50 pages • 1 hour read
John GrishamThe Racketeer
John GrishamFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The narrator, Malcolm Bannister, opens with the line “I am a lawyer, and I am in prison” (3). He mentions in passing that he is also Black. He has served five years of a 10-year sentence for racketeering. His wife has divorced him, and his son will be 16 years old before Malcolm is released. Malcolm is serving his time at Frostburg Federal Penitentiary for a crime he never knew he was committing. The FBI and prosecutors knew he was innocent of intent but prosecuted him anyway.
Frostburg is a low-security prison with no violence, so the situation is relatively tolerable. There are no walls around the prison, and Malcolm has to fight the impulse to simply walk away, but if he were to do so, he would likely be recaptured and sent to a much less tolerable place.
Chapter 2 Summary
Malcolm recounts his background. He grew up in Winchester, West Virginia, and practiced law with a small local firm called Copeland, Reed & Bannister, which barely made enough money to stay afloat. His former partners now refuse to have any contact with him. His father is a retired state trooper who believes that Malcolm is guilty but visits him dutifully once a month. During one meeting, Malcolm tells his father that he will be leaving the country as soon as he is released. His father chides Malcolm for his resentment toward the government that wrongly convicted him.
Chapter 3 Summary
Malcolm finds a news article that he has been waiting for. Judge Raymond Fawcett has been found dead with his mistress in his vacation cabin. An open safe was found in the cabin. The FBI has no leads, and they are offering a $100,000 award for information leading to capture of the killer.
Chapter 4 Summary
Malcolm has been obsessed with Judge Fawcett for three years. He never met the judge, but he did meet the man who would eventually kill the judge. Malcolm has been planning for this moment.
Chapter 5 Summary
Malcolm arranges to meet with the prison warden. He persuades the warden to contact the FBI and tell them that Malcolm has information about the murder.
Malcolm’s narrative now goes back in time to recount the circumstances of his arrest. He was having lunch at the Civic Club when FBI agents swarmed into the room and arrested him. Before the arrest, the FBI had been investigating the racketeering scheme in which Malcolm had been unwittingly entangled. Malcolm had cooperated fully, and the FBI had assured him that he was not under suspicion. Once faced with arrest, Malcolm realized that they were lying.
Chapter 6 Summary
Back in the present, Malcolm is called to a meeting with a pair of FBI agents, Hanski and Erardi, who were sent to question him. He can see immediately that they don’t take him seriously. Malcolm tells them that he knows who killed Judge Fawcett and why. He will give them this information in exchange for freedom and protection. They say that they will bring his request to their boss.
Chapter 7 Summary
The narrative’s perspective shifts to the FBI’s temporary headquarters for the Fawcett investigation in Roanoke. The investigation is going nowhere. Hanski and Erardi meet with Victor Westlake, the leader of the task force, and convey Malcolm’s offer. Westlake tells them to start examining everyone Malcolm has had contact with since he entered prison. He asks about the details of Malcolm’s conviction, and they tell him that Malcolm had gotten mixed up with the notorious Barry the Backhander.
Back in Frostburg, Malcolm explains that he never met his client, Barry the Backhander, until Malcolm was indicted for racketeering. Malcolm had taken on a real estate deal for a client who wanted to buy a hunting lodge. The deal grew increasingly complicated. The corporate name of the purchaser changed several times. When the deal finally closed, $450,000 was supposed to be transferred into the Copeland, Reed & Bannister account. Instead, the transfer turned out to be $4.5 million, with another $3 million appearing a month later. Malcolm tried to contact the client without success. He then tried to return the money, again without success.
The buyer was later arrested for the death of an underage girl, and his underhanded dealings were uncovered, including the money-laundering scheme in which Malcolm was unwittingly entangled.
Chapter 8 Summary
Malcolm writes to Victor Westlake, reiterating his offer to identify the murderer. Checking the newspapers, he finds that there has been no progress in the Fawcett case. His narration explains that he spends about a quarter of his time as a jailhouse lawyer, helping inmates with appeals. That is how he met the man who told him about Judge Fawcett and what was hidden in the judge’s safe. Malcolm also describes the case of another inmate who was convicted because he had an incompetent lawyer.
Chapter 9 Summary
FBI agents Hanski and Erardi return with a young assistant DA named Dunleavy. Dunleavy begins by condescending to Malcolm about his “little deal.” Malcolm repeats that he will give them the information they want in exchange for release from prison, witness protection, plastic surgery, and the reward money, which has risen to $150,000. In addition, he demands that his sentence be commuted and his record cleared. Dunleavy tries to bluff Malcolm into lowering his demands, but Malcolm walks out, refusing to cooperate further until the FBI sends someone more competent and experienced than Dunleavy.
At the task-force headquarters in Roanoke, the FBI director, George McTavey, meets with Victor Westlake. The task force has still been unable to find a connection with Judge Fawcett in Malcolm’s past. They decide that given Malcolm’s relatively innocuous “crime,” the deal he’s offering is reasonable.
Chapter 10 Summary
Malcolm continues to wait for another month while the FBI tries and fails to find the killer. Meanwhile, he works with his jailhouse clients. Most of the time, there is nothing he can do for them. One of his clients is Otis Carter, a 23-year-old father serving 14 months for violating a Civil War artifact protection act. He and his grandfather had been hunting for artifacts on their own land for years. Recently, the preservation act was amended to make it illegal for them to dig for artifacts even on their own land. The Carters had no way of knowing about the change, and federal agents intentionally failed to warn the Carter family that the law had changed. Instead, they waited until they found the Carters digging on their land and arrested them. For many federal crimes, criminal intent is not required for conviction. Malcolm explains that the number of federal crimes on the books is constantly growing; no one can possibly keep track of them all, and ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse for breaking a law. Malcolm believes that the law that got the Carters arrested may not be constitutional. He adds that Otis Carter’s grandfather—also convicted—has health problems that cost the taxpayers over $25,000 per month to address, on top of the $40,000 per year that pays for his housing.
Malcolm recounts the circumstances of his own conviction, describing the legal process as a melee in which everyone cheats and the goal is to win, not to find truth or exact justice. After sentencing, he was taken directly to prison. Malcolm explains that often, convicts are allowed to self-surrender, meaning that Malcolm would have been allowed to drive to the prison 500 miles from his home in Winchester, Virginia, and turn himself in. Instead, he was flown and bussed all over the country, traveling thousands of miles over a course of weeks only to wind up at a place he could have driven to himself in eight hours. Malcolm states that even after his release, he will be regarded as a criminal, but he refuses to accept that fate. Instead, he has a plan to get himself out of the grip of the federal government and away from his past.
Chapters 1-10 Analysis
Given Grisham’s deliberate use of the unreliable first-person narrator, the opening line of The Racketeer is intended to raise multiple questions and add an immediate sense of mystery and suspense to the story. By presenting the apparent incongruity of a lawyer who is himself imprisoned rather than keeping others out of prison, Grisham implicitly promises an intriguing answer to satisfy this anomaly—eventually. Additionally, the setting in which Malcolm begins his tale makes him even more unreliable, for Grisham provides no immediate guarantees as to the protagonist’s guilt or innocence. Ultimately, Malcolm does turn out to be an extremely unreliable narrator, for although he never lies outright and is wrongfully convicted and imprisoned, he does deliberately withhold information from the narrative: a ploy on Grisham’s part to skew readers’ perceptions of the story.
In the first section of the novel, Malcolm immediately addresses The Cost of Punishment, which continues to be an ongoing issue in the United States penal system. In addition to each prisoner costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, the American cultural attachment to punishment and to the very concept of vengeance fills the penal system with people who are no danger to society or who are serving long sentences for trivial and unintentional crimes. Even Malcolm’s recitation of his personal experience with prisoner transportation emphasizes the inefficiencies of this system. Additionally, there is also a heavy cost in human dignity, for Malcolm has lost his connections with the outside world; his wife left him and moved on, his son will barely remember him when he gets out, and even his own father believes he is guilty. Thus, in more ways than one, Grisham uses his novels as a platform from which to elucidate his own views of the flaws in the American judicial system as a whole.
In accordance with this pattern, Malcolm’s conviction for a crime he didn’t know he was committing introduces the theme of Injustice in the Justice System. Malcolm was used by criminals to launder money but had no intention of committing a crime. Even though Malcolm had technically committed the crime, the FBI and prosecutors knew that he hadn’t done so with intent. However, they were willing to apply the letter of the law out of greed for their own egos and careers. Later, the FBI agents searching for Judge Fawcett’s killer will tacitly acknowledge that Malcolm was innocent in spirit if not in the letter of the law, although they don’t acknowledge any fault in the legal system.
In a pointed aside to the primary plot of the novel, Malcolm also critiques the entrapment of the Carter family, whose conviction for digging up Civil War artifacts on their own land is a farcical miscarriage of justice that can easily be classified as entrapment and is most likely based on an unconstitutional law. While this relatively minor case will have no impact upon the grander vision of the novel as a whole, Grisham once again uses the story as a means of conveying his own disgust with this less-than-fair aspect of the American legal system. In essence, he allows his protagonist to articulate the finer nuances of his views on the topic and delivers the information in a format that is more likely to have an impact upon the general public; thus, he makes it a point to simultaneously entertain and educate.
Even in these initial chapters, Grisham establishes the fact that Malcolm is capable of exhibiting a degree of ruthlessness, for rather than preemptively notifying authorities of the killer’s plans to murder the judge—thereby preventing a murder—he instead waits until after the murder has been committed before making his move. This decision hints at the depths of Malcolm’s rage at a corrupt legal system; if an innocent man can be convicted for someone else’s profit, then he sees no reason to save the crooked judge from his impending demise. Instead, he decides to use the corrupt system to restore a modicum of justice to his own situation. Malcolm’s loss of faith and subsequent rejection of the law therefore demonstrates an intangible but serious cost of injustice, for those who don’t trust their own laws may decide to take the law into their own hands.
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