Gangland

Author: Jared Savage
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1775491935
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
New Zealand's underworld of organised crime and deadly gangs 'The best true-crime book of the year by a long stretch.' - Steve Braunias, Newsroom 'A series of rip-snorting yarns about gangs, drugs, fancy cars, wads of cash, violence, and guns - Aotearoa New Zealand style.' - Simon Bridges New Zealand is now one of the most lucrative illicit drug markets in the world. Organised crime is about making money. It's a business. But over the past 20 years, the dealers have graduated from motorcycle gangs to Asian crime syndicates and now the most dangerous drug lords in the world - the Mexican cartels. In Gangland, award-winning investigative reporter Jared Savage shines a light into New Zealand's rising underworld of organised crime and violent gangs. The brutal execution of a husband-and-wife; the undercover cop who infiltrated a casino VIP lounge; the midnight fishing trip which led to the country's biggest cocaine bust; the gangster who shot his best friend in a motorcycle shop: these stories go behind the headlines and open the door to an invisible world - a world where millions of dollars are made, life is cheap, and allegiances change like the flick of a switch.

Gangland: New Zealand's Underworld of Organised Crime

Author: Jared Savage
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9781775541622
Category : Drug traffic
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Patched

Author: Jarrod Gilbert
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 1775581373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
For more than five decades, gangs have played a pivotal role in New Zealand crime life, beginning with the bodgies and widgies of the 1950s. Based on 10 years of gang research, this book chronicles the rise of the Hell's Angels and other bike gangs in the 1960s, the growth of the Mongrel Mob and Black Power in the 1970s, and organized crime during the last decade. With descriptions of such events as the Devil's Henchmen throwing Molotov cocktails at the Epitaph Riders in Christchurch's first gang war and Black Power members surrounding Prime Minister Rob Muldoon at Wellington's Royal Tiger Tavern, it also discusses the significance of colors and class. With accounts from gang members, police, and politicians, this violent and sometimes horrifying book transports its readers to a tough yet revealing part of New Zealand life.

Tokyo Underworld

Author: Robert Whiting
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307765172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
A riveting account of the role of Americans in the evolution of the Tokyo underworld in the years since 1945. In the ashes of postwar Japan lay a gold mine for certain opportunistic, expatriate Americans. Addicted to the volatile energy of Tokyo's freewheeling underworld, they formed ever-shifting but ever-profitable alliances with warring Japanese and Korean gangsters. At the center of this world was Nick Zappetti, an ex-marine from New York City who arrived in Tokyo in 1945, and whose restaurant soon became the rage throughout the city and the chief watering hole for celebrities, diplomats, sports figures, and mobsters. Tokyo Underworld chronicles the half-century rise and fall of the fortunes of Zappetti and his comrades, drawing parallels to the great shift of wealth from America to Japan in the late 1980s and the changes in Japanese society and U.S.-Japan relations that resulted. In doing so, Whiting exposes Japan's extraordinary "underground empire": a web of powerful alliances among crime bosses, corporate chairmen, leading politicians, and public figures. It is an amazing story told with a galvanizing blend of history and reportage.

Mr. Asia: The Last Man Standing

Author: Jim Shepherd
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466825669
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
Do not think for one instant that a life of crime is glamorous and exciting. It is not. It is a life of degradation, dishonesty, misery, violence, and loss of liberty. It has been more than 30 years since the Mr Asia drug syndicate came apart, when the handless, toothless body of Martin Johnstone was found dumped in a quarry in England. The members of the syndicate were responsible for a string of dead bodies all over the world and the importation of hundreds of kilograms of heroin and marijuana into Australia, New Zealand and Britain – and they made tens of millions of dollars doing it. In this never before heard story from the only surviving member of the syndicate, James Shepherd tells of Mr Asia's rise and fall in gritty, horrifying detail. This is not the flashy, glamourised account put forward in Underbelly, but raw, unadulterated truth. James Shepherd was named by the 1983 Stewart Royal Commission as second in charge of the Mr Asia Drug Syndicate, and was given a 25 year sentence for his role. The long years spent in jail contemplating the murder and misery caused by the syndicate convinced him that the full story needed to be told – as a warning to others, if nothing else. The result is something unique – as fascinating as it is horrifying. It's the real insiders account of the multi-million dollar, kill-or-be-killed world of our most notorious international drug syndicate.

McMafia

Author: Misha Glenny
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 0887848184
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
Drugs, weapons, migrant labour, women — these are just a few of the many goods that effortlessly cross national borders in this globalized age, often without the knowledge or permission of the nations concerned. How is this remarkable criminal feat managed?From gun runners in the Ukraine, to money launderers in Dubai, cyber criminals in Brazil, racketeers in Japan, and the booming marijuana industry in western Canada, McMafia builds a breathtaking picture of a secret and bloody business.Internationally celebrated writer Misha Glenny crafts a fascinating, highly readable, and impressively well-researched account of the emergence of organized crime as a globalized phenomenon and shows how its secret and bloody business mirrors both the methods and the rewards of the legitimate world economy. Employing his journalistic talent and his prior experience covering organized crime in Eastern Europe, Glenny reports on his travels around the planet to investigate this worrying and worsening situation. After comprehensively surveying the criminal scene, Glenny ends by considering the future of organized crime. McMafia is an important book that assembles all the pieces of this worldwide puzzle for the first time.

Blood Money

Author: Clive Small
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1742376061
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
A meticulously researched and revealing expose of the new players in organised crime.

The Bassett Road Machine-gun Murders

Author: Scott Bainbridge
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781459675056
Category : Homicide investigation
Languages : en
Pages : 427

Book Description
On Saturday, 7 December 1963, Eric Lewis called around to 115 Bassett Road, Remuera, Auckland to collect the rent. After his persistent knocking went unanswered, Lewis let himself in. He was not prepared for the scene awaited him when he opened the door.

Shantaram

Author: Gregory David Roberts
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429908270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 945

Book Description
Based on his own extraordinary life, Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram is a mesmerizing novel about a man on the run who becomes entangled within the underworld of contemporary Bombay—the basis for the Apple + TV series starring Charlie Hunnam. “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.” An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere. As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city’s poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power. Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas—this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart.

National Identity

Author: Simon Bridges
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1775492273
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
An open, honest and at times intensely personal memoir about race, fatherhood, marriage, masculinity, fitting in, and the things that shape our national character. Simon Bridges grew up as the son of a working-class Baptist preacher in Te Atatu, as the youngest of six children. In many ways he had a typical Kiwi upbringing, at a time when having little didn't seem to matter much. Yet for Bridges, his was the life of an outsider: experiencing otherness for being Maori, and yet an otherness from other Maori; a Westie with a thick accent, trying to break into the upper reaches of society; distanced from his father, an ageing man in his own world. As a young politician, Bridges soon came to realise he was an introvert in an extrovert's world, and a male leader who has never identified with New Zealand's idealised version of the strong, laconic, rugby-loving man. In National Identity, Bridges offers an attempt to question himself and the country he loves. Politics, crime, kai, music, nature: these are the stuff of a life. Through candid and self-aware reflections, he points out that politicians have become less robust, and that people don't participate as much anymore - eroding our institutions and national life. He speaks his mind on an education system in crisis, the decline of Christianity, and how being the smallest, most isolated developed country in the world explains why we are how we are. Authentic, brilliant, humorous and poignant, National Identity is a must-read New Zealand memoir.