Saviano says he can no longer look at a beach or a map without seeing cocaine, and many will share that view after reading...
An inside account of the international cocaine trade.
Italian investigative journalist Saviano has lived under armed guard since the 2006 publication of his bestselling debut, Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’s Organized Crime System. This revealing new book, with a strong focus on Mexico’s cartels, surges with fast-moving prose detailing the lives of drug lords and pushers, the inner workings of their violent world, and how their lucrative business (between $25 billion and $50 billion annually) affects all our lives. “The world’s drowning in unhappiness,” he writes. “Mexico has the solution: cocaine.” An obsessive (“My White Whale is cocaine”), Saviano says reporting on drugs—in the hope it will foster change—gives meaning to his life. His stories offer a close glimpse of Mexico’s cartels: the biggest, the Sinaloa cartel, owns 160 million acres. La Familia cartel recruits in drug rehabs and lavishes money on peasants and churches. The Knights Templar cartel, with a rigid honor code, portrays itself as a protector of widows and orphans. Between 2006 and 2011, such cartels killed 31 Mexican mayors and more than 47,000 other people. Working like remarkably efficient, moneymaking machines, they use Africa, with its poor border controls, as a drug warehouse, build submarines (capable of carrying 10 tons of cocaine) in hidden jungle shipyards, and teach aspiring mules how to package and ingest cocaine-filled capsules at a school in Curacao. Saviano describes the complexities of money laundering, how world banks help make it possible, and the many ways in which drugs are smuggled: in paintings, handcrafted doors, frozen fish, and more. Throughout, the author provides vivid stories of the lives of well-known drug bosses and their minions.
Saviano says he can no longer look at a beach or a map without seeing cocaine, and many will share that view after reading this dark, relentless, hyperreal report.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-550-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Calling his February 1983 arrest ``the day help arrived,'' London civil-servant Dennis Nilsen, a former constable, readily confessed to the murder and dismemberment of 15 young men who'd visited his apartment. Here, Masters (The Life of E.F. Benson- -1992), with the full cooperation of Nilsen, tells the serial killer's story in shocking detail. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, Masters says, Nilsen has a penchant for ``florid necrophilia.'' But unlike Dahmer, Nilsen has proven extroverted and loquacious, with his prison journals, poetry, and letters to Masters thoroughly describing his crimes (complete with sketches). Nilsen was arrested after a plumber found bits of flesh clogging the piping at the killer's home. He confessed almost immediately, informing detectives that he'd strangled three youths at the current address and ``about thirteen'' at his previous one. While Nilsen had buried some remains in a nearby garden after chopping and burning them, he directed police to a bathroom cupboard and tea chest, where they found boiled skulls, as well as hands, legs, and odd portions of flesh he'd yet to dispose of. Masters writes perceptively and revealingly about Nilsen's early years in Scotland, his military service, and his adulthood; he also relates Nilsen's grisly description of December 30, 1978, ``the night things began to go terribly wrong'' in his search for companionship through London's ``soul-destroying pub scene'' and ``arid homosexual subculture.'' With disturbing matter-of-factness, Masters details the first killing—similar to all the rest—of an Irish youth: strangling the victim; bathing, dressing, and then undressing the body; attempting sex with the corpse; burying it; digging it up and dressing it again; and, finally, dismembering and disposing of the remains. Genuinely frightening—and not for weak stomachs. (Thirty b&w photos and line drawings—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42425-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
Knife-edged retelling of a killing in California's ritzy residential country club Rancho Mirage, in which the sadistic victim heedlessly orchestrates his own murder by way of his mentally troubled wife. Saroyan (Friends in the World, 1992, etc.) writes more coolly here than ever before and few will deny his objectivity, although he clearly deplores the court's final verdict of first-degree murder, with no insanity plea influencing the wife's sentence of 25-years-to-life. Beautiful ninth-grade dropout Andrea Claire, a lifelong victim of males and addicted to serving them, leaped from high-priced call girl to wife of elderly Bob Sand, a millionaire bound to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis but gripped by a boundlessly kinky sex drive. This was her fifth disastrous marriage, his second, and at the time of his death she was 39, he 69. She married, she said, not for money but companionship. But jealous Bob curtailed her social life, kept her running about the house nude, enjoyed making up rape fantasies and having Andrea act them out while he masturbated or took endless Polaroids of her bareness. Andrea liked this sex play with her fun-loving, well- read, intellectual husband (as she saw him) and had no qualms when he showed his photo collection to visitors. But she began reacting badly to his ever more intense spanking-and-rape fantasies, which echoed a real rape endured in her teens: Her none-too-stable mind at last burst as he drew for her a terrible scene, causing her to go into a blackout and stab him 26 times. The prosecutor bent himself fiercely to proving her sane, and won, but the reader groans. Told through a film of ice—but may Saroyan's success here not trap him exclusively in the true-crime genre. (Photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 23, 1993
ISBN: 0-942637-95-X
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Barricade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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