Blood Brothers is investigative journalism at its best and most relevant.
All over Asia, bankers, gangsters, government officials and intelligence agents interact, while organised 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 Southeast 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 an 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 the 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 globalised mobsters?
Bertil Lintner has lived in Thailand since 1979. He is a senior writer for the Far Eastern Economic Review. He has written articles for Asian, American and European publications and has published several books. He is widely respected as an authority on crime in Asia.
Bertil Lintner is regarded by many as the most authoritative Western voice on Burma. But these days his articles on Burma appear less frequently in the Far Eastern Economic Review, for whom he has written for the last 20 years. Has he lost interest in Burma? No. The Swedish journalist still keeps his eyes on Burma from his home in northern Thailand. But for journalists there is not much going on in Burma, he says.