Published in 1999, this book focuses on organized crime as a worldwide phenomenon that has taken great advantage of enabling technology in banking, communications and transportation to build what is probably the first true 'virtual' corporation in the world. It looks at organized crime as a threat to national and international security ironically stemming, in part, from the collapse of the Soviet empire that provided an already thriving, ruthless and well-organized system of graft, corruption and crime with a new lease of life and also unleashed it on to the world scene. Organized crime is also seen as a system of transnational alliances with the potential to destabilize democratic values and institutions; distort regional, if not worldwide, economies; and subvert the international order by allying itself with terrorist organizations, rogue states and developing countries in search of rapid industrialization and market dominance.

For many people around the world, instances of what is described as organized crime may be part of their everyday experience; in their neighbourhoods, their streets, and the places they work and live. Policymakers, law enforcement, and the media rarely fail to bring up the issue when discussing the nature and seriousness of contemporary criminal threats, and the appropriate responses towards them. Many more people are familiar with the notion of organized crime, as the film and TV industry regularly draw on fictional and real figures and situations. Organized crime feels like a tangible, inescapable issue in today's world. In this Very Short introduction, Georgios A. Antonopoulos and Georgios Papanicolaou uncover the reality of organized crime in our world today. Shining a light on the people involved in organized crime, Antonopoulos and Papanicolaou question whether the term 'organized' is used to evoke the image, the operations, and power of a legitimate organization, such as a corporation. Discussing whether there are particular crimes that the label 'organized crime' applies to, or if any crime can be organized, they also consider what happens when organized crime extends beyond borders. Using examples from across the globe, they analyse the different cultural traditions of organized crime, such as the Mafia, Yakuza, and Triads, and also the nature of organized crime, from arms trafficking and drug dealing to extortion. Finally they explore the methods and agencies in place to control and prevent organized crime. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Foreword by Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean, Simon Wiesenthal Center A real-life adventure story told by a New York Times bestselling author and war correspondent who reveals how he became a hostage, an arms dealer, and an Israeli spy. And the Rest Is History takes readers on a traveling circus from Paris to Beirut, Baghdad, and beyond, introducing them to spies and terrorists, arms dealers and crooks, and along the way reveals a few surprises about the secret underbelly of recent history you won't find in WikiLeaks. This book pinpoints precisely when the era of "fake news" actually began in America, and will change the way you think about journalism and journalists. It includes: * riveting testimony of the author's torture and born-again experience as a hostage in a Beirut cellar; * unusual insight into the beginnings of the Iran-Contra scandal; * eyewitness reporting from the battlefields of the Middle East; * the inside scoop on Saddam Hussein's WMD programs; * astonishing stories of French government dirty tricks, the intelligence underworld, Israeli hostage negotiations, and the real-life escapades of a Soviet sleeper agent. And the Rest Is History is a reporter's journey from Left-Bank leftist to born-again Christian conservative. But most of all it's a rollicking good read full of unusual characters, places, and events you will never hear about on the evening news. "Ken Timmerman is a superb investigative reporter-and old school-which means he does his research. His behind-the-scenes adventures in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Israel, and even France are a terrific read for those of us who share his passion for tracking down the facts, not molding the facts to a 'narrative.'" -Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and NY Times bestselling author of Clinton Cash and Profiles in Corruption "I have followed for some time your excellent reporting on the Mid-East. You consistently provide insights and facts nowhere else available to the public. Your professionalism and persistence make a great contribution to our understanding, to the public debate, and ultimately to our national security." -R. James Woolsey, former director, Central Intelligence Agency "I have spent my life tracking the murderers of yesterday. Mr. Timmerman is tracking the murderers of tomorrow." -Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, introducing the author to an audience in Paris, France, in 2002

Wannabe is the first book written about youth gangs in suburbs and schools. Based on interviews with over 400 boys and girls between the ages of ten and twenty, the author offers a vivid portrayal of their lives in and around gangs. It chronicles the way in which suburban youths become involved with gangs, learn about committing crimes and violent acts, and gradually begin to question their loyalty to gang life.Contrary to the popular view of gang members as thoughtless thugs, Monti describes the difficult choices they make and explores the youngsters' ambivalence toward dealing in illegal narcotics and taking up arms against neighbors and their fellow students. Youngsters use gangs to express their disdain for an adult world that provides them with few effective ways to become a conventional person and, at the same time, as a means to negotiate an entrance into that very world.Surburban Gnags are seen to be different from innercity gangs in some important ways. What young persons find in their families, neighbourhoods, and schools clearly has an impact on the making and unmaking of gang members. Existing theories and intervention strategies intended to suppress gangs or lure youngsters from gangs are found to be ineffective. Far more important, Monti argues, are explanations of gang behaviour that focus on the power of conventional institutions to make human beings that move from gangs into the larger world as the youngsters grow older. An ambitious plan to rebuild a middle-class population of residents and business owners in cities is advanced as a way to help young persons make their way into the conventional adult world that has heretofore been denied.

Known for their striking full-body tattoos and severed fingertips, Japan's gangsters comprise a criminal class eighty thousand strong - more than four times the size of the American mafia. Despite their criminal nature, the yakuza are accepted by fellow Japanese to a degree guaranteed to shock most Westerners. "Yakuza" is the first book to reveal the extraordinary reach of Japan's Mafia. Originally published in 1986, it was so controversial in Japan that it could not be published there for five years. But in the west it has long served as the standard reference on Japanese organized crime and has inspired novels, screenplays, and criminal investigations. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition tells the full story of Japan's remarkable crime syndicates, from their feudal start as bands of medieval outlaws to their emergence as billion-dollar investors in real estate, big business, art, and more.

Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey explores the history of organized crime in Turkey and the roles which gangs and gangsters have played in the making of the Turkish state and Turkish politics. Turkey's underworld, which has been at the heart of several devastating scandals over the last several decades, is strongly tied to the country's long history of opium production and heroin trafficking. As an industry at the centre of the Ottoman Empire's long transition into the modern Turkish Republic, as important as the silk road had been in earlier centuries, the modern rise of the opium and heroin trade helped to solidify and complicate long-standing relationships between state officials and criminal syndicates. Such relationships produced not only ongoing patterns of corruption, but helped fuel and enable repeated acts of state violence. Drawing upon new archival sources from the United States and Turkey, including declassified documents from the Prime Minister's Archives of the Republic of Turkey and the Central Intelligence Agency, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey provides a critical window into how a handful of criminal syndicates played supporting roles in the making of national security politics in the contemporary Turkey. The rise of the 'Turkish mafia', from its origins in the late Ottoman period to its role in the 'deep state' revealed by the so-called Susurluk and Ergenekon scandals, is a story that mirrors troubling elements in the republic's establishment and emphasizes the transnational and comparative significance of narcotics and gangs in the country's past.

The killing took place outside a busy coffee bar in Naples in broad daylight. Pupetta was eighteen years old and six months pregnant when she pulled the gun from her bag. The victim? A man known as Big Tony who had ordered the hit on her husband just months earlier... In this unputdownable expose of women in the Mafia, investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau tells the stories of the women who have risen to prominence in the Italian mob, beginning with the first documented female boss, the infamous Pupetta Maresca. Through personal interviews and groundbreaking research, Nadeau gives us a jaw-dropping 360-degree view of the dark underbelly of Italian society, taking us deeper into the Mafia and its complex realities than ever before. 'Takes the reader into the little-known role of the women that underpin Italy's most ruthless mob families' Sara Gay Forden, author of House of Gucci 'An unflinching portrait of one the original divas of organised crime' Clare Longrigg, author of Mafia Women 'A must for true-crime fans' Publishers Weekly

With a foreword by Diane Negra and Jorie Lagerway As television has finally started to create more leading roles for women, the female antiheroine has emerged as a compelling and dynamic character type. Television Antiheroines looks closely at this recent development, exploring the emergence of women characters in roles typically reserved for men, particularly in the male-dominated genre of the crime and prison drama. The essays collected in Television Antiheroines are divided into four sections or types of characters: mafia women, drug dealers and aberrant mothers, women in prison, and villainesses. Looking specifically at shows such as Gomorrah, Mafiosa, The Wire, The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy, Orange is the New Black, and Antimafia Squad, the contributors explore the role of race and sexuality and focus on how many of the characters transgress traditional ideas about femininity and female identity, such as motherhood. They examine the ways in which bad women are portrayed and how these characters undermine gender expectations and reveal the current challenges by women to social and economic norms. Television Antiheroines will be essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in crime and prison drama and the rising prominence of women in nontraditional roles.

How global organized crime shapes the politics of borders in modern conflicts Separatism has been on the rise across the world since the end of the Cold War, dividing countries through political strife, ethnic conflict, and civil war, and redrawing the political map. Gangsters and Other Statesmen examines the role transnational mafias play in the success and failure of separatist movements, challenging conventional wisdom about the interrelation of organized crime with peacebuilding, nationalism, and state making. Danilo Mandic conducted fieldwork in the disputed territories of Kosovo and South Ossetia, talking to mobsters, separatists, and policymakers in war zones and along major smuggling routes. In this timely and provocative book, he demonstrates how globalized mafias shape the politics of borders in torn states, shedding critical light on an autonomous nonstate actor that has been largely sidelined by considerations of geopolitics, state-centered agency, and ethnonationalism. Blending extensive archival sleuthing and original ethnographic data with insights from sociology and other disciplines, Mandic argues that organized crime can be a fateful determinant of state capacity, separatist success, and ethnic conflict. Putting mafias at the center of global processes of separatism and territorial consolidation, Gangsters and Other Statesmen raises vital questions and urges reconsideration of a host of separatist cases in West Africa, the Middle East, and East Europe.

Here, from Jay Dobyns, the first federal agent to infiltrate the inner circle of the outlaw Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, is the inside story of the twenty-one-month operation that almost cost him his family, his sanity, and his life.
Getting shot in the chest as a rookie agent, bartering for machine guns, throttling down the highway at 100 mph, and responding to a full-scale, bloody riot between the Hells Angels and their rivals, the Mongols-these are just a few of the high-adrenaline experiences Dobyns recounts in this action-packed, hard-to-imagine-but-true story.
Dobyns leaves no stone of his harrowing journey unturned. At runs and clubhouses, between rides and riots, Dobyns befriends bad-ass bikers, meth-fueled "old ladies," gun fetishists, psycho-killer ex-cons, and even some of the "Filthy Few"-the elite of the Hells Angels who've committed extreme violence on behalf of their club. Eventually, at parties staged behind heavily armed security, he meets legendary club members such as Chuck Zito, Johnny Angel, and the godfather of all bikers, Ralph "Sonny" Barger. To blend in with them, he gets full-arm ink; to win their respect, he vows to prove himself a stone-cold killer.
Hardest of all is leading a double life, which has him torn between his devotion to his wife and children, and his pledge to become the first federal agent ever to be "fully patched" into the Angels' near-impregnable ranks. His act is so convincing that he comes within a hairsbreadth of losing himself. Eventually, he realizes that just as he's been infiltrating the Hells Angels, they've been infiltrating him. And just as they're not all bad, he's not all good.
Reminiscent of Donnie Brasco's uncovering of the true Mafia, this is an eye-opening portrait of the world of bikers-the most in-depth since Hunter Thompson's seminal work-one that fully describes the seductive lure criminal camaraderie has for men who would otherwise be powerless outsiders. Here is all the nihilism, hate, and intimidation, but also the freedom-and, yes, brotherhood-of the only truly American form of organized crime.

"From the Hardcover edition."

In the maelstrom of globalization and cyberspace, organized crime continues to defy definition. A diverse array of activities is perpetuated by criminal organizations, criminal groups and associations, and gangs, and it is clear that one specific label is no longer adequate. This book offers a uniquely global approach to organized crime and the multitude of forces that shape it in the 21st century. As well as discussing definitions of and the historical roots of organized crime, this book examines various forms of organized crime around the world in the US, Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean, Russia and Europe, Asia and Africa. This revised and updated new edition includes coverage of: the rise of the 'Ndrangheta in Italy and their global expansion; the impact of drug legalization on organized crime and the problem of methamphetamine; organ trading, money laundering, and animal poaching; changes in gang traditions and gangland penitentiaries; the decentralization of Mexican cartels, the growth of opium production in Myanmar, and the drug war in Africa; and the advancement of ISIS and the emergence of the Silk Road and the Dark Net. This book is essential reading for students engaged in the study of global and transnational organized crime, with features including chapter overviews, key terms, critical thinking questions, and case studies.

This book brings together empirical and theoretical case-study research on art and heritage crime. Drawn from a diverse group of researchers and professionals, the work presented explores contemporary conceptualisations of art crime within broader contexts. In this volume, we see 'art' in its usual forms for art crime scholarship: in paintings and antiquities. However, we also see art in fossils and in violins, chairs and jewellery, holes in the ground and even in the institutions meant to protect any, or all, of the above. And where there is art, there is crime. Chapters in this volume, alternatively, zoom in on specific objects, on specific locations, and on specific institutions, considering how each interact with the various conceptions of crime that exist in those contexts. This volume challenges the boundaries of what we understand as "art and heritage crimes" and displays that both art, and criminality related to art, is creative and unpredictable.

The infiltration of organised crime in the legitimate economy has emerged as a transnational phenomenon. This book constitutes an unprecedented study of the involvement of criminal groups in the legitimate economy and their infiltration in legal businesses, and is the first to bridge the research gap between money laundering and organised crime. It analyses the main drivers of this process, explaining why, how and where infiltration happens. Building on empirical evidence from the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the UK, Ireland, Italy, France and Finland, Organised Crime in European Businesses is divided into four parts. Part I explores the infiltration of legitimate businesses to conceal and facilitate illicit trafficking. Part II examines the infiltration of legitimate businesses to develop fraud schemes. Part III focuses on the infiltration of legitimate businesses to control the territory and influence policy makers. Part IV concludes by considering the research and policy implications in light of these findings. Bringing together leading experts and detailed case studies, this book considers the infiltration of organised crime in legitimate business around Europe. It is an ideal resource for students and academics in the fields of criminology, economics and sociology, as well as private sector practitioners, public officials and policy makers.

The true story of a music editor at VICE who tried to become the coolest reporter the company had ever had -- by becoming an international drug smuggler. In 2019, music reporter Slava P, an editor for VICE media, was sentenced to nine years in prison for recruiting friends into a scheme to smuggle cocaine from the U.S. into Australia. Five of them were already in jail. Immediately, Slava P was internationally infamous. Was he a victim of pressure to commit extreme acts for the sake of a good story? A product of a drug-obsessed work environment? Or a manipulator who pushed vulnerable young people into crime? Here, Slava P tells his side of the story: what exactly happened and how the precarious, dog-eat-dog atmosphere of a media company can lead the young, the naive, and the ambitious into taking crazy risks. Bad Trips is a story about drugs, hip-hop, influencers, and glamour, set against the backdrop of one of the world's most influential news and entertainment sites, VICE. Its cast of beautiful young people and semi-famous rappers passes from the seediest apartments to the most elegant of private clubs. Slava P's chronicling of his years at this famous hotbed of excess is a piercing insight into contemporary media culture. All royalties from the sale of Bad Trips go to co-author Brian Whitney.

Amsterdam, 2001. A shoot-out in the city's docklands leaves one man grievously injured and a rival drug dealer killed outright. The injured man is Tony Spencer from Coventry. Aka The Old Man. Once a prolific businessman, he is now considered Public Enemy No. 1 by the National Crime Squad and the head of several smuggling rings operating between the UK, Holland, Morocco, and Spain. At the age of 50, with bank robberies, counterfeiting, and several fortunes gained and lost behind him, he is on the run and living abroad. As Spencer's life hangs in the balance, his son Jason arrives in Amsterdam. While he prays for a miraculous recovery, he ponders who his father really is. He has raced anxiously to be by his bedside and yet he is somebody he doesn't know well at all. Jason begins digging in earnest. He begins to piece together the story of The Old Man's life. It's a story that is riddled with contradictions: a man who makes millions but saves nothing, prizes freedom but spends years inside, works in a violent world but who - seemingly - avoids violence. Spencer was absent, often in prison, for much of his upbringing but now, as his father recovers from the shooting, Jason begins to wonder. Maybe, if he can come to understand his father's life, he can begin to understand his own...

Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey explores the history of organized crime in Turkey and the roles which gangs and gangsters have played in the making of the Turkish state and Turkish politics. Turkey's underworld, which has been at the heart of several devastating scandals over the last several decades, is strongly tied to the country's long history of opium production and heroin trafficking. As an industry at the centre of the Ottoman Empire's long transition into the modern Turkish Republic, as important as the silk road had been in earlier centuries, the modern rise of the opium and heroin trade helped to solidify and complicate long-standing relationships between state officials and criminal syndicates. Such relationships produced not only ongoing patterns of corruption, but helped fuel and enable repeated acts of state violence. Drawing upon new archival sources from the United States and Turkey, including declassified documents from the Prime Minister's Archives of the Republic of Turkey and the Central Intelligence Agency, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey provides a critical window into how a handful of criminal syndicates played supporting roles in the making of national security politics in the contemporary Turkey. The rise of the 'Turkish mafia', from its origins in the late Ottoman period to its role in the 'deep state' revealed by the so-called Susurluk and Ergenekon scandals, is a story that mirrors troubling elements in the republic's establishment and emphasizes the transnational and comparative significance of narcotics and gangs in the country's past.

Few subjects elicit greater moral outrage than human trafficking. Media reports of dehumanizing practices such as slavery, abduction, child prostitution, and torture, along with shocking statistics, form the basis of public knowledge.

With sensitivity and candor, this book addresses the reality of human trafficking in Thailand, dissecting studies, presenting facts, and dismissing stereotypes. It focuses on the areas of fishing, agriculture, domestic work, sex work, and the trafficking of children, weaving individual narratives and official studies into the wider history of Thailand's changing economy and labor situation.

Sirok Sorajjakool is professor of religion, psychology, and counseling at Loma Linda University, California.

An astonishing read -- full of corruption, greed, strong drink and stronger language -- that reveals the rotten heart of the global economy - Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland Crackles along ... they deserve credit for exposing the dark underbelly of the jewellery industry and giving us another glimpse into the real cost of the global obsession with gold - Spectator __________ All that glitters is not gold. Gold is the new cocaine - and it's just as lucrative, dangerous, and destructive. __________ Dirty Gold is a searing expose on the booming gold mining industry and destruction on the land and people of Latin America. It looks closely at a small US firm in Miami that helped transform the city into the nation's No.1 importer of gold into the United States. The book follows the meteoric rise and fall of a group of drug traders known as 'the three amigos' who laundered narco money through gold illegally brought into the US and raked in millions before they were caught. Whilst they were making their millions, the humanitarian situation in Colombia, Peru, and many other countries deteriorated dramatically.

'How did a kid from the country who dreamed of joining the Victoria Police, end up on the wrong side of the bars? There are a lot of reasons, and I hope this story will help clarify some of them, not only for you, the reader, but for me too, because a lot of the time I am left shaking my head, wondering how things went so wrong.' Paul Dale knows he is tainted. After almost fifteen years as a cop, working in Homicide and rising to the rank of Detective Sergeant in the Victorian Drug Squad, he saw the worst of what people can do. But when he was accused and jailed firstly for drug offences and then for murder, Dale realised the murky world he was navigating was going to take him under too. Dale dealt with crims like Carl Williams, Terry Hodson and Tommy Ivanovic on the Melbourne streets. But when a burglary ended in Hodson's arrest, Dale's life started to unravel. He turned to Nicola Gobbo, a lawyer and friend he thought could help: the lawyer who became known as Lawyer X. Eventually exonerated of any crimes, Paul Dale's story reveals the shocking deals done at the highest levels of the Victorian Police Force and the damage wrought by Victoria Police's use of Lawyer X.

Arising from Soviet prison camps in the 1930s, career criminals known as 'thieves-in-law' exist in one form or another throughout post-Soviet countries and have evolved into major transnational organized criminal networks since the dissolution of the USSR. Intriguingly, this criminal fraternity established a particular stronghold in the republic of Georgia where, by the 1990s, they had formed a mafia network of criminal associations that attempted to monopolize protection in both legal and illegal sectors of the economy. This saturation was to such an extent that thieves-in-law appeared to offer an alternative, and just as powerful, system of governance to the state. Following peaceful regime change with 2003's Rose Revolution, Georgia prioritised reform of the criminal justice system generally, and an attack on the thieves-in-law specifically, using anti-organized crime policies that emulated approaches in Italy and America. Criminalization of association with thieves-in-law, radical reforms of the police and prisons, educational change, and controversial, draconian and extra-legal measures, amounted to arguably the most sustained anti-mafia policy implemented in any post-Soviet country - a policy the government believed would pull Georgia out of the Soviet past, declaring it a resounding success. Utilising unique access to primary sources of data, including police files, court cases, archives and expert interviews, Reorganizing Crime: Mafia and Anti-Mafia in Post-Soviet Georgia charts both the longevity and decline of the thieves-in-law, exploring the changes in the levels of resilience of members carrying this elite criminal status, and how this resilience has faded since 2005. Through an innovative and engaging analysis of this often misunderstood cohort of organized crime, this book engages with contemporary debates on the resilience of so-called dark networks, such as organized crime groups and terrorist cells, and tests theories of how and why success in challenging such organizations can occur.

In the last two decades, organised crime has grown more complex, posing evolving challenges for U.S. federal law enforcement. These criminals have transformed their operations in ways that broaden their reach and make it harder for law enforcement to combat them. They have adopted more-networked structural models, internationalised their operations, and grown more tech savvy. They are a significant challenge to U.S. law enforcement. This book examines a broad conceptualisation of organised crime in its narrative discussion of criminal activity. The analysis includes groups engaged in sustained criminal enterprises, such as, but not limited to: drug traffickers, mafia families, smugglers, violent gangs, and fraudsters. These operations may or may not have a transnational dimension to them, but they directly impact U.S. persons, businesses, and/or interests.

A biography of the spectacular rise and fall of Eddie Antar, better known as "Crazy Eddie," whose home electronics empire changed the world even as it turned out to be one of the biggest business scams of all timeBack in the fall of 2016 we heard the news about the passing of Eddie Antar, "Crazy Eddie" as he was known to millions of people, the man behind the successful chain of electronic stores and one of the most iconic ad campaigns in history. Few things evoke the New York of a particular era the way "Crazy Eddie! His prices are insaaaaane!" does. The journalist Herb Greenberg called his death the "end of an era" and that couldn't be more true. What's insane is that his story has never been told.Before Enron, before Madoff, before The Wolf of Wall Street, Eddie Antar's corruption was second to none in the U.S.A. The difference was that it was a street franchise, a local place that was in the blood stream of everyone's daily life in the 1970s and early '80s. And Eddie pulled it off with a certain style, an in your face blue collar chutzpah. Despite the fact that then Attorney General Ron Chertoff called him "the Darth Vader of capitalism" after the extent of the fraud was revealed, one of the largest SEC frauds in American history after Crazy Eddie's stores went public in 1984, Eddie was talked about fondly by the people who worked for him. They still do-there are myriads of ex-Crazy Eddie employee web pages that still attract fans.Many years have passed since the franchise went down in spectacular fashion but Crazy Eddie's moment has endured the way that iconic brands and characters do--one only need Google the media outpouring that accompanied his death. Maybe it's because it crystallized everything about 1970s New York almost perfectly, the merchandise and rise of consumer electronics (stereos!), the ads (cheesy!), the money (cash!). In Retail Gangster, investigative journalist Gary Weiss takes readers behind the scenes of one of the most unbelievable business scam stories of all time, reaffirming the old adage that the truth is often stranger than fiction.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the South Bronx had one of the highest per capita murder rates in America. As the use of crack cocaine surged, replacing heroin as the high of choice, dealers and gangs staked claims to territory and consumers through intimidation and murder, and families found themselves fractured by crime and incarceration. Chronicling the rise and fall of Sex Money Murder, one of the most violent gangs of its era, in this engrossing work of gritty urban reportage, Jonathan Green offers a visceral and devastating portrait of a New York City borough going down in flames, and of the detectives and prosecutors struggling to stem the tide of violence. Drawing on first-person interviews, police reports and court transcripts, Sex Money Murder, gives an extraordinary perspective on modern-day America.

When Debbie Calitz and her partner Bruno Pelizzari set sail from Dar es Salaam in October 2010, they could never have guessed that they would be making a voyage into the depths of hell.

Three days into their journey as crew on board the yacht Choizel, it was captured by Somali pirates who held Debbie and Bruno for ransom. For twenty months the pair was made to live in dark rooms while they were moved countless times between different locations and captors who subjected them – but especially Debbie – to untold horrors. Yet Debbie’s spiritual awareness, her sense of humanity and, ironically, her past history of being the victim of abuse, helped her to stay alive as she remained positive in the belief that she and Bruno would be rescued.

In this compelling book right from the depths of depravity Debbie Calitz reveals the details of their ordeal and their eventual rescue. It is a story of overwhelming courage from a woman who overcame all odds when freedom and dignity were a distant memory.