He Is Somebody.

Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson, by Kenneth R. Timmerman (Regnery, 512 pp., $29.95)

For a book that provides so little new information about its subject, this manages to be a shocking piece of work. Kenneth R. Timmerman has compiled an exhaustive, just-the-facts account that reads more like a prosecutor's brief than a biography; he reports what seems like every sleazy thing that has ever been reported or otherwise documented about Jesse Jackson's wildly successful 40-year career as a public nuisance. You come away from Shakedown astonished at how much we've always known about Jackson's flagrant dirtbaggery -- and at how little difference this knowledge has made to the Establishment.

Jackson's is an all-American success story, of the robber-baron type. Timmerman demonstrates that Jackson has always been a self-promoting egotist with boundless chutzpah, little regard for the rules, and an uncanny ability to manipulate the market -- in his case, the market in white guilt -- for immense personal gain. The only thing that's changed for him in four decades are the stakes. The difference between Jackson and the robber barons is that the latter left behind museums, libraries, and other facilities to enhance the commonweal. Jackson's legacy to anyone outside his family and inner circle of friends and supporters is nil.

The Jackson myth begins with a lie conjured and perpetuated by Jackson himself: that he consoled the dying Martin Luther King Jr., holding King's head as he lay stricken by an assassin's bullet. It is generally well known that King's associates, including the late Ralph Abernathy, have bitterly denounced Jackson for trying to steal the martyred King's mantle with a blatant falsehood. But that didn't stop Jackson, nor did it much matter to his legions of admirers. After King's death, Jackson returned to Chicago, where he resumed work with Operation Breadbasket (later renamed PUSH), an organization set up by King to encourage businesses in the black community to hire more blacks.

Jackson used the organization to threaten businesses with boycotts unless owners met his demands. Law-enforcement officials and press accounts quoted by Timmerman reveal that Jackson's enforcers were sometimes members of a notorious black street gang, El Rukn, whose leaders would eventually be jailed for murder, narcotics dealing, extortion, and other offenses. Jackson's half-brother, Noah Robinson Jr., was thick with the thugs. A black Chicago minister tells Timmerman: "There was one very powerful reason why none of us spoke out more loudly against Jesse for all those years. It was fear of the long arm of the black mafia that Jesse's half-brother controlled."

At this point, the reader stops to ask himself: What white American political figure in this day and age could be so closely associated with a bunch of murdering mafiosi, and still have any kind of public standing? It is generally believed that Democrat Mario Cuomo never ran for president for fear that possible -- though unproven -- mob ties in his wife's family's background would become an issue. Jackson's personal mob ties are a matter of public record, and he ran for president twice. But be warned: If you stop to ask yourself the "Could a white guy get away with this?" question every time you run across an egregious example of Jackson derring-do, you'll never finish the book.

The most interesting parts of Shakedown report on these early years in Chicago, in which Jackson first employed his techniques for mau-mauing businesses; milking political ties for government grants and set-aside contracts; financing Jesse, Inc., through the shadow support of wealthy donors; and intimidating black journalists who dared question his way of doing business. These are not substantially different from the way Jackson conducts his affairs today, except for one thing: He no longer has to intimidate journalists, black or white. A press that was much more critical of Jackson in his early years, when he wasn't much more than a Chicago street hustler ("Jesse Jetstream," they called him), has become utterly supine today -- even though Jackson's race-based shakedown schemes earn him and his cronies sums they couldn't have imagined in those Chicago days.

It's remarkable, too, to read how little Jackson cared about the people he claimed to speak for: poor blacks. To use just one of Timmerman's examples: Sam McBride, a black service-station owner, was stung by the IRS in the mid 1970s for ripping off customers. "Instead of denouncing McBride for ripping off black consumers, Jackson invited McBride to address the weekly Saturday meeting at PUSH headquarters, where Jackson called him a 'victim of the oil monopoly's exploitation,'" Timmerman writes. McBride and his friends were then in a position to become regular donors to Jackson's organization. When black journalists Angela Parker and Barbara Reynolds wrote investigative reports critical of Jackson's operations, he threatened them in baldly racial terms. ("No white reporter tells it all, and neither should you," he told Reynolds.)

When Jimmy Carter came into office, Jackson got his organizations on the government-grant gravy train by having them declared service providers for welfare programs. He contrived do-good schemes, such as one for lifting school marks and lowering violence among urban black youth, which government evaluators later found to be ineffective. But the media puffery was just beginning: Jackson convinced Dan Rather to do a flattering 60 Minutes piece on his PUSH-Excel program. The report legitimized Jackson overnight, and -- in turn -- opened up the multimillion-dollar floodgates of government largesse, courtesy of the Carter administration.

Jesse's less respectable half-brother, Noah Robinson, was also looting government programs designed to help minorities, specifically minority businesses, by offering contracts set aside for blacks only. Robinson, who would later be sentenced to life in prison for complicity in a murder, freely admitted to the Chicago Tribune that he was bilking the taxpayer (and honest blacks). Writes Timmerman: "Robinson spoke more freely than Jackson, but the two shared the same ethics. They were special. It didn't matter if they told bald-faced lies, or if their actions harmed black businesses and cost jobs to black workers. They were playing race politics and were out to get what the white government owed them. Someone else would pick up the tab."

Before he was outed last year as the father of a "love child," the heaviest hit to Jackson's public reputation came during his 1984 run for president, when -- in a chat with a black reporter for the Washington Post -- he called New York City "Hymietown." It was not a one-time slip of an anti-Semitic tongue. Jackson had by then built up a long public record of Jew-bashing, much of it connected to his public embrace of Yasser Arafat, once described by Jackson as "the friend of justice and humanity." One never hears about this anymore. Nor does one ever hear about Jackson's close personal and professional association with Jack O'Dell, a Communist operative who was for years one of Jackson's most influential policy advisers.

A little contrast will be helpful here. Charles Pickering was just rejected by the Democrat-controlled Senate for alleged racial insensitivity and purported affiliation with a racist organization -- when he was in college in the 1950s. As a grown man, Jesse Jackson complained about Jewish conspiracies, embraced Palestinian terrorists, and allowed a bona fide Communist into his inner circle -- and nobody cares. Shakedown makes it clear that there is a racial double standard in America, just not the one Jesse Jackson thinks.

Though the Reagan years were mildly tough on Jackson -- the administration investigated the finances of Jackson's organizations -- the return of the Democrats to office in 1992 sent Jackson into the stratosphere in terms of his finances and personal prestige. Timmerman takes us through Jackson's rise as a self-appointed diplomat, culminating in his being appointed Clinton's "special envoy" to Africa -- a position he parlayed into rich commercial dividends for himself, his family, and his associates. Jackson's connection to William Kennard, who was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under Clinton, helped Jackson squeeze large donations out of media companies in exchange for the endorsement of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition (as Jesse, Inc., was then called). And through his Wall Street Project, Jackson set himself up as an unofficial broker to the financial community, obtaining lucrative contracts for a small coterie of black financiers while offering racial absolution for white guilt to corporate titans.

Corporate America comes off badly in this book. There are only two heroes here: Both were business leaders who stood up to Jackson and refused to be bullied by his protection racket. Silicon Valley executive T. J. Rodgers told Jackson to take a hike a few years ago, and found his company denounced as a "white-supremacist hate group" by a Jackson surrogate. The world didn't end, and Jackson refused to take up Rodgers's challenge to debate him. The Nike shoe company similarly stood up to Jackson in the 1990s, and won.

According to Timmerman, in 1982, Anheuser-Busch -- then run by Auggie Busch III -- caused Jackson to call off a threatened boycott overnight by presenting him with a file detailing his luxurious lifestyle, secret financial arrangements, and other potentially embarrassing facts. But what Timmerman doesn't report is that shortly thereafter, the beer giant pledged $320 million to minority causes. That's more in line with the strategy of Auggie Busch IV, who headed off another boycott threat by Jackson, this time in 1998, by awarding Jackson's sons a $40 million Budweiser distributorship in Chicago.

Shakedown contains little to nothing about Jackson's scandalous personal life, except to report that the revelation of his sexual liaison with Karin Stanford caused his fall from grace. Timmerman writes that he "never seriously pursued [sex] rumors during my own investigation because I felt the real scandal of Jesse Jackson's career was his public behavior." That's fair enough, but what is missing from the book is a broader perspective on Jackson the man, and a framework that would help readers assess his role in American society and race relations. Timmerman merely piles up facts, newspaper-style, in an attempt to crush Jackson's reputation under the weight of accumulated detail. He succeeds, certainly, and he has done us a great service by collecting the dossier on Jackson between two covers. It is impossible to read Shakedown and look at Jackson with anything but contempt and cynicism.

So the media will just have to ignore it. Though Shakedown hit No. 1 on Amazon.com, there have been no reviews as of this writing, and little public attention. Meanwhile, Jackson soldiers on. The love-child scandal did not deter Toyota from settling a ridiculous bias claim with him, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And Timmerman reports that Jackson appears to be moving into new territory: mau- mauing pension-fund managers, and establishing a lucrative new partnership with lawyer Johnnie Cochran, who is devising a plan to shake down corporations with race-based class-action suits. For Jesse Jackson, there is every reason in the world to keep hope alive.