Francis Morland was one of Britain's most brilliant young artists, a leading member of the 1960s 'New Generation' movement beside such future giants as David Hockney. At the same time he lived a remarkable secret life: as the first major drug trafficker in UK history. He stuffed his sculptures full of Lebanese cannabis to ship to the US, sailed hashish from Morocco to Europe and, years before Howard Marks, became the most important dope runner in the country. But the drug squad found him, arresting him in 1971, 1980, 1990 and 2000. Now 81, he teaches ceramic classes.
The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts-first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets-by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion-including the readiness to risk one's life-to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi "expert" on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city's great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed "the Paper Brigade," and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group's worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto's secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet "liberation" of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved-only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto-a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach-The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.
Set in a nightmarish vision of the past where deadly monstrosities called darklings roam the shadows of Prohibition-Era America, Al Stone is a bootlegger who finds himself on the run when he inadvertently stumbles upon the bloody secret of the creatures survival. As the beasts close in to take back what s theirs, Al and his young ward, Nathan, must make their final stand. Smuggling Spirits is a pulse pounding, thrill ride that blends the action noir of Sin City with the horror and suspense of Hellboy.
Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority. Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.
Wheeling and Dealing is a vivid account of the world inhabited by "wholesale" illicit drug traffickers. Based on six years of participant observation, fieldwork, and extensive interviews in an elite Southern California community of dealers, the book gives a rare glimpse into the decadent yet fascinating "subculture of drug trafficking and unending partying, mixed with occasional cloak-and-dagger subterfuge." This second edition brings the story up to date by revealing the fate of several of Adler's key informants. By tracing their lives over a fifteen-year span, Adler offers a unique longitudinal perspective on deviant careers and the reintegration of dealers into conventional society. She also analyzes the unintended consequences of the federal government's war on drugs, tying it to the increasing violence and organizational sophistication of drug traffickers and the rise of international cartels.
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.
"A cellar door creaking open in the middle of the night, or a hand slipping quickly into a trench coat – the most compelling transactions are surely those we never see. Smuggling can conjure images of adventure and rebellion in popular culture, but as this fascinating book shows, it has also had a profound effect on the geopolitics of the world. Shining a light onto seven centuries of dark history, it illuminates a world of intrigue and fortune, hinged on furtive desires and those who have been willing to fulfil them. World-changing contraband has ranged from silk, spices and silver in the Age of Exploration to gold, opium, tea and rubber in times of empire, as well as drugs, people and blood diamonds today. Guns and art have always been smuggled, as have the most dangerous of all contraband – ideas. Central to this story are the (not always) legitimate forces of the Dutch and British East India Companies, the luminaries of the Spanish Empire, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Nazis, Soviet trophy brigades and the CIA, all of whom, at one point or another, have made smuggling part of their business. In addition, Simon Harvey traces out the smaller-time smugglers, the micro-economies of everyday goods, precious objects and people, drawing these stories together into a map of a subterranean world criss-crossed by smugglers’ paths. All told, this is the story of an unrelenting drive of markets to subvert the law, and of the invisible seams that have sewn the globe together."--Book jacket flap.
“Unforgettable. . . . An outstanding adventure in its lyrical, utterly compelling, and heartbreaking investigations of the world of diamond smuggling.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil For nearly eighty years, a huge portion of coastal South Africa was closed off to the public. With many of its pits now deemed “overmined” and abandoned, American journalist Matthew Gavin Frank sets out across the infamous Diamond Coast to investigate an illicit trade that supplies a global market. Immediately, he became intrigued by the ingenious methods used in facilitating smuggling particularly, the illegal act of sneaking carrier pigeons onto mine property, affixing diamonds to their feet, and sending them into the air. Entering Die Sperrgebiet (“The Forbidden Zone”) is like entering an eerie ghost town, but Frank is surprised by the number of people willing—even eager—to talk with him. Soon he meets Msizi, a young diamond digger, and his pigeon, Bartholomew, who helps him steal diamonds. It’s a deadly game: pigeons are shot on sight by mine security, and Msizi knows of smugglers who have disappeared because of their crimes. For this, Msizi blames “Mr. Lester,” an evil tall-tale figure of mythic proportions. From the mining towns of Alexander Bay and Port Nolloth, through the “halfway” desert, to Kleinzee’s shores littered with shipwrecks, Frank investigates a long overlooked story. Weaving interviews with local diamond miners who raise pigeons in secret with harrowing anecdotes from former heads of security, environmental managers, and vigilante pigeon hunters, Frank reveals how these feathered bandits became outlaws in every mining town. Interwoven throughout this obsessive quest are epic legends in which pigeons and diamonds intersect, such as that of Krishna’s famed diamond Koh-i-Noor, the Mountain of Light, and that of the Cherokee serpent Uktena. In these strange connections, where truth forever tangles with the lore of centuries past, Frank is able to contextualize the personal grief that sent him, with his wife Louisa in the passenger seat, on this enlightening journey across parched lands. Blending elements of reportage, memoir, and incantation, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers is a rare and remarkable portrait of exploitation and greed in one of the most dangerous areas of coastal South Africa. With his sovereign prose and insatiable curiosity, Matthew Gavin Frank “reminds us that the world is a place of wonder if only we look” (Toby Muse).
Retells the story of America--and of its engagement with its neighbors and the rest of the world--as a series of highly contentious battles over clandestine commerce.
Smuggling as Subversion is the first comprehensive account of the opium industry in western India during the colonial period, from its beginnings to the mid-19th century. This is an in-depth examination of the use of opium during colonial times, and at the same time the fascinating story of how Indian merchants developed a smuggling enterprise that subverted the East India Company's monopoly in the drug, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the first Opium War in China.
