Download or read book Corrupt Cities written by and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2000 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the devastation caused by the recent earthquake in Turkey was the result of widespread corruption between the construction industry and government officials. Corruption is part of everyday public life and we tend to take it for granted. However, preventing corruption helps to raise city revenues, improve service delivery, stimulate public confidence and participation, and win elections. This book is designed to help citizens and public officials diagnose, investigate and prevent various kinds of corrupt and illicit behaviour. It focuses on systematic corruption rather than the free-lance activity of a few law-breakers, and emphasises practical preventive measures rather than purely punitive or moralistic campaigns.
Download or read book The Shame of the Cities written by Lincoln Steffens and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 1957-01-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Corrupt Illinois written by Thomas J. Gradel and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-02-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public funds spent on jets and horses. Shoeboxes stuffed with embezzled cash. Ghost payrolls and incarcerated ex-governors. Illinois' culture of "Where's mine?" and the public apathy it engenders has made our state and local politics a disgrace. In Corrupt Illinois, veteran political observers Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson take aim at business-as-usual. Naming names, the authors lead readers through a gallery of rogues and rotten apples to illustrate how generations of chicanery have undermined faith in, and hope for, honest government. From there, they lay out how to implement institutional reforms that provide accountability and eradicate the favoritism, sweetheart deals, and conflicts of interest corroding our civic life. Corrupt Illinois lays out a blueprint to transform our politics from a pay-to-play–driven marketplace into what it should be: an instrument of public good.
Download or read book Bad City written by Paul Pringle and published by Celadon Books. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pringle’s fast-paced book is a master class in investigative journalism... when institutions collude to protect one another, reporting may be our last best hope for accountability." —The New York Times For fans of Spotlight and Catch and Kill comes a nonfiction thriller about corruption and betrayal radiating across Los Angeles from one of the region's most powerful institutions, a riveting tale from a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who investigated the shocking events and helped bring justice in the face of formidable odds. On a cool, overcast afternoon in April 2016, a salacious tip arrived at the L.A. Times that reporter Paul Pringle thought should have taken, at most, a few weeks to check out: a drug overdose at a fancy hotel involving one of the University of Southern California’s shiniest stars—Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the prestigious medical school. Pringle, who’d long done battle with USC and its almost impenetrable culture of silence, knew reporting the story wouldn’t be a walk in the park. USC is one of the biggest employers in L.A., and it casts a long shadow. But what he couldn’t have foreseen was that this tip would lead to the unveiling of not one major scandal at USC but two, wrapped in a web of crimes and cover-ups. The rot rooted out by Pringle and his colleagues at The Times would creep closer to home than they could have imagined—spilling into their own newsroom. Packed with details never before disclosed, Pringle goes behind the scenes to reveal how he and his fellow reporters triumphed over the city’s debased institutions, in a narrative that reads like L.A. noir. This is L.A. at its darkest and investigative journalism at its brightest.
Download or read book They Wished They Were Honest written by Michael F. Armstrong and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In fifty years of prosecuting and defending criminal cases in New York City and elsewhere,Michael F. Armstrong has often dealt with cops. For a single two-year span, as chief counsel to the Knapp Commission, he was charged with investigating them. Based on Armstrong's vivid recollections of this watershed moment in law enforcement accountability—prompted by the New York Times's report on whistleblower cop Frank Serpico—They Wished They Were Honest recreates the dramatic struggles and significance of the Commission and explores the factors that led to its success and the restoration of the NYPD's public image. Serpico's charges against the NYPD encouraged Mayor John Lindsay to appoint prominent attorney Whitman Knapp to chair a Citizen's Commission on police graft. Overcoming a number of organizational, budgetary, and political hurdles, Chief Counsel Armstrong cobbled together an investigative group of a half-dozen lawyers and a dozen agents. Just when funding was about to run out, the "blue wall of silence" collapsed. A flamboyant "Madame," a corrupt lawyer, and a weasely informant led to a "super thief" cop, who was trapped and "turned" by the Commission. This led to sensational and revelatory hearings, which publicly refuted the notion that departmental corruption was limited to only a "few rotten apples." In the course of his narrative, Armstrong illuminates police investigative strategy; governmental and departmental political maneuvering; ethical and philosophical issues in law enforcement; the efficacy (or lack thereof) of the police's anticorruption efforts; the effectiveness of the training of police officers; the psychological and emotional pressures that lead to corruption; and the effects of police criminality on individuals and society. He concludes with the effects, in today's world, of Knapp and succeeding investigations into police corruption and the value of permanent outside monitoring bodies, such as the special prosecutor's office, formed in response to the Commission's recommendation, as well as the current monitoring commission, of which Armstrong is chairman.
Download or read book We Own This City written by Justin Fenton and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • The astonishing true story of “one of the most startling police corruption scandals in a generation” (The New York Times), from the Pulitzer Prize–nominated reporter who exposed a gang of criminal cops and their yearslong plunder of an American city NOW AN HBO SERIES FROM THE WIRE CREATOR DAVID SIMON AND GEORGE PELECANOS “A work of journalism that not only chronicles the rise and fall of a corrupt police unit but can stand as the inevitable coda to the half-century of disaster that is the American drug war.”—David Simon Baltimore, 2015. Riots are erupting across the city as citizens demand justice for Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who has died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. Drug and violent crime are surging, and Baltimore will reach its highest murder count in more than two decades: 342 homicides in a single year, in a city of just 600,000 people. Facing pressure from the mayor’s office—as well as a federal investigation of the department over Gray’s death—Baltimore police commanders turn to a rank-and-file hero, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, and his elite plainclothes unit, the Gun Trace Task Force, to help get guns and drugs off the street. But behind these new efforts, a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scale was unfolding within the police department. Entrusted with fixing the city’s drug and gun crisis, Jenkins chose to exploit it instead. With other members of the empowered Gun Trace Task Force, Jenkins stole from Baltimore’s citizens—skimming from drug busts, pocketing thousands in cash found in private homes, and planting fake evidence to throw Internal Affairs off their scent. Their brazen crime spree would go unchecked for years. The results were countless wrongful convictions, the death of an innocent civilian, and the mysterious death of one cop who was shot in the head, killed just a day before he was scheduled to testify against the unit. In this urgent book, award-winning investigative journalist Justin Fenton distills hundreds of interviews, thousands of court documents, and countless hours of video footage to present the definitive account of the entire scandal. The result is an astounding, riveting feat of reportage about a rogue police unit, the city they held hostage, and the ongoing struggle between American law enforcement and the communities they are charged to serve.
Download or read book The Politics of Trash written by Patricia Strach and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Trash explains how municipal trash collection solved odorous urban problems using nongovernmental and often unseemly means. Focusing on the persistent problems of filth and the frustration of generations of reformers unable to clean their cities, Patricia Strach and Kathleen S. Sullivan tell a story of dirty politics and administrative innovation that made rapidly expanding American cities livable. The solutions that professionals recommended to rid cities of overflowing waste cans, litter-filled privies, and animal carcasses were largely ignored by city governments. When the efforts of sanitarians, engineers, and reformers failed, public officials turned to the habits and tools of corruption as well as to gender and racial hierarchies. Corruption often provided the political will for public officials to establish garbage collection programs. Effective waste collection involves translating municipal imperatives into new habits and arrangements in homes and other private spaces. To change domestic habits, officials relied on gender hierarchy to make the women of the white, middle-class households in charge of sanitation. When public and private trash cans overflowed, racial and ethnic prejudices were harnessed to single out scavengers, garbage collectors, and neighborhoods by race. These early informal efforts were slowly incorporated into formal administrative processes that created the public-private sanitation systems that prevail in most American cities today. The Politics of Trash locates these hidden resources of governments to challenge presumptions about the formal mechanisms of governing and recovers the presence of residents at the margins, whose experiences can be as overlooked as garbage collection itself. This consideration of municipal garbage collection reveals how political development often relies on undemocratic means with long-term implications for further inequality. Focusing on the resources that cleaned American cities also shows the tenuous connection between political development and modernization.
Download or read book Corruption and Racketeering in the New York City Construction Industry written by New York State Organized Crime Task Force and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, Corruption and Racketeering In The New York City Construction Industry: The Final Report of the New York State Organized Task Force, lays out in close and compelling detail the intricate patterns of currupt activities and relationships that for the better part of a century have characterized business as usual in the construction industry in America's largest metropolis. The book is the end product of more than five years' worth of investigation, prosecutions, and research by the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, a unique agency that has set a national example for marrying law enforcement initiatives with comprehensive and exhausting analysis of the causes and dynamics of industrial racketeering. This is a sobering analysis of the construction industry , one of New York City's largest industries, and in effect, one of the city's most significant economic sectors. In any given year during the 1980s, billions of dollars of construction were being carried out at any one time. The industry regularly employs more than 100,000 people in the city, involving some one hundred union locals and many hundreds of general and specialty contractors as well as a large number of architects, engineers, and materials suppliers. The book shows—in great and provocative detail—how organized extortion, bribery illegal cartels, and bid rigging characterize construction in the city. The basis for much of this crim is labor racketeering, controlled or orchestrated by organized crime. It reveals how this world of corruption affects not only the private sector but the city's vast public works program, and it spells out the ways in which both organized crime and official corruption each sustain the dynamics of ongoing criminality. Wrong-doing on a massive scale is documented at length. But this book is more than a recitation of extensive and systematic criminality. The book recommends a number of plausible options for genuine reform. Necessarily these are profound and radical solutions, but everyone who reads this book will conclude that only profound and radical solutions could hope to solve such an entrenched and intractable crime problem.
Download or read book Corruption and Reform written by Edward L. Glaeser and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite recent corporate scandals, the United States is among the world’s least corrupt nations. But in the nineteenth century, the degree of fraud and corruption in America approached that of today’s most corrupt developing nations, as municipal governments and robber barons alike found new ways to steal from taxpayers and swindle investors. In Corruption and Reform, contributors explore this shadowy period of United States history in search of better methods to fight corruption worldwide today. Contributors to this volume address the measurement and consequences of fraud and corruption and the forces that ultimately led to their decline within the United States. They show that various approaches to reducing corruption have met with success, such as deregulation, particularly “free banking,” in the 1830s. In the 1930s, corruption was kept in check when new federal bureaucracies replaced local administrations in doling out relief. Another deterrent to corruption was the independent press, which kept a watchful eye over government and business. These and other facets of American history analyzed in this volume make it indispensable as background for anyone interested in corruption today.
Download or read book Busted written by Wendy Ruderman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the vein of Erin Brockovich, The Departed, and T. J. English's Savage City comes Busted, the shocking true story of the biggest police corruption scandal in Philadelphia history, a tale of drugs, power, and abuse involving a rogue narcotics squad, a confidential informant, and two veteran journalists whose reporting drove a full-scale FBI probe, rocked the City of Brotherly Love, and earned a Pulitzer Prize . In 2003, Benny Martinez became a Confidential Informant for a member of the Philadelphia Police Department's narcotics squad, helping arrest nearly 200 drug and gun dealers over seven years. But that success masked a dark and dangerous reality: the cops were as corrupt as the criminals they targeted. In addition to fabricating busts, the squad systematically looted mom-and-pop stores, terrorizing hardworking immigrant owners. One squad member also sexually assaulted three women during raids. Frightened for his life, Martinez turned to Philadelphia Daily News reporters Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker. Busted chronicles how these two journalists—both middle-class working mothers—formed an unlikely bond with a convicted street dealer to uncover the secrets of ruthless kingpins and dirty cops. Professionals in an industry shrinking from severe financial cutbacks, Ruderman and Laker had few resources—besides their own grit and tenacity—to break a dangerous, complex story that would expose the rotten underbelly of a modern American city and earn them a Pulitzer Prize. A page-turning thriller based on superb reportage, illustrated with eight pages of photos, Busted is modern true crime at its finest.
Download or read book Rogue Town written by Vito Colucci and published by . This book was released on 2023-05-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rogue Town is Vito Colucci's first-hand account of how he and a handful of honest cops risked everything to bring the guilty to justice in one of the most corrupt cities in 1960s - 1980s America. Revised and updated second edition.
Download or read book Lincoln Steffens s the Shame of the Cities and the Philosophy of Corruption and Reform written by H. G. Callaway and published by . This book was released on 2023-04-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a new scholarly edition of Lincoln Steffens' classic, "muck-raking" account of Gilded Age corruption in America. It provides the broader political background, theoretical and historical context needed to better understand the social and political roots of corruption in general terms: the social and moral nature of corruption and reform. Steffens enjoyed the support of a multitude of journalists with first-hand knowledge of their localities. He interviewed and came to know political bosses, crusading district attorneys and indicted corruptionists spanning a cast of hundreds. He also benefited from the support of a large-scale, nationally prominent network of anti-corruption specialists and luminaries, including President Theodore Roosevelt. Steffens explored in detail the high Gilded Age corruption of New York City, Chicago, "corrupt and contented" Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Minneapolis. His work culminated in a well-documented record of Gilded Age corruption in the cities; and, with the addition of the editorial annotations, Chronology and Introduction of this edition, the reader is placed in a position to gain an overview and considerable insight into the general, moral and social-political phenomenon of corruption. This book will be of interest for students and professionals in political philosophy, political science, American history and American studies.
Download or read book Fight City Hall and Win written by Connor Murphy and published by Wheatmark, Inc.. This book was released on 2017-12-07 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How often have you seen a development built that no one wanted or needed -- ruining the neighborhood, harming the landscape, and wrecking property values -- despite grumbling and protests by the neighbors, and sometimes without anyone even knowing it was going to happen until it was too late? All across America, bad development is approved because ordinary people don't have the knowledge they need to stand up and fight back. At any time, you can get a public notice telling you a notorious real estate developer has applied for a permit to build nearby. Will you know how to respond? Will you know what steps to take to protect your rights? Fight City Hall and Win gives ordinary folks the insider knowledge they need to protect their neighborhoods. It is filled with humor, irony, and true-to-life bedtime stories that teach readers how to take on the good old boys at city hall -- and win.
Download or read book The Failure of Governance in Bell California written by Thom Reilly and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “How could this have happened?” The question still lingers among officials and residents of the small southern California town of Bell. Corruption is hardly an isolated challenge to the governance of America’s cities. But following decades of benign obscurity, Bell witnessed the emergence of a truly astonishing level of public wrongdoing—a level succinctly described by Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley as “corruption on steroids.” Even discounting the enormous sums involved—the top administrator paid himself nearly $800,000 a year in a town with a $35,000 average income—this was no ordinary failure of governance. The picture that emerges from years of federal, state, and local investigations, trials, depositions, and media accounts is of an elaborate culture of corruption and deceit created and sustained by top city administrators, councilmembers, police officers, numerous municipal employees, and consultants. The Failure of Governance in Bell California: Big-Time Corruption in a Small Town details how Bell was rendered vulnerable to such massive malfeasance by a disengaged public, lack of established ethical norms, absence of effective checks and balances, and minimal coverage by an overextended area news media. It is a grim and nearly unbelievable story. Yet even these factors fail to fully explain how such large-scale corruption could have arisen. More specifically, how did it occur within a structure—the council-manager form of government—that had been deliberately designed to promote good governance? Why were so many officials and employees prepared to participate in or overlook the ongoing corruption? To what degree can theories of governance, such as contagion theory or the “rover bandit” theme, explain the success of such blatant wrongdoing? The Failure of Governance, by Arizona State University Professor Thom Reilly—himself former county manager of Clark County, Nevada—pursues answers to these and related questions through an analysis of municipal operations that will afford the reader deeper insight into the inner workings of city governments—corrupt and otherwise. By considering factors arising from both theory and practice, Reilly makes clear, in other words, why the sad saga of Bell, California represents both a case study and a warning.
Download or read book City for Sale written by Jack Newfield and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1988 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two of New York City's most respected investigative reporters recount the descent of Mayor Ed Koch's administration into crime and corruption.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity written by Frank Anechiarico and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-12-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using anticorruption efforts in New York City to illustrate their argument, Anechiarico and Jacobs demonstrate the costly inefficiencies of pursuing absolute integrity. By proliferating dysfunctions, constraining decision makers' discretion, shaping priorities, and causing delays, corruption control - no less than corruption itself - has contributed to the contemporary crisis in public administration.
Download or read book Controlling Corruption written by Robert Williams and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After three volumes presenting the desolate scenario of corruption around the world, volume 4 (of the four-volume reference) focuses on anti-corruption strategies, including a wide variety of approaches that illustrate the scale and difficulty of the task and offer no simple answers. Twenty-nine articles discuss general issues, control via codes of conduct and legal and formal means, anti-corruption measures in civil service and government agencies, prevention and sanctions, people and reform, and whistleblowing. The articles (reproduced in facsimile) are from journals such as Comparative Politics, Crime, Law, and Social Change, Corruption Reform, and European Journal of Development Research. Editors Williams (politics, U. of Durham, UK) and Doig (public services management, Liverpool John Moores U., UK) made the selections. The volume is not indexed, except by name. c. Book News Inc.
