CITY FOR SALE ED KOCH BETRAYAL OF NEW YORK BOOK

CITY FOR SALE - ED KOCH AND THE BETRAYAL OF NEW YORK

 STATED FIRST EDITION, 1988, JACK NEWFIELD AND WAYNE BARRETT

January I, 1986: On a cold, bright New Year's morning, Edward I. Koch arrives in downtown Manhattan to be sworn in for his third term as mayor of America's largest city. In the eight years since he took office, Koch has steered New York through its fiscal crisis and on to a period of phenomenal economic growth, improved its faltering morale and self-image, and lowered its crime rate. But in the frantic three months that followed his inauguration Mayor Koch found himself overwhelmed by a scandal of unprec- edented proportions. By the time the full extent of city corrup- tion was uncovered, a dozen major city leaders and nearly a hundred minor officials would be convicted of crimes ranging from accepting bribes to outright extortion. In (ity for Sale two of the country's most respected investiga- tive journalists recount the incredible story of the descent of the Koch administration into criminality. In their compelling account of payoffs and threats, of secret deals made by the overlords of the all-powerful clubhouses, Newfield and Barrett expose the behind-the-scenes story of the true workings of municipal power in America today. Their cast of characters is as rich as any novel's: politicians who fraternize with mobsters; the city's sec - ond most powerful official whose sordid life ends in a dramatic suicide; a former Miss America and city commissioner who is accused of brazenly manipulating a judge; a Holocaust survivor who launders his extortion money through a synagogue. Moti- vating them all is money-money taken in envelopes on quiet streets or in parking lots, from city agencies, in phony stock transactions. But (ity for Sale is also a book about justice and the valiant efforts of the individuals who fought to halt a system that had spun out of control. There are journalists who persist in seeking out truth and run up against the stonewalling efforts of City Hall; city cops and FBI agents who undertake huge undercover operations and find themselves listening as crimes are planned in diners, spas, and city offices; citizens who are appalled at being strong-armed; and then there is Rudolph Giuliani, the ambitious prosecutor who turns the war against public corrup- tion into a personal crusade and faces the battle of his life in a New Haven courtroom. ~ (continued from front flap) . At the center of City for Sale, of course, stands Ed Koch, who was seduced not by money, like his commissioners and political allies, but by power. Koch is revealed as a tragic figure who compromised his ideals to win officei a man who opportunisti- cally abandoned reform and became both a convenient conserv- ative and malleable pawn of the party bossesi a chief executive who consistently looked in the other direction whenever the decay of his government threatened to be revealed. Never have the inner workings of a city government been so ruthlessly exposed, and no cautionary tale could be more timely than that told in City for Sale. 

 NO WRITING, NO RIPS, NO TEARS, BINDING TIGHT, MINIMAL SHELF WEAR, DUSTJACKET SHOWS AGE YELLOWING AND EDGE TEARS, NOT PRICE CLIPPED