Skip the History Channel and read this book!

If you are looking for a hard dose of ethnic crime reality, James M. O’Kane’s The Crooked Ladder: Gangsters, Ethnicity, and the American Dream is for you. Save your time watching the History Channel and dive into this book. The lessons and educational benefits it offers are far superior.

O’Kane’s work offers its readers much more than its title and subtitle promise. It’s an honest assessment of gangsters, ethnicity and the American dream that comes to life through detailed sociological and criminal historical research, teaching as much about these disciplines as it does the stated variables. While doing so, O’Kane takes to task some of the top sociological scholars and thinkers and offers a fresh perspective that will justly be discussed for years to come.

Here’s how the book goes: In the first two chapters, O’Kane builds a solid historical and sociological foundation detailing the clashes of ethnic newcomers and those of the established American society, while explaining how these newcomers began at the bottom and endeavored to pull themselves up by their bootstraps—even if that meant engaging in criminal enterprises. He goes on to show how the children of these ethnic criminal newcomers often enjoy relatively middle-class lifestyles, opting to become lawyers, doctors, business professionals and such, while condescendingly frowning upon the illegal activity of their forebears. Thus the newcomers are assimilated into the larger society, handing the proverbial opportunistic criminal torch to different incoming ethnic groups.

O’Kane thunders ahead, panning his cinematically vivid lens into the pre-Civil War era of New York Irish criminals and gangs, shattering the common misconception that organized crime began with the later-arriving Italians. With razor edge precision, O’Kane illustrates the Irish criminal’s rise and fall from dominance while showcasing another relatively unknown factoid that Chinese crime bosses and gangs also flourished around the same time, albeit on a smaller scale and in their own enclaves. O’Kane presents a clear pecking order, chronicling how the Jews would subsequently replace the Irish, and in turn the Jews were replaced by the Italians who monopolized organized crime for most of the twentieth century until their eventual replacement by African American, Hispanic, Asian, and other ethnic newcomers who currently occupy the throne.

O’Kane rounds out his work in the book’s appendix treating the reader to a intriguing lesson about the criminal in American ballad and film. This is a must read for all American outlaw and gangster film enthusiasts and anybody who writes American historical crime fiction (think: Little Cesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Kiss of Death (1947), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Godfather I, II, and III (1972, 1974, and 1990).

O’Kane accomplishes so much in The Crooked Ladder. His eloquent writing style and tight prose simply make the read a pleasure. Pick up a copy and enjoy! You will be glad you did.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Crooked-Ladder-Gangsters-Ethnicity/dp/076580994X