Deal With the Devil
The FBI'S Secret Thirty-Year Relationship With a Mafia Killer

Peter Lance

First off, this is not a light read. This dense look at the New York Mafia centers around one captain, Greg Scarpa Sr., and ranges from the 60's civil rights movement, to the World Trade Center truck bomb, 9/11 and beyond. Through all of this, the corruption and sometimes willful incompetence of government agencies is brought to light

Using FOIA requested memos, and recently declassified or other publicly released information, Peter Lance takes you from the government's use of mafia enforcers to elicit confessions from civil rights era white supremacists through questionable tactics, (allowing the government agencies to skirt law and ethics on technicalities, since they weren't the ones employing these methods directly), to botched investigations and ignored opportunities to prevent current day terrorist attacks. The documentation of mafia methods, rituals, and history is just as well documented through interviews and police records. Some of the information is unsurprising, as pop culture and other works have given the world a pretty good idea of many Mafia procedures and codes, but other information horrifyingly demonstrates the lengths the government at federal, state, and local levels is willing to go to protect themselves, whether preemptively issuing immunity to their own agents engaged in criminal and ethical wrong-doing, or setting up innocent police officers to cover up the leaks and incompetence of those higher in the chain.

Once again, I definitely can't say this is a light or easy read, but it is definitely educational, and thorough. Copious documentation of sources, as well as reproduction of the actual government memos, reports, and crime files gives a solid background to the story. The story itself though, may leave you feeling hopeless about the state of the world, and the fact that levels and methods of corruption haven't changed through the years.