Reviews

It will come as a shock to most Americans to read that the heroin and much of the cocaine traffic in the U.S. is controlled by the Sicilian Mafia and not a domestic syndicate. Sterling ( The Terror Network ) maintains that in 1957, at a gangland summit meeting in Palermo, American mobsters gave the drug franchise to the Sicilians, who began to build a multinational drug cartel that has expanded ever since. It has ties to Turkish poppy growers and bases all over the world, increasingly strong ones in Brazil and Venezuela as the popularity of cocaine increases. The extent of the cartel's reach was not perceived until the mid-'80s, with the trial of 474 mafiosi in Sicily and the Pizza Connection case in the U.S. (which, according to Sterling, hardly damaged it). The book is an important contribution to our understanding of world crime. (Feb.)

Four years of exhaustive research in police records, court documents, and other archives has convinced Sterling, author of Terror Network ( LJ 3/15/81), that the Mafia operates a massive conspiracy which moves quantities of drugs and money anywhere with impunity. This control of the world heroin trade started, Sterling says, when leaders of the Sicilian Mafia and five U.S. ``families'' met at Palermo in 1957 to establish their network of refineries and distributors. The U.S.'s current heroin problem results from the families' deliberate increase in the supply available, Sterling says, and she sharply criticizes the police in many countries for their failure to take the Mafia threat seriously, to pursue leads with satisfactory vigor, to look for past patterns in their own files, or to share current information across borders. Thought-provoking and well-done.--Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York