Working closely with a former detective, James still goes out with Brighton police to gather material for his work about an English city with a rich criminal history.
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/06/157798379/author-peter-james-and-sidekick-track-seaside-crime
Robert Wittman founded the FBI’s Art Crime Team and tracked down more than $225 million worth of stolen art and cultural property â including a $36 million self-portrait by Rembrandt. He describes the heists in his memoir, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures.
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/24/137393980/robert-wittmans-priceless-pursuit-of-stolen-art
Witnesses to the riots in Salford, Greater Manchester, and Hackney, east London, tell Shiv Malik what happened this week and speak of their anger at a lack of job prospects.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/audio/2011/aug/12/salford-hackney-riots-audio
Nils Gilman describes deviant globalization as "the unpleasant underside of transnational integration."
There’s nice tourism, and then sex tourism, such as in Thailand and Switzerland. The vast pharmacology industry is matched by a vast traffic in illegal drugs. The underside of waste disposal is the criminal dumping in the developing world of toxic wastes from the developed world. Military activities worldwide are fed by a huge gray market in weapons. Internet communications are undermined by floods of malware doubling every year. Among the commodities shipped around the world are exotic hardwoods, endangered species, blood diamonds, and stolen art worth billions in ransom. Illegitimate health care includes the provision of human organs from poor people — you can get a new kidney with no waiting for $150,000 in places like Brazil, the Philippines, Istanbul, and South Africa. Far overwhelming legal immigration are torrents of illegal immigrants who pay large sums to get across borders. And money laundering accounts for 4-12% of world GDP — $1.5 to 5 trillion dollars a year.
These are not marginal, "informal" activities. These are enormous, complex businesses straight out of the Harvard Business Review. The drug business in Mexico, for example, employs 400,000 people. A thousand-dollar kilo of cocaine grows in value by 1400-percent when it crosses into the U.S. — nice profit margin there.