CAPTIVE CITY
By
It would seem a difficult task to add any further tarnish to Chicago's lusterless reputation, but Ovid Demaris, whose previous muckraking credits include co-authorship of The Green Felt Jungle (1963), may just pull it off. His feisty account of ""the aeonian horde of venal politicians, mercenary businessmen, and sadistic gangsters"" who keep Chicago in chains makes police brutality and Daley's political machinery seem like greaseless kid's stuff. Demaris details how police and court corruption and the world's most blatant mobster-politico alliance support a flourishing multi-billion dollar criminal colossus fed by union racketeering, gambling, prostitution, narcotics, loansharking, extortion, assault, and murder. He names names with a vengeance, and in case you didn't catch them appends an ""Antisocial Register"" with capsule biographies of the current big-time boys.