The Luciano Project: The Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the U.S. Navy

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.