NEW YORK CITY -- NEW YORK -- The builder was an out-of-towner, but was well-schooled in the ways that business sometimes gets done in New York.

So when a group of burly men turned up at his Queens construction site in 2005 and threatened to shut the place down unless he hired someone from their crew, he quickly made peace. He put one of them on the payroll for a no-show job that paid $15 per hour.

The arrangement may have looked like a traditional Mafia shakedown, but it wasn't. The men lining their pockets were leaders of a "minority labor coalition," ostensibly set up to help blacks land jobs in an industry still dominated by whites.

The difference may have been lost on the contractor. When he cut the checks, he wrote the word "extortion" on the stub...

Over the past year, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has obtained a string of indictments against the leaders of minority labor coalitions. MORE