Alex Perry
Список книг автора Alex PerryThe Good Mothers
You are born into it or marry in. Loyalty is absolute, bloodshed revered and you kill or go to your grave before betraying The Family. This code of omertà is how the 'Ndrangheta became the world’s most powerful mafia. The Good Mothers is the story of the women who broke the silence.We live in their buildings, work in their companies, shop in their stores, eat in their restaurants and elect politicians they fund. Founded more than 150 years ago by shepherding families in the toe of Italy, the ’Ndrangheta is today the world’s most powerful mafia, with a crushing presence in southern Italy, a market-moving size in global finance and a reach that extends to fifty countries around the world. And yet, remarkably, few of us have ever heard of it.The ’Ndrangheta’s power rests on a code of silence, omertà, enforced by a claustrophobic family hierarchy and murderous misogyny. Men and boys rule. Girls are married off as teenagers in arranged clan alliances. Beatings are routine. A woman who is ‘unfaithful’ – even to a dead husband – can expect her sons, brothers or father to kill her to erase the ‘family shame’.In 2009, when abused wife Lea Garofalo ‘disappears’ after giving evidence against her mafiosi husband, prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti realises the ’Ndrangheta’s bigotry may be its great flaw. The key to bringing down this criminal empire is to free its women and allow them to speak out and testify. When Alessandra finds two collaborators inside Italy’s biggest crime families, she must persuade them to cooperate, and save themselves and their children.The stakes could not be higher. Alessandra is fighting to save a nation. The mafiosi are fighting for their existence. The women are fighting for their lives. Not all will survive.
Once Upon a Jihad
Published in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in Paris in January 2015, Alex Perry's latest book examines the the question of what it is that drives young people to reject the society in which they have lived and been educated, in the name of radical causes.
Perry follows a group of young British muslims, radicalised through contacts made online, and shows how their normal teenage vulnerabilities are exploited with catastrophic consequences. A journey that begins at home with «looking the part» ends in martyrdom in a far away city. Perry shows how the binary positions adopted by jihadis and the countries increasingly frightened by them, have opened up a chasm of misunderstanding in which the truth has been lost. Both sides tell elaborate myths, about themselves and the world, which make any engagement with the other all but impossible. They speak past each other not with each other.
Perry believes it is the purpose of all journalism to pierce the murk, expose the fantasists and elucidate some truth. Mostly that’s a fairly civilised process but, he points out, the Charlie Hebdo assassinations remind us of the seriousness of the task. Because stories can, and do, kill.
Cocaine Highway
“The only reason I can write about any of this – how cocaine smuggling is ruining an area of Africa the size of Western Europe – is because I have agreed to identify almost no one who spoke to me.”
In Cocaine Highway, Alex Perry lifts the lid on a problem few are willing to talk about: direct connections between the recreational drug habits of the relatively rich and privileged in Europe, and the Islamists who fund their war against the west by smuggling narcotics. He concludes that foreign interventions in Africa which wilfully ignore the connections between instability and cocaine, risk not only creating the conditions that inspire Islamic militancy, but funding it too.