All over Asia, bankers, gangsters, government officials and intelligence agents interact, while organized crime networks threaten the rest of the world: Russian gangsters are active in New York, Miami and California; Chinese gangs run Chinatowns all over the United States and Europe; Vietnamese mobsters have taken over the heroin trade to Australia; and the Japanese yakuza not only influence government and business at home, but chase the yen through South-East Asia and Hawaii to Australia's Gold Coast. Organized crime is one of the biggest and most complicated issues in the Asia Pacific. Both Western and Asian pundits assert that shady deals are the Asian way of life. Some argue that corruption and illicit business ventures gambling, prostitution, drug trafficking, gun running, oil smuggling are entrenched parts of the Asian value system. Yet many Asian leaders maintain that their cities are safer than Sydney, Amsterdam, New York and Los Angeles. Bertil Lintner knows this territory well. In Blood Brothers, he takes you inside the criminal fraternities of Asia and the Far East, examining these networks in order to answer one question: how are civil societies all over the world to be protected from the worst excesses of increasingly globalized mobsters?