In the early hours of 8 August 1963, a crime took place which simultaneously captured the imagination of the general public, and shook the British Establishment to the core, in a way that no criminal event had ever done before. The Great Train Robbery, as it subsequently became known, involved the audacious high-jacking of one of Her Majesty's mail trains, netting the sixteen strong gang over GBP2.6 million, equivalent to almost GBP50 million in 2016. One by one, thanks to the tenacity of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad officers charged with bringing the perpetrators to justice, all known members of the gang were brought to trial and, with one exception, were subsequently convicted and sentenced to imprisonment. However, there was a great deal of public outrage at the length of the some of the sentences handed out by the trial judge, with many of the gang facing the prospect of up to 30 years in prison. Yet, for many of those involved both directly and indirectly in the Great Train Robbery, the story does not end there. Over the coming years, a series of tragedies, misfortunes, illnesses and downright bad luck were to blight the lives of a significant number of the guilty and the innocent. The Curse of the Great Train Robbery tells the thrilling story of the robbery and reveals the series of subsequent events which will leave readers to ponder whether this was a crime which was both cursed and doomed to fail from the very outset.

In the United States, the popular symbols of organised crime are still Depression-era figures such as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer Lansky - thought to be heads of giant, hierarchically organised mafias. In Double Crossed, Michael Woodiwiss challenges perpetuated myths to reveal a more disturbing reality of organised crime - one in which government officials and the wider establishment are deeply complicit. Delving into attempts to implement policies to control organised crime in the US, Italy and the UK, Woodiwiss reveals little-known manifestations of organised crime among the political and corporate establishment. A follow up to his 2005 Gangster Capitalism, Woodiwiss broadens and brings his argument up to the present by examining those who constructed and then benefited from myth making. These include the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, opportunistic American politicians and officials and, more recently, law enforcement bureaucracies, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Organised crime control policies now tend to legitimise repression and cover-up failure. They do little to control organised crime. While the US continues to export its organised crime control template to the rest of the world, opportunities for successful criminal activity proliferate at local, national and global levels, making successful prosecutions irrelevant.