Drugs, Money, and Secret Handshakes

Robin Feldman, Drugs, Money, and Secret Handshakes: The Unstoppable Growth of Prescription Drug Prices (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

In the warped world of prescription drug pricing, generic drugs can cost more than branded ones, old drugs can be relaunched at astronomical prices, and low-cost options are shut out of the market. In Drugs, Money, and Secret Handshakes, Robin Feldman shines a light into the dark corners of the pharmaceutical industry to expose a web of shadowy deals in which higher-priced drugs receive favorable treatment and patients are channeled toward the most expensive medicines. At the center of this web are the highly secretive middle players who establish coverage levels for patients and negotiate with drug companies. By offering lucrative payments to these middle players (as well as to doctors and hospitals), drug companies ensure than inexpensive drugs never gain traction. This system of perverse incentives has delivered the kind of exorbitant drug prices - and profits - that everyone loves except for those who pay the bills.

-Publisher's Description

Operation Greylord: The True Story of an Untrained Undercover Agent and America's Biggest Corruption Bust

Terrance Hake & Wayne Klatt.  Operation Greylord (Ankerwycke, 2015).

"Operation Greylord was the longest and most successful undercover investigation in FBI history, and the largest corruption bust ever in the U.S. It resulted in bribery and tax charges against 103 judges, lawyers, and other court personnel, and, eventually, more than seventy indictments. And it was led by Terrence Hake, a young assistant prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in Chicago, who worked undercover for nearly four years, accepting bribes, making payoffs, wearing a wire in bars and to racetracks, bugging a judge’s chambers, and befriending people he knew he would betray. Operation Greylord has never before been detailed by an insider in the investigation." 
—Publisher's description

Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United

Zephyr Teachout (Fordham University). Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United (Harvard University Press, 2014).

"'Corruption in America,' includes plenty of the juicy stories . . . . We learn, for example, about a diamond-studded snuffbox that Louis XVI gave Benjamin Franklin, then our ambassador to France, and how the Revolutionary generation regarded this gift — the result of a noncontroversial custom in Europe — as a possible threat to republican virtue. We read about an officer of the Turkish government in the 1870s who agreed to sell the products of an American arms manufacturer to his government in exchange for a small consideration, and who then, having duly moved the units, went to court to have the deal enforced. Good stuff, all of it. . . . As you might have guessed, Teachout’s main target is the currently reigning money-in-politics doctrine of the Supreme Court, as defined mainly by Citizens United, the 2010 decision that struck down certain restrictions on political spending by corporations."

—Thomas Frank, New York Times