Books about Smuggling from Amazon.com

Meet the economic gangster. He's the United Nations diplomat who double-parks his Mercedes on New York City streets at rush hour because the cops can't touch him--he has diplomatic immunity. He's the Chinese smuggler who dodges tariffs by magically transforming frozen chickens into frozen turkeys. The dictator, the warlord, the unscrupulous bureaucrat who bilks the developing world of billions in aid. The calculating crook who views stealing and murder as just another part of his business strategy. And, in the wrong set of circumstances, he might just be you.

In Economic Gangsters, Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel take readers into the secretive, chaotic, and brutal worlds inhabited by these lawless and violent thugs. Join these two sleuthing economists as they follow the foreign aid money trail into the grasping hands of corrupt governments and shady underworld characters. Spend time with ingenious black marketeers as they game the international system. Follow the steep rise and fall of stock prices of companies with unseemly connections to Indonesia's former dictator. See for yourself what rainfall has to do with witch killings in Tanzania--and more.

Fisman and Miguel use economics to get inside the heads of these "gangsters," and propose solutions that can make a difference to the world's poor--including cash infusions to defuse violence in times of drought, and steering the World Bank away from aid programs most susceptible to corruption.

Take an entertaining walk on the dark side of global economic development with Economic Gangsters.

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Auric Goldfinger, the most phenomenal criminal Bond has ever faced, is an evil genius who likes his cash in gold bars. This powerful villain is planning the biggest and most daring heist in history-robbing all the gold in Fort Knox. .
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In this work of grave beauty and searing powerone of the most widely praised pieces of investigative reporting to appear in recent yearswe follow 26 men who in May 2001 attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadly region known as the Devils Highway, a desert so harsh and desolate that even the Border Patrol is afraid to travel through it, a place that for hundreds of years has stolen mens souls and swallowed their blood. Only 12 of the men made it out..
Price: $5.30 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Imagine The Sopranos, with snakes! The Lizard King is a fascinating account of a father and son family business suspected of smuggling reptiles, and the federal agent who tried to take them down.


When Bryan Christy began to investigate the world of reptile smuggling, he had no idea what he would be in for. In the course of his research, he was bitten between the eyes by a blood python, chased by a mother alligator, and sprayed by a bird-eating tarantula. But perhaps more dangerous was coming face to face with Michael J. Van Nostrand, owner of Strictly Reptiles, a thriving family business in Hollywood, Florida. Van Nostrand imports as many as 300,000 iguanas each year (over half the total of America's most popular imported reptile), as well as hundreds of thousands of snakes, lizards, frogs, spiders, and scorpions.

Van Nostrand was suspected of being a reptile smuggler by Special Agent Chip Bepler of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who devoted years of his life in an obsessive quest to expose The Lizard King's cold-blooded crimes. How this cat-and-mouse game ended is engrossing and surprising. (2008).
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Nancy Drew comes to the aid of the owners of a local dancing school when they receive an anonymous note threatening their lives..
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When a new job falls his way, Chance jumps at the opportunity, becoming a runner who picks up strange packages on a daily route and delivers them to a shady man at the marina. Chase knows how much he will earn—what he doesn't know is how much he will pay.

Suspenseful, fast-paced, and timely, this novel avoids easy answers as it examines issues of terrorism and patriotism, fear and courage, and lives of privilege and poverty.

This brand new paperback edition includes a Q and A with author Carl Deuker..
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To Have and Have Not is the dramatic, brutal story of Harry Morgan, an honest boat owner who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who swarm the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.

In this harshly realistic, yet oddly tender and wise novel, Hemingway perceptively delineates the personal struggles of both the "haves" and the "have nots" and creates one of the most subtle and moving portraits of a love affair in his oeuvre. In turn funny and tragic, lively and poetic, remarkable in its emotional impact, To Have and Have Not takes literary high adventure to a new level. As the Times Literary Supplement observed, "Hemingway's gift for dialogue, for effective understatement, and for communicating such emotions the tough allow themselves, has never been more conspicuous.".
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"Lani opened her eyes fully, straining to see something, anything. It was as though she swam in a black sea that blacked out all light, all visual sensation. 'I can't see,' she whispered. 'I can't see!' Her shriek rose and echoed off the blackness."

A seemingly random shooting at her aunt's coffee farm has left Lani Tagama blind. Now she must learn to navigate in a world of darkness. With the help of an embittered ex-cop, Ben, and a half-trained guide dog, Fisher, Lani discovers she can regain a shadow of her former independence.

But strange and dangerous secrets lurk behind the beauty of this seaside paradise. Suspicion grows that this was not a random shooting, but an attempted murder, one with its roots in a hippie commune burned over thirty year ago. Lani realizes she is a target, and that she must find the shooter before he strikes again.

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Wesley Erks, itinerant machinist and adventurer, takes a hefty fee for smuggling a group of illegal Chinese immigrants ("yellowfish") from Vancouver, B.C., to San Francisco in the 1970s. Three are teenaged 'Hong Kong boys', one of whom is dying from an earlier stab wound; the fourth is the son of a rich Chinese casino owner who wants to settle some debts with The Triad, a secret Chinese society. The story of the perilous and suspenseful journey of these five men, filled with colourful fictional and historical characters, is as memorable as the story of the West itself. John Keeble, professor emeritus of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, is the author of four novels, including "Broken Ground" and "Nocturnal America". His fiction and nonfiction are widely published in literary magazines, and he has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Washington State Governor's Writers Award..
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Carolyn Nordstrom explores the pathways of global crime in this stunning work of anthropology that has the power to change the way we think about the world. To write this book, she spent three years traveling to hot spots in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States investigating the dynamics of illegal trade around the world--from blood diamonds and arms to pharmaceuticals, exotica, and staples like food and oil. Global Outlaws peels away the layers of a vast economy that extends from a war orphan in Angola selling Marlboros on the street to powerful transnational networks reaching across continents and oceans. Nordstrom's extraordinary fieldwork includes interviews with scores of informants, including the smugglers, victims, power elite, and profiteers who populate these economic war zones. Her compelling investigation, showing that the sum total of extra-legal activities represents a significant part of the world's economy, provides a new framework for understanding twenty-first-century economics and economic power. Global Outlaws powerfully reveals the illusions and realities of security in all areas of transport and trade and illuminates many of the difficult ethical problems these extra-legal activities pose..
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