A detailed case study of the rise and fall of the four year Air America cocaine ring.

Cocaine Hoppers provides empirical evidence to explain the involvement of Nigerians in the global cocaine trade. Investigating the criminogenic environment created by the Nigerian ‘state crisis,’ Oboh traces the geographic, demographic, economic, historical, political, and cultural factors enhancing cocaine culture in Nigeria. Based on years of research, Oboh reveals this social network that relies on “reverse social capital” wherein wealth and power are achieved through illegal means solely to benefit the individual. This lively, theoretically grounded study examines the new trend of traffickers dominating the illicit cocaine trade through West Africa to destinations across the globe to provide an account of Nigerian involvement in international drug trafficking as it has never been divulged before. This book will be appreciated by criminologists, social scientists, policymakers, drug researchers and organized crime scholars. And eagerly be read by those interested in Nigeria, and problems of African immigrants, and in the international drug trafficking.

This is the story of the most successful cocaine dealers in the world: Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, Carlos Lehder Rivas and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. In the 1980s they controlled more than fifty percent of the cocaine flowing into the United States. The cocaine trade is capitalism on overdrive -- supply meeting demand on exponential levels. Here you'll find the story of how the modern cocaine business started and how it turned a rag tag group of hippies and sociopaths into regal kings as they stumbled from small-time suitcase smuggling to levels of unimaginable sophistication and daring. The $2 billion dollar system eventually became so complex that it required the manipulation of world leaders, corruption of revolutionary movements and the worst kind of violence to protect.

Major Motion Picture based on Dark Alliance and starring Jeremy Renner, "Kill the Messenger," to be be released in Fall 2014 In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled “Dark Alliance,” revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras. Gary Webb pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from then newly declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that had never been publicly released, federal court testimony, and interviews, Webb demonstrates how our government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of our communities. Webb’s own stranger-than-fiction experience is also woven into the book. His excoriation by the media—not because of any wrongdoing on his part, but by an insidious process of innuendo and suggestion that in effect blamed Webb for the implications of the story—had been all but predicted. Webb was warned off doing a CIA expose by a former Associated Press journalist who lost his job when, years before, he had stumbled onto the germ of the “Dark Alliance” story. And though Internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department eventually vindicated Webb, he had by then been pushed out of the Mercury News and gone to work for the California State Legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He died in 2004.

Volume 1 outlines the nature and structures of illicit drug trafficking in the Caribbean. It discusses the escalating levels of social violence, crime and grinding poverty all linked to the illicit drug trade.

Winner of the British Society of Criminology Book Prize, 2015 Fleetwood explores how women become involved in trafficking, focusing on the lived experiences of women as drug mules. Offering theoretical insights from gender theory and transnational criminology, Fleetwood argues that women's participation in the drugs trade cannot be adequately understood through the lenses of either victimization or agency.

This study is based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork with Colombian drug traffickers (traquetos) in The Netherlands and Colombia. The author has uncovered the social world of traquetos: how and why they get involved in illicit activities, the nature of their work, and how they organize their businesses. This book will be valued by criminologists, social scientists, drug researchers, policymakers, organized crime scholars, and by those interested in Colombia, Latino immigrants’ issues, and the cocaine business.

The post-Cold War world has seen the emergence of new kinds of security threats. Whilst traditionally security threats were perceived of in terms of military threats against a state, non-traditional security threats are those that pose a threat to various internal competencies of the state and its identity both home and abroad. The European Union and the United States have identified Latin American cocaine trafficking as a security threat, but their policy responses to it have differed. This book examines the ways in which the EU and the US have conceptualized this threat. Furthermore, it explores the impact of cocaine trafficking on four state functions - economic, political, public order and diplomatic – in order to explain why it has become 'securitized'. Appealing to a variety of university courses, this book is especially relevant to security studies and European and US policy analysis, as well as criminology and sociology.

When the San Jose Mercury News ran a controversial series of stories in 1996 on the relationship between the CIA, the Contras, and crack, they reignited the issue of the intelligence agency's connections to drug trafficking, initially brought to light during the Vietnam War and then again by the Iran-Contra affair. Broad in scope and extensively documented, Cocaine Politics shows that under the cover of national security and covert operations, the U.S. government has repeatedly collaborated with and protected major international drug traffickers. A new preface discusses developments of the last six years, including the Mercury News stories and the public reaction they provoked.