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
A heart-stopping study of the infamous Stephanie Bryan murder trial, four decades after the crime. Farrell, an Edgar Award winner (Swift Justice, 1992), was a rewrite man at the San Jose Mercury News when word broke of the Bryan kidnapping, a case that shocked the sleepy Berkeley community. Stephanie was the pretty, brainy teenage daughter of a doctor who had recently moved to California from Massachusetts. Her mother had shown her a shortcut from school, and when Stephanie was walking home one September afternoon, tragedy struck in the form of Burton Abbott, a married 27-year-old studying to be an accountant. Stephanie apparently got into Abbott's car, and her family never saw her again. Farrell makes excellent use of newspaper accounts of the mounting horror throughout California as it became clear that Stephanie had been kidnapped. When her body was found in a shallow grave near Abbott's mountain home, the case was sealed against him. Farrell chooses to focus on the Abbott family and on Burton in particular, a man so emotionally distant that the doctor who administered a lie detector test to him said that of all the men he had ever examined, ``Herman Goering and Burton Abbott were the most self-centered.'' While Stephanie never fully comes alive to the reader, the description of the singular Abbott family and the trial is as compelling as it is unnerving. Abbott never admits his guilt, despite such evidence as Stephanie's purse and muddy bra buried in his basement. After little more than a year on death row, Abbott was put to death in the gas chamber. Two years later, emotionally devastated, Stephanie's father died of a sudden heart attack. A chilling look at an old crime that seems sadly modern; true-crime buffs won't want to miss it. (For another look at this case, as well as other kidnappings in America, see below, Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped.)
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-17009-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prizewinning team of Naifeh and Smith (Jackson Pollock, 1990, etc.) collaborate on this haunting, compulsively readable account of how a ``typical'' middle-class family produced a serial rapist and murderer. When 28-year-old nuclear engineer Danny Starrett was arrested in 1989 for kidnapping and rape, his family rallied reflexively to deny his guilt. Danny was their ``hero,'' a ``model child,'' the ``perfect son.'' Never mind his unsettling behavior of late: extended absences from work, a disheveled appearance, an unexplained estrangement from his Mormon wife and baby daughter. Not to mention a long history of odd behavior, some of it traceable to two childhood head injuries (paralyzing headaches, a tendency to black out), some of it not (a youthful obsession with drawing pictures of devices for chopping girls into dog meat). Naifeh and Smith produce long stretches of Danny's jailhouse journal, which chillingly describes how he concealed his mental illness and serial crimes from a doting family. These passages are deftly juxtaposed with an account of how Danny's mother, Gerry Starrett, finally awakened to her son's insanity, guiding him through the criminal justice system that demanded his death for the murder of a 15-year- old Georgia girl. (Danny was ultimately sentenced to 10 consecutive life sentences for crimes committed in South Carolina and Georgia.) But the book is too narrowly focused on Danny's indomitable mother: What of the other family members, to whom Danny was also a ``stranger''? And while the authors know how to make their story accessible to the general reader, they give short shrift to the law, dismissing complicated issues, such as the various state standards for mental competence, as mere ``legalese.'' A riveting though slightly simplistic story of crime and punishment, mental illness, and mother love. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93973-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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