the true story of an innocent Australian's eleven years in Indonesia's most notorious prisons. Christopher Parnell was on holiday with his family in Bali when the unthinkable happened. their holiday complex was raided and police claimed to have uncovered 12.5kg of hashish. Parnell and a travelling companion were immediately arrested. His companion was later released and left Bali as soon as the charges against him were dropped. While Parnell awaited trial, his friend signed a statutory declaration back in Australia to say that the drugs had belonged to him. He admitted he had been afraid to face Indonesian justice but believed the mix up would be rectified and Parnell released. Instead, Parnell was sentenced to the death penalty. that sentence was later reduced to 20 years and a fine of US$30,000. Over the next 11 years, Parnell was subjected to unthinkable sessions of torture. Left to starve and fight every day for his survival, Parnell became a man forced to eat everything from cockroaches to human flesh. the true story of an innocent Australian's eleven years in Indonesia's most notorious prisons. Christopher Parnell was on holiday with his family in Bali when the unthinkable happened. their holiday complex was raided and police claimed to have uncovered 12.5kg of hashish. Parnell and a travelling companion were immediately arrested. His companion was later released and left Bali as soon as the charges against him were dropped. While Parnell awaited trial, his friend signed a statutory declaration back in Australia to say that the drugs had belonged to him. He admitted he had been afraid to face Indonesian justice but believed the mix up would be rectified and Parnell released. Instead, Parnell was sentenced to the death penalty. that sentence was later reduced to 20 years and a fine of US$30,000. Over the next 11 years, Parnell was subjected to unthinkable sessions of torture. Left to starve and fight every day for his survival, Parnell became a man forced to eat everything from cockroaches to human flesh.

A magical story of a Crusade-era bookseller who embarks on a journey through the Islamic world’s great medieval cities, winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature In the epic fashion of the great Arab explorers and travel writers of the Middle Ages, scribe and bookworm Mazid al-Hanafi narrates this journey from his remote village in the Arabian Desert. Dreaming of grand libraries, his passion for the written word draws him into a secret society of book smugglers and into the famed cultural capitals of the period—Baghdad, Jerusalem, Cairo, Granada, and Cordoba. He discovers a dangerous new world of ideas and experiences the cultural diversity of the Islamic Golden Age, its sects, philosophical schools, wars, and ways of life. Omaima Al-Khamis’s magical storytelling and her vivid descriptions of time and place trace a route through ancient cities and cultures and immerse us in a distant era, uncovering the intellectual debates and struggles which continue to rage today.

At once a non-fiction thriller and a moral maze, this is one man's epic story of trying to find a safe place in the world. When Ali Al Jenabi flees Saddam Hussein's torture chambers, he is forced to leave his family behind in Iraq. What follows is an incredible international odyssey through the shadow world of fake passports, crowded camps and illegal border crossings, living every day with excruciating uncertainty about what the next will bring. Through betrayal, triumph, misfortune - even romance and heartbreak - Ali is sustained by his fierce love of freedom and family. Continually pushed to the limits of his endurance, eventually he must confront what he has been forced to become. With enormous power and insight, The People Smugglertells a story of daily heroism, bringing to life the forces that drive so many people to put their lives in unscrupulous hands. It is an utterly gripping portrait of a man cut loose from the protections of civilisation, attempting to retain his dignity and humanity while taking whatever path he can out of an impossible position. 'This is a story that had to be told.' The Weekend Australian'An engrossing account of a man seen by some as a saviour and others as a criminal. A significant book.' Thomas Keneally 'Gripping.' The Age'Tight, powerful and extraordinarily well written ...... a book which glories in the strength, courage and compassion of the human spirit.' The Drum'Just mindblowing ...... a moving saga of endurance and bravery.' The Australian Way (Qantas Magazine)'A totally riveting story about a brave and honourable man. Passionate, vivid and true, it bounces off the page.' Rosie Scott

One of the world's most beautiful endangered species, butterflies are as lucrative as gorillas, pandas, and rhinos on the black market. In this cutthroat $200 million business, no one was more successful—or posed a greater ecological danger—than Yoshi Kojima, the kingpin of butterfly smugglers. In Winged Obsession, author Jessica Speart tells the riveting true story of rookie U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agent Ed Newcomer's determined crusade to halt the career of a brazen and ingenious criminal with an almost supernatural sixth sense for survival. But the story doesn't end there. Speart chronicles her own attempts, while researching the book, to befriend Kojima before betraying him—unaware that the cagey smuggler had his own plans to make the writer a player in his illegal butterfly trade.

Martin and Rebecca Cate, founders and owners of Smuggler’s Cove (the most acclaimed tiki bar of the modern era) take you on a colorful journey into the lore and legend of tiki: its birth as an escapist fantasy for Depression-era Americans; how exotic cocktails were invented, stolen, and re-invented; Hollywood starlets and scandals; and tiki’s modern-day revival, in this James Beard Award-winning cocktail book. Featuring more than 100 delicious recipes (original and historic), plus a groundbreaking new approach to understanding rum, Smuggler’s Cove is the magnum opus of the contemporary tiki renaissance. Whether you’re looking for a new favorite cocktail, tips on how to trick out your home tiki grotto, help stocking your bar with great rums, or inspiration for your next tiki party, Smuggler’s Cove has everything you need to transform your world into a Polynesian Pop fantasia. Make yourself a Mai Tai, put your favorite exotica record on the hi-fi, and prepare to lose yourself in the fantastical world of tiki, one of the most alluring—and often misunderstood—movements in American cultural history.

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.

Tortoises disappear from a Madagascar reserve and reappear in the Bronx Zoo. A dead iguana floats in a jar, awaiting its unveiling in a Florida court. A viper causes mayhem from Ethiopia to Virginia. In Stolen World, Jennie Erin Smith takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, a dark adventure over five decades and six continents. In 1965, Hank Molt, a young cheese salesman from Philadelphia, reinvented himself as a “specialist dealer in rare fauna,” traveling the world to collect exquisite reptiles for zoos and museums. By the end of the decade that followed, new endangered species laws had turned Molt into a convicted smuggler, and an unrepentant one, who went on to provide many of the same rare reptiles to many of the same institutions, covertly. But Molt soon found a rival in Tommy Crutchfield, a Florida carpet salesman with every intention of usurping Molt as the most accomplished reptile smuggler in the country. Like Molt, Crutchfield had modeled himself after an earlier generation of natural-history collectors celebrated for their service to science, an ideal that, for Molt and Crutchfield, eclipsed the realities of the new wildlife-protection laws. Zoo curators, caught between a desire for rare animals and the conservation-minded focus of their institutions, became the smugglers’ antagonists in court but also their best customers, sometimes simultaneously. Crutchfield forged ties with a criminally inclined Malaysian wildlife trader and emerged a millionaire, beloved by some of the finest zoos in the world. Molt, following a string of inventive but disastrous smuggling schemes in New Guinea, was reduced to hanging around Crutchfield’s Florida compound, plotting Crutchfield’s demise. The fallout from their feud would result in a major federal investigation with tentacles in Germany, Madagascar, Holland, and Malaysia. And yet even after prison, personal ruin, and the depredations of age, Molt and Crutchfield never stopped scheming, never stopped longing for the snake or lizard that would earn each his rightful place in a world that had forgotten them—or rather, had never recognized them to begin with.

Meet Chris Heifner, overachieving drug runner for a Mexican marijuana cartel. But he wasn’t always. This one-time econ student from Texas—broke, deep in debt, and facing eviction with a growing family to support—yielded to the temptation that he had resisted countless times before and went to work for his best friend from college, Jake Andes. But it wasn’t exactly a Career Day kind of job. Andes was a big-time dealer, captaining a $25-million-a-year empire. Heifner became a mule, running multi-hundred-pound loads from Juárez around the country. After digging himself out of his financial hole, Heifner contemplated going clean. But the money and the lifestyle had hooked him, so he kept moving loads. He was so good that Andes was grooming him to become his second-in-command. And then Heifner got busted with $300,000 worth of dope in a rental car, and his world came crashing down. After bailing out of jail, Heifner went home for a much-needed shower. He emerged to find Andes and a hit man hired to kill him and his family should he decide to narc. Heifner realized that he had only one option: to flip and become an informant for the DEA. That’s when life got really dangerous.

THE TRUE STORY OF AN INTERNATIONAL CRIME RING AND ITS DOWNFALL In 1957, as the Cold War raged, Ian Fleming took a respite from writing James Bond to craft a work of nonfiction every bit as tense as a Bond adventure. Aided by an ex-MI5 agent and International Diamond Security Organization operative going by the alias “John Blaize,” Fleming chronicled the IDSO’s infiltration of the “million-carat network”―the world’s most notorious diamond smuggling ring. Every year, a shadowy band of racketeers pirated a fortune in diamonds out of Africa, and the majority of the stolen gems wound up in the hands of Communist nations. In response, the IDSO commissioned a private army, led by legendary British spymaster Sir Percy Sillitoe, to penetrate and topple the ring. When the operation was complete, the Sunday Times gave the story to Fleming, who had impressed Sillitoe with his earlier Bond adventure Diamonds Are Forever. A remarkable feat of investigative journalism, The Diamond Smugglers is the thrilling true story behind one of the greatest spy operations in history.

The story begins, as stories do in all good thrillers, with a botched robbery and a police chase. Eight Apuleian vases of the fourth century B.C. are discovered in the swimming pool of a German-based art smuggler. More valuable than the recovery of the vases, however, is the discovery of the smuggler's card index detailing his deals and dealers. It reveals the existence of a web of tombaroli -- tomb raiders -- who steal classical artifacts, and a network of dealers and smugglers who spirit them out of Italy and into the hands of wealthy collectors and museums. Peter Watson, a former investigative journalist for the London Sunday Times and author of two previous expos's of art world scandals, names the key figures in this network that has depleted Europe's classical artifacts. Among the loot are the irreplaceable and highly collectable vases of Euphronius, the equivalent in their field of the sculpture of Bernini or the painting of Michelangelo. The narrative leads to the doors of some major institutions: Sothebys, the Getty Museum in L.A., the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York among them. Filled with great characters and human drama, The Medici Conspiracy authoritatively exposes another shameful round in one of the oldest games in the world: theft, smuggling and duplicitous dealing, all in the name of art.