[What do plutocrats and Supreme Court members get from being
friends?]
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MOB JUSTICE  
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Brooke Harrington
May 8, 2023
The Atlantic
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_ What do plutocrats and Supreme Court members get from being
friends? _

The Godfather: The Wallpaper, by alvarezperea (CC BY-NC 2.0)

 

What is a Mafia? At the systemic level, it’s different from other
criminal groups. Above all, as Diego Gambetta—the premier scholar
of the Mafia
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it’s a network for the exchange of favors and the imposition of
obligations in the name of “friendship.” That’s how the crimes
get done.

We see this in the first _Godfather _film, when the mortician
Bonasera offers to pay Don Corleone to commit murder; the undertaker
wants revenge on the men who beat up his daughter but, in the formal
court system, were spared from prison. The Godfather reacts to
Bonasera’s offer with dismay—not because of the request for
murder, but because of the explicit suggestion of cash payment.
“What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?”
the Godfather asks. “Had you come to me in friendship, then this
scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day.”

Friendship? This, not the bureaucratic payment-for-service model that
Bonasera expects, is the basis for how Corleone’s world functions.
The Godfather agrees to deal with Bonasera’s enemies, but in return
for an unspecified future obligation. “Some day, and that day may
never come,” he tells Bonasera, “I’ll call upon you to do a
service for me.” This is understood to be more ominous and weighty
than any monetary debt could be. But as the powerful know, the right
to call in a future favor is priceless.

This scene sprang to my mind last month when the billionaire Harlan
Crow told _The_ _Dallas Morning News_ that he and Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas are “just really friends
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and that friendship alone motivated him to pay hundreds of thousands
of dollars
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luxury travel enjoyed by Thomas and his wife. (Perhaps the same
impulse led him to buy and renovate
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home of Thomas’s elderly mother, who continues to live there, as
well as to pay
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private-school tuition of Thomas’s grandnephew.)

Thomas himself has echoed Crow’s just-friends line, maintaining that
nothing is nefarious about his relationship with his benefactor. This
is despite Thomas failing to mention any of this expensive largesse in
his official financial disclosures over the years. Federal employees
are typically subject to rules designed to preserve impartiality and
prevent conflicts of interest 
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tightly limiting the type and value of gifts they may receive from
those doing business with them
[[link removed]].
But the Supreme Court governs itself, and its members are not even
subject
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the code of conduct for federal judges.

Bob Bauer: The Supreme Court needs an ethics code
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One sign of a failed state is that networks of favors and obligations
among friends begin to subsume the formal institutional pathways of
power in government. As much as Americans like to complain about
bureaucracies, they operate by a set of published rules, and
compliance with those rules is supposed to be transparent to the
public. Disclosure promotes public confidence. The consent of the
governed is obtained through trust that the system is fair and subject
to meaningful oversight.

But when elites—both corporate and political—conduct their affairs
through “friendly” exchanges of favors and gifts, the result is
corruption that can render democracy nonfunctional. Think Boss Tweed
and Tammany Hall in mid-19th-century New York, or the Daley Machine in
mid-20th-century Chicago. Scaled up to the federal level, this kind of
cronyism is extremely dangerous for a system based in the shared
public faith that justice is available, impartially, to all.

While there’s no suggestion that any direct quid pro quo occurred
between Thomas and his friend, Crow’s firm did have business
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the Supreme Court in 2004—a case from which Thomas did not recuse
himself. This brings the Thomas-Crow relationship into a gray area in
which no overt crime has occurred, but over which hangs a cloud of
suggestive obscurity incompatible with democratic legitimacy. When
rich businesspeople shower lavish favors on powerful jurists—at a
moment when questions of economic inequality, business regulation, and
corporate power are among the most divisive matters before the
courts—can those jurists credibly say they do no service in return?

Supreme Court justices are paid far better than the average American
but are far less wealthy than some of the people who cultivate them as
“friends.” In such systems, relatively low-paid government
employees lack the financial resources that someone like Crow enjoys,
but their public prestige and institutional authority allow them to
participate in the informal network of mutual obligations among
elites. As Gambetta has pointed out
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even people who might seem insignificant can play a vital role in a
Mafia-style system. They “may be short of cash but capable of
returning valuable favors,” he writes. “Services not for sale
elsewhere gain common currency here: votes, … bureaucratic
dispensations, … selective privileges of all sorts.”

Adam Serwer: Clarence Thomas is winning his war on 
[[link removed]]transparency
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These favors are the great leveler between the rich and powerful and
the network of people who “owe” them. Compared with Don Corleone,
Bonasera is an unimportant man, but he’s still of use to the
Godfather. (The service ultimately demanded of him was modest:
Bonasera’s artistry made the bullet-torn face of Corleone’s son
presentable for an open-casket funeral.)

Thomas—a self-described man of “regular stock,” who prefers
“the Walmart parking lots to the beaches”—isn’t the only
justice who appears to be enmeshed in a network of favors with the
rich and powerful. When Neil Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme
Court, he was part owner of a Colorado property that had languished on
the market for two years. Shortly after his confirmation, Gorsuch and
his co-owners sold
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to the chief executive of a law firm with frequent business before the
Court. Although Gorsuch declared the amount he earned from the sale on
his ethics disclosure form (between $250,001 and $500,000), he notably
left blank the name of the buyer. Since then, the law firm has argued
at least 22 cases before Gorsuch and his colleagues; in the 12 cases
where Gorsuch’s decision is recorded, he decided in favor of the
firm’s clients eight times. A coincidence, perhaps. But if it was in
any way a “bureaucratic dispensation” in return for taking a
justice’s share of a white-elephant property off his hands, the
public would never know. That’s the problem. Legitimacy has always
been mostly a matter of appearances.

That’s why recent news reports about Chief Justice John Roberts’s
wife are also unsettling. According to whistleblower documents
obtained by _Insider_, Jane Roberts earned more than $10 million
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commissions as a legal recruiter from 2007 to 2014, with clients
including at least one firm that later appeared before her husband.
The Supreme Court operates mostly on an honor system—which becomes
untenable if lawyers appear to be seeking favor before the high court
by enriching its members’ households, and if justices’ spouses can
be plausibly accused of monetizing their proximity to official power.

As in the Thomas case, mere “friendship” was once again invoked as
a defense. “Friends of John were mostly friends of Jane, and while
it certainly did not harm her access to top people to have John as her
spouse, I never saw her ‘use’ that inappropriately,” one of Jane
Roberts’s former colleagues told _Insider_. But another colleague
saw her actions as corrupt and filed a whistleblower complaint
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As part of her sworn testimony in that case, Jane summed up the modus
operandi of the Supreme Court and its circle with a line that could
have come straight from the Godfather’s lips: “Successful people
have successful friends.”

_Brooke Harrington
[[link removed]] is a
sociology professor at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Pop
Finance [[link removed]] and Capital
Without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent
[[link removed]]. Her site
is brookeharrington.com [[link removed]]._

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