Organized crime is everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Tales from the underworld have been mythologized by Hollywood, but the reality can be even stranger than fiction.

From the golden age of the American mafia to today’s cocaine empires, from the shadowy links between organized crime and terrorism to the twilight of the Yakuza, in this series Mark Shaw, the director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, discusses non-fiction books on organized crime and the illicit economy with the authors themselves. He asks about their backgrounds and investigations, but also about the challenges of writing about this murky world.