True Organized Crime

In the late 2000s, Molly Bloom, a 20-something petite brunette from Loveland, Colorado, ran the highest stakes, most exclusive poker game in existence. Hundreds of millions of dollars were won and lost at her table. Molly's game became the game for those in the know - celebrities, business moguls and millionaires. Molly staged her games in palatial suites with beautiful views and exquisite amenities. She flew privately, dined at exquisite restaurants, hobnobbed with the heads of Hollywood studios, was courted by handsome leading men....

For a quarter century, Luis Antonio Navia worked as a high-level cocaine transporter for all of the major Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, including Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, and flooded the United States and Europe with cocaine before his dramatic arrest in Venezuela in 2000 during the 12-nation Operation Journey. The story of Navia’s rise, fall, takedown, imprisonment, and redemption is expertly researched and told by acclaimed biographer Jesse Fink.

A través de testimonios escalofriantes y conmovedores, las autoras de este libro ofrecen explicaciones contundentes para entender por qué nuestros niños y niñas se vuelven criminales ante la indiferencia social, corrupción policiaca y la intolerancia del gobierno. Más aún se detalla la incompetencia de las autoridades, los vacíos legales y la incapacidad de las instituciones para ofrecer a estos adolescentes opciones para alejarse del delito, la drogadicción, las relaciones violentas o evitar la puerte por defender -o estar en contra- algún cártel.

For fans of the Netflix show Narcos and readers of true crime, Kilo is a deeply reported account of life inside Colombia’s drug cartels, using unprecedented access in the cartels to trace a kilo of cocaine - from the fields where it is farmed, to the hit men who protect it, to the smuggling ships that bring it to American shores.

During the peak of the Somali piracy crisis, three ships - from Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan - were hijacked and then abandoned to their fate by their employers, who lacked the money to pay ransoms. All would still be there, were it not for Colonel John Steed, a retired British military attaché, who launched his own private mission to free them. Author Colin Freeman, who has himself spent time held hostage by Somali pirates, takes listeners on an inside track into the world of hostage negotiation and one man’s heroic rescue mission.

This is the true story of how El Chapo built the world’s wealthiest and most powerful drug-trafficking operation, based on months’ worth of trial testimony and dozens of interviews with cartel gunmen, Mexican journalists and political figures, Chapo’s family members, and the DEA agents who brought him down.

Koh Tao, a small island in the Gulf of Thailand, surrounded by pristine beaches, swathed in sunshine, and a mecca for tourists, divers, and backpackers. But “Turtle Island” has its dark side. In 2014, Koh Tao was the site of the brutal double murders of two British backpackers, but theirs weren’t the only suspicious backpacker deaths.

San Pedro is Bolivia's most notorious prison. Small-time drug smuggler Thomas McFadden found himself on the inside. Marching Powder is the story of how he navigated this dark world of gangs, drugs and corruption to come out on top. Thomas found himself in a bizarre world, the prison reflecting all that is wrong with South American society. Prisoners have to pay an entrance fee and buy their own cells (the alternative is to sleep outside and die of exposure); prisoners' wives and children often live inside, too; high-quality cocaine is manufactured and sold from the prison.

Today, MS-13 is one of the most infamous street gangs on earth, with an estimated ten thousand members operating in dozens of states and linked to thousands of grisly murders each year in the US and abroad. But it is also misunderstood—less a drug cartel and more a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal economy is based mostly on small-time extortion schemes and petty drug dealing. Steven Dudley brings listeners inside the nefarious group to tell a larger story of how a flawed US and Central American policy, and exploitative economic systems, helped foster the gang and sustain it.

Detroit, mid-1930s: In a city abuzz over its unrivaled sports success, gun-loving baseball fan Dayton Dean became ensnared in the nefarious and deadly Black Legion. The secretive, Klan-like group was executing a wicked plan of terror, murdering enemies, flogging associates, and contemplating armed rebellion. The Legion boasted tens of thousands of members across the Midwest, among them politicians and prominent citizens - even, possibly, a beloved athlete.

Gianni Russo was a handsome 25-year-old mobster with no acting experience when he walked onto the set of The Godfather and entered Hollywood history. He played Carlo Rizzi, and he didn't have to act - he knew the mob inside and out: from his childhood in Little Italy, where Mafia legend Frank Costello took him under his wing, to having to go on the lam after shooting and killing a member of the Colombian drug cartel in his Vegas club. Along the way, Russo befriended Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando. Russo had passionate affairs with Marilyn Monroe and Liza Minelli....

Linda Scarpa had the best toys, the nicest clothes, and a close-knit family. Yet her childhood was far from idyllic. Classmates avoided her; boys wouldn't date her. Eventually she learned why: They were afraid of her father. A made man in the Colombo crime family, Gregory Scarpa, Sr., was a stone-cold killer nicknamed the "Grim Reaper." Unlike most tight-lipped mobsters, Scarpa talked business - and murder - in front of his kids.

Roger Reaves grew up a poor farm boy in Georgia and went from making 'moonshine' to becoming one of the most prolific smugglers of the 20th century. He covered six continents, transporting 20 ton ship loads of hash, tons of cocaine, and completed more than 100 sorties across the US border with plane loads of marijuana. His friends and associates spanned the globe - from Medellin Cartel kingpins Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar, to "Mr. Nice" Howard Marks and the infamous Barry Seal who was Roger's close friend and employee.

In this gritty New York Times best-seller, the true story of a crooked deal between the FBI and the Irish Mob is exposed. By providing a penetrating look into the mean streets of mid-1970s South Boston, the author shows how two kids from the neighborhood cross paths again years later, ending in the biggest informant scandal in FBI history.

In the early 1990s, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and his brother, Terry "Southwest T", rose up from the slums of Detroit to build one of the largest cocaine empires in American history: the Black Mafia Family. They socialized with music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, did business with New York's king of bling Jacob "The Jeweler" Arabo, and built allegiances with rap superstars Young Jeezy and Fabolous. Yet even as BMF was attracting celebrity attention, its crew members struck fear in a city.

"Johnny Boy" Gotti burst onto the national scene after a double murder catapulted him to the top of the Gambino family, the largest and most feared Mafia family in the USA. Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci reveal the man behind the headlines.

For years, the DeCavalcantes, the most powerful Mob family in Jersey, labored in the shadows of the more famous families in New York - the likes of the Gambinos and the Columbos. Dismissed by the big-city capos, the DeCavalcantes finally came into their own when they found their lives mirrored in the television hit, The Sopranos. Overnight it legitimized the made men of the Garden State. Now they were a familia to be reckoned with. Unfortunately with high profile came high risk.

In August of 1969, during two bloody evenings of paranoid, psychedelic savagery, Charles Manson and his dystopic communal family helped to wreck the dreams of the Love Generation. At least nine people were murdered, among them Sharon Tate, the young, beautiful, pregnant, actress and wife of Roman Polanski.

When she arrived at MIT in the 1990s, Alien wanted to study aerospace engineering, but she was soon drawn to the school’s venerable tradition of high-risk physical trespassing: the original “hacking”. Within a year, one of her hallmates was dead, two others were on trial, and two had been institutionalized. Alien’s adventures were only just beginning.

In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became the vital centre of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America—addiction like no other the country has ever faced. How that happened is the riveting story of Dreamland.