Heavy Allies
Description:... In his new novel, Heavy Allies, award-winning Australian author Wayne Grogan worms inside Nugan Hand to tell how the United States inflicted a heroin plague on its closest ally, with ruthless military precision. Wayne Grogan has married fact and fiction to chart the rise and spectacular fall of the CIA-controlled Nugan Hand Bank, the biggest criminal enterprise in Australian history. Australia didn't have a drug problem until the Nugan Hand merchant bank - with its shadowy tentacles to the CIA - opened in Sydney in the 1970s, financing heroin trafficking through money laundering on a mammoth scale. Its intricate chessboard of crime had two grandmasters: Michael Hand, a mysterious former Green Beret, and Bernie Houghton, a gregarious wheeler-dealer who was also a product of the US secret intelligence network. Heavy Allies gouges out the entrails of the shadowy merchant bank and its key movers: Frank Nugan, the Australian lawyer who mysteriously committed suicide; Michael Hand, the Green Beret and CIA operative who disappeared when the bank crashed in 1980, never to be sighted again; and Bernie Houghton, owner of the famous Texas Tavern and Bourbon and Beefsteak nightspots and CIA agent-at-large whose flamboyant personality brought the underworld and the bankers together as Nugan Hand's money laundering and heroin operations ramped up in Sydney at the end of the Vietnam War.
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