The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Whitehead, Colson. Crook Manifesto. Doubleday, 2023.

In the year of 1971, a Black furniture salesman named Ray Carney struggles to keep himself away from the criminal underworld that he traversed in his younger years. However, thanks to riots taking place in Harlem under the direction of the Black Liberation Army, Carney finds himself low on funds; when his daughter, May, asks him for tickets to a Jackson 5 show, Carney swallows his pride and reaches out to one of his connected contacts, a crooked police officer named Munson. In exchange for the tickets, Carney reluctantly agrees to help Munson sell off some stolen jewelry, but is attacked by another police officer named Buck Webb and has the jewels stolen from him. Under the auspices of explaining to Webb that there has been a misunderstanding, Munson takes Carney to an ostensible meeting, but instead shoots Webb point-blank and kills him, then proceeds to hold up a number of joints throughout the neighborhood. Munson makes the mistake of letting slip to Carney that he has been served a subpoena for his corrupt practices and is attempting to flee the city, information which Carney uses to orchestrate Munson's capture and murder by a powerful gangster named Notch Walker.

Two years later, in 1973, Carney finds himself back in the criminal world, and is approached by a Black filmmaker named Zippo who wants to use Carney's furniture store as a shooting location for his new film, Nefertiti T.N.T.. Carney grudgingly agrees, but he and his new muscle, Pepper, find themselves put off by the racially diverse nature of Zippo's crew and irritated by the loss in revenue that the filming causes. Things get worse when the film's lead actress, Lucinda Cole, mysteriously disappears, at which point Zippo asks Pepper for help tracking her down. Pepper manages to hunt down her co-star, Roscoe Pope, while he performs at a comedy club to an audience of white people, but Pope brushes Pepper off when he approaches him after his comedy routine. Pepper takes this in stride and follows Pope to his room at the Hotel McAlpin, where he interrupts Pope in the middle of a sexual encounter with a white woman and intimidates him into revealing that Lucinda has connections to a drug dealer named Quincy Black.

After a testy conversation with Quincy, Pepper manages to extract that Quincy was in fact supplying Lucinda with drugs, and that she has long held a tumultuous relationship with Chink Montague, one of the neighborhood's more notorious gangsters. On his way to speak with Zippo about this information, Pepper watches an up-and-coming politician named Alexander Oakes give a speech to a crowd of Black constituents and takes an immediate dislike to him. He manages to track down Chink's whereabouts and accidentally lets himself be ambushed by Chink and his men, but manages to learn Lucinda's real name and address before expertly breaking free of his bonds and killing Chink. When Pepper arrives at Lucinda's childhood home, he finds her completely unharmed; she explains that she simply needed a break from filming, and further elaborates that Chink helped her get her career as an actress started when she was younger. With his lead actress returned, Zippo successfully completes his film, and feels proud of his ability to create an authentic Harlem feature even though it is met with mixed reviews.

By 1976, Carney has risen to the top of the criminal underworld, and Alexander Oakes, the politician whom Pepper observed stumping in 1973, has been catapulted to a place of messianic prominence. Since his wife, Elizabeth, is an enormous supporter of Oakes' campaign, Carney finds himself spending a great deal of time at The Dumas Club with a number of political actors and a lawyer named Pierce to whom Carney takes a liking. Aware that Oakes has ties to the BLA and the criminal underworld, Carney immediately suspects Oakes' involvement when he learns that one of his tenants, Albert Ruiz, has died in an arson fire. He puts Pepper on the case, and Pepper quickly tracks down a number of prominent Harlem arsonists before being grabbed off the street and beaten bloody. Carney comes home after a long night of political conversation with Pierce to discover Pepper standing on his doorstep with blood all over his face.

After convalescing for several days in the Carney home (much to Elizabeth's distaste), Pepper puts together that the men who took him off the street are members of Notch Walker's organization, and decides to find out why his old ally has turned against him. Carney and Pepper work together to kidnap a man named Dan Hickey from his regular hangout, then proceed to torture him until he reveals that an arsonist named Leon Drake was behind Pepper's beating and that himself, Drake, and a number of other men in Walker's unit have been secretly contracting for Alexander Oakes. When Pepper hires a man to break into Oakes' personal safe so as to study his finances, Oakes retaliates by sending Leon to firebomb Carney's furniture store. Furious, Carney agrees to a meeting with Oakes, Leon, and a man named Reece at The Dumas Club, one that appears poised to turn disastrous for Carney and Pepper until Reece flips on Oakes and kills him, prompting Leon to burn the building to the ground. Nobody is correctly prosecuted for the burning of The Dumas Club or the death of Alexander Oakes, and following his recovery from the incident, Carney appears to reconsider his criminal activity.