It's A Jungle In Here 

Would that Jimmy Breslin's The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez triggered this sort of galvanizing, across-the-board improvement in working conditions, as the infrastructure that Breslin exposes is no less tangled, greedy, and carelessly corrupt.

On November 23, 1999, in the Hasidic neighborhood of Brooklyn known as Williamsburg, a building under construction went down like a flimsy house of cards, each floor caving in the floor beneath as helpless construction workers -- most of them illegal immigrants from Mexico -- plummeted three stories into a swirling vat of wet concrete.

The cement pump still stood on one part of the floor that had not snapped. The pump kept pouring concrete down, the thickest of gray rains. The workers were stuck in it. As it covered the chests of the workers, it started to flatten them and stifle their breathing. If one exhaled, the weight of the concrete on his chest prevented him from inhaling again.

Rescuers appearing on the scene were confronted with the most arduous and horrific task -- pulling live mummies out of concrete quicksand.

They began to try and remove people by first bending forward with their arms stretched out and digging at the wet concrete with their hands. Dig it and shove it to make a clearing around the body. As they made this clearing, the concrete came back like a heartless tide.

Amazingly, only one worker would die in this hell-on-earth, and it is that individual, 21-year-old Eduardo Gutierrez, that Breslin focuses on in this unbearably sad, tirelessly investigated book -- a Jungle for this young century.

Longtime New York City reporter/columnist Jimmy Breslin has been exposing municipal corruption for so long (didn't he blow the lid off Tammany Hall?) that many think he's a relic, no longer a relevant voice in modern journalism. This book should silence that crowd, as Breslin hauls politicians and bureaucrats -- none of whom had ever heard of Eduardo Gutierrez, much less cared about the plight of immigrant day laborers -- into his Court Of Inquiry. Some, such as Rudolph Gulliani and Hillary Clinton, are merely tangential to the Williamsburg tragedy, although their participation in a Byzantine system of cronyism and spoils-sharing is breathtaking in scope. Others, such as the rabbi-landlord and building inspectors who allowed the house of death to go up, have real blood on their hands.

Breslin is at his muckraking best, however, when penetrating the mazelike Brooklyn Municipal Building -- a Kafkaesque nightmare if there ever was one -- to get at the truth behind how a crook with blueprints could remain in operation for so long.

Next to each computer, a printout machine that could have carried the news of Truman's victory rattles and grinds as it sends out long pages of building violations.

It's a sad and sordid tale, but what elevates this book above the usual expose is Breslin's determination to summon forth the extinguished life of the invisible victim. He accomplishes this by winding back the chain of circumstances that led a poor, uneducated man out of the squalor and hopelessness of San Matias, Mexico, in pursuit of America's illusory riches. To achieve that end, the tenacious reporter crisscrossed the border, tracking the men, women, and children who risk their lives in pursuit of "the Job" (undeclared Yankee dollars, yet more than could ever be earned in their own country). With the help of "coyotes" (a network of well-paid guides that lead Mexicans through tunnels, mountains, deserts and rivers, all the while avoiding the gun barrels and spotlights of border patrol), Eduardo Gutierrez did exactly that, only to end up in a No Exit limbo in Brighton Beach.

Not only did the late-night homesickness torture them, but the loneliness became more searing in the sunlight. They sat in the room and told themselves -- and then their wives and children on the phone -- that they would be home soon. They did not learn English because they were sure of leaving for home forever. They drank at sunrise on weekends and spoke only in Spanish, thus robbing themselves of any chance for better work.

Life in America for Gutierrez and his compadres was a sickening grind of low paying, highly dangerous work. And the terrain was baffling -- after missing his subway stop one day, the hapless Gutierrez took over half a day to find his way home.

He asked Hispanic after Hispanic, and most were unsure of whether they were in Brooklyn or not.

But basically, what really doomed Gutierrez was an economic marriage of convenience -- undocumented immigrants struggling to survive in an unfamiliar environment, and unscrupulous builders hell-bent on constructing with the shoddiest of materials -- and the lowest payroll possible.

In other words, it's a very old story, enacted countless times by countless individuals in countless situations -- only this time someone named Eduardo Gutierrez drowned in a vat of cement, and someone named Jimmy Breslin appeared on the scene, to document it for public scrutiny. *