Douglas Century and Rick Cowan
Suffering from Sopranos withdrawal, the Reader has a sit-down with the first of several Mafia books…
For 50 years organized crime - the Mafia - ran the commercial waste disposal business in New York City. New York businesses were paying three to four times what businesses in other cities were paying, and millions of dollars were flowing into mob pockets.
In 1992 NYPD detective Rick Cowan was investigating an honest garbage company’s complaint that one of their trucks had been torched. As he leaving the business some mob muscle showed up to spell out the meaning of the fire. The quick-thinking businessman who had reported the crime introduced Cowan as his cousin, an improvised role that became Cowan’s undercover identity for the next three years.
As the “cousin” Cowan made contacts with the mob and infiltrated their garbage operations, sitting in on meetings where territory was divided up and getting to know some of the mobsters so well that they let down their guard in his presence and talked about things they should have kept quiet about. Those conversations were recorded and, along with Cowan’s testimony, the became the basis of a series of trials that broke the back of the Mafia’s garbage racket.
“Takedown” is a gripping, frightening story, well told by Cowan and his co-author.
(You can hear Rick Cowan tell his story in Act Three of This American Life episode #249, “Garbage“)
