bosses by Joseph Kennedy, Sr. His efforts were greatly assisted by the advocacy of singer Frank Sinatra, an entertainer with strong personal ties both to the Kennedys and the underworld, and the Syndicate believed they had an understanding that a victorious Kennedy Administration would go easy on them. But instead, newly appointed Attorney-General Robert Kennedy redoubled the government’s war on organized crime, leading outraged mob boss Sam Giancana to nearly order the killing of Sinatra in retaliation. Certainly the perceived betrayal greatly facilitated the involvement of various gangster elements in the subsequent Dallas assassination.

Ironically enough, organized crime itself had been sharply divided in that 1960 election. Jimmy Hoffa, head of the very powerful and fully mobbed-up Teamsters Union, had become a bitter foe of Robert Kennedy during the latter’s 1957 service as Chief Counsel of the Senate “Rackets Committee,” and Hoffa therefore became one of Nixon’s most important backers, secretly delivering his campaign committee a million dollars in cash and encouraging all the Teamster locals and the affiliated gangster groups he could influence to give the Republican candidate their enthusiastic support.

The actual relationship between crime lords and the new American president was a complex and contradictory one, with brother Robert fiercely prosecuting the mob even as the CIA enlisted the support of the same groups—and sometimes even the same individuals—in their unsuccessful efforts to assassinate Cuba’s Communist dictator, Fidel Castro.

Although I was quite surprised when I discovered that all these gossipy rumors were actually based upon solid evidence, even more shocking were the less sanguinary facts that finally came to my attention. Although scrupulously ignored by respectable journalists and historians, there was strong evidence that elements of organized crime had already deeply penetrated the commanding heights of corporate America, and sometimes secured important government decisions on their behalf.

Consider, for example, the General Dynamics corporation, which already ranked as one of America’s leading defense contractors by the 1950s, and whose name had always held a vague place in my mind not too different from that of Lockheed or Boeing. Years earlier I had read with considerable shock an offhand paragraph by the late journalist Alexander Cockburn, a fearless muckraker:

Talking of continuity, a notorious scandal of the Kennedy years was JFK’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, overruling all expert review and procurement recommendations and insisting that General Dynamics rather than Boeing make the disastrous F-111, at that time one of the largest procurement contracts in the Pentagon’s history…Crown, of Chicago Sand and Gravel, had $300 million of the mob’s money in General Dynamics’ debentures, and after the disaster of the Convair, General Dynamics needed the F-111 to avoid going belly-up, taking the mob’s $300 million with it.

Although I later became quite friendly with Cockburn and respected his opinion, at the time I treated his casual claims with considerable skepticism. However, Hersh’s far more detailed coverage fully confirmed that story, and reported some of its even more amazing details. Apparently agents of the aerospace corporation were observed burglarizing the home of JFK’s favorite mistress, and Hersh suggested that the incriminating blackmail evidence they presumably obtained was the reason why Defense Secretary Robert McNamara overruled all of his Pentagon brass and awarded the largest military government contract in world history to the Syndicate-backed firm. Moreover, even by government procurement standards, the resulting F-111 was a particular disaster, never achieving any of its intended performance goals despite suffering nearly 700% in cost-overruns. So a financial investment of organized crime was salvaged at great cost both to our military effectiveness and to the taxpayer.

Given that organized crime had apparently played a far greater national role in twentieth century American history than I had realized from my readings of mainstream newspapers and magazines, I recently decided to expand my knowledge in that area. Someone brought to my attention the work of investigative journalist Gus Russo, a leading author in that topic. Russo had worked as a lead reporter for the award-winning PBS Frontline series and filled similar roles at other television networks, while being nominated for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his book on the JFK-Mafia alliance against Castro.

Over a dozen years ago, Russo had published a pair of massive volumes on the history of organized crime focused on two particular regions, with The Outfit in 2001 discussing Chicago and Supermob in 2006 dealing with California. Taken together these two works of deep investigative research run more than 1100 pages and over a half million words, apparently dwarfing almost anything else in that subject area. By the 1990s declassification of a vast quantity of government documents, including FBI wiretaps and Congressional files, allowed Russo access to this previously unavailable material. He supplemented this crucial archival research with the secondary source material contained in hundreds of books and articles, as well as more than 200 personal interviews, and his especially extensive second volume references this wealth of source material by more than 1500 footnotes. The numerous laudatory cover-blurbs by prominent prosecutors, former law enforcement agents, and experts on organized crime strongly attest to the credibility of his research, which certainly must have absorbed many years of concentrated effort.

As a newcomer to the subject of the Chicago Syndicate, my first surprise was the remarkable continuity and longevity of that criminal organization. I had always vaguely assumed that after Al Capone’s imprisonment and the repeal of Prohibition, his gang had largely disintegrated or at least had lost most of its power, but this was entirely incorrect. Instead, over the next few decades, Capone’s successors greatly reduced the public violence that had provoked a harsh federal crackdown, but simultaneously multiplied their wealth and power by gaining control of numerous other sources of revenue, many of them legitimate unions and businesses, and also expanded their reach across various other states. Chicago’s gangland leadership also seemed remarkably stable throughout most of the next half-century, so that even as late as the 1970s, the paramount Syndicate authority was exercised by an individual who had originally enlisted with Capone in the 1920s as a violent young hoodlum, allegedly soon winning widespread renown by beating to death two of Big Al’s treacherous henchmen with a baseball bat.

Authors have a natural tendency to emphasize the importance of their particular subjects, but I think Russo makes a persuasive case that the unity and stability of the Chicago underworld gave it a considerable advantage over its New York City counterparts, whose permanent division into five separate Mafia families led to an uneasy local peace occasionally punctuated by violent conflict. As a result, the disunited New York gangsters were never able to exercise much control over their local city government let alone the rival criminal power-centers of other East Coast cities, while the Chicago Syndicate seems to have always been a very powerful force in city politics, and successfully extended its suzerainty throughout much of the Midwest, the Rocky Mountain states, and into California.

Another surprise was the ethnic skew of the Chicago Outfit and its closest collaborators. Across the East Coast, full Mafia membership was traditionally restricted to Sicilians or other Italians, but none of those rules seemed to apply in the Windy City. During the 1920s there had been a series of bloody battles between Capone’s Italian mob and the violent Irish gangsters who controlled the Northside, with Jews being substantially represented in both groups. But Capone had steadily eliminated his opponents, winning a final, crushing victory with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, after which Irish names mostly disappear from the crime narrative, while the presence of Slavs or Germans had always been rare, despite their huge local populations.

But although the top Syndicate leadership remained almost entirely Italian—with a Welsh immigrant being the sole exception—roughly half of all the key figures found in Russo’s detailed narrative turned out to be Jewish. From the 1930s onward, organized crime in Chicago was essentially an Italian-Jewish partnership, with the Italians concentrating on the violent muscle side of the business and the Jews more likely to be involved in money-laundering, political corruption, and legal manipulation.

The deep underworld links of individuals whom my mainstream histories had never characterized as “mobbed up” was eye-opening. For example, I’d always known of Walter Annenberg as the very wealthy publisher of TV Guide and a close friend of the Reagans, endowing the massive Annenberg Foundation to support various non-profit projects, including PBS. However, the family fortune was established by his father Moe Annenberg, who created America’s largest bookie wire service in close alliance with Capone and his Chicago successors. The elder Annenberg eventually served time in federal prison for evading taxes on his enormous illegal income and paid the largest tax fine in American history, while arranging that charges were dropped against his son Walter, who was his partner in the business. Russo actually defends Annenberg, arguing that he was unfairly targeted for prosecution by the Roosevelt Administration because of his political opposition to FDR.

As another example, my history textbooks had frequently mentioned that President Harry Truman had been a product of the Pendergast machine of Kansas City, Missouri, whose activities I’d always assumed were restricted to local politics and perhaps a bit of municipal graft. But according to Russo, the city was second only to Chicago in its degree of municipal corruption, with the local police force run by an ex-Capone mobster and ten percent of the officers having criminal records, while Pendergast himself had been a prominent participant at the 1929 national gangster convention in Atlantic City as well as later mob summits. Truman’s handwritten journal records the criminal actions he had regularly allowed in return for his elected judgeship.

According to Russo, Pendergast later decided to elevate Truman to the U.S. Senate mostly to gain protection from the backlash over the recent local murder of four federal agents, and Truman’s victorious Senate campaign had involved several additional killings. During the Truman Administration, Attorney-General Tom Clark was apparently promoted to the Supreme Court in exchange for arranging the early release of a top Capone lieutenant who was then serving time in federal prison, a scandal that led the Chicago Tribune to demand Clark’s impeachment.

Truman himself had reached the White House because he was placed on the 1944 ticket as FDR’s Vice President, and his nomination had been pushed by garment union leader Sidney Hillman, president of the CIO and sometimes described as the second most powerful man in America. According to contemporaneous news accounts backed by declassified government files, the successful rise of Hillman’s union had been facilitated by a close alliance with the gangsters of New York’s Murder, Inc., whose leader Lepke Buchalter was eventually executed for one of Hillman’s hits.

During this era, the huge growth in the power and influence of organized crime had not passed unnoticed by those outside its orbit, who sometimes chose to focus upon it for their own reasons, but often suffered unexpected setbacks. In 1950 freshman Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver decided to raise his public profile for a future presidential run by leading a national crusade against gangster power and holding public hearings to vilify their leaders. However, Kefauver was a notorious womanizer and during his preliminary visit to Chicago, compromising photos were taken of him in the arms of two mob-supplied women, after which the Senator changed his mind about requiring testimony from his top Syndicate target.

Sometimes real life gangsters impinged upon their Hollywood counterparts in ironic ways. In 1959 Desi Arnez began producing The Untouchables, a popular television show presenting weekly Prohibition Era battles between G-Man Eliot Ness and mobsters Al Capone and Frank Nitti, with the TV drama playing a major role in shaping the public perceptions of organized crime. According to later mob memoirs, the top Chicago gangsters soon became outraged at what they regarded as a highly inaccurate portrayal of their own history and one which they regarded as slanderous toward Italian-Americans, so after Arnez ignored the warnings they sent him via Frank Sinatra, they arranged to have him killed. But their California agents dragged their feet about assassinating the longtime star of I Love Lucy, and Capone’s widow soon vetoed the hit because her son had been Arnez’s best friend during their days as Florida high school classmates.

This very crude attempt of Chicago’s Italian gangsters to modify the perceived ethnic aspects of a simple television show raises a much broader point, which should be carefully considered. Aside from our personal experiences in real life, nearly everything we know about the world comes from the media, with electronic entertainment being especially dominant for most people. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s gangster movies of varying quality had been quite popular, and to some extent The Untouchables helped revive that genre for the newly powerful medium of television. Meanwhile, with the exception of cartoon-focused Disney, all of Hollywood’s major studios had almost always been owned or run by Jews, who also controlled all our radio and television networks. So for decades nearly everything ordinary Americans heard or saw arrived through that very specific ethnic filter.

The popular perceptions of the nature of organized crime demonstrated the impact of that situation. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, gangsters were sometimes presented without any clear ethnic tinge, frequently as Italians or perhaps Irish, but only very rarely identified as Jewish, thus establishing an implicit framework of reality that was considerably misleading.

As I gradually came to recognize this distortion of history a couple of decades ago, I once decided to conduct a simple thought-experiment by mentally listing the dozen most prominent figures that casually came to my mind from the Gangster Era. Al Capone was obviously the most infamous, followed by Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Bugsy Siegel. After that came a number of somewhat lesser figures: Frank Costello, Legs Diamond, Lepke Buchalter, Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Moran, Johnny Torrio, Hymie Weiss, and Arnold Rothstein. I had never studied American crime history so my list was vague and impressionistic, but I was surprised to realize that a milieu I’d always regarded as overwhelmingly Italian was actually mostly Jewish, suggesting that I had accepted the misleading headlines of a historical narrative without focusing upon its actual contents. Indeed, Brooklyn’s notorious Murder Inc. was originally established by Lansky and Siegel and seems to have been overwhelmingly Jewish, while living up to its name by its many hundreds of killings, with one of its leading members supposedly having a personal body-count of over 100 or even far higher. But since I’d never heard of a single Jewish gangster in Chicago, I was still very surprised that such individuals comprised nearly half of the leading figures in Russo’s comprehensive history.

Russo’s 2001 volume may well rank as the definitive history of Chicago organized crime, and after years of additional research he published Supermob, a 2006 sequel focused upon my own state of California, which I found even more interesting and deeply disturbing. While his first book was primarily an account of a city’s underworld and its evolution under the heirs of Al Capone, this one told the story of how individuals who had gotten their start among those Syndicate gangsters went on to achieve far greater wealth and power in the “upperworld” of business respectability. And the ethnic dimensions of organized crime, which had been an important subtext of that first work became absolutely central to this second one.

His sweeping narrative explains that during the years immediately following World War II, a group of interconnected individuals who were alumni of the Chicago Syndicate relocated to California and largely took over the politics of the Golden State, even while the local and national media averted their eyes from these important developments, rendering them invisible to the general public. He makes a strong case for the reality of such extraordinary claims.

An important point emphasized by the author is that this transformation was facilitated by the political reforms of former governor Hiram Johnson and other leading California progressives in the early decades of the twentieth century. Seeking to prevent the rise of the political “bossism” endemic to many Eastern states, they had drastically curtailed the power of political parties by allowing candidate cross-registration and other measures intended to greatly reduce the influence of the party infrastructure. But the state’s population then skyrocketed by over 50% between 1940 and 1950 and by nearly another 50% in the decade that followed, largely due to new arrivals from elsewhere in the country. With parties having little power and most candidates being unknown to the vast influx of new California voters, advertising money became the crucial ingredient of political success in such a huge state with expensive media markets, so those able to raise the necessary funding might rise very quickly in political circles. Furthermore, individuals who had been trained in the ruthless political jungle of Chicago found naive California a far easier environment in which to operate.

As Art White, a leading Los Angeles political reporter of that era, later explained these unusual political circumstances:

California was to become a state full of strangers, political waifs and mavericks who registered in their party of preference only to find that they had come to a place where political ideology was of no importance. Republicans ran as Democrats and Democrats ran as Republicans. With disconcerting regularity, Republicans, having won both party nominations, were elected in the primaries.

Since party designations had no meaning to the electorate, elections were won by the candidate with the most money, the greatest number of billboards, direct mail pieces, and the most radio time.

Any individual who could devise a system to furnish these campaign necessities on a sustained basis was on his way to becoming a political boss, California style. The boss…could have a say, perhaps the final word, in the appointment of judges from the municipal courts to the state supreme court. Other appointive jobs included inheritance tax appraisers, deputy attorney generals, state department heads and commissioners of departments. With a handful of such appointments in his pocket, the boss could protect his economic interests.

One of the most striking examples of such rapid success was the career of former Chicago attorney Paul Ziffren, whose meteoric rise in the backroom world of California politics was fueled by his ability to raise enormous sums of money for his favored candidates. Soon after arriving in Los Angeles during the mid-1940s, his strong relationship with the Truman White House allowed him to quickly supplant the leading local Democrats in national influence. By 1953 he had been named the Democratic National Committeeman for California, and was hailed for “reinvigorating” the state party, which had successfully captured both houses of the state legislature for the first time in 75 years. He won the fulsome praise of the party’s National Chairman, who described him as the most important individual Democrat behind that success.

Ziffren’s lifelong mob associations pervade some one hundred pages of Russo’s book, but in 1954 he successfully elected Pat Brown as California’s Attorney-General, who repaid that crucial backing by naming Ziffren’s brother as the Assistant Attorney-General for Southern California, thereby providing the Syndicate’s ongoing activities with a great deal of legal protection despite the continuing hostility of local law enforcement departments.

This new kingmaker of California Democratic politics saw his legal risks further diminish the following year when Alex Greenberg, his longtime business partner, was shot to death gangland style on the streets of Chicago, taking to the grave his personal knowledge of Ziffren’s enormous web of Syndicate-related real estate transactions. Ziffren’s power and influence lasted for decades, and when he finally died in 1991 at the age of seventy-seven, his mourners included former California governors Pat and Jerry Brown, future governor Gray Davis, and numerous top Hollywood stars, while he received uniformly glowing tribute s in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, none of his provided a hint of his nefarious personal background.

The California Republican Party frequently pursued similar financial temptations. While Ziffren was successfully raising funds from mysterious sources for the 1950 U.S. Senate campaign of Helen Gahagun Douglas, longtime mob lawyer Murray Chotiner was performing the same task for her successful foe Richard Nixon, whose victory established Chotiner as a leading Republican strategist, both in California and nationwide. Ironically enough, while candidates regularly denounced the underworld ties of their opponents, all these rival Democratic and Republican “Supermob” lawyers with nearby homes and offices in Beverly Hills generally remained good friends with each other and even occasional business partners, perhaps exchanging casual gossip about the strengths and weaknesses of the various candidates whose campaigns they regularly ran, much like jockeys might do about their different racetrack mounts.

Pat Brown reached the governorship in an upset against Chotiner’s Republican candidate in 1958, and then won reelection against Nixon in 1962, but lost in 1966 to newcomer Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s own political rise had been orchestrated by Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman of MCA, yet another Chicago transplant. Wasserman together with his mentor Jules Stein also had decades of mob-ties stretching back to Al Capone himself, having regularly employed gangster muscle to strong-arm their business partners and suppress their competitors.

Russo provides the remarkable account of how Wasserman had propelled Reagan, then a washed-up B movie actor, into the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild in 1959 in order to obtain a special industry exemption for MCA, afterward rewarding the future president with an extremely lucrative TV contract. As a result of this successful regulatory maneuver, MCA’s unique business opportunities established Wasserman as the reigning king of Hollywood for decades and he subsequent played a major role in elevating Reagan to the governorship.

Russo’s own factual account of these events draws upon Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob, a heavily-researched 1986 volume by veteran crime journalist Dan Moldea, which I had previously read and found quite persuasive. The enormous clout of MCA and executives may have severely reduced distribution and media coverage of Moldea’s book, while the author was forced to resign from The Institute of Policy Studies, a leftwing DC thinktank dependent upon financing from MCA-connected donors. Back in 1972 a very similar fate had befallen popular author Henry Denker’s 1972 novel The Kingmaker, a roman a clef portraying Wasserman and the political rise of Reagan, which also saw its distribution widely suppressed despite its excellent reviews.

Although Wasserman achieved great wealth and enormous social prominence, he never cast aside his long criminal associations, and for decades his closest personal friend was the Syndicate’s California liaison.

That individual was attorney Sidney Korshak, who constitutes the central figure in Russo’s long narrative, with one of his rare public photographs gracing the cover. Korshak had gotten his start working for the Capone gang in Chicago, and he soon gained a reputation for his deft ability to bridge the worlds of criminal gangs, racketeer-influenced unions, and legitimate businesses. This effectiveness and his near-total lack of a paper trail in public records or the media established him as the ideal representative of the Chicago Syndicate, and according to later Congressional testimony, they moved him out to Southern California in the early 1950s to oversee their rapidly-expanding West Coast operations.

In the years that followed, Korshak became one of the leading powerbrokers in Hollywood, while also having enormous influence over the unions of the Western states and the businesses dependent upon them, sometimes having the power to start or stop strikes with merely a phone call. Although nominally still a lawyer, he had no office nor staff, and conducted most of his business activities from a private phone he had installed at his favorite table of a leading Beverly Hills bistro, sometimes walking outside for his more delicate discussions in order to avoid eavesdropping. All references to his overlords back in Chicago were given in code, so upon returning from their honeymoon, Korshak’s new wife noted the long list of opaque messages that had been left by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. FBI wiretaps revealed that the Syndicate bosses warned California gangsters never to contact Korshak directly, but instead to always use his Chicago superiors as the conduit for all requests and communications.

Throughout his long career Korshak went to enormous lengths to maintain his near-total public invisibility, and although he regularly attended Hollywood events and elite dinner-parties, there was a horrified stir when an uninformed screenwriter once accidentally snapped his photograph. Despite a growing awareness of his enormous power in Southern California and his very unsavory connections, he successfully deployed his connections and influence to ward off almost all newspaper coverage. In 1962 the top management of the Los Angeles Times suddenly dismantled that newspaper’s star investigative unit in order to terminate a long series they had begun running on the Teamsters Union funding for suspicious real estate transactions, which would have inevitably led to Korshak and his inner circle of Syndicate associates. As the Times’ managing editor later described the situation: “Once you get to the point where you can get a guy to talk, then either you or he or both are going to end up in a lime pit somewhere.”

By 1969 widespread local awareness of Korshak’s enormous hidden power and deep gangland ties finally prompted the national editor of the Times to commission his profile by a young reporter. Despite a great deal of lobbying pressure, this story finally ran, though in sufficiently tame form that Korshak later boasted that all this friends regarded it as an personal advertisement. Still, to avoid any such future coverage, he soon offered Buff Chandler, the newspaper’s matriarch, an immediate payment of $25,000 to ensure that his name would never again appear in print, an agreement she accepted and honored. Over the years, several determined journalists across California would find their heavily-researched stories killed by their editorial superiors, sometimes causing them to quit their newspapers in disgust.

During Korshak’s decades of power, one of the extremely rare major profiles of his activities appeared in The New York Times, written in 1976 by fellow-Chicagoan Seymour Hersh, who had already gained renown for breaking the My Lai massacre story a few years earlier, a triumph that earned him a Pulitzer Prize and numerous other accolades. As Hersh later explained, when he began his research, outraged police officials and previously muzzled journalists quickly provided him with troves of background material. But he also soon discovered that Korshak had obtained all his calling records and travel itinerary from a Times employee, and he later had a chilling phone conversation with the subject of his probe from a pay phone in West LA. Although Korshak was careful to never explicitly threaten him, his dialogue was very heavily laced with words like “murder…bodies…blood…death…killings,” and the reporter still vividly recalled the conversation decades later. Hersh learned from others that Korshak regularly employed this style of intimidation that in such situations.

Although powerful lobbying by Korshak’s allies and threats of lawsuits led two top Times executives to try to stop the investigation, and the Teamsters eventually struck the newspaper on the very eve of the series’ scheduled appearance, Hersh’s stories ran, and they provoked a great deal of national attention, although they was studiously ignored by the Los Angeles Times. Afterward, Hersh was contacted by one of Korshak’s nieces, who provided a personal anecdote that included a casual mention of how in his younger days at a family Passover seder Korshak had expressed satisfaction after receiving a call reporting the successful assassination of an Illinois political reformer. In a rare personal interview with Russo, Hersh tersely summarized his appraisal of Korshak: “He was the godfather. There’s no question, he ordered people hit.”

Aspects of Korshak’s lifestyle certainly comported with such notions. His walled and gated home was patrolled by armed guards, reportedly former members of the Israeli military. A studio executive who visited him found the front door answered by a man with a gun, a situation that he had never previously encountered.

Such considerations of personal security may not have been unwarranted. According to FBI documents later released, Korshak had hardly been monogamous in his loyalties, and he had sought to maintain his legal immunity by providing a steady stream of confidential information to Las Vegas law enforcement and the Bureau, facts that surely would have put his life at serious risk if they had been discovered by his underworld confederates. Indeed, when Korshak was in his eighties, he was once suddenly approached by a Hollywood reporter on the street, and reacted as if he assumed that his number had finally come up, then was greatly relieved to discover that the fellow was just a journalist rather than the hitman whose coming he had long awaited.

Korshak’s massive impact is described in enormous detail across the pages of Russo’s thick volume. He played crucial roles in electing California governors, made Al Pacino available as the star of The Godfather, apparently helped ensure that Roman Polanski escaped punishment for raping and sodomizing a thirteen-year-old girl, and was involved in a vast number of legal and illegal business transactions whose dollar values seemingly total in the billions. But with his name almost never appearing in the media, the general public was surely unaware of his existence when he died of natural causes in 1996. At that point, the news media suddenly regained its courage, and his passing was announced in headlines that must have somewhat puzzled their previously ill-informed readers, with The New York Times running “Sidney Korshak, 88, Dies; Fabled Fixer for the Chicago Mob” and The Los Angeles Times “Sidney Korshak, Alleged Mafia Liaison to Hollywood, Dies at 88.”

Money was undoubtedly the mother’s milk of postwar California politics. But the speed with which these recent Chicago transplants transformed themselves into powerful financial figures in their new state was greatly assisted by their participation in a particular financial windfall. They were leading beneficiaries of one of the worst governmental violations of constitutional rights in our national history, and Russo devotes an entire chapter to this dark tale.

Like all other Asians, California’s ethnic Japanese population had long suffered under the harshest sort of racial discrimination, being denied naturalized citizenship and therefore prohibited from owning land, while nearly all additional immigration from their homeland had been banned in the 1920s. Yet although they had arrived as penniless farm laborers mostly around the turn of the century, their intense work-ethnic and diligent savings had established them as a small but reasonably prosperous community by the late 1930s. The Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to their American-born children, thus allowing their families to eventually acquire large amounts of farmland and other properties, with their visible success sometimes provoking considerable envy from their white neighbors and competitors.

As I have discussed elsewhere, FDR’s desperate attempt to circumvent overwhelming public opposition America’s involvement in World War II eventually led to his endless 1941 provocations against Japan, which successfully culminated in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Soon afterward, demagogic appeals by politicians and media pundits led much of the public to begin demanding the incarceration of all ethnic Japanese, U.S. citizens or not, and by early 1942 FDR signed an executive order shipping some 120,000 Japanese-Americans off to grim concentration camps, with those individuals sometimes being forced to leave their homes on very short notice. As a result, they lost nearly all the property they had steadily accumulated over two generations, most of which was either seized or otherwise ended up in government hands. Similar government edicts led to the confiscation of numerous German-owned businesses throughout America, many of which had enormously valuable assets.

Within a couple of years, these federal holdings has swelled to include half a million acres of the state’s best farmland, some 1,265 small Japanese-owned hotels, and numerous urban parcels throughout Los Angeles, San Jose, and other cities. In 1942 the federal government estimated the value of these former Japanese-American properties at around $3 billion in present day dollars, but the huge postwar California economic and population boom would surely have greatly increased the value of this real estate portfolio by the early 1950s. The business assets and patent holdings of the seized German companies were worth additional billions.

Following the end of the war, all this property needed to be sold off, and powerful Chicago interests recognized this tremendous opportunity. The 1946 elections had produced a crushing national defeat for the ruling Democrats, with the Republicans regaining control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1932. Thus, President Truman faced an desperate battle for reelection, and Chicago’s powerful political machine deployed its considerable political clout to place the sales process in the hands of David L. Bazelon, a young Chicago lawyer and leading Democratic fund-raiser with deep Syndicate ties. Bazelon had taken a pay cut of 80% to enter government service, but he soon boasted to the Washington Post that he had become “one of the largest businessmen in the country.” His motive quickly became apparent as he arranged the sale of assets for a fraction of their real value to his circle of Chicago friends and associates, sometimes apparently receiving a secret slice of the lucrative ownership stakes in return.

As an extreme example, Bazelon almost immediately sold Chicago’s Henry Crown a twenty-six thousand acre California mine site, containing tens of millions of dollars worth of coal, for a mere $150,000. A private $1 million sale of seized German property in 1948 to a group formed by his lifelong best friend and former law partner Paul Ziffren was worth $40 million by 1954, and Ziffern soon rewarded Bazelon with a 9.2% share of his multimillion-dollar real estate holding company. Another major beneficiary of Bazelon’s unusual sales practices later told a Congressional investigating committee that he gave Bazelon a 25% share of his large hotel holding company because he “was just feeling good and generous and was grateful.”

These particular hidden gifts to Bazelon only later came to light through happenstance references that were eventually uncovered by diligent researchers, so we may assume that such transactions probably represented just the tip of an enormous iceberg. It seems plausible that Bazelon received quiet kickbacks totaling many millions or perhaps even tens of millions in present-day dollars in exchange for his very favorable distribution of billions in government assets to the network of beneficiaries who shared his roots in the Chicago Syndicate.

This vast transfer of wealth in the early postwar years from the plundered Nisei gave all these mobbed-up Chicago newcomers the financial wherewithal to soon gain substantial control of California’s money-based political system. As Art White, the veteran Los Angeles political journalist, later described the situation:

During these years some hundreds of associates of Greenberg, Evans, and others of the Capone crime syndicate, and of Arvey and Ziffren, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into California. They bought real estate, including hotel chains through apparently unrelated corporations from San Diego to Sacramento. They invested in vast tracts of land, built or bought motels, giant office buildings, and other commercial properties. More importantly, they invaded the loan field, establishing banks and home loan institutions. By 1953, Ziffren and his associates had gained control of an enormous block of California’s economy. They could finance political campaigns with the best of the native barons.

Russo notes that the FBI analysts subsequently endorsed White’s conclusions:

When the FBI reviewed White’s research into the extent of the relationship between the Capones and Ziffren, it concluded with a rare declaration vindicating White’s conclusions: “The extraordinary success of the adventurer [Ziffren]—and by the same token his backs, who can be traced right into the Midwest and East Coast hoodlum world—has been proven and documented. (Author’s italics).

Russo’s Appendix A provides a long but partial list of the major properties acquired by Chicago’s Supermob associates.

The dispossession of California’s Japanese-Americans certainly constituted a central factor in the enormous growth of Syndicate-connected wealth and power in that state, but Russo describes it as “an inadvertent boost for the fortunes of the Supermob.” He may be entirely correct, but other possibilities come to mind.

During World War II, California was located many thousands of miles from the Pacific theater of operations, while Hawaii was obviously far closer and also served as America’s most vital military base; yet the larger population of Japanese-Americans living on those islands escaped any such mass incarceration. America’s top Republican leader, Sen. Robert Taft, was absolutely opposed to the wholesale imprisonment of the Japanese-Americans, as was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, hardly a man noted for his deep civil libertarian tendencies.

Meanwhile, the earliest and most prominent advocate of the internment policy was California Attorney-General Earl Warren, who used the political issue with great effectiveness to unseat the state’s incumbent Democratic governor in the 1942 election. And we should note that Warren’s successful gubernatorial campaign was masterminded by Chotiner, a Beverly Hills attorney with strong underworld connections, who later became a good friend and sometime business partner of Korshak and the other members of the Chicago Syndicate circle.

Perhaps Warren and his backers merely believed that demonizing a small and powerless racial minority and demanding that they be placed behind barbed wire would represent an excellent means of achieving statewide political victory in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. But they may also have considered that the concurrent seizure of billions in accumulated property might provide tempting poss