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(More customer reviews)Rodney Campbell's "The Luciano Project: The Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the U.S. Navy" is a fascinating two-pronged history. The first story, as the subtitle indicates, has to do with the Navy's recruitment of the Luciano crime family to protect New York's waterfront (including the Brooklyn Navy Yard) from Nazi saboteurs and u-boats. After all, the government reasoned, who is better qualified to protect the docks than the people who have controlled them for decades? This was, as Campbell points out, very pragmatic. However, from a moral and legal view, this was extremely problemmatic.
The second history, however, is an ironic one, so ironic it nearly makes one laugh. Once the Navy paid Luciano and the mob all that cash to protect the docks, one thing was never established: Did the Mafia do its job? In other words, who regulated the Mafia? To whom did the wise-guys submit their progress reports? How many spies and saboteurs did the Mafia catch, if any? Or did they just take the money and run, and hope for the best? Did they even hope for the best? As far as the mob was the concerned, if the docks blew up, so what? What would the government do about it? Sue them for breach of contract? What contract? You get the idea.
Much like Christopher Simpson's "Blowback" which explores the government's protection of Nazis after the war, in order to exploit their intelligence against the Communists, Campbell's "Luciano Project" is an examination of that old saying "All's fair in love and war." But at what cost? Is it justifiable to hire and protect killers (Nazis and Mafiosi did kill people, after all) in order to protect National Security? Is it justifiable to keep such things secret from the public? It's something for every American to think about, especially given what's going on in our post-9/11 country.
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