- Grisham, John.
The Racketeer.
New York: Doubleday, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-345-53057-8.
-
Malcolm Bannister was living the life of a retail lawyer in a
Virginia town, doing real estate transactions, wills, and
the other routine work which occupies a three partner firm,
paying the bills but never striking it rich. A law school
classmate contacts him and lets him know there's a potentially
large commission available for negotiating the purchase of a hunting
lodge in rural Virginia for an anonymous client. Bannister doesn't
like the smell of the transaction, especially after a number of odd
twists and turns during the negotiation, but bills must be
paid, and this fee will go a long way toward that goal. Without any
warning, during a civic function, costumed goons arrest
him and perp-walk him before previously-arranged state media.
He, based upon his holding funds in escrow for a real estate
transaction, is accused of “money laundering” and indicted
as part of a
RICO
prosecution of a Washington influence peddler. Railroaded through
the “justice system” by an ambitious federal prosecutor and
sentenced by a vindictive judge, he finds himself imprisoned for ten
years at a “Club Fed” facility along with
other nonviolent “criminals”.
Five years into his sentence, he has become the librarian and
“jailhouse lawyer” of the prison, filing motions on
behalf of his fellow inmates and, on occasion, seeing injustices
in their convictions reversed. He has lost everything else: his wife
has divorced him and remarried, and his law licence has been
revoked; he has little hope of resuming his career after release.
A jailhouse lawyer hears many things from his “clients”:
some boastful, others bogus, but some revealing secrets which
those holding them think might help to get them out. When a federal judge
is murdered, Bannister knows, from his
contacts in prison, precisely who committed the crime and leverages
his position to obtain his own release, disappearance into witness
protection, and immunity from prosecution for earlier acts. The
FBI, under pressure to solve the case and with no other leads, is
persuaded by what Bannister has to offer and takes him up on the deal.
A jailhouse lawyer, wrongly convicted on a bogus charge by a despotic
regime has a great deal of time to ponder how he has been wronged,
identify those responsible, and
slowly
and surely draw his plans against them.
This is one of the best revenge novels I've read, and it's
particularly appropriate since it takes down the tyrannical regime
which
incarcerates
a larger percentage of its population than any
serious country and shows how a clever individual can always outwit
the bumbling collectivist leviathan as long as he refuses to engage it
on level terrain but always exploits agility against the
saurian brain reaction time of the state.
The only goof I noticed is that on a flight from Puerto Rico to Atlanta,
passengers are required to go through passport control. As this is a
domestic flight from a U.S. territory to the U.S. mainland, no passport
check should be required (although in the age of
Heimatsicherheitsdienst, one
never knows).
I wouldn't call this a libertarian novel, as the author accepts the
coercive structure of the state as a given, but it's a delightful tale
of somebody who has been wronged by that foul criminal enterprise
obtaining pay-back by wit and guile.
November 2013 