As a follow up to the bestselling Killing Kebble: An Underworld Exposed (2010), Ministry of Crime: An Underworld Explored examines how organised crime, gangsters and powerful political figures have been able to capture the law enforcement authorities and agencies.

These various organisations have been eviscerated, hollowed out and left ineffective. They have been infiltrated and compromised and, as a result, prominent underworld figures have been able to flourish in South Africa, setting up elaborate networks of crime with the assistance of many cops.

The criminal justice system has been left exposed and it is crucial that the South African public knows about the capture that has occurred on different levels.

WINNER OF THE WINDHAM-CAMPBELL LITERATURE PRIZE 2013

WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR

At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of South Africa's Eastern Cape lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is inconceivably poor. It is to here that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of the greatest plague of our times, the African AIDS epidemic.

He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who refuses to be tested for AIDS despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral programme. It is Sizwe's deep ambivalence, rooted in his deep sense of the cultural divide, that becomes the key to understanding the dynamics that thread their way through a terrified community.

As Steinberg grapples to get closer to finding answers that remain just out of reach, he realizes that he must look within himself to unlock the paradoxes at the heart of his country.

WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES ALAN PATON AWARD

On 9 June 2003, a 43-year-old coloured man named Magadien Wentzel walked out of Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. Behind him lay a lifelong career in the 28s, South Africa's oldest and most reviled prison gang, for decades rumoured to have specialised in rape and robbery. In front of him lay the prospect of a law-abiding future, and life in a household of eight adults and six children, none of whom earned a living. Jonny Steinberg met Wentzel in prison in the dying months of 2002. By the time Wentzel was released, he and Steinberg had spent more than 50 hours discussing his life experiences.

The Number is an account of their conversations and of Steinberg's journeys to the places and people of Wentzel's past. Wentzel had lived a bewilderingly schizophrenic life, wandering to and fro between three worlds: the arcane universe of prison gangs, steeped in a mythology of banditry and retribution, where he was known as JR; the fringes of South Africa's criminal economy, where he lived by a string of stolen names and learned the arts of commercial fraud; and his scattered family which eked out a living int the coloured ghettos of the Cape flats. The Number visits each of those worlds in turn. It is a tale of modern South Africa's historic events seen through the eyes of the country's underclass.

Surprisingly, perhaps, it is neither a story of passivity nor despair, but of beguiling ingenuity and cool cynicism. Most of all, the book is an account of memory and identity, of Wentzel's project to make some sense of his bewildering past and something worthy of his future. When Steinberg met him, Wentzel was embarking on a quest to retrieve the name he had been given at birth. He was also beginning the daunting task of gathering together the estranged children he had sired into a nuclear family. It was an eccentric and painful venture for a man with his past, but it has led him to construct an account of himself that begs to be told.

A hundred years ago, on the night of 3 October 1922, a thirty-two-year-old clerk named Percy Thompson was stabbed to death as he walked home to his suburban villa in Ilford. With him was his wife, twenty-eight-year-old Edith. His killer was Edith's lover: Frederick Bywaters, a merchant seaman aged twenty. Bywaters was hanged for murder on 9 January 1923. So too was Edith Thompson. There was no evidence, of any kind, that she was involved with the killing. What condemned Edith were the letters that she had written to her lover, which were interpreted by the law as incitement to murder. These letters are remarkable documents. Charged with the vitality of Edith's voice, they are moving, perplexing, maddening, banal, spectacularly sensual, infused with a stream-of-consciousness immediacy. And they have never been collected in print, until now. In Au Revoir Now Darlint, Laura Thompson - author of the CWA Gold Dagger-shortlisted Rex vs Edith Thompson - gathers the letters together alongside illuminating commentary to tell the story of an ordinary life and an extraordinary imagination that ultimately led to appalling tragedy.

Demonic possession. Exorcism. Haunted Houses. Satanic Rituals. For most people this is the stuff of nightmares, horror movies, folklore, and superstition. For New York City police Sergeant Ralph Sarchie, it's as real--and dangerous--as midnight patrol . . . A sixteen-year NYPD veteran, Ralph Sarchie works out of the 46th Precinct in New York's South Bronx. But it is his other job that he calls "the Work": investigating cases of demonic possession and assisting in the exorcisms of humanity's most ancient--and most dangerous--foes. Now he discloses for the first time his investigations into incredible true crimes and inhuman evil that were never explained, solved, or understood except by Sarchie and his partner. Schooled in the rituals of exorcism, and an eyewitness to the reality of demonic possession, Ralph Sarchie has documented a riveting chronicle of the inexplicable that gives a new shape to the shadows in the dark.
In "Deliver Us from Evil," he takes readers into the very hierarchy of a hell on earth to expose the grisly rituals of a Palo Mayombe priest; a young girl whose innocence is violated by an incubus; a home invaded by the malevolent spirit of a supposedly murdered nineteenth-century bride; the dark side of a couple who were literally, the neighbors from hell; and more. Ralph Sarchie's revelations are a powerful and disturbing documented link between the true-crime realities of life and the blood-chilling ice-grip of a supernatural terror.

Raised in a South Boston housing project, James "Whitey" Bulger became the most wanted fugitive of his generation. In this riveting story, rich with family ties and intrigue, award-winning Boston Globe reporters Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy follow Whitey s extraordinary criminal career from teenage thievery to bank robberies to the building of his underworld empire and a string of brutal murders.

It was after a nine-year stint in Alcatraz and other prisons that Whitey reunited with his brother William "Billy" Bulger, who was soon to become one of Massachusetts s most powerful politicians. He also became reacquainted with John Connolly, who had grown up around the corner from the Bulgers and was now with Billy s help a rising star at the FBI. Once Whitey emerged triumphant from the bloody Boston gang wars, Connolly recruited him as an informant against the Mafia. Their clandestine relationship made Whitey untouchable; the FBI overlooked gambling, drugs, and even homicide to protect their source. Among the close-knit Irish community in South Boston, nothing was more important than honor and loyalty, and nothing was worse than being a rat. Whitey is charged with the deaths of nineteen people killed over turf, for business, and even for being informants; yet to this day he denies he ever gave up his friends or landed anyone in jail.

Based on exclusive access and previously undisclosed documents, Cullen and Murphy explore the truth of the Whitey Bulger story. They reveal for the first time the extent of his two parallel family lives with different women, as well as his lifelong paranoia stemming in part from his experience in the CIA s MKULTRA program. They describe his support of the IRA and his hitherto-unknown role in the Boston busing crisis, and they show a keen understanding of his mindset while on the lam and behind bars. The result is the first full portrait of this legendary criminal figure a gripping story of wiseguys and cops, horrendous government malfeasance, and a sixteen-year manhunt that climaxed in Whitey s dramatic capture in Santa Monica in June 2011. With a new afterword covering the trial, this book promises to become a true-crime classic."

Residents of the idyllic villages scattered throughout the Upper Peninsula's richly forested paradise live in quiet comfort for the most part, believing that murder rarely happens in their secluded sanctuary3/4but it does, and more often than they realize. This collection of twenty-four legendary murders spans 160 years of Upper Michigan's history and dispels the notion that murder in the Upper Peninsula is an anomaly. From the bank robber who killed the warden and deputy warden of the Marquette Branch Prison to the unknown assailant who gunned down James Schoolcraft in Sault Ste. Marie, Sonny Longtine explores the tragic events that turned peaceful communities into fear-ridden crime scenes.

For three decades after the Second World War, the 'Butcher of the Balkans' lived an idyllic life with his family in a Los Angeles suburb. Andrija Artukovic was a senior member of the Ustasha, a Croatian fascist and nationalist movement, and was responsible for the brutal murders of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. Wanted in Yugoslavia to stand trial for war crimes, he had illegally entered and claimed political asylum in the United States - and his powerful supporters sought to keep him there. Meanwhile, just 10 miles away, David Whitelaw lived with his mother, Judith, who fled Germany in 1938. Seventy-six of her relatives were killed in the Holocaust. When David learned Artukovic was living comfortably nearby, he vowed to ensure his deportation to stand trial as a war criminal. But when a firebomb, thrown with the sole intention of causing fear, saw the young man sent to jail, a battle began for his own freedom, while the war criminal remained at large. A true David versus Goliath battle, The Fierce is the story of the teenager who helped take down the worst mass murderer and war criminal in America.

In Historic Columbus Crimes, the father-daughter team of David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker looks back at sixteen tales of murder, mystery and mayhem culled from city history. Take the rock star slain by a troubled fan or the drag queen slashed to death by a would-be ninja. Then there's the writer who died acting out the plot of his next book, the minister's wife incinerated in the parsonage furnace and a couple of serial killers who outdid the Son of Sam. Not to mention a gunfight at Broad and High, grave-robbing medical students, the bloodiest day in FBI history and other fascinating stories of crime and tragedy. They're all here, and they're all true

The area known as Dogtown--an isolated colonial ruin and surrounding 3,000-acre woodland in seaside Gloucester, Massachusetts--has long exerted a powerful influence over artists, writers, eccentrics, and nature lovers. But its history is also woven through with tales of witches, supernatural sightings, pirates, former slaves, drifters, and the many dogs Revolutionary War widows kept for protection and for which the area was named. In 1984, a brutal murder took place there: a mentally disturbed local outcast crushed the skull of a beloved schoolteacher as she walked in the woods. In this award-winning debut, Elyssa East evocatively interlaces the story of the grisly murder with the strange, dark history of this wilderness ghost town and explores the possibility that certain landscapes wield their own unique power. Winner of the 2010 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award in nonfiction and named a Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards, "Dogtown "takes readers into an unforgettable place brimming with tragedy, eccentricity, and fascinating lore, and examines the idea that some places can inspire both good and evil, poetry and murder.

A pioneer in forensic anthropology, Dr. Bill Bass created the world's first laboratory dedicated to the study of human decomposition--three acres on a hillside in Tennessee where human bodies are left to the elements. His research has revolutionized forensic science, but during a career that has spanned half a century, Bass and his work have ranged far beyond the gates of the "Body Farm."

In this riveting book, the renowned bone sleuth explores the rise of modern forensic science and takes readers deep into the real world of crime scene investigation. Beyond the Body Farm is an extraordinary journey through some of the most fascinating investigations of Dr. Bass's career--and a remarkable look at the high-tech science used to crack the most perplexing cases.

As mob families go, the Philadelphia Mafia is the most dysfunctional familyof all--with brother turning against brother, sons turning on their fathers.In 1993, an embittered legacy of rivalry and hatred exploded into a brutal, bloody battle between old world mobster and the young, flamboyant JoeyMerlino. However, this would be warfare different from any other. This time, theFBI had it all down on tape.

Among the mobsters caught on tape:

John Stanfa, the violent, often irrational, paranoid old-school mob don battlinga new generation of savage young turks.

Rosario Bellocchi, the young Sicilian-born hitman in love with his boss'sdaughter, who would do anything to get ahead--even kill his best friend.

John Veasey, the two-hundred-pound mad dog hitman who once had to postponea hit--in order to visit his parole officer.

Drawing on four years of investigative work, and more than two thousandtaped conversations, veteran true crime journalist George Anastasia takes readersinside the world of mobsters at war, and FBI agents so close on their heels thatt hey even watched onehit unfold live through asurveillance camera.

In "Shell Games," journalist Craig Welch delves into our nation's waters and wildlands in search of America's most unusual criminals. The resulting detective story is filled with butterfly thieves, bear poachers, shark-trafficking pastors--and a rogues' gallery of double-crossing crooks who get rich smuggling bizarre marine creatures.

Puget Sound is home to the geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck"), the world's largest burrowing clam--a seafood delicacy worth millions on the international black market. Outlaw scuba divers pursue this prize while dodging cops, committing arson, and hiring hit men to eliminate their rivals. Detective Ed Volz has spent decades chasing fish and wildlife smugglers. Now, he and a team of federal agents are desperate to take down the most remarkable thief they've ever hunted: a darkly charming con man who works both sides of the law and calls himself the "Geoduck Gotti."