The Phantom Capitalists

It was a pleasure to learn of the re-publication of what is surely a classic criminological text, Mike Levi's The Phantom Capitalists. Originally published in 1981 but, as Levi himself notes, out of print now for some 20 years, I had approached reviewing the book with the mindset that readers of this journal would be familiar with its contents, save of course for the newly written ‘Introduction and Postscript’ to this second edition—a generous 67 pages, upon which I therefore planned to focus this review. But, if readers of this journal are in fact familiar with the text, then I learnt from the briefest bit of research that familiarity with or any prior knowledge of the book will not have been gleaned from pages of the British Journal of Criminology itself—when first published, the book did not merit a review on the pages of this journal, being reviewed, in fact, in several sociology journals (and, it seems, ‘highly lauded’ by the notorious Chief Constable of Merseyside, Kenneth Oxford, p. xxvi)

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