Operation Jackpot was the drug investigation that ended the 1980's reign of South Carolina's "gentlemen smugglers"; this book profiles some of the individuals involved in the "golden age" of marijuana trafficking.

"In 1979, Wisconsin native Tim McBride hopped into his Mustang and headed south. He was twenty-one, and his best friend had offered him a job working as a crab fisherman in Chokoloskee Island, a town of fewer than 500 people on Florida's Gulf Coast. Easy of disposition and eager to experience life at its richest, McBride jumped in with both feet. But this wasn't a typical fishing outfit. McBride had been unwittingly recruited into a band of smugglers--middlemen...

"January, 2015 will mark a century of the war on drugs in the United States: one hundred years since the first arrests under the Harrison Act. Facing down this anniversary, Johann Hari was witnessing a close relative and an ex-boyfriend bottoming out on cocaine and heroin. But what was the big picture in the war on drugs? Why does it continue, when most people now think it has failed? The reporter set out on a two-year, 20,000-mile journey through...

Amexica is the harrowing story of the extraordinary terror unfolding along the U.S.-Mexico border-"a country in its own right, which belongs to both the United States and Mexico, yet neither"-as the narco-war escalates to a fever pitch there. In 2009, after reporting from the border for many years, Ed Vulliamy traveled the frontier from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico, from Tijuana to Matamoros, a journey through a kaleidoscopic landscape...

Pressure is the unbelievable true story of Eric Canori, who buried $10 million worth of gold bars in the woods—and later used them to buy himself out of prison. Eric Canori was one of the largest high-end marijuana dealers on the East Coast of the United States—before it became legal in any state—smuggling weed out of Canada via eighteen-wheelers, helicopters, and boats. He was a mastermind, doing well over $300 million of business by age twenty-nine—without...