Michael Woodiwiss's "Double Crossed: The Failure of Organized Crime Control" offers a convincing portrayal of American anti-crime strategies as rooted in hypocrisy and xenophobia, which has led to a thoroughly counterproductive approach today.

These are not entirely novel conclusions, but Woodiwiss, a history professor at the University of the West of England, brings to bear an unusual wealth of historic evidence. Throughout the book, he traces American conceptions of the word "mafia" back to the assassination of the New Orleans police chief in 1890, allegedly as a result of a rivalry between Italian and Sicilian gangs. The murder sparked a period of collective hysteria and bloodlust; local leaders exploited fear of foreign criminals to justify a dubious prosecution and lynchings of the city's Italian-born residents, though without any evidence that these actions truly punished the guilty parties nor solved any public problems.

This episode marks one of the first of many occasions in which officials -- in this case, New Orleans Mayor Joseph Shakespeare -- attempted to turn an isolated incident into an urgent danger that a criminal cabal presents to the broader public. In so doing, they frequently painted outsiders as the villains. Even national political leaders began to voice worry about the growth of an "oath-bound, murderous society" operating in the United States, despite scant evidence that the murder had anything to with what we typically consider a mafia organization.

As Woodiwiss amply demonstrates, American politicians, often with help from journalists, have time and again built up the threat from criminal organizations in pursuit of their own personal interests. Following in Shakespeare's footsteps were Charles Dawes, a prominent Chicago banker and anti-mafia politician who served as Warren Harding's vice president; Richmond Pearson Holmes, an Alabama Congressman and prominent prohibition advocate; and various others.

Their advocacy often resulted in dubious crime policies -- first pursued at home, and later around the world -- stemming from morally bankrupt foundations. Prohibition stemmed, in part, from the belief among politicians that "liquor will make a brute" out of African-Americans. A renewed push to eradicate the American mob during the 1930s was largely the product of fawning coverage of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's efforts to stamp out the Sicilian mafia, notwithstanding the questionable relevance of a model pursued by a fascist dictatorship in a liberal democracy.

Woodiwiss' account highlights several common features of US crime policy over the length of the past century. One is the tendency to use false data to justify policy decisions. In the 1930s, influential figures around the government propagated a story in which a rapid nationwide purge of the mafia's old guard precipitated the ascendance of a young Charles "Lucky" Luciano to the head of a nationwide organization. There is no documentary evidence that such a purge ever occurred. Elsewhere, during mob disputes in the 1970s, which were the justification for redoubled federal anti-mafia efforts, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was quoted saying, "It's all bullshit. We don't really know what's going on."

Reading these and other anecdotes, one is reminded of an alarming anecdote Peter Andreas included in his 2010 book, "Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts":

One DEA agent describes his desk job in the Latin America headquarters: "The other half of the job is makin' up fact sheets and briefing papers -- you know, statistical bullshit, how we're winnin' the war -- so one of these clowns can go on TV or testify before Congress." When asked where he got the statistics, he laughed. "Outta yer head, where else?"

Perhaps the most striking element of the US approach to organized crime throughout the past century has been the tendency to personalize the struggle. Some 75 years ago, politicians and journalists obsessed over the outsized influence of figures like "Lucky" Luciano and Mayer Lanksy. Twenty years ago, American officials saw Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel as the unquestioned kings of the cocaine trade. More recently, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán was the bogeyman whose name kept American officials up at night.

In these and other cases, not only did the United States adopt an exaggerated concept of its enemies' strength, but it acted as though if only these men were removed, a broader societal ill would be cured. The so-called kingpin strategy represented the culmination of the assumption that such a key villain's arrest or killing would automatically pacify the society in question -- whether Bogota or the Bronx. This belief was emphatically incorrect.

This all amounts to a virtually indisputable argument for a rethink of American strategy. It also represents a call for humility for any analyst of crime policy; we often know far less about the current circumstances, to say nothing of future contingencies, than we ideally would.

SEE ALSO: Coverage of Security Policy

The book's substantial virtues are balanced by two authorial missteps. One is that Woodiwiss has placed his criticism of the global drug regime within a broader leftist critique of the liberal market economic system that the United States husbanded to global preeminence. This results in chapters-long attacks on, for instance, the US government's failure to prosecute banking executives after the 2008 financial collapse. Neoliberalism generally also receives a bit of abuse, and readers are even treated to the somewhat head-scratching complaint about bankers being "keen on money," and therefore less likely to crack down on laundering.

The problem with these sections isn't that they are wrong, but rather that they don't fit. Both the Department of Justice's prosecutorial priorities following the financial crisis and neoliberalism generally are fascinating issues that have inspired endless argument. There are reasonable cases for each side, but none of this has much to do with organized crime, and while reading this, one can't avoid the sense that there are other books better positioned to tackle these topics.

Another of the book's unfortunate aspects is its persistent tendency to treat US policymakers not merely as often mistaken, but malicious. For instance, Woodiwiss goes too far in accusing US officials of latching on to organized crime myths as a justification for the "building of America's national security state." He approvingly cites an analyst who accuses the United States of neglecting completely any study of US prison gangs, when in fact US agencies have publishedand funded a substantial amount of research on this topic. At one point he presents the "American intelligence community" as a credulous monolith, taken in by charlatans over the objections of "serious researchers."

SEE ALSO: Coverage of Narco Culture

This occasionally leaves the reader with a simplistic idea of American policymakers as racists, rubes, or both. Such sections add little to Woodiwiss's entirely justifiable conclusion that US crime policy is wracked by inanity, and it ignores the substantial evolution in American crime policy over the past eight years. It also fails to consider the many brilliant people who work in the US government, pushing a massive bureaucracy away from its more pernicious habits.

Woodiwiss shows great nuance and rigor in testing popular assumptions related to criminal groups, and had he applied the same appreciation of subtleties in discussing official policies, including the errors, the book would be stronger.

But if "Double Crossed" isn't perfect, it remains an incisive and thought-provoking consideration of the pathologies infecting US organized crime control. Anyone interested in the subject, especially the men and women charged with crafting US strategy, would do well to ponder its conclusions.