Rare, romantic, and forever: The diamond industry depends on these myths to reap billions of dollars of profit. This sensational investigation explodes such fallacies and reveals how multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns create the impression of rarity and romance. It reveals a very secret and unromantic world, one that is dominated and controlled by a handful of mighty corporations. With Leonardo DiCaprio’s movie The Blood Diamond making more people than ever aware of the seamy side of the diamond trade, Janine Roberts’ explosive exposé, taking us through seven decades of intrigue and manipulation, is the right book at the right time.

Journalist and human rights activist Janine Roberts was funded for many years by a coalition of US and European churches to work on international human rights frontiers. This work led her to De Beers and its diamond cartel affiliates - after they clashed with an Australian Aboriginal community. She has now been researching and writing on De Beers and the diamond trade for over twenty years, during which time she has made several films, including The Diamond Empire, a feature length documentary shot in six continents, made for the BBC, Australia's ABC and WGBH (Frontline). Although this film was televised and critically acclaimed in the US and Canada, under pressure from De Beers it was severely edited by the BBC for broadcast in the UK and was completely suppressed in some other territories, including Southern Africa and Australia. Bertelsmann AG's British, Australian and Canadian Doubleday imprints then commissioned, paid for and advertised a major work by Ms. Roberts on diamonds - only to drop it at the very last moment, citing the "likelihood of litigation" by "notable and powerful businessmen and politicians." This book reveals everything - and more - that the BBC did not have the guts to broadcast and that Doubleday was scared to print.

We are the Rossetti's. The exiled "sixth family" of the New York mafia. We're the good guys. People don't fear us...much. They respect us. The five of us? We're the Brooklyn Brothers. And we protect what's ours. Don't ask me what made this girl different, what made her stand out. I'm not proud of it, but it wasn't exactly my first ever lap dance. The last thing I expect is for the same woman I've been obsessing over for two months to waltz right into my gym. Catalina "Cat" Vasquez is the most alluring, sensual woman I've ever met. She has secrets, and I want all of them. It's the only way I can protect her. Because it seems I'm not the only one who's been looking for her. Just my luck that I would fall for a woman who has connections with the Mexican cartel. Who would have thought her stalker would be the same man who's about to wage an all-out war on my turf? I'm a fighter by nature. I fight for what's mine. And I'm not about to lose to someone who wants to steal Cat away from me. If he thinks his guns will save him from my fists, he came to the wrong city.

Grasping. Avarice. Covetousness. Miserliness. Insatiable cupidity. Overreaching ambition. Desire spun out of control. The deadly sin of Greed goes by many names, appears in many guises, and wreaks havoc on individuals and nations alike. In this lively and generous book, Phyllis A. Tickle argues that Greed is "the Matriarch of the Deadly Clan," the ultimate source of Pride, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, Lust, and Anger. She shows that the major faiths, from Hinduism and Taoism to Buddhism and Christianity regard Greed as the greatest calamity humans can indulge in, engendering further sins and eviscerating all virtues. As the Sikh holy book Adi Granth asks: "Where there is greed, what love can there be?" Tickle takes a long view of Greed, from St. Paul to the present, focusing particularly on changing imaginative representations of Greed in Western literature and art. Looking at such works as the Psychomachia, or "Soul Battle" of the fifth-century poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, the paintings of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymous Bosch, the 1987 film Wall Street, and the contemporary Italian artist Mario Donizetti, Tickle shows how our perceptions have evolved from the medieval understanding of Greed as a spiritual enemy to a nineteenth-century sociological construct to an early twentieth-century psychological deficiency, and finally to a new view, powerfully articulated in Donizetti's mystical paintings, of Greed as both tragic and beautiful. Engaging, witty, brilliantly insightful, Greed explores the full range of this deadly sin's subtle, chameleon-like qualities, and the enormous destructive power it wields, evidenced all too clearly in the world today.

The definitive, classic account of the fall of the House of Baring, the oldest merchant bank in London, in 1995 and the ultimate rogue trader, Nick Leeson, who brought down the venerable institution with speculative investing. John Gapper, associate editor of the Financial Times, and his coauthor Nicholas Denton, now founder of Gawker Media, interviewed all the major players involved in the collapse of one of England's oldest banks. All That Glitters reveals the Faustian deal struck between the whizz-kid derivatives traders who seemed to be bringing in huge profits and the old guard who were happy to pocket them without asking too many questions. Gapper and Denton present a thrilling, in-depth account of Nick Leeson's motives and methods for hiding the unauthorized speculative trading as well as the final days of Barings and the last-ditch attempts by politicians and bankers to save the bank.

"From class struggle to crass struggle; that is the defining feature of the times. And the genius of today's political economy has been to convert what used to be a potential life-and-death conflict between haves and have-nots into a minor disagreement between have-lots and wanna-have-mores." Why do those who are extremely well off spend their money in socially and environmentally damaging ways? How do crooks, con artists, and counterfeiters function in the hypercharged markets catering To The whims and fancies of the very rich? and why do so many of the less fortunate insist on slavishly emulating the über rich, spending way beyond what their limited means allow? A critique of the lifestyles of today's ultra rich bolstered by old-fashioned muckraking,Crass Struggleprovides a sharp, original, and often humorous commentary on "the bad side of the good life, The underbelly of the potbelly." Taking the reader inside today's luxury trades, R.T. Naylor visits gold mines spewing arsenic and diamond fields spreading human misery, knocks on the doors of purveyors of luxury seafood as the oceans empty, samples wares of merchants offering top-vintage wines (or at least top-vintage labels), calls on companies running trophy-hunting expeditions and dealers in exotic pets high on endangered lists, and much more. What stands out is that so many high-priced items glitter on the outside, but have more than a spot of rot at the core. Through a series of outrageous but all too true stories,Crass Strugglereveals the appalling consequences of consumerism run amok and its links to repetitive financial swindles And The alarming degradation of the biophysical environment.

What happens in Vegas doesn't necessarily stay in Vegas and the proof is in this lively and entertaining compilation of stories chronicling decades of decadence, celebrity shenanigans, and political corruption, as well as the glitz and glamour of the casinos that pass for everyday life in Las Vegas. Underneath the city's present success lies many infamous tales of excess and debauchery. Using new information from recently released FBI documents, Jeff Burbank brings to life the Vegas mob in its heyday, recounting never-before-heard tales of the mobsters who made Vegas what it is today. But mobsters aren't the only ones with skeletons in Las Vegas' closet. Over the years, Hollywood stars have had their share of the limelight. Burbank has uncovered the many fateful, and often amusing, incidents that have befallen the glamorous and here he recalls the details of the darkest moments in the lives of the famous and foolish: Marilyn Monroe's quickie divorce; boxer Sonny Liston's secret heroin deal just before his death; The Doors singer Jim Morrison's arrest for fighting on the Strip; and the hookers who trick-rolled comedian Tommy Smothers in his hotel room. With fast-paced and entertaining prose, Burbank captures the true stories from Las Vegas' seedy underbelly that have led to America's 100-year fascination with the aptly named Sin City.

ANOTHER TRUE CRIME STORY FROM J. NORTH CONWAY—NOW IN PAPERBACK! The riveting story of one of America’s most notorious crimes and the mysterious man behind it “Engrossing. . . . Conway skillfully paints a backdrop of fierce and flamboyant personalities who paraded across the Gilded Age. . . . [H]e capably recounts his story against a background of glitter and greed.” —Publishers Weekly “A page-turning account of one of the most brazen crimes of our time.” —Reader’s Digest “Conway, a college prof and ex-newspaper man, covers this ancient tale in a way that makes it feel like a hot news story.” —New York Post King of Heistsis a spellbinding and unprecedented account of the greatest bank robbery in American history, which took place on October 27, 1878, when thieves broke into the Manhattan Savings Institution and stole nearly $3 million in cash and securities—around $50 million in today’s terms. Bringing the notorious Gilded Age to life in a thrilling narrative, J. North Conway tells the story of those who plotted and carried out this infamous robbery, how they did it, and how they were tracked down and captured. The robbery was planned to the minutest detail by criminal mastermind George Leonidas Leslie—a society architect and ladies’ man whose double life as the nation’s most prolific bank robber led him to be dubbed the “King of the Bank Robbers.” An absorbing tale of greed, sex, crime, betrayal, and murder, King of Heistsblends all the richness of history with the thrills of the best fiction.