Based on a twenty year investigation, Sally Denton’s The Bluegrass Conspiracy illustrates the links formed among Lexington Kentucky police, politicians, the wealthy and major drug traffickers. Organized crime and law enforcement are intimately associated in Kentucky’s blueblood network of criminal activity. When evidence of the criminal network came to light, involving the highest officials in Kentucky, the U.S. Department of Justice covered up the investigation. This is because governments are in place to maintain law to provide social order. Social order would be greatly disrupted by such high-level corruption gaining the light of day (i.e. public awareness). This is similar to Block’s depiction of why governments often commit state-organized crime, “Despite the laws, officials of the government or the state will often find themselves caught in a contradiction between complying with the law and meeting other obligations, demands, or institutionalized ends” (328).
In Denton’s Bluegrass Conspiracy, we see that corruption in this case involved the Governor, top political aides, former law enforcement officers and a wealthy man named Andrew Thorton, the chief of a group of wealthy bluebloods known as the “Company”. We see how coercion is often used to get those in a position of law enforcement to comply with the state and/or wealthy who are intimately involved in criminal activity and organized crime. Such an example is Ralph Ross, a Kentucky state police officer who tried to put Thorton and his cronies away but was framed in an illegal wiretapping case. McCoy argues that it is often conflicting policies and politicians that help fuel such criminal activity, even if inadvertently. It is a system that works nearly as well as the coercion used by Mafia goombas to get compliance. As McCoy writes, “This succession of policy regimes, from free trade to prohibition, has created a vast illicit commerce that may we...