Book Review Down and dirty union battles

By Dylan Foley

THE RACKETS, by Thomas Kelly. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 374 pp. $24.

"The Rackets," the new novel by Thomas Kelly, tells the story of Jimmy Dolan, a young Irish-American who battles the corrupt Teamster boss who destroyed his father. It is a brutal and moving tale, in which Kelly draws vivid pictures of the Irish-American blue-collar world in New York City. It is world where the old Irish neighborhoods — Inwood and Hell’s Kitchen — are shrinking as new immigrants move in and the urban Irish way of life fades away.

As the book opens, Dolan has gotten out of the blue-collar world through college and is an important aide to the uptight Republican mayor of New York City. A shoving match with Teamster boss Frank Keefe in front of TV cameras obliterates Dolan’s political career, and he is forced back to Inwood and work in construction. When Dolan’s union reformer father is killed, Dolan decides to pick up his father’s mantle, diving deep into the violent world of union corruption.

Kelly’s strength as a writer is in creating powerful characters, defying the stereotypes of blue-collar workers and mobsters alike. The reader will meet Tara, Jimmy Dolan’s hero cop girlfriend, and Cronin, a disgraced FBI man who is growing sick of all the bad things he’s done. There is also Liam Brady, a Gulf War veteran and gun smuggler. The most compelling character, however, is Mike Dolan, the martyred father, who knows that his life isn’t worth much to the corrupt powers that be.

"The Racket" offers up a taut, twisting plot, where alliances shift and good and bad are rarely clear. The federal government is involved in controlling the corrupt Keefe and his federal handlers have much to lose if Keefe loses the election to Jimmy Dolan. The government may have to destroy Dolan or it may get to him through Tara, wrecking her career and possibly taking her life. Kelly moves easily between writing about the people who inhabit the corridors of power to the rented leg-breakers who attack reformers on job sites.

Above the Teamster battle floats the vicious gangster Tommy Magic, who lives in a tiny house in Howard Beach, Queens, with millions buried in the backyard.

He provides the novel with moments of sheer terror and unadulterated humor.

Magic proves that even stone-cold killers suffer from the claustrophobia of government surveillance and creeping old age. When Magic subcontracts out some of the Teamster violence to the Russian mob, one member of which is a one-eared murderer from Grozny, the adrenaline levels in "The Rackets" shoot up.

Despite the quick turns and betrayals that pop up in "The Rackets," Kelly is firmly in control of his material. An unlikely romance has a horrific conclusion and the mob showdown with the union reformers is quick and harsh.

And like a bottom-feeding shark, a particular murky government agent is always around to prey on the weak, to stir things up and eliminate thugs who have outlived their usefulness. In all the chaos at the end of the book, Jimmy Dolan comes out as a well-formed character, full of determination to carry out his father’s battles for a clean union.