Volume 55, Number 16 · October 23, 2008
The International Crooks Now in Power
By Joshua Hammer
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
by Misha Glenny
Knopf, 375 pp., $27.95
Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible
by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun
Wiley, 308 pp., $25.95; $15.95 (paper)
One evening in the winter of 2004, while working as Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau chief, I found myself in a dark parking lot outside a banquet hall in suburban Tel Aviv, waiting for Israel's most powerful gangster, Ze'ev Rosenstein, alias the 'Fat Man.' The son of Romanian Jewish immigrants, born in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv, Rosenstein controlled one of the world's largest international drug trafficking rings, and had survived seven assassination attempts, including an aborted guided missile attack on his convoy a few months earlier.
Review, 4516 words
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