1990, ISBN: 0393027961

Gebundene Ausgabe

[EAN: 9780393027969], Gebraucht, guter Zustand, [PU: NY.1990. W.W. Norton & Co.], Jacket, red & black ½ cloth hardbound 8vo. 8º (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cov… Mehr…

[EAN: 9780393027969], Gebraucht, guter Zustand, [PU: NY.1990. W.W. Norton & Co.], Jacket, red & black ½ cloth hardbound 8vo. 8º (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. contents free of markings. dustwrapper in near fine cond. 1" scratch on front at top. not price clipped. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking , underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing ( # 1 in # line). 384p. b&w maps. b&w photo. illustrations. chronology. list of distinguished cadavers. notes. biblio. index. world history. conspiracy theory. secret societies. camorra.cosa nostra. luciano leggio. capo di tutti capi. cafe mille luci.salvatore inzerillo. stefano bontante. don giuseppe genco russo. big barbeque in appalachin. joe bonanno. don masino. cocaine. FBI. DEA. carlo gambino. heroin. thailand. turkish mafia. palermo. ~ The Sicilian Mafia, primary purveyor of heroin to the world, has been written off as finished many times. Hit by stupendous defections, tremendous revelations, spectacular arrests, trials, and convictions, it should by rights be dying or dead. In fact, it is stronger than ever. In a brilliant, chilling, and exceptionally authoritative account, Claire Sterling exposes this sinister and apparently indestructible crime consortium. Its rise to global power and unimaginable wealth began with a secret covenant agreed upon thirty-odd years ago, in a baroque chamber in the Grand Hotel Des Palmes in Palermo. There, amid gilded mirrors and frescoed ceilings, leaders of the American Mafia gave their Sicilian counterparts an exclusive franchise for the heroin market in the United States. Thus the Americans divested themselves of the risks while sharing in the profits; the Sicilians, building a multinational heroin cartel, rose to the summit of the international underworld. Today the American Mafia yields to them; the Sicilians, not the Americans, operate on a planetary scale; the center of Mafia power is in Palermo, not New York. "The head of the Octopus is here, here, HERE!" exclaimed an exasperated chief of detectives in Palermo when the press kept getting it wrong. Even as authorities announced their inevitable decline, Sicily's Men of Honor were in a stage of frightening expansion. Apart from creating and feeding much of the world's heroin habit, they have become the brokers for much of the world's cocaine as well. Indeed, the Sicilian Mafia is the only organized crime syndicate capable of moving both heroin and cocaine across oceans and continents in massive quantities. No law enforcers anywhere had an inkling of this until the 1980s. By then, Sicilian Mafiosi held strategic outposts from Bangkok, London, Munich, and Marseilles to Montreal, Caracas, Sao Paulo, and some twenty key cities in the United States. There was scarcely a country in Europe, Asia, Africa, or Western Hemisphere that they had not penetrated or corrupted in passing. What made them invisible for three decades was not so much their own guile as the innocence of the societies they victimized. Accustomed to dealing with mere neighborhood mobs, agents of the law could not alee in the Sicilian Mafia's transcontinental magnitude. They did not know what it was--0r feel the need D know. Their failure to look for information in their own archives, to compare notes with other countries, D link one criminal act to another and crimes of the resent to those of the past, was central to the success if a calamitous international conspiracy. The conspirators might still be invisible if the money in drugs had not incited them to raging, uncontrollable greed and a frenzy of bloodletting. The treat Sicilian Mafia War of 1981-83 left over a thousand dead: shot, stabbed, strangled, poisoned, bombed, beheaded. The killing drove dozens of ranking Men of Honor to turn to the law for the first time in over a century of Mafia history., Books<