Claire Sterling's Octopus recounts how the brutal and sophisticated Sicilian Mafia has grown rich in the international drug trade. She exposes a vast mafia heroin network that stretches from the Golden Triangle in the Far East (Burma, Laos, Thailand) through the Golden Crescent (Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan - the largest opium-producing region on earth). It runs through the poppy-growing fields of the Middle East and includes a multimillion-dollar arms-drugs trade with the region's terrorists. The network spans the globe. An alliance with Colombia's cocaine cartels allows only the Sicilians to import cocaine into Europe, where per capita drug consumption is reported to be higher than in the United States. Sicilians peddle heroin in the United States from coast to coast through arrangements with the American Mafia, many of whom are their blood relatives.
This Sicilian worldwide organization was successfully concealed for more than thirty years while it grew to monumental proportions. Heroin trafficking elevated the Italian mobsters from local villains to multinational titans whom law enforcement experts long underestimated. Even after a series of prosecutions in Italy and the United States aimed at breaking the cartel's back, Sterling warns, the Sicilian Mafia is a dangerous as ever.
Sterling meticulously documents chilling Mafia characters such as Lucky Luciano (Charlie Lucky), who was pivotal in creating the Sicilian empire, and Luciano Leggio, who won it in the Mafia Wars of 1981-83. Hardly noted in the world's press, at least 1,000 people died in these wars, many hideously tortured in Palermo's Mafia death chamber or thrown alive into drums of acid
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