The rackets - Thomas Kelly

Jimmy Dolan, onetime roughneck construction worker, is now an Ivy League-educated advance man for New York City's mayor. When he strikes out against a corrupt union boss at a power breakfast, he is fired. Meanwhile, Jimmy's father is running for president of the Teamsters. He is brutally muscled out of the race, so Jimmy must risk his life and return to the working-class world he left behind.

Set in the union halls, taverns and half-built skyscrapers of a Manhattan, populated by Irish racketeers, Italian mobsters and Russian killers, THE RACKETS is a fast-paced literary thriller that paints a vivid portrait of an urban underworld rarely seen in fiction.