CRUSADER AGAINST CRIME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 929, 31 May 1957, Page 13

CRUSADER AGAINST CRIME

THE MAN WHO ROCKED THE BOAT, by William J. Keating; Victor Gollancz, English price 16/-. T was announced recently that the United States Senate had voted unanimously to investigate racketeering in the Labour-Management field and that the American A.F.L.-C.1.O. had decided to oust all union officials with racketeering or corruption records. The author of this book must have welcomed the news with a mixture of amps and scepticism. Ten years’ ago, as an Assistant-District Attorney in New York, Keating forced through the first murder prosecution ever brought against a leading waterfront racketeer, although waterfront murders had been commonplace for many years. The reactions of his colleagues and superiors varied from pasSive resistance to outright hostility; Keating himself was spied upon and his efforts to obtain evidence were hampered by officials in his own department. In 1950, he resigned to become Counsel for the New York City AntiCrime Committee, formed as a. result of the Kefauver Senate Committee’s sensational revelations of gangster penetration into ‘the highest industrial and political circles. There, his exposure of a hushed-up wire-tapping scandal infuriated the District Attorney’s Office and the police, who were deeply involved. He was forced to resign from the AntiCrime Committee and was sent to jail when he refused to reveal the confidential sources of information he had sworn to protect. These are two of the major incidents in an exciting, sincere and, above all, convincing book of the personal testimony type now so popular in the States. The title is appropriate: like other anticrime crusaders before hit, the author discovered that, although one determined man may "rock" the boat, only an informed and aroused public can upset it once and for all.

Henry

Walter