The study of America's underground economy, the murky world of clandestine exchanges and under-the-table payoffs, allows scholars not just to gain insight into its inner workings and measure its impact on the larger economy, but to engage with critical questions about urbanity. As frequent hosts of illegal transactions, cities have both shaped and been shaped by criminal markets throughout history. Much is learned about urban life through an exploration of the mechanics of illicit exchange. The density and diversity of cities has facilitated the growth of the various complex networks that sustain unlawful economic activities, and in turn these acts have left their mark, transforming both personal interactions and physical space across the country.A motley group of sociologists, economists, historians, political scientists, and ethnographers write on the underground economy, and the literature on the subject is marked by disciplinary divisions. Some works give their attention to its broad contours-tracking the flow of money and goods in and out and determining its effect on the gross national product; others focus on particular parts of the whole, allowing for a more detailed look into the interactions between the shadow economy and the places where it is centered. From different methodological perspectives, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh's Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, Eric Schneider's Smack: Heroin and the American City, and Stephen Mihm's Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States take this approach to studying the underground economy. A fourth work, Sara Schneider's The Art of Darkness: Ingenious Performances by Undercover Operators, Con Men, and Others, provides insight into the shifts in identity that go on in the spaces where the underground economy thrives.The closest examination of the underground economy originates with Off the Books. Sociologist Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh surveys the day-to-day lives of black residents of a ten-block community in Chicago he refers to as Maquis Park. 1 He lived in and studied this tiny area of rundown homes and battered parks for several years to learn about the residents' interactions with the local economy, finding everyone from crack dealers to unlicensed day care providers caught in an interconnected web of licit, or legal if reported, and illicit exchanges. In Venkatesh's capable hands,