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. This book argues that these forces can be defeated only by an unprecedented degree of international co-operation, backed by political will. Claire Sterling is the author of The Terror Network and Octopus.