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Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment
By Anthony Lewis
Basic Books, 2010, 240 pages
$10.85 paperback, $9.77 Kindle

I don’t know if most Americans appreciate how extraordinary our right to a free press is. Our news media, publications, and written words of all kinds—and spoken words for that matter—are relatively free to criticize, hold accountable, and disclose secrets of the government and politicians, corporations and business leaders, organizations and public figures, celebrities, alleged criminals, and big shots. This freedom enables the press to act as an independent watchdog against abuse of power, and as an open marketplace of ideas. The USA has the freest press on earth, according to Pulitzer-prize winning author Lewis (author of Gideon’s Trumpet).

The book’s enigmatic title can be explained by a quote from an article by Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in The New Republic (July 14-21, 1986):

“The First Amendment contains no requirement that the speech it protects is harmless. On the contrary, speech that somebody thinks is harmful is the only kind that needs protecting.”

The language in the First Amendment is clear: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” But its application involves many gray areas and legal quagmires, as Lewis demonstrates in his lucid legal history of free speech in the USA, starting with the 1798 Sedition Act (which criminalized criticism of President Adams). The history involves issues such as the difference between ordinary speech, commercial speech, and political speech; artistic expression, libel, privacy, obscenity, hate speech and incitement to terrorism; and the press’s shielding of confidential sources.

Characters in this story include Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, and others whose bold and stirring decisions on the Supreme Court have advanced and protected freedom of speech.

Freeing the Presses: The First Amendment in Action
Edited by Timothy E. Cook
Louisiana State University Press, 2006, 187 pages
$18.95 paperback

Six political communication scholars draw on history, sociology, political science, legal philosophy, and journalism to analyze the freedoms and privileges given to the news media and to reporters, and whether those freedoms actually help produce the kind of news that keeps American democracy strong.

Here are the definitive biographies of Justices Louis Brandeis and Thurgood Marshall. Both are inspiring. [Click on the book images for details or to purchase.]

Louis D. Brandeis: A Life
By Melvin Urofsky
Pantheon, 2009, 976 pages
$26.40 hardcover, $21.12 Kindle

Louis Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916 by President Wilson, and served until 1939. He is considered an extraordinary justice because of his mastery of procedural details, his comprehensive research of the facts and the law in each case, and the great clarity and logic of his opinions.

Brandeis was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Jewish immigrants. He entered Harvard Law School when he was eighteen, and graduated in 1877 with the highest grade average in the school’s history.

As a “people’s lawyer” he championed individual rights, defended worker protection and labor laws, and fought against powerful corporations, monopolies, and public corruption. He also helped create the Federal Reserve System.

His nomination to the Supreme Court was bitterly contested not only because he was Jewish, but also because, as Justice William O. Douglas noted, he was incorruptable.  As Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis’s opinions famously included a strong defense of free speech and the right to privacy.

He wrote hundreds of opinions, but the one with the greatest impact on the law—particularly American federalism—may have been Erie Railroad v. Tompkins in 1938. In Erie, the plaintiff brought a personal injury action in federal court because Pennsylvania law was more favorable to the defendant. Erie established the modern doctrine of diversity jurisdiction for federal courts, which essentially says a federal judge can’t make new common law in contradiction to judge-made state law. So the decision prevents the federal government from stealing powers that the Constitution reserved to the states. Erie also discouraged “forum shopping” by plaintiffs in civil actions.

Brandeis was active in the Zionist movement, seeing it as a solution to antisemitism in Europe and Russia, while reviving “the Jewish spirit.” He died in 1941.

Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary
By Juan Williams
Three Rivers Press, 2000, 504 pages
$8.24 paperback

Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967 by President Johnson, and served until 1991. He was admired more as a civil rights litigator than as a justice. His greatest achievement may have been winning the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. Brown overturned the “separate but equal” system of apartheid in education that had been established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

“He led a civil rights revolution in the 20th century that forever changed the landscape of American society,” writes Williams, a Washington Post correspondent and TV commentator. By working through the courts “to eradicate the legacy of slavery and [destroy] the racist segregation system of Jim Crow,” Marshall “had an even more profound and lasting effect on race relations than either…Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X.” (Williams is also the author of Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965.)

Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908. His great-grandfather was a slave. He graduated first in his class from the historically black Howard University School of Law—having been rejected by the University of Maryland School of Law because of its segregation policy. Years later he successfully sued the University of Maryland for that policy (Murray v. Pearson, 1936).

As an NAACP lawyer, he won his first case (of many to come) before the Supreme Court in 1940, at the age of 32. Later that year he was appointed chief counsel for the NAACP. John Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961; and Lyndon Johnson appointed him solicitor general in 1965, in preparation for the high court nomination.

Williams respectfully glosses over Marshall’s history of heavy drinking and womanizing.

As a Supreme Court justice, he compiled a liberal record that included support of affirmative action and abortion, opposition to the death penalty, and protection of the rights of criminal suspects. But the Supreme Court years are anticlimactic in a heroic, combative, and courageous life, and this part of the biography is slow. Marshall died in 2001.

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The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law
By Mark Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz
NYU Press, 2009, 448 pages
$21.75 hardcover, $14.30 Kindle

Denbeaux and Hafetz, who represented some of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, rely on government data and court testimony, as well as interviews with their clients, to present a chronological narrative of the legal maneuvering that took place at Gitmo—which at its peak housed 750 detainees from 40 countries.

The defense lawyers’ biggest battles involved gaining access to their clients in the first place, and establishing the detainees’ right to habeas corpus. The defendants were by and large underlings who didn’t know anything of value about terrorism, according to the authors. (Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called them “among the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”) Many of them were isolated for years without diversions or outside contact—and worse. Publishers Weekly said, “The desperate words…of Gitmo detainees on torture grab the heart and do not let go.”

Honor Bound: Inside the Guantanamo Trials
By Kyndra Rotunda
Carolina Academic Press, 2008, 264 pages
$25.60 hardcover

As a member of the Office of the Chief Prosecutor, U.S. Army Captain (now Major) Kyndra Rotunda prepared war crimes charges against suspected al Qaida and Taliban detainees at Guantanamo. Through a series of vignettes, Rotunda analyzes the laws governing the war on terror, the Geneva Conventions, and the policies toward the treatment and rights of detainees held in Cuba. She describes in detail the detention camp, her experiences with detainees and interrogators, and the work of the Criminal Investigation Task Force around the globe to assemble evidence against suspected terrorists.

The author says that the military commissions at Gitmo gave the detainees more legal rights and privileges than the Geneva Conventions require. She asks, “In a war our enemies call a ‘religious war,’ where radical Islamists use their religion to justify brutally beheading innocent civilians, is it smart to exceed the Geneva Conventions?” Rotunda would have you believe the prisoners were not tortured.

In fact, she noted that gentle interrogations techniques and patience were more effective than harsh interrogation methods, which tends to undermine the Bush administration’s justification for using the latter.

The book’s cover shows a hooded jihadist with the Quran in one hand and a hand grenade in the other, in case you were wondering whose side the author is on.

The National Security Court System: A Natural Evolution of Justice in an Age of Terror
By Glenn Sulmasy
Oxford University Press (USA), 2009, 256 pages
$21.56 hardcover, $16.47 Kindle

The recent Boumediene v. Bush decision, which upheld the right of habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees, promises to throw national security law into chaos, says Glenn Sulmasy, an expert on national security law. His book opens with a history of America’s long and complicated experience with military commissions, and argues for a more sensible approach to the global war on terror’s unique set of prisoners. He proposes creating a separate standing judicial system, overseen by civilian judges, that allows for habeas corpus appeals and which focuses exclusively on existing war-on-terror cases as well as the inevitable cases to come.

See also: Bush, the Detainees, and the Constitution: The Battle over Presidential Power in the War on Terror, By Howard Ball (University Press of Kansas, 2007, 275 pages, $26.56 hardcover).

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The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia
By Mike Dash
Random House, 2009, 416 pages
$17.82 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle

Giuseppe Morello arrived in the USA from Corleone, Sicily, in 1892, and resumed a successful counterfeiting operation that his family had begun in Italy. He broadened his criminal activities to include extortion, insurance scams, and kidnapping; and eventually became the head of the nascent New York Mafia.

Bestselling history author Dash (Satan’s Circus) writes, “Morello and his henchmen were parasites who terrorized their fellow countrymen, exploited the weak, and dealt in fear.” A consummately cold-blooded killer, Morello himself was gunned down in 1930. “Dash depicts the balance between loyalty and betrayal as an ever-changing dance, and nimbly catalogues the endless gruesome murders committed in the name of revenge and honor” (Publishers Weekly).

The author destroys any romantic notions Americans might have about the mob from watching the “Godfather” movies and “The Sopranos.” There is nothing civilized about organized crime.

The First Family is “comprehensively researched. Riveting details and engrossing dialogue create novelistic scenes and tensions, but it’s all true” (American History).

Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires
By Selwyn Raab
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006, 784 pages
$12.89 paperback

Neither does Raab romanticize the Mafia—he exposes romantic myths and shows that “the collective goal of the five families of New York [Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese] was pillaging the nation’s richest city and region.” That included corrupting labor unions, garbage collection, the garment industry, construction, police departments, and Wall Street. They also flooded eastern and midwest cities with heroin and other drugs.

“Former New York Times crime reporter Raab sets a new gold standard for organized crime nonfiction” with this book (Publishers Weekly), which includes 24 pages of photos.

American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power
By Thomas Reppetto
Holt Paperbacks, 2004, 352 pages
$12.75 paperback

Repetto (an ex-Chicago police detective) contends that the mob’s corruption of politicians, not its management of crime (which actually was more mismanagement), made rich men of the mob bosses, most of whom started out as poor immigrants.

History of the Mafia
By Salvatore Lupo
Columbia University Press, 2009, 352 pages
$21.75 hardcover

The idea that the American Mafia’s culture was based on traditional Sicilian peasant values, with strong family solidarity and codes of honor, is a grotesque, self-serving myth, according to historian Lupo. His history follows the Mafia from its roots in Italy’s wars of unification in the 1800s, back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, to the anti-Mafia trials of the 1980s and 90s in Palermo. Publishers Weekly said, sadly, that this book “is almost as byzantine as the Mafia.”

The prosecution of African slaves for murder and piracy aboard an illegal Spanish slave ship off the coast of Cuba, and their dramatic acquittal at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1841, was all but forgotten until Steven Spielberg’s film “Amistad” refreshed our memory. The movie was based primarily on a 1987 book by Howard Jones. (Click on the images above for details or to purchase.)

For a deeper exploration of the legal issues—including the complete trial record and maps of the voyages—see the University of Missouri Law School’s website.

Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy
By Howard Jones
Oxford University Press, 1987, 304 pages
$31.09 paperback, $13.47 Kindle

In 1839, captive Africans being transported illegally as slaves commandeered the Spanish slave ship La Amistad (”Friendship”) off the Cuban coast, and killed all but two of the crew. The 53 mutineers were tricked by the surviving crew members into sailing to the Long Island coast instead of back to Africa. The U.S. Navy siezed and imprisoned the Africans, and charged them with murder and piracy. In March 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court freed the surviving 35 Africans (including their leader Cinque), and 10 months later they returned to Sierra Leone. “The trial raised fundamental legal questions about the relevance of slavery and race to the American conception of liberty,” according to Library Journal, and “temporarily united disparate factions of the fledgling abolitionist movement.” It also prompted President Van Buren to improperly interfere with the judicial process. Jones’s book is generously illustrated and documented.

The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone
Iyunolu Folayan Osagie
University of Georgia Press, 2003, 216 pages
$22.95 paperback

This “extended essay” examines the cultural significance of the 1839 Amistad revolt in contemporary America and Africa. The author is from Sierra Leone, where the Africans on the Amistad were enslaved. She sees the “re-memory” of the story, chiefly as a result of Spielberg’s 1997 film “Amistad,” as significant for the national and cultural identity in both Africa and the African diaspora in America.

Amistad
Starring Djimon Hounsou (as Cinque), Matthew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman, and Anthony Hopkins. Director Steven Spielberg
Dreamworks, 1997, 2 hrs 35 mins, Rated R
$7.99 on DVD

“Amistad” garnered four Academy Award nominations, including Best Supporting Actor (Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams). BlogCritics called it “one of the more dramatic and important films of the decade. ‘Amistad’ serves as a reminder that freedom is not to be taken for granted.”

A review in Entertainment Weekly, on the other hand, said the film “takes on a mass atrocity…but its approach is almost bizarrely academic. Midway through, there’s a 20-minute sequence that showcases, in graphic detail, the claustrophobic horrors of the ‘Middle Passage’ (bloody whippings, starvation, mass drownings). Otherwise, the film seems all but uninterested in the psychological experience of slavery. Its investment is in the issue of slavery, one that Spielberg uses to craft a courtroom drama of dull, soapbox ponderousness. By the time John Q. Adams shows up at the Supreme Court, the film has lapsed into liberal self-caricature.”

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Here are two books in defense of, and two critical of, the Bush Administration’s expansion of executive power from 9/11/01 through 2008.

Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency
By Richard A. Posner
Oxford University Press, 2006, 208 pages
$23.96 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle

Posner, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, argues that in the face of terrorism, national security concerns become paramount, and the scope of constitutional rights and liberties must be narrowed. He says brutal forms of interrogation should be allowed in certain circumstances, and that all communications within the USA should be subject to interception and examination. Posner advocates expanding the power of the executive branch even in undeclared wars (like all of the wars we’ve fought since WWII).

Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror
By Benjamin Wittes
Penguin, 2009, 320 pages
$13.50 paperback, $9.99 Kindle

Legal affairs columnist and Brookings Institution fellow Wittes supports the expansion of executive power in the Bush-Cheney administration, and applauds many of its security measures, but argues that the “legal architecture” now in place is inadequate for a protracted war on terror. What we need now is broad legislation for addressing the civil liberties and human rights issues that arise in response to aggressive counterterrorism efforts. The legal foundation for domestic surveillance, extraordinary rendition, and torture of detainees is “cobbled together out of outdated and ill-fitting materials, and its flaws are glaring” (Booklist review). Wittes critizes the U.S. Supreme Court for interfering in foreign policy since 9/11/01 (e.g., attempting to extend its jurisdiction over detainees).

Power Play: The Bush Presidency and the Constitution
By James P. Pfiffner
Brookings Institution, 2008, 299 pages
$22.00 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle

The Bush-Cheney administration denied the writ of habeas corpus to individuals deemed to be enemy combatants. It suspended the Geneva Convention and allowed or encouraged the use of harsh interrogation methods amounting to torture. It ordered the surveillance of Americans without obtaining warrants as required by law. And it issued signing statements declaring that the president does not have the duty to faithfully execute hundreds of provisions in the laws he has signed. “Pfiffner builds a powerful case pointing toward one unmistakable conclusion: since 9/11, the claims and actions of the Bush administration [undermined] constitutional principles and rule of law,” wrote Hugh Heclo, professor of public affairs at George Mason University.

Bush, the Detainees, and the Constitution: The Battle over Presidential Power in the War on Terror
By Howard Ball
University Press of Kansas, 2007, 275 pages
$26.56 hardcover

Ball examines the enemy combatants cases of 2004 and 2006, including Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Bush, Rumsfeld v. Padilla, and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. He summarizes competing legal arguments pitting the detainees’ fundamental human rights (including habeas corpus) against Bush’s proclamation that he alone has the authority to decide their fate, as well as efforts by the Court and Congress to reclaim their own authority in such matters. Ball also analyzes the two Congressional Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, the Patriot Act, and the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program; and describes how the administration found ways to evade both the letter and spirit of the Supreme Court’s decisions through new legislation, presidential signing statements, and redefinition of the status of the detainees. “President Bush’s treatment of enemy combatants in the ‘war on terror’ is the most important constitutional story of our time, and Howard Ball tells it with a deft sense for detail, an impressive field of vision, and a sharply critical eye,” wrote David Cole, author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.

L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City
By John Buntin
Harmony, 2009, 432 pages
$17.16 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle
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Buntin’s book is a dual biography that weaves together the careers of (a) ruthless and flamboyant mobster Meyer Harris “Mickey” Cohen, and (b) uncorruptible but racist L.A. police chief William Parker. The Los Angeles criminal scene that Buntin describes, mostly from the Great Depression through the Watts race riots of 1965, is brutal and appalling.

Parker joined the L.A. police in 1927, became chief in 1950, and died in 1966. Before he took over as chief, the police “didn’t fight organized crime, they managed it.” Police were poorly educated, hardly trained, often drunk on the job, and hostile to minorities. City hall was equally corrupt. Parker hired 1,400 new cops and instilled discipline (not respect for civil liberties) in the force.

The diminutive Cohen, kingpin of the Los Angeles underworld, was “Hollywood’s favorite gangster” (Esotouric). Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Sammy Davis Jr. hung around with him. He was brought down not by Parker but by the feds twice for tax evasion, for which he served two hitches in the pen. When he died (in his sleep) in 1975, he still owed the USA almost $500,000.

L.A. Noir is entertaining, but Buntin “writes in cliched journalese,” says Jonathan Yardley in his Washington Post review, “and tries to cram too much” into the book. Kirkus called it “a roller coaster ride [and] gripping social history.”

The 1945-46 Nuremberg trial of Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity was the first international criminal tribunal, and the foundation of international justice and human rights policies. Following are reviews of three books and three DVDs. (Click on the book or DVD images for details, or to purchase.)

Justice at Nuremberg
By Robert E. Conot
Basic Books, 1993, 590 pages
$14.78 paperback

Originally published in 1983, this was the first, and is still the most comprehensive, dramatic account of the trial of 21 Nazi military and civilian leaders for atrocities they committed before and during World War II. Norman Birkett, one of the British judges, called it “the greatest trial in history.” Conot reconstructs both the proceedings at Nuremburg and the offenses with which the accused were charged. As sickening and dispiriting as the atrocities were, they are balanced by the dignity and fairness with which the trial was conducted. (Amazon.com mistakenly says this paperback edition has 230 pages.)

Nuremberg Diary
By G. M. Gilbert
Da Capo Press, 1995, 488 pages
$18.00 paperback

This book is both spellbinding and chilling. Dr. Gilbert was the prison psychologist at Nuremberg, watched and questioned the Nazi war criminals. With scientific dispassion he encouraged Göering, Speer, Hess, Ribbentrop, Frank, Jodl, Keitel, Streicher, and the others to reveal their innermost thoughts. In the process Gilbert exposed what motivated them to create the distorted Aryan utopia and the nightmarish worlds of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald. In Nuremberg Diary, he describes their day-to-day reactions to the trial proceedings; their off-the-record opinions of Hitler and the Third Reich; their views on slave labor, death camps, and the Jews; their testimony, feuds, and desperate maneuverings to deny their guilt.

The Nuremberg Legacy: How the Nazi War Crimes Trials Changed the Course of History
By Norbert Ehrenfreund
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 288 pages
$21.24 hardcover, $15.37 Kindle

Ehrenfreund presents “a case for adhering to the Nuremberg legacy of fair treatment for even the most odious offenders” (Kirkus).

Judgment at Nuremberg
Starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximillian Schell, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift. Directed by Stanley Kramer
MGM Studio, 1961
$10.49 for DVD

This fictionalized version of the trial examines the questions of individual complicity in crimes committed by the state. Spencer Tracy plays Dan Haywood, the American judge selected to head the tribunal. Maximillian Schell won an Oscar for his role as counsel for the defense. The courtroom scenes depict graphic accounts of murder and crimes against humanity, including actual historical footage, exceptionally gruesome for a mainstream film in 1961, of huge piles of naked corpses bulldozed into pits.

Nuremberg
Starring Alec Baldwin, Brian Cox, Christopher Plummer, Jill Hennessy. Directed by Yves Simoneau
Turner Home Entertainment, 2001 (180 minutes)
$13.99 for DVD

This TV movie drives home the point that the prosecutors took a big risk in trying the Nazi high command for war crimes, which was then a novel and controversial concept. There was a passion for vengeance in the countries that had suffered under the Nazis; no international criminal laws existed; and the there was no assurance that the prosecutors would win convictions. If acquitted, the defendants would go free. “The political maneuvering between Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union that made [the trial] possible is explained fairly well in the early portions of the film,” said reviewer Robert J. McNamara.

Alec Baldwin stars as Robert Jackson, a U.S. Supreme Court justice who served as the chief prosecutor for the Allies at Nuremberg. “Baldwin at times delivers lines that seem to have been lifted from a high school history textbook,” said McNamara. But Brian Cox’s portrayal of the manipulative defendant Hermann Goering (Hitler’s deputy) is brilliant.

Nuremberg: Tyranny on Trial
The History Channel (A&E Home Video), 1995
$19.99 for DVD

This documentary film features some of the men who were present at the trials, including the chief counsel for the prosecution, telling how they planned the case against the defendants, knowing that the eyes of the world and the judgment of history watched their every move.

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The Buffalo Creek Disaster: How the survivors of one of the worst disasters in coal-mining history brought suit against the coal company—and won
By Gerald M. Stern
Vintage, 2008, 304 pages
$6.24 paperback

In February 1972, an impoundment dam owned (and negligently maintained) by the Pittston Coal Company burst, sending a 25-foot tidal wave of water, sludge, and debris crashing into southern West Virginia’s Buffalo Creek hollow, leaving over 100 dead, 1,000 injured, and 4,000 homeless.

Of the two books reviewed here, The Buffalo Creek Disaster is the one that should have been made into a movie. The magnitude of the tragedy was massive. The defendant Pittston was clearly the heartless villain, showing callous disregard for human life. The jury verdict was deeply satisfying. And the author Stern, the lawyer who won the case, is eloquent. Stern refrains from bashing the defendant; rather he evokes sympathy and admiration for the survivors, who banded together to sue, foregoing settlement offers that were very tempting since many of them were destitute. The Chicago Tribune called the book “a fascinating tale of how investigative lawyers work.”

A Civil Action
By Jonathan Harr
Vintage, 1996, 502 pages
$10.88 paperback

W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods dumped a carcinogenic industrial solvent into the water table of Woburn, Massachusetts, for years. In 1981, the families of eight leukemia victims sued, but the case was mired in legal maneuvering and infighting. Many of the characters are fascinating, including the hotshot plaintiff’s lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, the brilliant defense lawyer Jerome Facher, and the perjurious tannery owner who concealed the dumping. The plaintiffs ended up with a settlement that was so small that Schlichtmann reckoned he failed. The author, a journalist, tells the story mainly from Schlichtmann’s point of view.

“A Civil Action” (VHS)
Starring John Travolta, Robert Duvall, Kathleen Quinlan
Directed by Steven Zaillian
Walt Disney Video, 1999,  rated PG-13
$10.49

John Travolta plays Schlichtmann, and Robert Duvall plays Facher. Duvall steals the show. The movie does a good job of condensing the 502-page book, but as a Hollywood drama it’s not satisfying because (a) Schlictmann the movie character is not nearly as three-dimensional as portrayed in the book; and (b) the Woburn survivors don’t triumph, as do the Buffalo Creek survivors; so the tragedy of cancer is compounded by the implied denial of justice.

Here are five books, all compelling and revolting, about cops who are not the courageous, heroic sort. They are the corrupt, brutal, racist, sexist, cowardly sort. No wonder the book covers are so dark. (Click on the book images for more info or to purchase.)

NYPD Blue Lies: The Shocking True Story of Racism, Corruption, Cover-Ups and Murder in the NYPD
By Charles Castro
Arbor Books 2009, 320 pages
$15.95 paperback

When a New York City cop issued a traffic ticket to a state Senator, the politician called a top-ranking member of the NYPD and asked for a favor. That call started a chain of events that resulted in the horrific murder of an innocent woman. The NYPD’s connection to the murder was covered up, and the police brass set up police sergeant Charles Castro as the scapegoat. But Castro refused to roll over, and struggled to prove his innocence. His book reveals rampant corruption in the department, and paints a scathing portrait of Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

NYPD Confidential: Power and Corruption in the Country’s Greatest Police Force
By Leonard Levitt
Thomas Dunne Books 2009, 320 pages
$17.15 hardcover, $13.72 Kindle

As a reporter for Newsday, Levitt covered the NYPD, the world’s largest law enforcement agency with 35,000 cops. He witnessed heroism, but this book is about scandal. He observed that corruption wasn’t just a rank-and-file phenomenon, but it permeated the highest levels of the department (as well as City Hall). Frank Serpico said, “It’s a fascinating read. I couldn’t put it down.”

Police Unbound: Corruption, Abuse, and Heroism by the Boys in Blue
By Anthony V. Bouza
Prometheus 2001, 303 pages
$30.98 hardcover

The majority of cops perform daily acts of individual heroism that go unrecognized, says Bouza, who joined the NYPD in 1953 and rose through the ranks to Minneapolis chief of police before retiring in 1989. But he portrays police departments collectively as agencies that primarily protect the interests of the “white, moneyed overclass.” For the non-white underclass, they are characterized by neglect at best and systemized brutality at worst. “The temptations to abuse are everywhere, and practically irresistible,” he says. This book, which is part memoir and part how-to manual for police departments, is written “with humor, surprising insights, and questions of social justice that may unnerve many readers,” said Publishers Weekly.

Satan’s Circus: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, and New York’s Trial of the Century
By Mike Dash
Three Rivers Press 2008, 464 pages
$10.85 paperback, $9.99 Kindle

Satan’s Circus was the vice district of Manhattan in the first two decades of the 1900s, featuring saloons, dance halls, houses of prostitution, and casinos. This book focuses on NYPD lieutenant Charles Becker, who worked undercover in the Circus as leader of a vice squad—as well as a vast extortion racket. He earned a reputation for extreme corruption and brutality. In 1912 Becker was convicted of murdering a gambler and pimp, and became the only cop to be executed in U.S. history. His trial both fascinated and divided the city, as some believed he was innocent, set up by powerful mobsters, cops, and/or politicians. Becker himself was as tall, handsome, and articulate as he was repelling.

Brotherhood of Corruption: A Cop Breaks the Silence on Police Abuse, Brutality, and Racial Profiling
By Juan Antonio Juarez
Chicago Review Press 2004, 320 pages
$18.21 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle

The author was a Chicago cop, working in an elite narcotics unit. He observed police brutality, racism, sexual abuse of female suspects, and “horrific” and “harrowing” corruption of all sorts, including the violent sort. Did he courageously expose this alarming betrayal of public trust, as did the hero Frank Serpico, while he was employed by the Chicago Police Department? No, he became one of the abusers, then he got busted, and then, when exposing corruption no longer required courage, he wrote this book and is still earning royalties from the story—the moral of which is that the most terrifying gang in town is the corrupt police unit.