This revealing first-person narrative, by one of the founders of the Witness Protection Program and a personal protector to more than five hundred informants, offers an eye-opening, dead-on authentic perspective on the safeguard institution. How did law enforcement’s frustration with the criminal underworld and a serpentine series of hit-or-miss rules and mistakes give rise to one of the most significant and endlessly fascinating government-run programs of the 20th century?In 1967,...

When U.S. Marshal John Partington suddenly found himself protecting the family of renowned mobster Joe "The Animal" Barboza, he made up the rules as he went along. Among Partington's diverse activities: managing a rotating crew of U.S. Marshals; chasing the family cat; convincing Barboza's wife not to leave; keeping the witness, his wife, and their child alive; and transporting the witness to and from hearings in the face of death threats. Unbenownst to him, this experience would lead to h...

As a cop, Ron Previte was corrupt. As a mobster he was brutal. And in his final role, as a confidential informant to the FBI, Previte was deadly. The Last Gangster is his story—the story of the last days of the Philadelphia Mob, and of the clash of generations that brought it down once and for all. For thirty-five years, Ron Previte roamed the underworld. A six–foot, three-hundred–pound capo in the Philadelphia-South Jersey crime family, he ran every mob scam and gambit from drug ...

'Next to Curtis Warren, the Krays were pathetic minnows.' --THE OBSERVERCurtis Warren is an underworld legend, the Liverpool scally who took the methods of the street-corner drug pusher and elevated them to an art form. He forged direct links with the cocaine cartels of Colombia, the heroin godfathers of Turkey, the cannabis growers of Morocco and the ecstasy labs of Holland and Eastern Europe. His drugs went around the world, from the clubs of Manchester and Glasgow to the beaches...

The riveting New York Times bestseller by the award-winning columnist—now with a stunning new afterword detailing Whitey Bulger's capture.For years their familiar story was of two siblings who took different paths out of South Boston: William "Billy" Bulger, former president of the Massachusetts State Senate; and his brother James "Whitey" Bulger, a vicious criminal who became the FBI's second most-wanted man after Osama Bin Laden. While Billy cavorted with...

The stories that inspired the TV drama series. Made in Melbourne; slayed in Sydney. This was Australia's underbelly. Chris 'Rentakill' Flannery was a Melbourne gunman who sold his services to Sin City's highest bidder. He went on the missing list because he didn't realise the future belonged to those who controlled pills and powders, not pistols. A world of corrupt cops, bent politicians and beautiful women who fell for rich gangsters. And a few detectives trying to stop the tidal wave.

One Sunday morning in 1993 a 16-year-old girl named Eliza Claps goes missing from a church in the centre of Potenza, Italy. Shortly before her disappearance, Elisa had met Danilo Restivo, a strange local boy with a fetish for cutting women's hair on the back of buses. Elisa's family are convinced that Resitvo is responsible for their daughter's disappearance, but he is protected by local big-wigs: by his Sicilian father, by a doctor with links to organised crime, by a priest who had vices ...

Many people are familiar with the story of Al Capone, the “untouchable” Chicago gangster best known for orchestrating the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. But few are aware that Capone’s remarkable story began in the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn, New York. Tutored by the likes of infamous mobsters Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale, young Capone’s disquieting demeanor, combined with the “technical advice” he learned from these insidious pedagogues, contributed to the molding of a brutal criminal...

The "riveting" true story of the Vietnamese gang that terrorized Manhattan's Chinatown, from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Westies ( Newsday).They are children of the Vietnam War. Born and raised in the wasteland left by American bombs and napalm, these young men know a particular brand of cruelty—which they are about to export to the United States. When the Vietnamese gangs come to Chinatown, they adopt a name remembered f...

A stunning exposé of prostitution in Canada, where a criminal syndicate traffics young women across the country, selling their bodies and murdering them at will.Annie Mae Wilson was nineteen years old on the night she died. After five years working the streets of Nova Scotia, she had found a new pimp and cut ties with supermarket bag boy Bruno, who had called himself her man. Bruno was furious and demanded to be compensated. When Annie Mae refused, he lost his tempe...

“You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.” —Epictetus“Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will follow.” —Matthew 24:28Body Brokers is an audacious, disturbing, and compellingly written investigative exposé of the lucrative business of procuring, buying, and selling human cadavers and body parts.Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who ...

The daily robbing, bashing, drugging, extortion and murder of foreign tourists on Thai soil, along with numerous scandals involving unsafe facilities and well established scams, has led to frequent predictions that Thailand's multi-billion dollar tourist industry will self-destruct. Instead tourist numbers more than doubled in the decade to 2014. The world might not have come to the hometowns of the many visitors fascinated by Thailand, but it certainly came to the Land of Smiles.W...