Law Professor James Jacobs Pens Fourth Book on La Cosa Nostra

By Elizabeth Fasolino

In The Godfather, Part III, the mafia don Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, growls, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” In a way, NYU School of Law professor James B. Jacobs could say the same thing.

Jacobs, the Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts, has just written his fourth book about La Cosa Nostra – Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement, published this month by New York University Press. An analysis of 20th-century mafia infiltration and exploitation of unions and of federal law enforcement’s relentless efforts to remedy the problem since 1975, the book is Jacobs’ latest and most ambitious contribution to a socio-legal history of the rise and fall of the most renowned crime families.

Jacobs’ interest in crime began more than 30 years ago at the University of Chicago, where he earned a J.D. in law and a Ph.D in sociology. Working as a research assistant under renowned criminal law scholar Norval Morris, Jacobs was offered the chance to spend a summer studying the inmates of Joliet’s notorious Stateville Penitentiary,

“I was terrified,” Jacobs says of his first days at Stateville. “The warden more or less just gave me complete freedom to go wherever I wanted, interview whomever I wanted about whatever I wanted. I was almost immediately approached by gang leaders, who hoped I might be helpful to them as long as I wasn’t an undercover cop.”

Jacobs wound up spending several years conducting interviews with inmates, guards, administrators, prisoner’s rights lawyers, and prison reform activists. The result was a sociology doctoral dissertation and book, Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society (University of Chicago Press, 1977). After graduating and teaching law and sociology at Cornell for seven years, Jacobs joined the NYU School of Law faculty in 1982 and is now director of the school’s Center for Research in Crime and Justice.

Jacobs’s series of mob books grew out of his work in the 1980s and 90s with Ronald Goldstock, former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Labor, director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, and currently an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law. Working with the task force’s investigators, prosecutors, and researchers, Jacobs wrote a landmark report to the state legislature, “Corruption and Racketeering in the New York City Construction Industry,” which was published by NYU Press in 1990. Describing an industry riddled with criminal wrongdoing and unions thoroughly penetrated by the mob, the report offers solutions to a seemingly intractable problem.

In his next two books on the subject, Jacobs profiled efforts to address the issue. Busting the Mob: The United States v. Cosa Nostra (N.Y.U. Press, 1994) presented five case studies, each outlining organized crime trials of the 1980s to illustrate the federal government’s strategy—all involving the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) statute—of investigating and prosecuting the mafia. In 1999 he published Gotham Unbound: How New York City Was Liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime (NYU Press, 1999). The book illuminates the political and economic power of the Cosa Nostra crime families, who have been entrenched in New York’s Fulton Fish Market, air cargo operations at JFK airport, the garment center, and the Javits Exhibition Center, as well as the commercial waste hauling and massive construction industry, for much of the past century.

“In the 1980s there was a sense that organized crime could not be dislodged,” Jacobs says. “Rudy Giuliani was a visionary who believed it could be successfully dismantled and dislodged from the legitimate economy, and that’s what he set about doing with remarkable determination and creativity.”

Mobsters, Unions, and Feds, which Jacobs calls his most ambitious work yet, analyses the failure of the labor movement, rank and file workers, and local, state, and federal law enforcement to confront organized crime until the mid 1970s, after the death of J. Edgar Hoover brought a modern FBI into being and after the mafia galvanized political and law enforcement attention by assassinating Jimmy Hoffa, the convicted and deposed head of the Teamsters Union.

“This story deserves to be a major chapter in the history of American labor, the history of American organized crime, and the history of the nation,” says Jacobs. “Because it is such a large story, covering a whole century and events across the country, the great challenge was to present the main themes with important factual examples but not overwhelm the reader with details. ”

Jacobs has covered a wide range of legal issues, including such hot-button topics as hate crime laws and gun control, but he always returns to the world of mobsters and the men and women who investigate, prosecute, and sentence them. Since organized crime keeps taking on new forms, Jacobs is confident he’ll always be busy.

“I’d like to publish a volume on organized crime and American politics,” says Jacobs. “That’s a link that has gone egregiously unexplored. I’d also like to focus on the new faces of organized crime—the Bloods and Crips, the Russian mafia, Central American crime groups, and others. So there’s still plenty to accomplish.”