Potus Geeks Book Review: Wise Guys and the White House by Eric Dezenhall
With the popularity of crime shows like the Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire, a book about the relationship between gangsters and US Presidents sounds like it would make for good entertainment, and for the most part, Eric Dezenhall's 2025 book WiseGuys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents and the Deals They Made fills that bill. As might be expected, those involved in organized crime don't keep extensive written records that fill archives, and most US Presidents don't include their dealings with La Cosa Nostra (LCN) in the papers kept at their Presidential Libraries, so much of the stories told by Dezenhall in this book are the memories of descendants of some of the principal players, or else they're a retelling of what other authors have written about the subject. Whether everything remembered is accurate or not, the book contains an interesting account of the dealings between eight US Presidents and some of the big names in organized crime.
The eight POTUSes are Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Dezenhall writes about how FDR worked with Lucky Luciano to protect the eastern shores of the nation from Nazi infiltration during the second world war, Harry Truman's rise to power with the aid of Boss Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, how the Chicago mob helped JFK win in the pivotal state of Illinois, LBJ's use of mob help to track down the killers of civil rights workers in Mississippi, Nixon's ties to Jimmy Hoffa (whom he later pardoned), Reagan's association with Lew Wasserman, Trump's association with gambling and construction cartels, and Biden's links to Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran.
Dezenhall grades each of these Presidents on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being "wouldn't have been President without the mob") and summarizes some of the lessons learned from looking at these relationships. Two glaring lessons are that while many of these Presidents may have enjoyed career advancement with help from organized crime, this didn't stop them from overseeing Justice Departments that vigorously pursued mob prosecutions, and that in the end, it was always the politician who obtained the biggest benefit from the relationship, while the mobsters usually ended up in prison or dead.
Harry Truman and Kansas City "boss" Tom Pendergast
Because of the nature of the subject matter, much of what Dezenhall writes about is speculative, the historical accuracy of much of what is contained in this book is always open to question. Much of this book is more like watching an episode of the Sopranos than reading history, and at times the author is a little too descriptive in describing some of violence used by organized crime, likely for shock value. To be fair though, the subject matter coupled with the passage of time presents a difficult job for any historian, and Dezenhall deserves credit for his efforts to connect with some of the children and grandchildren of the mobsters that he writes about. With all that in mind, I would give this book three stars out of five for being an entertaining read, but leaving the reader not much more knowledgeable about the Presidents who are the book's subjects.