Sublime

It is a fact that the Third Avenue Transit Company secretly told Moses it was very anxious not to have the terminal condemned, for its location was strategic for its buses. And it is also a fact that for twenty years it was considered an open secret in Bronx political circles that key borough politicians held large but carefully hidden interests in

During much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private detective agencies had filled the vacuum left by decentralized, underfunded, incompetent, and corrupt sheriff and police departments.

New York was the city of the Fix, of “protection,” of the shakedown. The twelve years of La Guardia had been only an interlude. New York was again what it had been before the Little Flower bounced into City Hall: a city in which everything had its price.

New York farmers and grain merchants were the big losers, but the chances of Congress requiring the roads to raise rates from the west were approximately zero.* What farmers did care about, on the other hand, was rate volatility, since the perennial price wars frequently caused a violent seesawing of tariffs. The Eastern Traffic Association, the la

rapacious

Or consider the line drawn by Mr. Jaffe at the candy store around our corner—a line so well understood by his customers and by other storekeepers too that they can spend their whole lives in its presence and never think about it consciously. One ordinary morning last winter, Mr. Jaffe, whose formal business name is Bernie, and his wife, whose forma

were known as “straw buyers”—might not exist, or might be victims of identity theft. Or they might be Sonny Kim’s partners in mortgage fraud. So might the brokers, appraisers, notaries, title agents, and ultimately the bankers who were in on the deals, some of them showing up again and again. Everyone was making money on Sonny Kim’s business, and t