Thieves' world

No one has benefited more from the political changes of the 1990s than international organized come. Within the space of just three or four years, the world's great crime syndicates have joined in a planet-wide criminal consortium unlike any in history. A Pax Mafiosa has emerged - an agreement to avoid conflict, devise common strategy, and exploit the planet peaceably together - linking the American and Sicilian mafias, Russian organized crime, the Chinese Triads, the Japanese Yakuza, and Colombia's cocaine cartels. It threatens the liberty, security, and political integrity of the U.S., Europe, and all free societies. For these giants of the underworld, the creation of the European Community in Western Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the east have erased borders and made the commerce of crime easier than ever.

In Thieves' World, outstanding international investigative reporter Claire Sterling traces the stunning advance of this global criminal enterprise since 1990: the proliferation of its criminal interests and growth of its investment capital to a quarter of a trillion dollars, its deepening penetration of worldwide money markets, its spreading powers of blackmail and corruption, and its alarming colonization of Western Europe and America. Above all, Claire Sterling describes the great shift of worldwide criminal attention to eastern Europe and Russia, showing how a country covering a sixth of the earth's land mass has been taken captive by the mafias of the world in partnership with Russian criminals, looting the nation systematically, crippling its economic capacity, contaminating its body politic, and suffocating its political will - all at enormous peril to the West.