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Review

Whitney Webb's One Nation Under Blackmail, Volume 1 is a sprawling, meticulously sourced investigation that reframes the Jeffrey Epstein scandal not as an aberration but as the product of nearly a century of convergence between organized crime and American intelligence. Beginning with Operation Underworld — the WWII arrangement that saw Naval Intelligence recruit Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky — Webb traces an unbroken lineage of symbiotic relationships between the criminal underworld, the CIA and its precursor the OSS, and the commanding heights of American political and economic power.

The book's architecture is chronological but its argument is structural. Webb demonstrates how the wartime marriage of convenience between intelligence and the mob became permanent through shared interests in the drug trade, offshore banking, and above all, blackmail. The KMT opium monopoly fed into CIA proprietary airlines like Air America; the money washed through offshore banks like Castle Bank and Trust, co-managed by OSS veteran Paul Helliwell and Chicago mob lawyer Burton Kanter; and the whole apparatus was protected by the sexual blackmail of key officials, most notoriously FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The chapters on Roy Cohn are perhaps the book's most revelatory. Webb builds a devastating portrait of how Cohn — McCarthy's former chief counsel, mob lawyer, and later mentor to Donald Trump — operated a sexual blackmail ring using minors out of the Plaza Hotel's Suite 233, ensnaring figures from Hoover to members of Congress. Cohn's "favor bank" system, where favors given and received created a web of mutual obligation and compromising material, is presented as a direct precursor to Epstein's own operations. The testimony of multiple independent witnesses, including former NYPD detective James Rothstein and liquor baron Lewis Rosenstiel's ex-wife Susan Kaufman, gives this account considerable weight.

Webb excels at tracking money. Her chapters on the Bronfman family's rise from Saskatchewan bootleggers to global liquor magnates through their Prohibition-era partnerships with Lansky and Longy Zwillman are essential reading on how criminal capital enters the legitimate economy. Similarly, her treatment of the Chicago "Supermob" — the network connecting Jake Avery, Sidney Korshak, Henry Crown, and the Pritzker family to organized crime and eventually to defense contractors like General Dynamics — reveals how deeply intertwined the criminal underworld became with mainstream American capitalism in the postwar era.

The later chapters on the Reagan era bring all the threads together. The PROMIS software scandal, in which Israeli intelligence (through spymaster Rafi Eitan and media mogul Robert Maxwell) stole and backdoored revolutionary tracking software and sold it to governments worldwide, anticipates contemporary surveillance capitalism. Iran-Contra is recast not as an isolated scandal but as one node in a permanent structure where drug trafficking, arms dealing, and covert operations financed one another through the same offshore banking networks the mob had built decades earlier. William Barr's role in covering up these scandals while serving as George H.W. Bush's Attorney General underscores how deeply the rot penetrated official institutions.

The book is not without weaknesses. At over 800 pages for Volume 1 alone, it can feel encyclopedic, and the density of names, shell companies, and financial connections occasionally overwhelms narrative momentum. Webb sometimes relies heavily on secondary sources and the testimony of figures whose reliability is itself contested. And while the web of connections she draws is genuinely impressive, the book occasionally implies causation where correlation may be all that exists — the hazard of any work that traces networks across decades.

Nevertheless, One Nation Under Blackmail succeeds as a work of synthesis. Webb has brought together research from dozens of investigators, journalists, and historians — Peter Dale Scott, Alfred McCoy, Gus Russo, Anthony Summers, Douglas Valentine — and woven their findings into a single, coherent narrative framework. The book's central argument — that sexual blackmail, drug trafficking, and intelligence operations form an integrated system of covert governance that operates beneath and alongside the formal democratic state — is presented with enough documentary evidence to demand serious engagement, regardless of where one ultimately lands on its conclusions.

Reviewed 2026-04-09

Notable Quotes

Who are these people? They are the group that is popularly called the Enterprise. They are in and outside [the] CIA. They are mostly Right Wing Republicans, but you will find a mix of Democrats, mercenaries, ex officio Mafia and opportunists within the group. They are CEOs, they are bankers, they are presidents, they own airlines, they own national television networks.

Epigraph to the book, quoting former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings, circa 1990, describing the network the book investigates — intelligence-organized crime nexus, deep state, covert power

They ruin their detractors and they fear the truth. If they can, they will blackmail you. Sex, drugs, deals, whatever it takes.

Final line of Bruce Hemmings' warning about the Enterprise's methods of controlling dissent and maintaining power — blackmail, sexual blackmail, political control

Jeffrey Epstein was not an anomaly and his activities represent just the tip of the veritable iceberg.

Webb's thesis statement in the introduction, arguing Epstein must be understood as part of a much older and larger system — Epstein, systemic corruption, core thesis

We cannot properly address the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, nor prevent them being committed by others in the future, unless we grapple with the covert power structures that have long wielded blackmail, bribes and assassinations as their weapons of choice to corrupt and control public institutions while manipulating and looting the public.

Webb's argument in the introduction for why historical context is essential to understanding the Epstein case — systemic analysis, blackmail, institutional corruption

Operation Underworld was the beginning of the creation of a new underworld entirely, one built on the cooperation, if not outright symbiosis, between organized crime and American intelligence.

Webb on the WWII arrangement between Naval Intelligence and Lucky Luciano that permanently merged the criminal underworld with the US intelligence apparatus — Operation Underworld, intelligence-crime nexus, origins

Simply stated, paper currency and even silver were often useless, as there was nothing to buy with money; opium, however, was the form of payment everybody used. Not to use it as a means of barter would spell an end to our operations.

OSS Detachment 101 head William R. Peers describing how the OSS used opium as currency in the China-Burma-India theater during WWII — drug trade, CIA, moral compromise, wartime expediency

Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities.... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, revealing in 2009 that drug trade proceeds helped prevent bank collapses during the 2008 financial crisis — drug money, banking, financial crisis, systemic corruption

Why is Lansky a 'gangster' and not the Bronfman and Rosenstiel families? I was involved with all of them in the 1920s, although they do not like to talk about it and change the subject when my name is mentioned.

Meyer Lansky in old age, bitter that his bootlegging partners had successfully laundered their reputations into respectability while he remained branded a criminal — class, respectability, organized crime, hypocrisy

Cohn's job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not want to go along with the program. Cohn's job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself.

Former NYPD detective James Rothstein recounting what Roy Cohn told him directly about his role in a sexual blackmail operation targeting politicians with minors — sexual blackmail, Roy Cohn, political control, child exploitation

Roy Cohn was providing protection. There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That's where Cohn got his power from -- blackmail.

New York attorney John Klotz summarizing his findings after investigating Cohn and Suite 233 at the Plaza Hotel for a legal case — Roy Cohn, blackmail, power, child exploitation

I thought her absolutely truthful.... The woman's power of recall was phenomenal. Everything she said was checked and double checked, and everything that was checkable turned out to be true.

Former Chief Counsel of the New York State Crime Committee, Judge Edward McLaughlin, defending the credibility of Susan Kaufman's testimony about Hoover, Cohn, and Rosenstiel's blackmail parties at the Plaza Hotel — credibility, testimony, blackmail, J. Edgar Hoover

Sometimes it almost seemed that the American Congress and the Canadian federal and provincial legislatures must have secretly held a grand conclave to decide one issue: How they could draft anti-liquor laws and regulations that would help maximize the Bronfman brothers' bootlegging profits.

Author Peter Newman on how perfectly the patchwork of Prohibition laws across jurisdictions served the Bronfman family's bootlegging operations — Bronfman family, Prohibition, regulatory capture, bootlegging

Ronald Reagan was an opportunist. His whole career was guided by MCA -- by Wasserman and [MCA founder] Jules Stein, who bragged that Reagan was malleable, that they could do what they wanted with him.

Documentary filmmaker Shawn Swords on how the mob-linked entertainment conglomerate MCA shaped Reagan's career from Hollywood to the White House — Reagan, MCA, organized crime, political manipulation

Roy could fix anyone in the city.

Stanley Friedman, Roy Cohn's law partner and later New York deputy mayor imprisoned for bribery, describing Cohn's power as a political fixer in 1980 — Roy Cohn, political corruption, power brokering

It now appears that pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency, rather than any legal problem, was what caused the Justice Department to drop what could have been the biggest tax evasion case of all time.

Revelation that the CIA shut down the IRS investigation into Castle Bank -- the Helliwell-Kanter offshore bank serving mob figures, tax evaders, and intelligence operations -- on 'national security' grounds — CIA, obstruction of justice, Castle Bank, national security excuse

MCA was divided into two groups. There was a Democratic group and a Republican group. They always wanted to have a hand in the White House, no matter which party was there.

Hollywood producer Henry Denker explaining how the mob-linked entertainment conglomerate MCA hedged its political bets by backing both parties simultaneously — bipartisan corruption, MCA, political capture, organized crime

I fixed that sonofabitch.

Meyer Lansky's boast about obtaining compromising photographs of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, which effectively neutralized the FBI as a threat to organized crime operations — blackmail, Hoover, Lansky, FBI compromise

If they were [brothels], they were the best in the West!

Sam Bronfman's alleged quip years later when confronted with long-standing accusations that his family's early Canadian hotels had doubled as houses of prostitution — Bronfman family, prostitution, organized crime origins

Iran-Contra, PROMIS, BCCI, and related schemes of the Reagan era are clear examples of how the alliance between intelligence networks and organized crime resulted in both national and international business rackets with criminal elements. Such conspiracies largely succeeded thanks to individuals at the highest levels of government, particularly in the Justice Department, who worked to protect these rackets and the bad actors behind them.

Webb's summary of how Reagan-era scandals were not isolated incidents but the natural product of the intelligence-crime nexus reaching the heights of government power — Iran-Contra, PROMIS, BCCI, systemic corruption, Reagan era

Smuggling -- especially of heroin, in which the trade grew steadily more lucrative after the opening up of Asia's golden triangle in 1948 -- tilted to the South, taking advantage of the enormous Rim coastline and the porous Mexican border.

Kirkpatrick Sale on how the postwar shift of American power to the Southern Rim opened vast new opportunities for organized crime to invest drug money in legitimate industries — drug trade, Southern Rim, money laundering, economic transformation

We were Ivy League, white middle class.... We were naive, totally naive about this, and he felt pretty expert. He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs.

A CIA employee describing George White, the FBN agent recruited by Sidney Gottlieb to run MK-ULTRA safehouses where unsuspecting people were dosed with LSD — MK-ULTRA, CIA, class, covert operations