Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes: Robert F. Kennedy's War Against Organized Crime.

• Author: Dolan, Anthony R.

In 1960, the arrest of George Ratterman in a Newport, Kentucky bordello made national news. A reform candidate for sheriff in a town notorious for its corruption, Ratterman claimed the arrest was a set-up. Still in his twenties and a lawyer in the Kennedy Justice Department's organized crime section, Ronald Goldfarb became the lead prosecutor in the government case against those accused of drugging and framing Ratterman--an effort that spun out to include a more general effort to clean up Newport.

Towards the end of his work in the town, an elderly woman stopped the federal attorney in the street: "You're the prosecutor of the Ratterman case, Mr. Goldfarb, aren't you?" she asked. "Well, I want you to know, Mr. Goldfarb, that I've lived in Campbell County for 75 years and we good people here go to bed each night thanking God for sending us a good Christian boy like you to clean things up."

Goldfarb's experience in Newport is two chapters in this important, engrossing, chronicle of the Justice Department's crackdown on organized crime in the early 1960s. But in addition to a brief history of Robert Kennedy's war on the mob, the legal issues it raised, and the obstacles overcome, the book offers something else: Not infrequently, a la the Newport lady, we get a hoot. I laughed out loud when the Kennedy prosecutors get a mafioso for violating the Migratory Bird Act. (With few federal racketeering laws, they had to be imaginative. And Robert Kennedy's prodigious wit is everywhere--what he said when journalist Charlie Bartlett told him not to become Attorney General; how he teased his assistant Henry Petersen; the times he complained about the number of Democrats his department was indicting.

In his memorable RFK biography, Arthur Schlesinger shows a breathless awe at Kennedy's humor. "He made jokes," he writes, with a sense of wonder not unlike a Ukrainian peasant seeing his first tractor. Clearly, Arthur did not grow up in an Irish household. Bobby did though and a gift for mirth was essential to his make-up--something Goldfarb, who grew up in a Jewish household (almost as good), knows and uses to his advantage.

Goldfarb also gives readers something unexpected--a portrait of the younger Kennedy that even those well-versed in the RFK literature will find intriguing. As good an account as possible is here of the family back-and-forth over Bobby's appointment to Justice; so too are glimpses into the interior of the relationship between brother and...