Murder in the Garment District
The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
The thrilling and true account of racketeering and union corruption in mid-century New York, when unions and the mob were locked in a power struggle that reverberates to this day
In 1949, in New York City's crowded Garment District, a union organizer named William Lurye was stabbed to death by a mob assassin. Through the lens of this murder case, prize-winning authors David Witwer and Catherine Rios explore American labor history at its critical turning point, drawing on FBI case files and the private papers of investigative journalists who first broke the story. A narrative that originates in the garment industry of mid-century New York, which produced over 80 percent of the nation's dresses at the time, Murder in the Garment District quickly moves to a national stage, where congressional anti-corruption hearings gripped the nation and forever tainted the reputation of American unions.
Replete with elements of a true-crime thriller, Murder in the Garment District includes a riveting cast of characters, from wheeling and dealing union president David Dubinsky to the notorious gangster Abe Chait and the crusading Robert F. Kennedy, whose public duel with Jimmy Hoffa became front-page news.
Deeply researched and grounded in the street-level events that put people's lives and livelihoods at stake, Murder in the Garment District is destined to become a classic work of history—one that also explains the current troubled state of unions in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Witwer, a Penn State Harrisburg history professor, and his colleague Rios, a filmmaker and humanities professor, deliver an insightful analysis of the period in the 1950s when American labor unions acquired a reputation for corruption and criminality that lingers today. Discrediting accusations of widespread moral failures by union leaders, Witwer and Rios argue that long-standing relationships between businessmen and mobsters made it nearly impossible to organize workers in certain industries without engaging with gangsters. Organizers who resisted the mob, including William Lurye, whose brazen, broad-daylight murder in New York City's Garment District the authors use as a framing device, found themselves vulnerable to violent attacks, with little redress from police or government officials. Witwer and Rios argue that accommodations worked out between labor and organized crime were part of the "operational codes" of the period, and document how such agreements enabled labor leaders to win rights and concessions for workers, but left them vulnerable to congressional investigations and anti-union legislation. Witwer and Rios amass a wealth of detail to complicate the prevailing narrative around the subject, and make a strong case that the reputation of labor unions as inherently corrupt is overblown. This granular, revisionist history will resonate with labor activists and history buffs.
