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Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy
Illicit activities are exploding worldwide. The onslaught of globalization has unleashed a tidal wave of bad stuff--everything from arms trafficking, human smuggling, and money laundering to music bootlegging. Here is the dark side of globalization: the mushrooming underground economy. Moisés Naím explores this murky world in his book Illicit. Naím is the editor of the relaunched magazine Foreign Policy and a former executive director of the World Bank and Minister of Trade and Industry of Venezuela. In Illicit, he unties the connections between the Colombian cocaine dealer, the New York banker steering money to offshore tax havens, the Albanian forcing women into prostitution, and the Chinese market stall-holder selling counterfeit DVDs. Naím reports that legitimate global trade has doubled since 1990 from $5 to $10 trillion. Meanwhile, money laundering has gone up tenfold, exceeding $1 trillion a year. Smuggling and money laundering have always existed, but Naím shows how they have increased at a staggering pace in the wake of globalization, despite new government controls since 9/11. The main culprits are the collapse of the Iron Curtain and state deregulation. As the reach of organized crime has expanded, governments have failed to keep up. Naím illustrates the problems with stories about A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb who sold nuclear technology to North Korea and Libya; Walter C. Anderson, an American who was accused of hiding $450 million in offshore accounts to evade taxes; and Vladimir Montesinos, the Peruvian intelligence czar who is on trial for trafficking drugs and arms. The book, while a little dry, will be interesting to policy buffs and aspiring crooks alike. --Alex Roslin.
Price: $6.74
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Moonshine: Recipes * Tall Tales * Drinking Songs * Historical Stuff * Knee-Slappers *How to Make It * How to Drink It * Pleasin' the Law * Recoverin' the Next Day
Now here’s a volume you can really drink to! Something’s brewing in these pages, and it’s moonshine—a word that evokes fascination, curiosity, and a warm sense of nostalgia Never before has there been such a richly illustrated, thorough, and entertaining celebration of the history of making fine distilled spirits. Take a trip through moonshining’s past: travel from its beginnings as a pioneer staple to the dark days of prohibition, from quickly produced urban rotgut to today’s carefully handcrafted artisanal libations. Get in on the fun with how-to instructions that take into account all legal regulations and requirements before covering ingredients, building a still, basic distilling techniques, and dozens of recipes, all adapted for the beginner. Whiskies, brandies, grappa, schnapps: they’re all here, along with dozens of page-turning quotes, song lyrics, and vintage photographs and illustrations. “Making whisky or brandy is not the least bit difficult. Making something you’d want to drink…well, that may take some practice.” —Matthew B. Rowley .
Price: $8.65
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The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities-- From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums
The story begins, as stories do in all good thrillers, with a botched robbery and a police chase. Eight Apuleian vases of the fourth century B.C. are discovered in the swimming pool of a German-based art smuggler. More valuable than the recovery of the vases, however, is the discovery of the smuggler's card index detailing his deals and dealers. It reveals the existence of a web of tombaroli—tomb raiders— who steal classical artifacts, and a network of dealers and smugglers who spirit them out of Italy and into the hands of wealthy collectors and museums. Peter Watson, a former investigative journalist for the London Sunday Times and author of two previous exposés of art world scandals, names the key figures in this network that has depleted Europe's classical artifacts. Among the loot are the irreplaceable and highly collectable vases of Euphronius, the equivalent in their field of the sculpture of Bernini or the painting of Michelangelo. The narrative leads to the doors of some major institutions: Sothebys, the Getty Museum in L.A., the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York among them. Filled with great characters and human drama, The Medici Conspiracy authoritatively exposes another shameful round in one of the oldest games in the world: theft, smuggling and duplicitous dealing, all in the name of art. .
Price: $1.41
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Kentucky Moonshine
When the first American tax on distilled spirits was established in 1791, violence broke out in Pennsylvania The resulting Whiskey Rebellion sent hundreds of families down the Ohio River by flatboat, stills on board, to settle anew in the fertile bottomlands of Kentucky. Here they used cold limestone spring water to make bourbon and found that corn produced even better yields of whiskey than rye. Thus, the licit and illicit branches of the distilling industry grew up side by side in the state. This is the story of the illicit side—the moonshiners' craft and craftsmanship, as practiced in Kentucky. A glossary of moonshiner argot sheds light on such colorful terms as "puker," "slop," and "weed-monkey." David Maurer's tone is tongue-in-cheek, but he provides a realistic look at the Kentucky moonshiner and the moonshining industry..
Price: $9.54
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White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South
White Women, Black Men is a fascinating study of a category of interracial relationships that conventional wisdom has held did not exist: liaisons (the term author Martha Hodes prefers) between black men and white women in the antebellum South. Hodes shows how such relationships were tolerated, though not encouraged, to a surprising degree before the Civil War. In a fascinating feat of historical detective work, she uses court documents and other records in cases involving racial status, rape, divorce, and property, to explore the nature of these relationships. She shows white women who voluntarily gave up their privileged status to cohabit with black men, and white communities that turned a blind eye toward such unions. It was not until after the Civil War--when freedom for blacks meant Southern whites needed new ways to enforce their putative superiority--that black men were routinely punished with violence for real, or imagined, relationships with white women..
Price: $17.95
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To Have and To Kill: Nurse Melanie McGuire, an Illicit Affair, and the Gruesome Murder of Her Husband
One by one, three waterlogged suitcases were pulled from the Chesapeake Bay. In each were body parts of a man. In a forensics room, the truth was discovered: William McGuire had been horribly murdered and dismembered William and his loving wife, a registered nurse named Melanie, had just closed on their New Jersey dream home. Little did William know about the nightmare that was in store… For Melanie had been involved in a long-term affair with a married doctor at the fertility clinic where she worked—and she had plans for the future that didn’t include William. Investigators believe that on April 29, 2004, Melanie first drugged her husband, then murdered him in cold blood. Three years after America witnessed the details of the suitcase incident unfold—on 48 Hours, Dateline NBC, and ABC Primetime, and in People magazine, among other news outlets—Melanie was convicted of first-degree murder and desecrating human remains. This is the true story of a marriage that turned deadly… .
Price: $6.99
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A SILENT NIGHTMARE: The bottom line and the challenge of illicit drugs
A Silent Nightmare presents a blueprint for a viable drug policy. America has been immersed in the struggle against illicit drugs for decades; however, drug use and abuse continue to weight heavily on the shoulders of our youth, crime associated with illicit drugs has increased dramatically, and the drug traffickers and their stealth friends in the business world continue to grow richer. This book uncovers the drug facts - the myths, the root causes, and the many drug-related events - and delivers the urgently needed hope that much can be achieved with a different drug policy. It is the author's intention to shed light on a new path leading towards a more rational, coherent and humane drug policy. He joins many distinguished personalities, including the late Milton Friedman, Economics Nobel Prize winner, William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of the National Review, and Walter Cronkite, award-winning journalist, who have raised their voices calling for an overhaul of the current failed drug policy..
Price: $19.62
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Spiritual Marriage: The Curse of Illicit Sexual Union
We live in a world where the spiritual is superimposed on the physical, with the physical dovetailing into the spiritual People who allow events in their lives to pass without connecting them to spiritual issues, not only don't understand what is happening to them, they also can't do anything to change their world. Nothing in this world happens by chance. Not with God, nor the devil. In Ecclesiastes 8:4-6, we read, "Where the word of a king is, there is power: and who may say unto him, What doest thou? Whoso keepeth the commandment shall feel no evil thing: and a wise man''s heart discerneth both time and judgment. Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery of man is great upon him." In the realm of the spirit there are no accidents. There are certain spiritual truths you should know before you start dating, having sex, or start thinking about marriage. Ignorance of spiritual matters may become a source of problems for you and your descendants. If you violate any spiritual law without the appropriate atonement, you will incur its ramifications. Currently, our sexuality is under tremendous attack. Spiritual marriages to demonic entities have become a source of hidden problems in our relationships. This manual along with a companion book, "Killing Me Softly," exposes, and helps you deal with evil enforcers assigned to fight against your home, and family..
Price: $13.43
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