Death Dealers: A Witness to the Drug Wars That Are Bleeding America

Front Cover
HarperCollins, 1999 - Drug abuse and crime - 472 pages
When "Good Guy, Bad Guy" was first published in 1991, it revealed a shocking picture of a drug underworld operated by vicious gangs, a world where the mob had been shoved aside by a deadly proliferation of ultra-violent ethnic gangs. Seven years later, as headlines scream of innocent people murdered by Hells Angels in Montreal and Asian Triad gangs in Toronto, the drug battle has become an all-out war. Completely revised and updated with frightening new information on the current state of the illegal drug trade in North America, "Good Guy, Bad Guy" is now "Death Dealers", a hard-hitting front-line expos' from foremost criminal gang expert and bestselling author, Yves Lavigne.

"Death Dealers" is a gritty, street-level view of how gangs are willing to stop at nothing to grab their cut of the world's $500-billion-a-year illegal drug market-and who pays the price for their greed. Using his extraordinary connections and years of investigative journalism experience, Yves Lavigne hunts the hunted, from an increasingly violent Chinatown in Toronto to the lair of New York's most successful heroin dealer and beyond to the shark-infested waters on the Florida coast. Black street gangs in Los Angeles, Colombians, Vietnamese street gangs, Jamaican posses, prison gangs and the ever-present biker gangs are all part of Lavigne's world, where paranoia, terror and human carnage are the norm. At the same time, he reveals the high-tech world of the crime fighters, former Green Berets and Vietnam vets, who would like to even the score.

A gripping chronicle that draws chilling conclusions, "Death Dealers" is a masterful work of true crime.

About the author (1999)

Yves Lavigne is a Canadian journalist who has spent many years researching outlaw motorcycle gangs. He is considered to be the North American expert on the Hell's Angels motorcycle club, and he has written several books about them. Lavigne's first book, Hell's Angels: Taking Care of Business, was published in 1987. In his next book, Hell's Angels: Three Can Keep a Secret If Two Are Dead, Lavigne chronicled the metamorphosis of the Hell's Angels, from its beginning, now nearly forgotten, as a stateside club for World War II fighter pilots to its contemporary involvement in organized crime. These books caused a friend of his to suggest that Lavigne write the story of Anthony Tait, an informant who infiltrated the highest ranks of Hell's Angels while helping the FBI to conduct an undercover sting operation. Lavigne agreed to meet Tait and, in 1992, began interviewing him about his involvement in Hell's Angels and his role in the FBI operation. Lavigne conducted some of the interviews while traveling through California with Tait, who, now a target for retaliation, carried a small arsenal with him and kept a gun by his bed at night. Tait's story is told in Hell's Angels: Into the Abyss.

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