A new global criminal consortium has emerged to threaten the security of Europe and America, ignoring the national frontiers that used to protect us. Today the world's powerful crime syndicates co-operate rather than compete; the Sicilian Mafia has links with criminals from the USA and Colombia to China and Japan, to create a criminal world order. They have forged a powerful alliance with Russian organized crime and are exploiting the chaos in Russia and the borderless European Community to attack the West. Linked to a three-part series on BBC1, this book argues that these forces can only be defeated by an unprecedented degree of international co-operation, backed by political will. Claire Sterling is the author of The Masaryk Case, The Terror Network and The Mafia.