Jonathan Marshall - Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of American Democracy

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marshall, Jonathan, 1955 author.

Title: Dark quadrant : organized crime, big business, and the corruption of American democracy / Jonathan Marshall.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020047801 (print) | LCCN 2020047802 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538142493 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538142509 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Political corruptionUnited StatesHistory. | Organized crimePolitical aspectsUnited StatesHistory. | Big businessPolitical aspectsUnited StatesHistory. | Business and politicsUnited StatesHistory. | DemocracyUnited StatesHistory. | United StatesPolitics and government1945-1989. | United StatesPolitics and government1989

Classification: LCC JK2249 .M374 2021 (print) | LCC JK2249 (ebook) | DDC 364.1060973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047801

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047802

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

I am grateful to several friends who provided encouragement or commented on portions of this book, including crime reporters Gus Russo and Dan Moldea; Louis Trager and Mark Paul, independent historians and former reporters; Peter Dale Scott, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley; Ryan Gingeras, professor of history at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey; and independent writer Ray Welch. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Jim Drinkhall provided documents from his voluminous files on the Teamsters Union. Special thanks to Phyllis Schultze at Rutgers Universitys Center for Law and Justice, who made available papers that she rescued from the files of the late criminologist Alan Block. I also appreciate the many helpful staffers at the National Archives in Maryland (especially Robert Reed of the Special Access and FOIA Branch), Library of Congress manuscript division, George Washington Universitys National Security Archive, and several presidential libraries. The overworked staff at the FBIs Freedom of Information office also provided useful documents, though some requested files remained inaccessible due to inordinately long processing times. Finally, I am grateful for permission to reuse material that previously appeared in The Lobster (Blackmail in the Deep State, Summer 2017) and the Journal of Global South Studies (The Dictator and the Mafia: How Rafael Trujillo Partnered with U.S. Criminals to Extend His Power, v. 35, no. 1, Spring 2018 by the University of Florida Press).

A s citizens of a global superpower in the waning stages of its supremacy, Americans today are experiencing a crisis of confidence over their nations slipping military, economic, and technological leadership. At the core of that crisis is their rapidly declining faith in the fairness of its governing institutions and even its democratic model. The disruptive GOP candidate Donald Trump owed his surprise victory in the 2016 presidential race in no small part to his promise to drain the swamp. Upon taking office, however, he deepened the bog in unprecedented ways, flagrantly turning the White House into a virtual subsidiary of his family enterprise. After a year of his presidency, 44 percent of Americans in a national poll said that corruption was pervasive in the White House, a jump from 36 percent in 2016. In December 2019, the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President Trump, both concerning corrupt actions related to Ukraine.

These popular concerns are grounded in reality. In 2018 the United States slipped to #22 on Transparency Internationals corruption index, below most other developed nations and only just ahead of the United Arab Emirates. The organization observed:

The US faces a wide range of domestic challenges related to the abuse of entrusted power for private gain, which is Transparency Internationals definition of corruption.

Key issues include the influence of wealthy individuals over government; pay to play politics and the revolving doors between elected government office, for-profit companies, and professional associations; and the abuse of the US financial system by corrupt foreign kleptocrats and local elites.

The current US president was elected on a promise of cleaning up American politics and making government work better for those who feel their interests have been neglected by political elites. Yet, rather than feeling better about progress in the fight against corruption over the past year, a clear majority of people in America now say that things have become worse.

Corruptionand widespread perceptions of corruptionentail a host of public and private costs. One of the most serious and lasting is the erosion of confidence in the very legitimacy of public governance. Observes Patricia Moreira, Transparency Internationals managing director, Corruption chips away at democracy to produce a vicious cycle, where corruption undermines democratic institutions and, in turn, weak institutions are less able to control corruption.

Serious students of American government are every bit as alarmed as ordinary members of the public. Harvard University political scientist Stephen Walt titled one 2019 article, Americas Corruption Is a National Security Threat.

Popular and scholarly discussions of the frightening erosion of American political and legal norms sometimes contrast the Trump era with an age of robust democracy in the latter half of the twentieth century, when the United States was governed by statesmen rather than grifters. From the end of World War II until about 1980, democracy worked reasonably well because we were less complacent and more interested in institution building, commented Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Isabel Sawhill. [T]he period from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War was unique; it required U.S. leadership and a willingness to use our resources and power to check tyrants and encourage democracy around the world. Without a commitment to provide that kind of indispensable leadership going forward, a liberal world order and democracy itself are at risk.

Without denying the novelty and vigor of President Trumps recent assault on traditional ethical and legal norms, this book challenges the myth of a golden age of American democracy. It tells a largely neglected story of how well-protected criminals systematically organized the corruption of American politics and business at a national level in the postWorld War II era. Instead of offering a general survey, I have chosen to dive more deeply but selectively into several largely forgotten (or unknown) cases from the first quarter century of the Cold War, when the greatest generation governed the nation. National dismay over political corruption in the Truman administration was an important driver of the Republicans landslide victory in the 1952 elections. It seriously threatened Lyndon Johnsons political career in 1963 and 1964. It also brought down Richard Nixon after his historic reelection in 1972 and his celebrated foreign policy triumphs with China and the Soviet Union. These cases exposed ongoing and systemic failings of the US political system, not simply isolated examples of personal wrongdoing. Those failings hadand today still haveserious consequences. As garment workers union official Gus Tyler observed decades ago,