"As Gallan, Boyd and DI Asif Malik inch ever nearer to the man responsible for the shooting, they uncover a murderous conspiracy that will take them to the heart of one of London's most notorious criminal gangs. What they cannot know is that they've also embarked on a journey that will lead one of them straight into the rifle sights of the enemy."--BOOK JACKET.

Unlike much of the existing literature on organised crime, this book is less focused on the problem per se as it is on understanding its implications. The latter, especially in fragile and conflict regions, amount to strategic challenges for the state. Whereas most commentators would agree that criminal activities are harmful, this volume addresses the questions of ‘how?’, ‘for whom?’ and, controversially, ‘are they always harmful?’ The volume is authored by experts with multi-year experience analysing criminal and other non-state activities. They do so through different lenses - conflict and security, development, and technology - engaging academics, practitioners and policy makers. They offer a comprehensive integrated response to the challenges of transnational organised crime beyond traditional law-enforcement driven recommendations.

In this intriguing book, Petrus C. van Duyne and Michael Levi introduce the reader to an ever-unfolding series of problems, from mind-influencing substances to the complications of international drug regulation and the interaction between markets

In this book the author examines the illegal wildlife trade from multiple perspectives: the historical context, the impact on the environment, the scope of the problem internationally, the sociocultural demand for illegal products, the legal efforts to combat it, and several case studies from inside the trade. The illegal wildlife trade has become a global criminal enterprise, following in the footsteps of drugs and weapons. Beyond the environmental impact, financial profits from the illegal wildlife trade often fund organized crime groups and violent gangs that threaten public safety and security in myriad ways. This innovative volume covers several key questions surrounding the wildlife trade: why is there a demand for illegal wildlife products, which actors are involved in the trade, how is the business organized, and what are the harmful consequences. The author performed ethnographic fieldwork in three key markets: Russia, Morocco, and China, and has constructed a detailed picture of how the wildlife trade operates in these areas. Conversations with informants directly involved in the illegal business ensure unique insights into this lively black market. In the course of his journey the author follows the route of the illegal wildlife trade from poor poaching areas to rich business districts where corrupt officials, legally registered companies, wildlife farms and sophisticated criminal organizations all have a share. A fascinating look inside the world of poachers, smugglers and traders.

This book evaluates the impact of situational crime prevention measures implemented by social media platforms to identifying, blocking, and removing content linked to illegal traded medicines. It discusses the extent of social media usage in trafficking of medicines; the ease of access; visibility of the content; language of posts; products most traded; and types of posts. Research results support the hypothesis of the limited impact of these measures, due not to a lack of effectiveness but to asymmetrical implementation. This volume will be of interest to researchers, law enforcement, policy makers, social media groups, public health practitioners.

Investigate 100 of the world's most notorious crimes, including the Great Train Robbery, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the murders of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Were the perpetrators delusional, opportunist, or truly evil? Find out what really happened and how the cases were solved. Discover conmen with sheer verve, such as Victor Lustig who "sold" the Eiffel Tower to scrap dealers in 1925, adrenaline-fuelled escapes, and mind-bending exploits of pirates, kidnappers, and drug cartels. The Crime Book demystifies malware, cybercrimes, and Ponzi schemes and sets out the terrifying ploys of mass murderers from 16th-century Elizabeth Báthory who drained young girls' blood to the more recent exploits of Rosemary and Fred West. Like a virus, crime mutates and adapts. The Crime Book explains how pivotal moments in history opened up new opportunities for criminals, such as the smuggling of alcohol during the American Prohibition era. It also charts developments in justice and forensics including the Innocence Project, which used DNA testing to exonerate wrongly convicted convicts. It examines how the forces of law and order have fought back against crime, explaining ingenious sting operations such as tracking down the jewel thief Bill Mason and the final capture of murderer Ted Bundy. With a foreword from bestselling crime author Cathy Scott, The Crime Book is an enthralling introduction to humanity's darker side. Series Overview: Big Ideas Simply Explained series uses creative design and innovative graphics, along with straightforward and engaging writing, to make complex subjects easier to understand. These award-winning books provide just the information needed for students, families, or anyone interested in concise, thought-provoking refreshers on a single subject.

A groundbreaking investigation of how illicit commerce is changing the world by transforming economies, reshaping politics, and capturing governments.In this fascinating and comprehensive examination of the underside of globalization, Moises Naím illuminates the struggle between traffickers and the hamstrung bureaucracies trying to control them. From illegal migrants to drugs to weapons to laundered money to counterfeit goods, the black market produces enormous profits that are reinvested to create new businesses, enable terrorists, and even to take over governments. Naím reveals the inner workings of these amazingly efficient international organizations and shows why it is so hard — and so necessary to contain them. Riveting and deeply informed, Illicit will change how you see the world around you.

Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey explores the history of organized crime in Turkey and the roles which gangs and gangsters have played in the making of the Turkish state and Turkish politics. Turkey's underworld, which has been at the heart of several devastating scandals over the last several decades, is strongly tied to the country's long history of opium production and heroin trafficking. As an industry at the center of the Ottoman Empire's long transition into the modern Turkish Republic, as important as the silk road had been in earlier centuries, the modern rise of the opium and heroin trade helped to solidify and complicate long-standing relationships between state officials and criminal syndicates. Such relationships produced not only ongoing patterns of corruption, but helped fuel and enable repeated acts of state violence. Drawing upon new archival sources from the United States and Turkey, including declassified documents from the Prime Minister's Archives of the Republic of Turkey and the Central Intelligence Agency, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey provides a critical window into how a handful of criminal syndicates played supporting roles in the making of national security politics in the contemporary Turkey. The rise of the "Turkish mafia", from its origins in the late Ottoman period to its role in the "deep state" revealed by the so-called Susurluk and Ergenekon scandals, is a story that mirrors troubling elements in the republic's establishment and emphasizes the transnational and comparative significance of narcotics and gangs in the country's past.

Histories of Transnational Crime provides a broad, historical framework for understanding the developments in research of transnational crime over the centuries. This volume provides examples of transnational crime, and places them in a broad historical context, which has so far been missing from this field of study. The contributions to this comprehensive volume explore the causes and historical precursors of six main types of transnational crime: -piracy -human smuggling -arms trafficking -drug trafficking -art and antique trafficking -corporate crime. The historical contributions demonstrate that transnational crime is not a novel phenomenon of recent globalization and that, beyond organized crime groups, powerful individuals, governments and business corporations have been heavily involved. Through a systematic historical and contextual analysis of these types of transnational crime, the contributions to this volume provide a fundamental understanding of why and how various forms of transnational crime are still present in the contemporary world. In the past two decades, the study of transnational crime has developed from a subset of the study of organized crime to its own recognized field of study, covering distinct societal threats and requiring a particular approach.

A thrilling, eye-popping look at true crime in the billion-dollar art world. The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world--everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud. However, the extent of the economic and cultural damage that results from criminality in the global art scene rarely comes to light. The stories of high-stakes, brazen art crimes told by art experts Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm are by turns thrilling, disturbing, and unbelievable (the imagination for using art to commit crimes seems boundless). The authors also provide a well-founded analysis of what needs to change in the art market and at museums. From the authors of False Pictures, Real Money (about the Beltracchi art forgery case), Art and Crime includes a chapter on art owned by Donald Trump. It is a thoroughly researched, explosive, and highly topical book that uncovers the extraordinary and multifarious thefts of art and cultural objects around the world.