November 22, 2024

Two very fun books about organized crime

Pound for pound, the best movies are always about heists: from Heat to Sneakers, from Dog Day Afternoon to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, from Out of Sight to Ocean’s Eleven, from Die Hard to Fargo, the structure of organized crime maps on to the pleasure of the movie like white on rice; or black on beans.¹

Sadly, not a lot of people in academia or in polite society (lawyers excluded, you know what you did) spend much time thinking about organized crime; about the function of gangs and/or the appeal of transgression.

As a result, the politics of the intelligentsia, the cultural politics of the liberal, are usually fantastical — and not in a good way. As in, detached from reality.

Consider for example, the bizarre morality of Zootopia ($1.5 billion box office) or the decadent posturing in The West Wing (154 episodes) or the way that prime time television was conquered by a crypto-fascist like Dick Wolf (Law & Order).²

The consequences of this pervasive intellectual failure are not limited to our shallow, facile entertainment. The consequences are in the White House, the Supreme Court, the US Capitol.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Understanding organized crime, its patterns and psychology, is no idle pastime: it’s the civic duty of anyone who prefers a government that is efficient and accountable rather than corrupt and captured.

Better yet, reading about crime is fun! So, without further ado, here are:

1. The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man

“A professor of linguistics who specialized in underworld argot, Maurer won the trust of hundreds of swindlers, who let him in on not simply their language but their folkways and the astonishingly complex and elaborate schemes whereby unsuspecting marks, hooked by their own greed and dishonesty, were ‘taken off’ – i.e. cheated—of thousands upon thousands of dollars.”

2. Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate

“By deciphering how criminals signal to each other in a lawless universe, this gruesomely entertaining and incisive book provides a quantum leap in our ability to make sense of their actions.”

(While you’re waiting for the book to download or arrive in the mail, here’s a timely exegesis of Elon Musk’s sprawling scam through the lens of the latter book.)

I can’t recommend them enough.

And I think they’ll serve us far better than, say, reading the text of the 14th Amendment or the editorial pages of the NYT.

Finally, once you adopt this framework of understanding how power flows through us, you’ll realize that organized crime is all around us.

Consider, for example, this law firm hawking its services with the counter-intuitive claim that white collar crime will be prosecuted at higher levels during the next four years, as the Trump admin fails to control lower-level DOJ officials.

Enjoy!