The Rule of Law Enforcement
AFTER HAVING SPENT the prior six months in a fruitless cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation and counter-counter-retaliation with the administration of the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Worth, where I managed to do about half of my time in the hole before finally getting kicked out altogether, I was delighted to arrive here at FCI Three Rivers, a medium security prison subject to occasional outbreaks of gang warfare that also happens to be quite a lot of fun. And though one’s first few days at a new prison are always given over largely to errands and social obligations, I did manage to get in some much-needed reading time when someone lent me a copy of Five Families, a history of the American mafia by the veteran New York Times crime reporter Selwyn Raab. I’ve never had much interest in organized crime of the non-governmental sort, but ever since 2009 when I read through the bulk of Thomas Friedman’s past columns in the course of researching a book on the subject of incompetence, I’ve been fascinated by the extent to which a fellow can be a bit of a dummy, with questionable writing abilities and a penchant for making demonstrably erroneous attacks on others, and still find regular employment with the nation’s most prestigious newspaper (though in fairness to the Times, they did eventually get rid of William Kristol).
I’m afraid I gave up on reading Five Families straight through after about the halfway mark, by which point it had become clear that Raab, contrary to all decency, was going to continue using the phrase “law-enforcement” thusly, with the unwarranted hyphen, something that would have been more tolerable did the term not necessarily appear every few pages due to the nature of the subject matter, often in the company of such other improprieties as “civil-rights,” “public-relations,” “stolen-car rings,” or “loan-shark,” and to such an extent that one could be forgiven for suspecting that Raab himself, for all his tough talk on crime, is in fact some sort of illicit hyphen smuggler.
Luckily, this is the sort of book from which one can extract the most telling instances of Gray Lady-caliber foolishness just by skimming around. At some point Raab seems to decide that the writers of The Sopranos must be punished for humanizing the mafia in the course of writing a drama about human beings who are in the mafia. And so, more in sadness than in anger, but more in confusion than either, he set out to debunk the show’s fictional plotline by way of his own fictional journalistic expertise: “Genuine capos and wiseguys would never emulate Tony’s behavior. … No top-tier mobster would last long if he behaved like Tony Soprano, who defies basic Mafioso caution by exposing himself as a ripe target, to be easily mowed down by rivals. He drives without a bodyguard; sips espresso in daylight at a sidewalk café.” This comes just a few chapters after we’re told the following about a real-life top-tier mobster: “Shunning bodyguards and bullet-proof limousines, the sixty-six-year-old godfather met with his Mafia associates in restaurants and travelled about Manhattan in taxis like any ordinary businessman.”
To his credit, Raab did manage to refrain from rendering this last bit as “ordinary-businessman,” which is just extraordinary, so we’ll give him another try: “Sex and psychiatry are prominent in The Sopranos’ story line. Confiding in a psychiatrist, however, would be a radioactive mistake for a boss or capo, who can never display symptoms of weakness or mental instability.” Naturally Raab has already forgotten having written the following about mafia boss Frank Costello: “Striving for inner peace while hovering between criminal affiliates and respected society, Costello tried psychoanalysis.”
https://theintercept.com/2016/02/02/barrett-brown-the-rule-of-law-enforcement/
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