Showing titles in Organized Crime

On 28 November 2004, banker and father-of-two Alistair Wilson was shot three times on his doorstep in a killing more commonly associated with inner city gang wars than a sleepy seaside town in the Scottish Highlands. All these years later, the question remains: why? Over the years, lines of enquiry have been investigated and dismissed, gossip has spread, theories offered and rumours debated at length. And yet, so long after Alistair's death, no arrest has ever been made and precious few motives have been made public.

In the early 1990s, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and his brother, Terry "Southwest T", rose up from the slums of Detroit to build one of the largest cocaine empires in American history: the Black Mafia Family. They socialized with music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, did business with New York's king of bling Jacob "The Jeweler" Arabo, and built allegiances with rap superstars Young Jeezy and Fabolous. Yet even as BMF was attracting celebrity attention, its crew members struck fear in a city.

This is the untold story of the American federal agent who captured the world's most wanted drug lord. Every generation has its larger-than-life criminal legend living beyond the reach of the law: Billy the Kid, Al Capone, Ronnie Biggs, Pablo Escobar. But for every one of these criminals, there's a Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett or Slipper of the Yard. For Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán-Loera, aka 'El Chapo' - the 21st century's most notorious criminal - that man is DEA Special Agent Cole Merrell.

As an undercover police officer with the drugs squad, Neil Woods regularly risked his life on the streets, dealing with some of the most violent and unpredictable criminals in Britain. Good Cop, Bad War is a unique story about a man with a striking ability to infiltrate and extinguish drug gangs but who, as the success of his operations grows, becomes disillusioned with the war on drugs, as he sees how it demonizes those who need help whilst empowering the very worst elements in society.

They have names like Barmy Bernie, Daft Donald, and Steamin' Sammy. They like lager (in huge quantities), the queen, football clubs (especially Manchester United), and themselves. Their dislike encompasses the rest of the known universe, and England's soccer thugs express it in ways that range from mere vandalism to riots that terrorize entire cities. Now, Bill Buford, editor of the prestigious journal Granta, enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure.

They are everywhere, the thieves and their people. Masters of secrecy. Until now we have detected their presence only by what they leave behind. A body in a burned-out Audi. Workers riddled with bullets in the Kazakh desert. A rigged election in Zimbabwe. A British banker silenced and humiliated for trying to expose the truth about the City of London. They have amassed more money than most countries. But what they are really stealing is power.

In 1946, Italy became a democratic Republic, thereby entering the family of modern Western nations. But deep within Italy there lurked a forgotten curse: three major criminal brotherhoods, whose methods had been honed over a century of experience. As Italy grew, so did the mafias. Sicily's Cosa Nostra, the camorra from Naples, and the mysterious 'ndrangheta from Calabria stood ready to enter the wealthiest and bloodiest period of their long history. Italy made itself rich by making scooters, cars and handbags.

In July 2011, the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was drifting through the treacherous Gulf of Aden when a crew of pirates attacked and set her ablaze in a devastating explosion. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for Lloyd's of London, inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. Soon after his inspection, he was murdered. Dead in the Water is a shocking expose of the criminal inner-workings of international shipping, an old-world industry at the backbone of our global economy.

It's men like Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone who gave Hell's Kitchen its name. In the mid-1970s, these two longtime friends take the reins of New York's Irish mob, using brute force to give it hitherto unthinkable power. Jimmy, a charismatic sociopath, is the leader. Mickey, whose memories of Vietnam torture him daily, is his enforcer. Together they make brutality their trademark, butchering bodies or hurling them out the window.

The Outlaw Ocean is a riveting, adrenalin-fuelled tour of a vast, lawless and rampantly criminal world that few have ever seen: the high seas. There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to the unbridled extremes of human behaviour and activity.

Koh Tao, a small island in the Gulf of Thailand, surrounded by pristine beaches, swathed in sunshine, and a mecca for tourists, divers, and backpackers. But “Turtle Island” has its dark side. In 2014, Koh Tao was the site of the brutal double murders of two British backpackers, but theirs weren’t the only suspicious backpacker deaths.

Fashionably dressed, the charismatic but deeply flawed Shelby family blind enemies by slashing them with the disposable safety razor blades stitched in to the peaks of their flat caps, as they fight bloody gangland wars involving Irish terrorists and the authorities led by a devious Home Secretary, Winston Churchill. But who were the real Peaky Blinders? Did they really exist? Well-known social historian, broadcaster and author, Carl Chinn, has spent decades searching them out.

The Real Top Boys reveals the lives of the street gangs who have taken over, and now rule, dozens of corners of the UK's capital. Best-selling true crime author Wensley Clarkson takes us on a tour of the housing estates and volatile neighbourhoods where pride, rivalry and revenge are the codes people live and die by.

In Spam Nation, investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs unmasks the criminal masterminds driving some of the biggest spam and hacker operations targeting Americans and their bank accounts. Tracing the rise, fall, and alarming resurrection of the digital mafia behind the two largest spam pharmacies - and countless viruses, phishing, and spyware attacks - he delivers the first definitive narrative of the global spam problem and its threat to consumers everywhere.

At home, Richard Kuklinski was a dedicated suburban family man; on the street, he was the Iceman, a professional hit man and lethal scam artist, a man so heartless he kept one of his victims frozen for over two years to disguise the time of death. His personal body count was over 100, but the police couldn’t touch him. Then undercover agent Dominick Polifrone posed as a mobster and began a deadly game of cat and mouse. The Iceman chronicles Kuklinski’s grisly career and exposes his murderous double life.

Danielle has a safe, happy childhood growing up in West London, but her bright future fades as she turns her back on school for gang life and crime. Betrayed by the police after a brutal gang rape, she finds protection under the wing of organised criminals and falls in love with the local ‘top boy’. However, her allegiances bring terror to her doorstep when gun-toting rivals target her flat – and the authorities answer by taking away her baby. Heartbroken, Danielle spirals deeper into gang life and becomes a key player in a sprawling county lines operation.

A sworn member of the Colombo crime family in New York City, Michael Franzese was considered the biggest moneymaker in the mob since Al Capone. At age 35, he was number 18 on Fortune Magazine's list of the 50 most wealthy and powerful Mafia bosses in America. But then he did the unthinkable. He quit the mob. Franzese met Camille Garcia, who turned his world upside down with her innocent beauty. He fell in love with her, married her, and began a new life that didn't include the Mafia.

Shaun Attwood, former ecstasy kingpin in Arizona turned author and podcast-host, has gained a reputation for earning the trust of some of the world's most dangerous people, including gangsters, serial killers, and mafia enforcers. Drawing on his many hours of interview material, along with new content exclusive to the book, Shaun collates a collection of hard-hitting conversations with ten of the most dangerous murderers he's ever met.

His name was Antonio, but they would call him Nem. From the infamous favela of Rocinha in Rio, he was a hardworking young father forced to make a decision that would turn his world upside down. Nemesis is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum in Rio, the head of a drug cartel and perhaps Brazil’s most wanted criminal. A man who tried to bring welfare and justice to a playground of gang culture and destitution while everyone around him drew guns and partied.

Barry Seal flew cocaine and weapons worth billions of dollars into and out of America in the 1980s. After he became a government informant, Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel offered a million for him alive and half a million dead. But his real trouble began after he threatened to expose the dirty dealings of George HW Bush.

If you think you know everything about the East End's toughest gangsters, think again. Meet Linda Calvey, a.k.a. the Black Widow. Growing up in the East End of London, Linda falls in with gangsters including the Krays, Freddie Foreman and Ronnie Cook. When the love of her life, Mickey Calvey, is gunned down on a job gone wrong, Linda resolves to carry on his work. But in 1990, after years of living in fear of her lover Ronnie Cook, Linda finds herself accused of his murder in a trial that shocks the nation. Still, Linda sticks to her code of honour, refusing to confess. Until now.

If you've heard any news report on the upsurge in knife crime recently, you'll have heard the words 'county lines'. From the street slang that was once known as 'going country' - it sees powerful drugs gangs supplying outside of the capital through an underworld 'emerging markets enterprise', using children as young as 12 and vulnerable men and women to do their dirty work. Teens whose bereaved relatives assume they led ordinary lives, who tell us they were 'good kids', suddenly end up stabbed to death with no seeming motive.

The benefits of living in a digital, globalised society are enormous; so too are the dangers. The world has become a law enforcer’s nightmare and every criminal’s dream. We bank online, shop online, date, learn, work and live online. But have the institutions that keep us safe on the streets learned to protect us in the burgeoning digital world? Have we become complacent about our personal security – sharing our thoughts, beliefs and the details of our daily lives with anyone who cares to relieve us of them?

FINLAND TRUE CRIME - TRUE CRIMES - REAL CRIME CASES. n this sixth volume of his True Crime series, Germany's bestselling True Crime author Adrian Langenscheid once again unleashes heart-pounding, addictive reading. This breathtaking and deeply harrowing portrait of the human abyss arouses powerful emotions due to its cool, factually neutral descriptions. Free of any sensationalism, sixteen True Crime short stories retell some of the most spectacular Finnish criminal cases in recent decades.

Questa è una storia di traffico di cocaina. I protagonisti sono i produttori, i distributori e le polizie di tre nazioni. Ma questa è anche la storia di una piena, un'onda di piena lenta e inesorabile che arriva imprevista e sale fino a travolgere la vita di un giovane uomo. È la storia di Gianfranco Franciosi, che grazie al suo talento di meccanico nautico, viene suo malgrado coinvolto in un traffico di cocaina proveniente dal Sud America e inizia a collaborare con la polizia italiana diventando di fatto un infiltrato.

Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, Ronnie Biggs, the Krays.... All have become folk heroes, glamorised and romanticised, even when they killed. But where are their female equivalents? Where are the street robbers, gang leaders, diamond thieves, gold smugglers and bank robbers? Queens of the Underworld reveals the incredible story of female crooks from the 17th century to the present.

In Kilo, Toby Muse takes us deeper into the mechanism of the drug trade than ever before, following a kilo of cocaine as it travels from its origins to the street. On the ground in the drug war for over a decade, earning the trust of those involved on all sides, Muse takes us with him through the endless blood-soaked horror and economic logic, at every level of the journey of the world’s most alluring and dangerous drug. We come to meet, and ultimately understand, the tainted personal psychology and motivations of each player in this dark El Dorado.

In the mid-1970s, at the age of 29, Stephen Bentley, a fresh-faced detective, turned himself into Steve Jackson, a dope-smoking, hard-drinking hippie. His time spent undercover with a gang making and distributing LSD helped bring down two criminal networks - but the operation also led to deep personal aftershocks felt long after the case closed.

The Don: 36 Rules of the Bosses is the fascinating culmination of author RJ Roger’s extensive research into the Italian-American Cosa Nostra. Analyzing more than 100 years of underworld history, Roger has distilled the behavior of the bosses of the five New York Mafia families—the most powerful in the United States—into 36 rules. Unwritten until codified in The Don, these rules were the foundation of the bosses’ success for over a century.

Incarceration has a long and inglorious history, from dungeons in the bowels of castles to oppressive penal colonies in Australia. Karen Farrington brings this history up to the 21st century, exploring some of the world's worst prisons, from Alcatraz to Pollsmoor, and the unending battles that rage between convicts and warders. Inside the prison walls, gangs rule, guards devise sadistic punishments, and newcomers suffer abuse at the hands of experienced tormentors.