Exactly. As Raab pointed out in Five Families, one day delay on a $100 million project can add up to and extra $75,000 in interests costs alone. If you're a contractor, it's very tempting to make a one-time payment of, say, $50,000, rather than risking more than that each day.

But even more than that, it's tempting for the contractors to form sweetheart deals with the mobbed up union. Union-scale workers can make 4 times as much as non-union workers. The mobbed up union will allow the contractor to use the cheaper non-union workers in return for a kickback and/or no-show jobs. Through this the contractor can save a lot of money.

That's where it really becomes the problem - when the racketeering becomes institutionalized. And that means, as Raab explained in his book, as long as contractors could pass along the price of kickbacks to their customers, and that they'd only have to pay off once, they would actually prefer to deal with the mob rather than honest union leaders who have the ability to disrupt their schedules by exercising their collective bargaining agreements.