Their Town: The Mafia, the Media and the Party Machine

Who were the politicians, lawyers, fixers, developers, organized crime bosses, newspaper publishers and businessmen who, historically, ran Hamilton? How did the get their power, and how did they exercise it?

Their Town is a unique book about Hamilton, a study not of the local corporate elite or labour leaders but rather of the people who in fact ran the city, day by day. The authors offer accounts of the 50-year history of organized crime in the city from its origins in rumrunning during prohibition; accounts of the business and politics of the only newspaper in town; an anatomy of the Liberal Party machine in Hamilton East. Throughout the book contrasts the profligacy of the city's elites among themselves with the paucity of their concern for the city's less fortunate citizens.

Their Town offers gritty studies of the real mechanisms of civic power in Hamilton from the 1920s to the end of the 1970s.