Fifty years investigating institutional corruption and organized crime: an interview with Selwyn Raab

Woodiwiss, Michael

Abstract

© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York. This email interview with Selwyn Raab was conducted during 2014. It discusses Raab’s background, influences, career and current thinking and activities from his experiences as a student journalist during the 1950s through to his establishment as one of America’s foremost investigative journalists. During the 1960s he played an important role in exposing the fabricated evidence surrounding the convictions of George Whitmore Jr. and the top boxer, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, in two prominent murder cases. He worked for The New York World-Telegram and The Sun and later for The New York Times and a number of television stations. In addition to his newspaper and broadcasting career, Raab has also published several books. The first of these was Justice in the Back Room (1967) which covers the Wylie-Hoffert (“Career Girls”) murders of 1963 and the corruption surrounding the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of George Whitmore Jr. for these crimes. The book formed the basis for the CBS television series Kojak. In 1994 he co-wrote Mob Lawyer with Frank Ragano—a lawyer who represented, among others, Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa and mafiosi Santo Trafficante. In 2006 Raab’s history of New York’s mafia families was published—Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jun 27, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 6, 2019
• Journal: Trends in Organized Crime
• Print ISSN: 1084-4791
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 1-2
• Pages: 74-85
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-015-9248-x
• Keywords: Selwyn Raab, organized crime, organized crime control, corruption, corruption control
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/836782
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12117-015-9248-x
• Additional Information: Additional Information : The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12117-015-9248-x