Waiting On Kelly and Her AI
Five Families: A Book Review
Selwyn Raab, of New York Times bylines, of the exoneration of Hurricane Carter, of the massive tome, Five Families, full title, Five Families: The Rise, Decline and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires, recently passed away. I was deep into this book when it happened. It was a bit of an honorific, in his memory, that I plodded through the rest. Still, as my friend and colleague, Kelly Paxton and I both like to say, you get a lot out of reading.
It's because of Kelly that I’m doing the book review, but not because Kelly and I share a love for reading. Rather, it's because we also share an interest in AI. When I did my last [no longer even trying for weekly] blog post, I wrote about AI and its impact on the research profession. Since then, Kelly has also posted some materials on AI. I wanted to reference them in a follow-up on AI and research. Kelly liked that idea, but mentioned to me that she has an upcoming podcast digging more into AI. I decided then to wait for her podcast t be better informed on the topic. And I have been meaning to write about Five Families. Behold my first ever book review.
Why Read Five Families
Selwyn Raab spent over 20 years reporting for the New York Times, and for much of that time, he was the paper’s mob guy. Five Families is not a collection of his reporting, but it reads like a very extended article in the Grey Lady. Its primary faults being born from his journalism career at the Times. First, it is deferential to institutional and especially government interests. Second, while the book has notes and a bibliography, its sourcing is fuzzy and indeterminate. Third, it rarely (but not never) engages in issues that have bothered criminal justice professors for years. To Raab, there is no doubt the Mafia exists, exactly as portrayed by the federal government, even if it turns out that the DOJ’s charging and convicting Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno with being the Boss of the Genovese Crime Family was not accurate. Notwithstanding those faults, the book’s biggest strength is that you will know a lot more about organized crime in New York after reading it, and it is truly packed with facts and knowledge.
Other benefits from getting immersed in this book:
Learning how to take public record findings and other materials and create a narrative.
Insight into criminology and the criminal justice system’s response to it.
It's just a good read for researchers and investigative professionals.
Learn how to take public record findings and other materials and create a narrative
Raab created this enormous book (about 700 pages before appendices, sources, and bibliography) from a variety of open sources. This included newspapers, court records, public law enforcement documents, as well as his own interviews, to document New York’s mafia. The book is comprised of three parts: the emergence of the Cosa Nostra or New York’s Five Families; the eventual reaction with RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) and the development of methods like wiretaps, infiltrations and flipping to countervail organized crime, and finally, histories focused on the leaders and structure of each of the five families through about the 1990’s.
Writing this book, as he would a Times piece, Raab makes assertions and statements without clear support. Over and over, Raab “buries the lede.” You read and wonder how he knows all this stuff, what’s the basis; only later do you learn that so-and-so turned government witness and provided all the details of what you just read. It's a style that would not work in the modern due diligence context, where upfront sourcing and the basis for all facts is expected to be documented with links and screenshots and miscellaneous attachments. Still, you can reverse engineer Raab’s work. See the sourcing. See how he built the narrative. This is a skill that is hard to teach or translate to a novice researcher. Careful reading and understanding of a work like this will greatly help researchers and investigators and forensic accountants create their own tomes, transfer open-source intelligence into readable reports.
Criminology and the criminal justice system
Professional criminologists and others interested in the criminal justice system love the mob. While this stuff makes great movies, it also makes great theories. Edwin Sutherland, the father of modern criminology, studied white-collar criminals to understand what caused people to turn to crime. His thesis was that these people are not coming from slums, nor are they maternally deprived, yet they commit crimes. Organized crime presents a similar issue. Why do they turn to crime? Raab posits that while many infamous mobsters came from poverty and other conditions associated with crime, but many others grew up in stable, financially comfortable families. What turned them into vicious criminals. You can learn much about what motivates and inspires criminality by studying these “hoods.” That said, as noted above Raab steps around myriad academic theories and critiques regarding organized crime. You can use the facts for your own theories but not rely on Raab to provide too many explanations of the allure of organized crime.
Organized crime also exposes issues about “the system.” As Raab details, for years, state and federal officials had a tough time putting mafioso in jail. Foremost, it took an understanding of this form of crime, which really wasn’t fulsome until at least the 1960’s, to attack it. You cannot successfully fight an enemy you do not know. It took innovation in the criminal law, e.g., the creation of the RICO statute and wiretap laws, and a certain amount of trial and error when it came to prosecutorial strategies and tactics to move against the mob. Critics of the criminal justice system could have a field-day with civil liberties and other “abuses” raised by defense attorneys in the mafia prosecutions. In fact, my law school criminal law professor spent weeks castigating the RICO law as vague and criminalizing associations more than actions. The long and the short is that you learn a lot about criminal justice by studying organized crime. And this book covers a lot about organized crime.
Good researchers and good investigators love to read
When I was on Kelly’s podcast a few years ago, we bonded over our love of reading. I’ve covered this many times on my blog, especially here. I said in 2019, and I stand by it today, “To be a really good researcher, you need to know certain answers before you know the questions.” This comes from reading. And what to read. Read about the mob.
No matter how many times you watch Goodfellas or the Godfather movies or Soprano reruns, you may think you will never dabble in that world. In my experience, if you do due diligence, you will surely come across cases with questions about mob ties. I’ve seen it in cases, somewhat obvious, like in waste-hauling and unions, but also in things like insurance and movie production. If you do background research and due diligence investigations, you should know some key aspects of organized crime. Five Families will give you a lot of that. Knowing about the mob will come in handy.
In Summation
It can take a commitment to finish an exceptionally long book like this. You may ask yourself questions about sourcing or wonder why Raab doesn’t address certain obvious issues, but you may be impressed with the research. And when you finish, you will be a better researcher, with new insights into criminology and criminal justice, which may make you more aware of nuanced but important things that will likely come up in your everyday cases.