A fresh, new look at gangs in every part of the world which deliberately avoids the stories that have been done to death - about Capone, Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde - and focuses on less well-known gangs such as 'Ma' Barker's Boys; the Smaldones of Denver; Scotland Yard's 1960s' Flying Squad, the so-called Firm within a Firm; Dr Death, the Melbourne drug dealer and Andre Stander, the former South African police officer who led a gang of bank robbers before being shot dead in Fort Lauderdale having fled a 17-year sentence.

Enter the world of gangland crime. Some men command a respect that few others, even in this violent underworld, can equal. They live by a strict code and to them violence is simply an accepted part of their profession. Here is the fullest ever collection of 'hard men' accounts: over 30 true stories of men living on the very edge of what is 'normal' to the rest of us — the merciless streets of the Mafia, Triads, Yardies, Yakuza, Hell's Angels, and Chinese Tongs. They are the faces behind a dozen urban myths, and bywords for toughness. People you just don't want to mess with. Including both recent gangsters and notorious earlier Mafia-age predecessors — from Dillinger, Capone, Ned Kelly and the Krays, to Mad Frank, Lenny 'the Guv'nor' Mclean and Sonny Barger — this is the ultimate collection for anyone interested in violent true crime, how 'real' criminals think, and the darker elements of society.

Detailed accounts of over 30 contemporary cases, or older cases reopened as a result of advances in forensic science. Crime scene investigations draw on a wide range of cutting-edge technology including genetic fingerprinting, blood splatter analysis, laser ablation, toxicology and ballistics analysis. Cases covered here include: the abduction of Madeleine McCann; the vindication of Colin Stagg, convicted of having murdered Rachel Nickell; Hadden Clark who killed and ate a six-year-old child in Maryland; Robert Pickton, the Vancouver farmer who fed his female victims to his pigs; the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia (was Amanda Knox guilty?); Lindsay Hawker's gruesome death in Japan; Josef Fritzl and the cellar in which he imprisoned and raped his daughter.

"First-hand accounts of life inside the mob by Frankie Saggio, Joey Black, "Donnie Brasco," Albert DeMeo, Richard Kuklinski and many more.

The rise - and fall - of the outlaw lords of the drug world, from the Cali Cartel, the richest, most powerful crime syndicate in history, to Britain's biggest drug baron, Curtis 'Cocky' Warren and the 'Essex Triple Murders'. From freewheeling cannabis operations to the lethal 'heaviness' of organized crime, the doings of the dealers, bouncers, bagmen and 'taxmen' - those crazy enough to extort money from drug dealers - of a ruthlessly violent underworld. Here you will find an account of the pursuit and capture of 'Mr Nice', Howard Marks (along with the complementary recollections of Mrs Marks), the story of the hunt for Pablo Escobar and an in-depth piece on cocaine production deep in the Colombian interior. This is the no-holds-barred, inside story of drug trafficking, from the Golden Triangle to the Golden Gate and from Spain's Costa del Crime to the future of conflict and prohibition with its fresh cast of Afghan warlords and central European gangsters. It examines how and why things go wrong, and the price which is paid when they do.