Dust jacket notes: Chicago is a city on chains. It is owned and operated by a cabal of organized criminals and corrupted politicians. So-called "respectable businessmen" cooperate fully. For the first time, their relationship is clearly shown, not in an archetypal tale, but in a book conceived with courage and packed solid with hundreds of names!
Crime now poisons every level of American society - but Chicago is unique. It is the killing ground, the training school, the pace setter. Here, the alliance of mobster and politico is brazenly open. The "Westside Bloc", as noted in this book, is Mafia controlled and dominates the State Assembly on every issue of importance to the crime business. Members, virtual card-carrying Mafiosi, have been sent to Congress.
"I believe," declared author Ovid Demaris, "that the tie between mobster and politician is closer in Chicago than anywhere else in the world including Sicily."
There have been more than one thousand gangland slayings in Chicago and only two convictions. The power and popularity of the politician-protected Mafia group is demonstrated again and again in specific examples of union racketeering, gambling, prostitution, narcotics, loan-sharking, extortion, assault and murder.
The mobster-politician ties have existed in Chicago for a century but never as openly and brazenly as they exist today.
Captive City treads where angels fear to go. It chronicles the mob structure that controls the city's pompous puppet Mayor Daley. It quotes from heretofore secret Federal reports regarding police and court corruption. It shows why today it is nearly impossible to differentiate between the partners: the businessman is a politician, the politician is a gangster and the gangster is a businessman.
Captive City is the most outspoken book ever written on the subject concerning live people. No aspect of mob culture goes unexamined in this fearless report on the men who rule Chicago today.