Tupac Shakur

He was just 25 years old when, in September 1996, he was assassinated in front of thousands of people on the main boulevard in Las Vegas, after watching his friend (Mike Tyson) deliver a knockout fight.

While stopped at a traffic light, a Cadillac pulled up alongside his car, driven by his manager, and a gunman fired multiple shots into the passenger side, where 2pac was seated. It was a professional and calculated execution, in the most public of places. Four bullets tore into his torso, shredding his insides, including a lung that was later removed.

Crime Scene of 2Pac’s Murder

Rushed to hospital, he spent several days in a coma while the music industry waited in vigil. By this time he had sold over 40 million records and was on the way to becoming the most successful African American artist in modern history. Despite the huge crowds and witnesses, no arrests were made and the case remains officially unsolved, but the consensus on who was responsible is fairly clear.

After a series of charges in New York the previous year, 2Pac had been in prison, with bail set at $1 million USD. Even for a superstar, that is extreme. Enter Marion “Suge” Knight, a powerhouse of a man who built an enormous record label through the distribution of crack cocaine. Suge Knight was a well-known underworld figure and high ranking member of the notorious Piru street gang (otherwise known as ‘Bloods’) in South Central Los Angeles. He also employed many LAPD officers to assist with security and act as body guards, provide intelligence and weapons, among other things.

Suge Knight

Suge Knight paid 2Pac’s bail and legal fees, under the condition that he sign with his record label, aptly named Death Row Records, which at the time dominated the American rap music scene with artists such as Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre on board. So with the deal signed, 2Pac began to make a lot of money and just as many enemies. One of whom was an old friend from Brooklyn, Christopher Wallace, a fellow rapper with the stage name Biggie Smalls (or Notorious B.I.G.), married to singer Faith Evans and managed by Sean “Puff Daddy” Coombs.

Notorious BIG / Biggy Smalls

In his final year, 2Pac knew he would be murdered and spent almost the entire year in a California studio writing songs about his inevitable fate. Even to extent of explaining in detail what to put in his coffin, who to invite to his funeral and saying goodbye to those he cared about, especially his mother, for whom he wrote a particularly emotional song called “Dear Mama”, thanking her for raising him and apologizing for all the trouble he caused.

So why was he murdered? And how did he know it was coming?

Suge Knight stood up at the New York Source Music Industry Awards in red gang colors and openly criticized local record labels, to the point of making a blatant offer:  “… to any artist in New York who wants to make real money without having your producer dancing in the film clips, come to LA…”

It was a clear attack aimed directly at Biggie Smalls and, in particular, his manager, Puff Daddy.

This event effectively split the rap music industry in half and the division went global. It was East Coast vs West Coast. You were either on one side or the other. Initially it was just words, a heated slanging match from one studio artist to another, but then the words became bullets and 2pac was shot 5 times while in New York, an incident for which he officially claimed was a failed robbery, but in reality he blamed Biggie Smalls and his followers.

Second, Suge Knight had lost several artists, including Dr Dre, who at this stage had (by comparison) mild success, but saw future in another white rapper, Eminem. The two made a pact and laid low, waiting for things to finally settle, before going on to become the most successful black/white partnership in music history.

This pre-emptive decision earned Dr Dre much criticism, but he stood by his (then outcast and up-coming) white artist, and finally they had their say in 2011, performing in front of America’s music heavy weights, telling them and the world that they risked each other’s lives and careers for each other, and it was all worth it.

The following clip will go down as one of the greatest comeback moments since the “rap wars” almost two decades ago and proves the legacy remains.

In the mid 90’s, with Death Row Records hanging much of its hopes on 2Pac, who had repaid his bail and legal debt many times over, Suge Knight believed (or knew) 2Pac would eventually leave the record label too. Effectively 2pac was trapped, like a Colombian statesman offered the choice of ‘lead or silver’.

In the year before his execution nobody knows exactly how many songs he wrote, but many commentators believe it is in the thousands. Only a handful of which have been officially released.

Fans of 2Pac know that his love of theater and Shakespeare influenced much of his work. A student of the Baltimore school of Arts where he studied theater, 2pac understood the Shakespearian psychology of inter-gang wars and inter-cultural conflict. During a 1995 interview, 2pac told Pulitzer prize-winning LA Times reporter Chuck Philips:

“… I love Shakespeare. He wrote some of the rawest stories, man. I mean look at Romeo and Juliet. That’s some serious ghetto shit. You got this guy Romeo from the Bloods who falls for Juliet, a female from the Crips, and everybody in both gangs are against them. So they have to sneak out and they end up dead for nothing. Real tragic stuff.

And look how Shakespeare busts it up with Macbeth. He creates a tale about this king’s wife who convinces a happy man to chase after her and kill her husband so he can take over the country. After he commits the murder, the dude starts having delusions just like in a Scarface song. I mean the king’s wife just screws this guy’s whole life up for nothing…”.

Chuck Philips made his interview available on September 13, 2012, the 16th anniversary of Tupac’s death. Philips said that what impressed him the most about 2pac was that he was at heart, a true poet.

“I like sacred texts, myths, proverbs and scriptures. … When 2pac came along, I thought he was quite the poet… It wasn’t just how cleverly they rhymed. It wasn’t just the rhythm or the cadence. I liked their attitude. It was protest music in a way nobody had ever thought about before. …These artists were brave, wise and smart – wickedly smart. The thing about Tupac was he had so many sides. He was unafraid to write about his vulnerabilities.”

As fate would have it, Bigggie Smalls was executed in a similar manner while touring in LA not long after 2Pac’s murder. Seen by many as a payback killing, it sparked a feudal war in the ghettos of both New York and LA that resulted in hundreds of murders. Little wonder Dr Dre and Eminem chose to lay low and wait for the fire to settle.

Back in New York, Biggie Smalls received a public burial, with the funeral procession making its way through Brooklyn and drawing the entire neighborhood into the street to celebrate and commiserate.

The following year Puff Daddy and Faith Evens (Biggie’s widow) recorded the classic track “I’ll be missing you.”

To this day it remains one of the highest selling singles in iTunes, and is a common anthem played at many concerts around the world, in respect of all musicians and story tellers who have passed along the way.

The story of 2pac and Biggie Smalls has been covered in countless books, documentaries, newspaper articles, even via a major Hollywood film called “Notorious”.

In the end, both artists were pawns in a game controlled by powerful criminal elements that built their empires on the back of the crack epidemic, and ran their businesses like gangsters, literally turning words into bullets.

“June One-Six Seven-One, the day… mama pushed me out her womb, told me yagotta get paid…”

If 2pac were still alive, he would’ve turned 42 this week and no doubt be at the top of his game, although who knows? Times have changed and so perhaps his real problem was the era in which he lived.

Almost 17 years since his assassination, and more than 75 million record sales later, he continues to influence artists today. Gangster, thug, musician, poet, prophet, writer, story teller, preacher, however he is viewed, Tupac Shakur lived and died by his own words, as did Biggie Smalls. These are truly historic events in musical story telling from which we have all lost, but the music and stories live on.

In a recent tribute to both artists, Puff Daddy, Sting and Faith Evens brought together the Brooklyn Gospel Choir at the MTV Music Awards to remember their friends and the impact they had on music today.

Here is that performance. Have a listen, if not for these two artists, then for anyone in your own life who “you’ll be missing”…

www.jaradhenry.com.au

Pink Tide is available online. Click on the image below if you wish to buy a copy.

According to the opposition camp, Mr Erdogan is an individual who not only wants to return Turkey to it’s religious Ottoman past, he is also doing this as a cover for making money out of the whole ‘being PM’ thing. Personally I don’t know what precisely is given as evidence for this however it is irrefutable that Mr Erdogan has become wealthy during his time in office and his son in law does seem to win an inordinate number of building contracts from the Turkish government in recent years. But outright corruption? I don’t know, just like I don’t know who exactly is the force, if such a thing exists outside of simple fury and discontent, that is ‘behind’ the protest movement that began in Taksim Square, Istanbul.

What I do know however is that demonisation is a very effective way of making your enemy ‘not like us.’ And we have to make our enemies ‘not like us’ in order to both justify our own actions and galvanise our supporters against the ‘wicked other’ that does not resemble us. For our enemies just to be wrong isn’t enough. During the First World War stories about German soldiers marching along with Belgian babies speared on their bayonets were deliberately manufactured by the allied powers in order to enrage public opinion at home and to allow the men fighting these ‘butchers’ to view them as little better than savages. Consequently they could be killed easily and without thought or in many cases conscience. It’s a psychological technique that is probably older than the hills and I am not surprised to see it being used in a conflict like that currently taking place in Turkey in the 21^st century. People will and do undermine their enemies in this way.

That said when a government uses such rhetoric it does stick in my craw because it’s so bloody transparent. We get it here in the UK all the time. If you don’t believe in the austerity that the government is currently instituting then you are an irresponsible person who is out of touch with reality. Should you say anything about the notion that the austerity is only hitting the poor, you’re told that just isn’t true and if you dare mention tax loopholes for the rich we’re back in the land of ‘you’re deluded’ again. Apparently closing tax loopholes for the rich that, some economists say, if plugged could fund the alleviation of world hunger, is a pointless exercise which will only raise a couple of million pounds at the most. Only ‘negative’ people would even allude to such ‘nonsense’. And so you shut up. Or not.

One of the great things about education is that you pick stuff up those in power would really rather that you didn’t. You get to know some basic psychology and sociology, you talk to people who know a thing or two and before you know where you are, you’re pretty sure that those who claim to have your best interests at heart sometimes seek to manipulate for their own ends. I think it may be called ‘growing up’. Whatever, if you don’t have a lightbulb moment or two like that you will remain in what is, for an adult, a really rather unacceptably childish state. What a pity that those who sometimes run our countries would really rather deal with us on that kind of level.

What the truth about the Turkish protests may shake out to be in the future I do not know. At present I just fear for a people and a place that I love and I don’t think that the dehumanising rhetoric we are hearing every day now is helping.

Among the required reading was a book called Pelastikk. It means Bowline. You know, that fiendish knot that every scout or seaman should be able to tie with his eyes closed, the one with the snake coming out of the hole, around the tree and back down the hole to produce an eye that won’t slip. This was a novel with a nautical slant and although I wasn’t reading much Icelandic stuff back then, this one caught my imagination and I read it at a single sitting.

It had been written by a local author called Guðlaugur Arason, known as to everyone as Gulli Ara and something of a legend as the author of several books that shocked and surprised when they were published in the 1970s and 80s, as well as having been a fisherman since he was a boy. He had even been a student at the same college in Dalvík a few years before me.

Pelastikk tells the story of a precocious eight-year old boy at the tail-end of the 1950s who gets the opportunity to spend the summer at sea with the crew of a Dalvík herring boat. It paints a picture of a world that disappeared not long afterwards. In the 1950s the herring boats were small. These were 80-90 foot wooden boats that sailed with a crew of a dozen or more men following the migrating herring eastwards along the north of Iceland until the shoals took a turn southwards, providing Iceland’s eastern fishing villages with booming economies while the fish were there. As winter approached, the fish would disappear into deeper water and the following spring it would all start again.

The year after Gulli’s book was set, the first power blocks appeared and the old-fashioned purse boats started to disappear. (Apologies for the technical stuff, but it’s part of the tale). In 1968 the herring disappeared and a way of life went with them. The reasons are still not entirely understood, but a combination of heavy fishing, climatic change and natural fluctuations of pelagic stocks are all part of the mix.

It was catastrophic for Iceland, which saw hard times and large-scale emigration in the following years. But things improved and stabilised. Fishing shifted to groundfish and the fleet went from purse seining to trawling and longlining.

Gulli Ara’s book is a vivid portrait of the herring years when work was plentiful and a season on the herring could put enough in their pockets for a young couple to buy their first flat. Icelanders of a certain age still talk wistfully of the herring years, while those of my age look back at the shrimp years when there was a boom in catching the little pink beasties. That came to an end as well, due to falling prices and rising fuel costs, but that’s another story.

Anyhow, I picked up Pelastikk all those years ago and started translating it, purely for my own amusement, a couple of pages every night, with a pile of paper that grew on the living room table next to a rattling manual typewriter. Yes, it was that long ago.

One day I looked Gulli up in the phone book, gave him a call and asked if he minded if I tried to find a publisher. Mind? Of course he didn’t.

In the meantime I had moved back to England and in between working at sea myself and trying to find my feet as a jobbing hack, I re-typed the manuscript of Pelastikk into a shiny new Amstrad.

Pelastikk had been a hugely popular book in Iceland and was even a set text for years in schools and colleges. English-language publishers weren’t interested. Some were polite. Others were snooty to the point of being downright offensive. One specialist small press showed an interest, but with Arts Council funding slashed, simply couldn’t afford it. It went nowhere and while Gulli and I kept in touch, the English manuscript of Pelastikk, now renamed Bowline moved from one hard drive to another every time I upgraded to a new computer.

The last time this happened I gave Gulli a call and suggested that it was maybe time to go down the self-publishing route, explaining what a Kindle is.

I had to edit the whole thing again, making it less stilted. My original translation had been extremely close to the original text – too close, if the truth be told. So in places sentences have been melded together, idioms have been replicated as faithfully as possible and the untranslatable jokes have been spun around or replaced with something that fits the bill.

Translation is very different from writing your own stuff, calling for a different set of skills that include an element of creativity, while also remaining as faithful to the original as is practical. There is so much that that does not translate well directly and a translator has to be able to interpret as well as translate, but without slipping into the pitfall of ‘improving’ on the original text. A translator is not an editor, but occasionally you have to ask yourself if you need to be thinking of your readers or of the author’s original text, and treading a path between the two isn’t always easy.

So with the text tweaked and polished, I navigated the surprisingly straightforward process of formatting and uploading, and we were ready to go. So Guðlaugur Arason’s Bowline is now available at long last in its English translation on Amazon here (UK), here (US) and here (Germany) for anyone who has a Kindle or an iPad.

It has taken more than twenty years since I started tapping out the translation on that battered typewriter and in spite of the attempts, I suppose I knew that it would never be likely to find a place on even an obscure publisher’s list. So it’s a huge satisfaction to see it at last available for the niche market of readers who take an interest in Icelandic fiction and fishy stuff.

Originally published in 1980 when there were still clear memories of boats queuing to land their fish at the height of the season and the anxiety as the herring made themselves scarce at the end of the 960s, Bowline is unique in providing an account of Iceland during the bustling, smelly, colourful herring years written as fiction.

Or is it fiction? I did ask Gulli how much of this really happened. He wouldn’t be drawn. But my guess is that much all of it’s real, even the part about the giant farmer’s boy on Grímsey who knocked out his great-grandmother’s teeth with a hay rake.

Where the Wild Things Are

Noah, according the myth, collected a pair of each animal and loaded them onto an arc as he had advanced warning that a flood would wipe out life on the planet. This week a modern version of Noah was busted in Bangkok, although no arc was found on the premises. But that is a minor detail, as no self-respecting face displaying local would be caught dead shoving animals into a wooden Arc. The new Arc is an imported luxury cars.

Before we move on to the animal selection process for filling up an Arc, let’s start with the noise animals make. Noah must have had neighbors, too. We never heard their side of the story. Noah didn’t work in silence. He banged nails day and night to construct the arc, while his animals caged up kicked up a chorus. Never heard that part of the story? Right. That merely proves that some great background stories never are told, or if told, are remembered and passed down from generation to generation.

In Bangkok, after a drinking session the music is usually turned up … and up … and at some point it blares through of the neighbor’s walls. The racket Leeches through the floors and ceiling and sucks you dry. Welcome to the neighbor from hell. The one with the teenagers who has formed a rock band with his buddies but no one has ever taken a music lesson.  The wannabe rock stars bang away on electric guitars and drums from midnight to four in the morning. You complain to the police. They do nothing. As Thailand is a hub of the unconventional story about hellish neighbors, at last there is a story where the police actually came, saw, held their noses, and returned with very large trucks to remove the source of the noise. Only in this case, it wasn’t loud music that caused the misery.

In one of the remote neighborhoods in Bangkok, Khun Lek bolted up in bed as he tries to awake for a nightmare of roaring lions and a distant tingling of pigs and peacocks. You are awake but the sound of jungle hasn’t disappeared. And then he smelled something foul as if a hundred sewers have backed up and overflowed in your bedroom.

The police discovered the neighbor—a Mr. Montri runs a pet shop at the Weekend Market also known as Jattujak or JJ Market. He’d previously been convicted of trading in wildlife and had gone back to his old ways as officials found: 14 white lions, 4 otter civets, 2 hornbills, 1 oris, 23 meerkats, 1,000 sugar gliders, 12 peacocks, 13 turtles, 6 minks, 4 miniature pigs, 17 marmosets, a number of birds, and some stuffed animals. It seems the police got tired of counting after the exhaustion of counting 17 marmosets (those little buggers race around like rats on speed and all look alike making counting an ordeal) as quantities grow vague when it comes to birds and stuffed animals. There it is. After the great flood, the world starts over with this population of animals.

Mr. Montri told the police that he had the paperwork to legally import the lions from South Africa. Apparently a lion cost Baht 200,000 wholesale or about $6,700.00. There was a slight problem with the papers. The import documentation showed 16 lions coming into Bangkok, and there were only 14 in the cages on Mr. Montri’s land. The paperwork hasn’t stopped the police from charging Mr. Montri with offenses that could delay the sailing of the Mr. Montri’s Arc by up to 4 years.

Where were the missing 2 lions? That question is one Mr. Montri’s neighbors are seeking answers to as they gingerly rush from their front doors, climb into their cars or on to the seat of their motorcycles and get out while the getting is good.

The rich in Thailand apparently have a strong desire to own unusual pets. There is also a dark side, too, as the delicate bits from some of these animals are also made into medicines usually to increase the vitality and virility of aging men.

The secret sex lives of some old men include harvesting organs from rare, large African animals. Others go for luxury sports cars.

This leads us back to the on-going investigation by a large number of agencies into the smuggling of luxury cars into Thailand. The 300% import taxes are staggeringly high for someone using the normal import channels. That provides an opportunity for someone who can figure out a short cut. Somehow 2,000 luxury cars were smuggled into Laem Chabang port in Chon Buri and stored, making it one of the world’s largest luxury car parking lots in the world. As one would expect, cars began disappearing from the port as importers began selling them off at bargain prices.

The Department of Special Investigation (DSI) is looking into 600 luxury cars to see if they were legally imported. DSI has impounded a 100 luxury cars so far this year.

News reports indicate 90% of the luxury cars imported into Thailand came in illegally. That is more than just a little leakage in the system. That’s the sound of Niagara Falls roaring next to those missing lions. Like prohibition of alcohol, criminalization of drugs, or 300% taxes on for a luxury item is guaranteed to fuel a grey and black market, corrupt officials and create a wealthy criminal class of middlemen. In the case of Thailand, the grey and black markets are the lion’s share of the luxury car market. The grey market includes luxury cars used abroad by students and imported into Thailand—just think about it. You come home from year of study abroad with a half-million car that slides under the tax regulations. Or if you have a luxury car assembled in Thailand, another free pass. Though the assembly of such cars require technicians and facilities that rival NASA, and the local ‘assembly’ shops appear to have no more than the usual screwdriver and hammer. And the luxury car has to be registered. Basically the luxury car market is a legal mess with many fingers pointing and many more fingers in the pot.

The owners of luxury cars are a who’s who of Hi-So personalities, senior government officials and even an abbot. Their sons and daughters also have a taste for the exotic import that distinguishes them from the lower orders running around town in their government subsidized locally assembled cars that cost less than the upholstery on a Bentley.

You need vitality to drive one of these babies. With a white lion in the passenger’s seat no one, I repeat no one, is going to have a larger face than the man behind the wheel. Most people are status obsessed and the Thais are no exception to the rule. Face is important. What you drive, wear, and the animals you collect, if of the right sort, can create a face the size of the moon. Capitalism in its full glory has provided a mechanism to achieve the elevated heights undreamed up in Noah’s day of mere arc builders.

If we stand aside from the personalities and the distracting images, we can see more clearly what is at stake. The lions and the luxury cars are really a story about our uneasy, troubled relationship with nature and each other. Our problem has caused a problem with nature once it became apparent that there is vastly more profit in destruction than in maintenance of natural resources.

We are a species of Deceptive Apes, Killer Apes, and we are a danger to ourselves and all other species. Our ancestors passed laws and wrote constitutions to protect us against ourselves. In the digital age we have found those in power have discovered new and powerful ways of deception, means far beyond the imagination of prior generations.

We deceive ourselves that nature can absorb our rapacious behavior. We deceive ourselves that those who collect information will never use it for their benefit rather than our own.

We deceive ourselves into believing that the rule of law will continue to protect us like a dyke against the rising tide of government intrusion. Apathy is the bedfellow of deception. We are enablers of the worst excesses that should worry us but don’t. A majority of Thais accept corruption as part of the system. A majority of Americans don’t object if their government accesses, stores and analyzes their emails, Amazon purchases, Google searches, Facebook likes and posts, and telephone calls.

Collectively we’ve fallen into a state of denial that a price is paid for deception, and we are the one’s who pay it. Our minds fill with the soma of the media and the government officials, and we miss the context and the larger issues. Like a great magician, who knows how to distract his audience, we are easily fooled. We focus our attention on the slightly amusing personal stories that limit the damage to a couple of dodgy schemes that the authorities are investigating. Imported lions and luxury vehicles are a good laugh. Until we realize that we are laughing when we should be weeping.

We live in a time of great loss—nature, privacy, freedom, honesty and fairness. One by one, these values are dying. Like Old English words, one day no one will remember what such words meant back in our day. The natural habitat of the Deceptive Ape is in transition. What that new space will look like? Perhaps our descendants will occupy a mental cage with as much space to roam as the cages that the Bangkok resident white lions were housed.

We can only guess. Where the Wild Things Are is just beginning to unfold.

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www.cgmoore.com

Christopher G. Moore’s latest book is Thirteenth in Vincent Calvino P.I. seriesMissing in Rangoon, which is available as ebook version.

The Underground Empire opens with this assertion. First published in 1986 by James Mills, at the time it was a highly controversial book. Little wonder, given it was the result of five years legwork and extensive interviewing, research and access to classified United States government documents.

Repeatedly emphasizing the enormous power of drug lords, and their ties to various conflicts or warzones, Mills brings forth one piece of evidence after another of the influence exerted by narcotics traffickers over governments, particularly in South East Asia and Latin America.

Mills writes in an objective manner, as though he is not part of the earth’s population, almost like an alien observer, trying to make sense of our planet and the geo-politics of drugs and the legislation designed to control something that could not be controlled even if those pretending to control it actually wanted to.

The US Central Intelligence Agency, Mills observes, protected foreign drug traffickers whom it valued as sources of information. These days, this is not a new assertion, but at the time Mills walked a fine line and is perhaps lucky to have published his work during an era when making such allegations might result in a suspicious heart attack, drug overdose or car accident.

A decade after its publication I studied his work whilst completing my degree in criminology. This was before the internet or email had become a normal means of communication. Before text messaging, Skype, Viber, smart TV’s and smart phones. Before Apple, Android, Hotmail, Google, Facebook, 3G and WiFi.  Yet even back then, the globalization of organized crime was not a new phenomenon.

The Politics of Heroin, by Alfred McCoy, is another piece of work that places much of blame for the growth in the illegal drug trade at the doorstep of the US Central Intelligence Agency and its ‘picking sides’, turning a blind eye, even sanctioning mass scale trafficking. To this day, his work is still regarded as a chronicle of historical relevance. The author was at the time of publication (1972) a Professor of South East Asian History at the University of Wisconsin, backed by more than twenty years of research.

In 1986, Roger Warner, another highly regarded observer and journalist in Washington DC, wrote The Invisible Hand, a take on a common marketing theory used in legitimate business, which he applied to the drug trade. In it he poses the following question:

How can any product, one with no access to legal advertising, marketing or legitimate transportation, make its way from the manufacturers to the consumers, whilst at the same time generate increased profit margins, higher quality outputs and continued reductions in price?

It’s a tough question; the answer to which Warner asserts would be considered the holy grail of legitimate business. Given this, his work implies, the illicit drug trade may well be the most successful business enterprise in the world.

The Trail of the Triads, by Fenton Bresler (1980) and Chasing the Dragon, by Christopher Cox (1996), both describe a world of shifting alignments between organized crime, warlords and a ‘drugs-for-weapons’ dependence much of the world could not go without, even if we truly wanted it to.

Above: China White, ‘Number 4’ Heroin. Branding signifies its origin and destination.

In 1989 Berkley Rice first released his famed book, Trafficking, an in depth and at times comical analysis of what became known as the Air America Cocaine Ring, a collection of hot headed pilots and entrepreneurs who smuggled more than 50 tons of the drug into America. They were, if you like, at least two fingers on the Invisible Hand that provided a ‘door-to-door’ service from Colombia to the US, using kitted-out cars, airplanes, speed boats, stash houses, trucks and enough adrenaline to literally fly under the radar for many years.

This book, along with Max Mermelstein’s, The Man who made it Snow have been turned into a franchise documentary called Cocaine Cowboys. The trailer alone for this documentary has over 300,000 YouTube hits and the DVD itself broke all known records for documentary sales.

So the link between organized crime and globalization is not new. Just as technology and the cyber world expands and diversifies so does the underground empire and the invisible hand that guides it.

In 2005 Australian Customs seized 5 million ecstasy tablets at Melbourne’s Webb Dock. The pills were manufactured in Holland, smuggled through Europe to Canada, literally half way around the world to their final destination. At the time it was the world’s largest seizure, yet it had no impact on price, purity or availability in the weeks and months thereafter. Three years later Australian Customs and Federal Police made another seizure, this time 15 million tablets concealed in tomato cans shipped from Italy.

This tripled the previous world record, but this time the seizure did make an impact, so much so that the availability of ecstasy bottomed out almost completely, right across the world.

The bust was touted as win in the war against drugs, but on the frontline the result was more like standing on a waterbed, as consumers simply switched to more expensive and often dangerous drugs, which remained (or became) more available, such as cocaine, GHB and crystal meth or ‘ice’.

Rates of overdose, ambulance attendances and hospital admissions spiked and a number of high profile deaths occurred. In the age of social media, a Facebook group even formed to rebel against the shift in trends. One member of the group posted the following statement:

People wouldn’t be looking for alternative drugs if pills weren’t so sh%t….

Mean while, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Mexican drug cartels in Juarez and US border cities like Tijuana are at constant war, with over 3,000 people murdered every year as rival factions fight for control of the cocaine and crystal meth market. Last year, on the wall of the DEA headquarters in Los Angeles, a protester wrote in angry black spray paint that the drug war had caused the death of 400 million people worldwide. Who knows about the accuracy of this figure, but there’s no doubting the sentiment.

Above: Two primary food groups: Guns and Drugs

Since 2002, when the war in Afghanistan began, opium production has increased and is used to help fund the purchasing of weapons, all under the watchful eye of both the Taliban and Coalition Soldiers.

The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which compiles data from law enforcement agencies the world over, stated in its 2010/11 annual report that seizures, availability and purity of all drug types had increased consistently over the past three decades, forcing many countries to shift strategic direction, replacing the goal of ‘supply reduction‘ with ‘supply disruption‘.

Back in the Golden Triangle, where opium production used to be the primary illicit trade, super labs are now being detected underground, with an estimated 8 tonnes of methamphetamine a week in production and global distribution safely inside the invisible hand of the various warlords, Triads, mafia and of course, the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.

Above: Methamphetamine ‘Super Lab’ Reaction Vessel

So how to make sense of all this, and what is the solution? In pragmatic terms, the ideal of legalisation or regulation is simply that, an idea. Politically, it isn’t even on the table and never will be, so what is then?

The following map, pulled from the CIA’s own website, doesn’t offer much of an answer, especially for Australia, given that it would appear heroin (and now crystal meth) coming out of the Golden Triangle and cocaine from South America and Mexico is shipped right into the middle of the Australian “outback”, a dry and baron desert 4 times the size of Texas, where almost nobody lives.

Perhaps that is proof enough that a solution doesn’t exist, even if we wanted one, but since a picture tells a thousand words, I’ll finish with a cartoon from Jack Herer’s 1985 The Emperor Wears No Clothes that sums up the question of whether or not anyone can ever win the war, and in the process who pays the cost…

Back in the old days when they were called things like ‘Razzle’, these things were rather more racy than their modern cousins, which are called things like ‘Nuts’ and ‘Zoo’. I am told you could see ‘the lot’ as it were, back in the 1980s, whereas now men have to content themselves with photo layouts entitled ‘Best Tits 2013′ and ‘Bum of the Year’. That said the small ads at the back of ‘Nuts’ and ‘Zoo’ do not hold back. Generally pushing sex lines they have titles like ‘Granny, 60,  so experienced and all worked up for you’, ‘Hot, Horny and Wet’ and other things even I can’t reproduce here. So what is too much and what isn’t?

A group of campaigners known as ‘Lose the Lads Mags’, who are determined to use EU legislation regarding equality to get lads mags outlawed say that it’s all too much. These publications they claim, demean and objectify women in a most vile manner and they really should be stopped. And I agree with them. However there is a ‘but’.

A long time ago when my son was very small I knew a woman who worked on a sex line. Her husband was retraining because he’d been made redundant and so money was tight. My friend, a woman of short stature in her late 30s back in those days, took a job as a fake ‘saucy seductress’ on a sex line. Advertised via a terrible newspaper that used to be around in the early 90s called ‘The Sunday Sport’, men would call in to my mate, often when she was ironing, in the hope that the ‘leggy 24 year old’ at the other end would help them, verbally, to masturbate. And she did because that was her job.

Of course it was all a total fantasy. My friend usually worked wearing a pair of tattered jogging bottoms, an old cardigan, no make-up and she usually had a fag on. In addition she found the experience both tragic and hilarious by turns and she had nothing much but contempt for her ‘clients’. But the money she got from the sex line got her and her family through some dark times and in terms of who was being exploited by whom, she felt that the jury was definitely out on that one. Without the sex line she could have got work. She could have cleaned people’s houses or worked in a bakers shop but for a woman with no qualifications it was a no brainer. The sex line paid so much more than unskilled work and she didn’t have to get her hands dirty.

At the time I couldn’t really work out whether she was being exploited or not. If men didn’t want such a service that kind of work wouldn’t exist. But why was, and is, it so well paid? Well funny though my mate might have found her job from time to time, it was and is unpleasant. Listening to generally sad and lonely people masturbate as well as often having to say things that are silly, cruel or frightening to them to facilitate their climax is not a nice thing to have to do. This is man at his most base which is generally ugly.

Similarly women I’ve come across over the years who have posed for ‘glamour’ photos, generally for use in lads mags, say that there is sometimes a deep sadness in what they do too. Behind all the jokey laddishness of it all, to be objectified to that extent is deeply offensive and threatening. Once their photos are out in the public domain, some of these women do become nervous, some of them look continually over their shoulders. And yet are these photos and lads mags in general, as bad or worse than what can be seen on Internet porn sites? No of course not, Internet porn sites are beyond the imaginings of anyone except the most severely degraded and depraved, lads mags fade into insignificance beside them. And nothing, so far, seems to have been done about them. I don’t even know what can be done.

Ever since I grew up, I’ve been opposed to censorship and prohibition. I’ve worked in the health service and so I know that the easiest way to create alcoholics is to legally ban booze. As happens in Iran, people just smuggle the stuff in, or make it themselves and end up addicted and, in the latter case, often blind into the bargain too. But then as a feminist I find that with the ‘Fuck Books’ I am conflicted. ‘Nuts’, ‘Zoo’ and all those mags do objectify women, they are sleazy and offensive and they shouldn’t be in our newsagents. But they do also employ people and in a recession that has to be a consideration when one is thinking about shutting an organisation or an industry down. Where will the employees go and what will they do? If we sweat the ‘small stuff’ of the lads mags will the people involved in them go on to work in the much more suspect world of Internet porn?

Obviously there is no way of knowing until it happens. But my gut feeling is that if we close down ‘Nuts’ and ‘Zoo’, and though it pains me to say so, what will bubble up in their place will be so much worse. There’s already stuff on line that makes the small ads in ‘Nuts’ look like the Bible. On line you don’t even know who the women are, whether they are slaves or prisoners, whether they are now alive or dead. Fuck Books are bad news and men shouldn’t bloody need them but while so many of them remain sexually juvenile then these mags are at least a semi-respectable outlet for them. And so it is with regret and much continuing soul searching that I have to say that, though still conflicted, I feel that on balance ‘Nuts’ and ‘Zoo’ do probably need to stay.

The fine election promises to make life easier for debt-ridden ordinary people haven’t actually been broken yet, but there has been some hurried backtracking and issues that candidates breezily expected to deal with in a matter of months now appear to be more likely to take years. Committees are being appointed, which means that this all gets kicked deep into the long grass of the middle of the Parliamentary term in a couple of years.

It seems that the fisheries levy that the last government fought tooth and nail to impose will be repealed, possibly as early as this summer. It’s hardly a surprise, although the rapidity of it is breathtaking – but there is huge pressure from the shipowners, and there’s more or less consensus that the badly flawed form the levy finally took was a dog’s breakfast that nobody could be happy with.

What’s also no surprise is that aluminium is back on the agenda in a big way. The new government is set on allowing the construction of a new smelter at Helguvík that has already been quietly taking shape in spite of the fact that the power it will require isn’t there.

To provide enough power, the south-west corner of Iceland will have to be riddled with geothermal power plants and practically every stream along the south coast, including some of the unique tourist attraction waterfalls, will undoubtedly have to be diverted and harnessed for hydro-electric power. It’s as if 2007 never went away. The Kárahnjúkar project in eastern Iceland that was built to power the smelter at Reyðarfjörður has a track record of environmental damage to the region, the promised prosperity in the region certainly hasn’t materialised and the foreign-owned aluminium conglomerate uses the same creative accounting as most multi-nationals to ensure as little as possible of its profits go to the host country in the form of taxes.

You have to ask yourself, after the Kárahnjúkar experience that the same two political parties presided over in a previous administration, why they would be so keen on another dose of the same medicine?

Iceland isn’t the same place it was in those heady pre-Crash days of 2007. Before the Crash, aluminium was the main bone of contention between those who wanted to see everything possible turned into hard cash, especially for themselves and their friends, and those who wanted to see Iceland’s unique natural environment pickled in aspic, and all shades of opinion between the two extremes. The centre-left kept the Bacofoil bandits firmly at bay, but now aluminium is back.

Before the Crash government largely did what it wanted and unpopular legislation would be steamrollered through regardless. The Kárahnjúkar dam was the subject of environmental assessments before it was built that were swept aside in the rush, but which were subsequently shown to have been quite right. The department that had the authority to question government on such plans had that authority taken away and can now only advise.

It’s only relatively recently that it was confirmed, after having been long suspected, that the power from the Kárahnjúkar dam is sold to the smelter in Reyðarfjörður at bargain basement rates that are a fraction of what local consumers and businesses pay for power. The numbers don’t add up. A new smelter at Helguvík means a massive programme of power generation to sell electricity at knockdown prices for years to come to produce metal in a marketplace that is apparently shrinking as the price of aluminium continues to stay low. According to one commentator, the price of aluminium needs to rise by a couple of hundred dollars per tonne before the Helguvík smelter could pay its way, unless it is essentially subsidised by the Icelandic state, which would be an incongruous situation as the amount of employment it is likely to generate once the construction phase is over is minimal.

One of the symptoms of madness is supposed to be doing the same thing over and over, while expecting a different result. The new government seems keen to repeat the mistakes of a decade ago, although they may not get away with it so easily this time. The elections were a mess, the results more a reflection on the previous government’s shortcomings than the new administration’s promises and dubious past track record. There is no party that reflects the electorate’s broad opinions and aspirations, leaving little choice than the devil you know or the other devil you know.

The first of May, right before the elections, saw a green march take place among the usual union marches celebrating International Labour Day. Not long afterwards a crowd of more than a thousand (trust me, in a country the size of Iceland, that’s a respectable bunch of people) gathered with green flags outside Parliament to hand the brand-new Prime Minister a petition listing their concerns at the speed and scope of the plans for heavy industry.

Will the government take any notice? In the past the concerns of these people would have been contemptuously brushed aside. This time, I’m not so sure. These days Icelanders trust their politicians even less than they did a few years ago and they can hardly be blamed for it, considering the dubious quality of the majority of them. There’s far less of an appetite for leaving the politicians to it, taking into account the headaches and hardships that many Icelanders have to put up with.

So will big business and its friends in government get away with it one more time? The pessimistic view is that yes, they probably will. But this time I’d like to hope they could have a real fight on their hands for a change.

Kohl’s escorts were two private security personnel whose job was delayed at Suvarnabhumi Airport due to bad weather. The security detail had decided to wait for the onward flight to Germany in the transit lounge with Mr. Kohl. It was a long overnight wait and the guards fell asleep according to the Bangkok Post  (although the Australians denied that). Mr. Kohl decided he wasn’t all that anxious to return to Germany where he was wanted on parole violation charges. According to local reports he wandered around the airport for hours.

Mr. Kohl on his way to a foot massage in Suvannabhumi Airport in Bangkok.

The Bangkok Post:

His escape from the airport confirmed that it has more exit doors than  Bangkok’s illegal gambling casinos—300 doors—and is far less secure. Any one of the airport exit door, apparently, is easily disabled by snipping an electric wire.

Rumours are unconfirmed that Immigration—having discovered all of these doors may be in surplus for emergency use—might convert a half dozen of these surplus exits into Fast Track lanes for those willing to pay an extra fee. Of course, I made that up, but anything your can conceive in your imagination just might have a counterpart in reality in Thailand.

Thais love stories about handsome young rogue farang giving the authorities in Australia and Thailand a dual set of black eyes. He was bound to endear himself to a Thai audience by stopping at the airport for a foot massage before high tailing it to Soi Cowboy. The local press played the sanuk angle of the story as if Mr. Kohl’s tour of Bangkok’s hot spots was a blend of Home Alone and Hangover II. A handsome young rogue for a star, fumbling, sleeping Australians, and a tour of the hot spots of Bangkok.

Establishing the facts has been illusive. Like objects in zero gravity, facts in Thailand have a habit of floating free, bouncing off the shell of reality, untethered they remain fluid and forever just out of reach. The Thais have a way of dealing with facts that appear to incriminate someone important—those facts fall into the category of insufficient evidence. In Kohl’s case no Thai officials of rank were incriminated (that was news in itself). His romp through Bangkok was an adventure, and besides everyone was quite happy to lay the blame the Australian security detail—including the Australians. Falling asleep on the job? That could never happen in Thailand. What about all of those doors Mr. Kohl rattled? Some of the doors had been kept open for the convenience of airport staff. A bolt hole might be useful when the time comes to sneak a cigarette, hide from the boss, or to find a cozy spot for a quick nap.

Even the circumstances of Kohl’s capture/surrender/ambush—take your pick—are unclear. He was arrested in the vicinity of the German Embassy (the exact circumstances of his apprehension like most other aspects of the story are vague). One press report said Kohl had applied for a replacement passport two weeks earlier. That was the first clue that he’d been enjoying himself in Bangkok for some while. And he’d been flying under the radar.

Hadn’t anyone notified the Germany Embassy in Bangkok to be on the outlook for him? Apparently not, but facts like elementary particles in physics apparently only allow you to measure location or velocity. I’d hazard a guess that Heisenberg’s head would have been spinning to explain the facts in this case. Was Kohl on his way to the German Embassy to pick up his replacement passport? Did he suddenly have a pang of guilt and walked up and turned himself in to a Thai cop he saw on the way to the embassy? We don’t know those facts. You can’t find them anywhere in the press accounts.

In one week, Carlo Konstantin Kohl managed more front page coverage in the English language newspapers than the Prime Minister or her brother—the one who was prime minister when the airport with the 300 exit doors was opened, and the one through which he exited some years ago. This was exactly the kind of story the local media love—a Hollywood bankable rogue, keystone private cop foreigners, and no one of importance had been accused of corruption, thuggish behavior, or displays of gross arrogance. Allegations of negligence, well, to complain about that is to complain about the oxygen we breath. Though the Thai press had a report that the taxi driver that drove Kohl from the airport into Bangkok charged him Baht 3,000 for a ride that normally would cost under Baht 300.  It’s not certain Kohl was aware that he’d been grossly overcharged. I suspect his gave the driver a hundred dollar bill. Unless after his foot massage Kohl made a trip to one of the airport exchange booths.

With a bit of time to reflect, the Bangkok Post ran editorial suggesting that if Kohl could use a coin to open a security door at the airport, well-trained terrorists who’d been trained with escape and evasion skills could easily have popped open all 300 doors at once.

Kohl, who was fined Baht 6,000 ($200) and given a two-year suspended sentence for illegal entry, later conducted what appeared to be a workshop in front of about 50 officials who watched Kohl show how he had used a coin to open a security door and how he cut the wire. It was less a reenactment of the crime than the usual photo op the local papers run of a foreign guest speaker, guru from abroad, holding one of those seminars at a five-star hotel, lunch included, for the professional development and the transfer of foreign know-how and technology.

Kohl’s fun holiday in Bangkok overlooks one or two issues that I’ve not seen raised in the press accounts. Shouldn’t someone be asking the question as to whether there are protocols that require foreign police agencies, or private security firms used by law enforcement to transport prisoners to other countries, to notify local authorities that a criminal will be passing through as a transit passenger? Wouldn’t the Thais like to know in advance of arrival of someone like Mr. Kohl at their airport? Would they have rules to be observed such as don’t fall asleep in the transit lounge while escorting a prisoner? Can any serial killer show up in the custody of a couple of sleep deprived private security guards, take a power nap in the transit lounge, and let their charge take a tour of the city? What other people or things are going on in transit lounges that Thai officials might be interested in as a matter of public security and safety?

Or is this the international transport of prisoners one of those black boxes, like the renditions the Americans ran out of Thailand for some years, where flights come and go out of shadowy world with a wink and a nod? Do other countries have procedures that set out what notices and process must be complied with in flying prisoners in and out of their country?

The problem with such questions is they take the fun out of Kohl’s story. Better to keep a lid on the broader implications of what happened by limiting attention to the official response which is to send a crew around to rattle the 300 security doors at the airport. The questions are also embarrassing to both the Australians and the Thais. By asking why the Thai authorities didn’t receive advance notice of Mr. Kohl’s arrival raises the uncomfortable possibility that the Australians were under no obligation to give the Thais any such notice.

Credit must go to Mr. Kohl was exposing the security problem at the airport. Additional credit is due for establishing the abiding metaphor whenever an influential person is facing a ‘fact’ that causes a major loss of face and serious criminal charge—he will find 300 exit doors, and one of those door will allow him to escape. Call it the ‘insufficient evidence’ door.

The more interesting story this week was the explosion and fire that destroyed a carrier lorry loaded with six foreign luxury cars that somehow had entered the country and avoided import duties, and the parties have links to major politicians and government officials.

The six luxury cars have caused a turf battle between the police, customs, revenue department, and the anti-corruption agency—that no doubt other agencies will seek to have the cars and jurisdiction under their authority. Doors. 300 doors, and the question is which doors will open and close before the mystery of who owned and imported the six luxury cars. Next week, reading the local press will be an exercise in observing multiple doors opening and slamming shut like a nineteenth century prison cell. Could the Australians take the fall for those luxury cars? Did someone fall asleep again? Somewhere, official wheels are turning, door knobs to power tested.

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www.cgmoore.com

Phnom Penh Noir is available as ebook version.

Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson told us in their 1992 duet hit that “The Best Things in Life Are Free”. Jessie J says it’s not about the money, and not to worry about the “Price Tag”.

Call me a sceptic or a cynic, but I was brought up to believe that nothing is free, that everything comes with a price tag. It might not be monetary, but in the end the fleas come with the dog, or as my father used to say, in this world you get “nothing for nothing”.

What does this have to do with dogs?

It’s said that a dog is “man’s best friend”. Loyalty, forgiveness, companionship and unconditional love are just some of the traits many a dog lover will swear by. Some might even go as far as believing the same traits can never be found in other animals or even people, and that one could spend an entire lifetime and not find a single person with the same commitment to them as their dog. If this is even halfway close to the truth, it suggests a bond so powerful that perhaps only true “dog lovers” can appreciate.

So what is the “cost” of this friendship?

You pay for a dog when you first pick him or her out of the litter, store or shelter. You pay for food, vaccinations, toys, blankets, kennels, heart worm prevention, gates, fences, garden repairs, flea shampoo and tablets, veterinary bills, insurance.

The economic costs go on, but let’s go a little deeper and see what we find.

Whether you are a dog lover or not, there is no doubting the significance of their various ‘roles’ in contemporary life, particularly in western countries, much of which has to do with the ‘skills’ or ‘uses’ dogs have and which humans have capitalised on since domestication approximately 30,000 years ago.

A dog’s nose not only dominates his or her face, but the brain as well. A dog relies on sense of smell to interpret the world in much the same way as people depend on sight. The percentage of the dog’s brain devoted to analysing smells is 40 times that of a human. It’s been estimated that dogs can identify smells up to 10,000 times better than humans. A Beagle, Labrador or German Shepherd, for instance, has 225 million nasal scent receptors. Humans have 5 million.

Little wonder these particular breeds are so often used in the detection of drugs, weapons, dead bodies, bombs, cash, offenders, disaster recovery, even tumours in cancer patients. No wonder that Labradors are quite literally giving sight, companionship and freedom to blind people. One can only image the bond that exists between the vision impaired and their ‘best friend’.

Dogs are also a favourite in the context of ‘characters’ and ‘companions’, both in fiction and real life. In Blood Sunset a street kid junkie lives with a Bull Mastiff alone in a squat. The dog is not just his best friend, it is his only friend. Circumstances lead to the kid losing the dog and the main protagonist adopts him, allowing for stronger character development in a later novel, Pink Tide. The role of the dog as a ‘companion’ in these books is almost sub plot, but it builds on the complex relationships that underpin the story and events common in real life.

The book (and film) Marley and Me takes it a step further and gives the dog a central role in a love triangle that has reduced many grown men and women to tears. In the 1980′s Tom Hanks made the French Mastiff a household name after the release of the film Turner and Hooch.

In Australian households, the Staffordshire Bull Terrier is one of the top three most popular dogs. Originally bred by English coal miners to catch rats, bait bulls and fight other dogs in a pit, they are now affectionately known as the “nanny dog”, after their tenancy to bond and protect children.

A few personal examples:

My brother lives the quint essential “Australian Dream”; a promising career, suburban house with a landscaped backyard, a devoted wife, two healthy children and a family dog. His name is Diesel, an English Staffordshire. I asked him about how Diesel fits into his busy and hectic life.

Diesel

“He would never go to Lisa before the kids,” my brother said, “but when she was pregnant and I was away, he sat by her every night, particularly towards the end of the pregnancy. Diesel has been trained not to go into our rooms, but again when Lisa was pregnant he would sit by her side.

He was doing my home job while I was at work. He knew his role.

Nowadays he is gentle around the children, even outside, but can switch to play ‘rough’ with me and back to ‘gentle’ with the kids again. My daughter, Holly, absolutely adores him. She gives him tickles and pats at every opportunity.

We had some concerns or reservations when we brought the kids home from hospital for the first time. Diesel was 1 year old and had never had to ‘compete for our time’, but he is part of the family now. Without him, things would be very different.”

This is a dog acting out the role of ‘defender’ and ‘companion’, but there are other roles. In writing my first three books, my own dog was essential to the creative process. Everyday I’d walk him, running plot ideas, dialogue and character traits through my mind. By the time I returned to the keyboard the words practically typed themselves. Creative inspiration flowed while my dog sat beside me, a little heart beat by my feet.

There is no doubt ‘Zeus’ was stolen and sold to me in a common scam where particular breeds are snatched from the litter before they are weaned properly. This affected Zeus’s personality (and his upbringing) for his entire 15 years with me, but he had the best life I could give.

There is also evidence to suggest pets help those who are ill. When my father was in the late stages of Motor Neurone Disease, Zeus played a vital role in keeping his spirits up. Zeus, in the winter years of his own life as well, knew my father was dying. He slept on his bed in the hospice. One man and one dog, together facing the certainty of death, and the uncertainty of the beyond.

Zeus passed away almost a year to the day after my father died and I have yet to seek a replacement pet, but my fascination and appreciation of the canine role with mankind is alive and well.

In the underworld, dogs have their own place. In criminal slang, a “dog” is an informant, a snitch. It is a label reserved for the condemned. If you ‘dog’ on someone, you die or you run, forever.

Somewhat ironic, perhaps, given the loyalty canine companions offer, but it stems from the notion that a dog will follow anyone who offers them food. Conversely, in police parlance, surveillance teams are nick named “dogs”, as they follow criminals around, gathering (or scavenging) evidence.

Then there are the serial killers, many of whom begin their ‘careers’ as adolescents by killing animals. Cats are a favourite, but dogs don’t escape this either. Paul Denyer is just one of many who fit this profile. He smeared his victims’ houses with the blood of dead animals.

Does the killing or hurting of animal predict future behaviour? If so, then the story of ‘Buckley’ is another case in point. Buckley was found in a Melbourne western suburban school covered and soaked in a pool of blood. Somebody cut his ears and tail off with a pair of scissors. Nobody was ever caught or tried for this, but the story went viral.

Even hard man and ex-underworld identity, Mark “Chopper” Read, who cut his own ears off to force prison authorities to move him to another facility after a hit had been ordered on him, got involved and offered to adopt young Buckley. The name given to the mutilated puppy has its own significance, since “William” Buckley was an English convict transported to Australia almost 200 years ago, who escaped and was given up for dead, yet survived in an Aboriginal community for many years. It has since became the source of an Australian vernacular phrase “you’ve got Buckley’s chance”, meaning “it’s as good as impossible”.

Thankfully, not so for Buckley the puppy.

In some cultures, dogs are considered dirty. In Australia, every now and then a taxi driver with differing religious views on the canine companion refuses to let a blind person in their cab with a ‘blind eye dog’ and media outrages follows. In some cultures, particularly certain parts of Asia, dogs are slaughtered and become part of the human food chain, no different to chicken, lamb, pork or beef. In other cultures, they are a status symbol. Take music and the gangster image, for example. Snoop Dog (now self-renamed Snoop Panther) and Cuban born / Miami resident Pit Bull as a case in point.

Both are highly successful and talented artists, but are they adding to the cost or capitalising on the reputation of a particular breed?

The American Pit Bull Terrier is an English Staffordshire (or Nanny Dog) mixed with other breeds to create the ultimate urban canine warrior, as close as you can get to a domesticated lion. And in the gangster subculture, they are the gold chain, the Ferrari, the silicone implants and tattoo tears that ‘represent’ who they are. So who pays the cost?

In many instances, it’s the dogs themselves. Like cock fighting in Asia, putting dogs in a ‘pit’ and gambling on who wins is big business in the west, par for the course in the life of a gangster, (and his or her dog).

And like anything gangsters do, the law will follow, or at least try to. In Australia, the American Pit Bull is now classified as a ‘dangerous dog’ and banned. The RSPCA is considered the protector of all animals, yet it remains in favour the banning legislation, making it the enemy of anyone who owns a pit bull, or in many cases, breeds related to it, like the English Staffordshire. Take a drive through any Australian city and you’ll see stickers on the back windows of SUV’s with the slogan “Support the RSPCA – For all creatures great and small, except the American Pit Bull”.

In Los Angeles, a man has recently been charged with murder after his pit bull mauled a female jogger to death, bringing about further calls for the breed to be banned, but will this solve the problem or simply push it further underground?

Criminology 101: when something popular is banned, it becomes even more popular. Demand goes up. The cost to all: policy on the run.

The legislation has divided public opinion and increased the popularity of a breed of dog to the very people it aims to control or restrict. And so the fleas that come with the dog have grown into a swarm, like a tornado, gathering speed and momentum, fuelled by paranoia, knee jerk policy and a failure to assign blame in a consistent direction. In the end nobody wins. Not the dogs. Not the owners and families, and not the public.

As the tornado grows, we end up glorifying an underground culture that exploits the traits of specific breeds, and a divided opinion where some people will literally cross the street when they see any breed resembling a pit bull approach, while others will drop to their knees for a pat. Fear mongering may benefit media outlets, generate ratings and increase the cost of advertising space, but in the end we all pay the price.

We end up with a clash of ill-advised policy, increased demand for breeds by people who fail to understand or simply do not care about the commitment of being a responsible dog owner. You end up with young children being mauled by dogs neglected by irresponsible owners. The type of people who go to the shopping mall and wonder whether they should catch a movie or buy a dog today. People who do not respect the simple but all-important rule (or cost) that a dog is for life, not just Christmas.

So what does it all boil down to?

A dog may be man’s best friend and they indeed have many roles by which the human race can benefit, both in books, movies and reality, but in the end you still get nothing for nothing. Fleas come with the dog. Unless unchecked or treated properly, the fleas breed until we all (especially the dogs) pay the price.

But I’ll leave it to ex-premier of Victoria, Jeff Kennett, to conclude with a statement he includes in his book, Dog Lover’s Poems, one which summarises the cost of this unique friendship and grace’s the shrine of my own best friend’s resting place…

The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, the most precious and valuable possession of mankind.

He will be your friend, your partner, your defender.

You will be his life, his love, his leader.

He will be yours, faithful and true, to the very last beat of his heart.

You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion.

Zeus 1996-2012

Dedicated to anyone else who no longer feels that little heart beat by their feet.

1) On the roof of the Grand Bazaar. James Bond may well have motorcycled over the rooftops of the Grand Bazaar in ‘Skyfall’ but I’ve been up into the workshops that pepper the upper reaches of that structure and I can tell you it is a labyrinth up there. Whether actually on top of the roof or in the workshops and passageways just underneath it, put a body there, and it will disappear. Especially if you wrap it up in a carpet.

2) Aboard a Bosphorus ferry. As the Tube is to London, so the Bosphorus ferries are to Istanbul. Although it must be said that these days they do have competition from the city’s excellent metro and tramway systems. But ferries still plough up and down the Bosphorus on many and various routes and they are always packed. And, like the Tube, it’s possible and very easy to overlook a particularly quiet passenger as he or she takes what is later found to be his or her final voyage in this world.

3) The Church of St Mary Draperis, Istiklal Caddesi. One of Istanbul’s lesser known Catholic churches, St Mary Draperis, though in the heart of the city, is hidden away down a long flight of stairs and behind iron fences. Although of only 18^th century vintage it feels much older and inside it has a dark, fear of God atmosphere which reminds me of the church where Robert de Niro, in his guise as the Devil, met Mickey Rourke in the 1980s thriller ‘Angel Heart’. Nobody bothers you in St Mary Draperis in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in there. An apparently praying and motionless figure may well pass unnoticed for some hours.

4) Underneath the Hippodrome. There’s not much to see of the old Roman Hippodrome at ground level now. It is actually part of a park where its three surviving ancient structures, the Serpentine Column, The Egyptian Obelisk and the Walled Obelisk can be seen. It’s easy to pick out the shape and size of the Hippodrome but it is only when one gets underneath it that the real glories can be seen. That however is rather more easily said than done. There is an unobtrusive and small metal door at the southern end of the Hippodrome which does give access to the glories beneath. I know it exists because I’ve seen film of it. But to actually go in there you need to be an archeologist, with a boat (very wet underneath there) and/or a person going about something nefarious. It’s a marvellous place to hide a body. Truly marvellous.

5)Topkapi Palace Harem. Oh the poetic irony! Where once hundreds, sometimes thousands of girls waited for the call to the Sultan’s bed and the possibility of raised status and wealth that sex with the Lord of the Golden Horn could bring, a girl is found murdered in the opulent apartments of the Valide Sultan (the Sultan’s mother). The Royal Mother (Valide) was almost always opposed to any girl her son took a shine to and more than a few concubines were killed by successive valides. How apt therefore to find a young and attractive girl’s body in such a place.

6) The Botter House. This is on Istitklal Caddesi in Beyoglu and is one of my favourite Istanbul buildings. Constructed at the beginning of the 20^th century in the art nouveau style, it was designed by the Italian architect Raimondo D’Aronco. It was built for the Ottoman court tailor, the Dutchman Jean Botter and his family by the then Sultan, Abdulhamid II. However the Botter house fell into disrepair many years ago and is now a blackened and damaged shadow of its former self. Apparently there is some dispute as to who now actually owns the building which means that it is not only empty but neglected too. I’ve squeezed myself as far as I can behind the corrugated iron plates that now aim to defend it and I can tell you that it looks dirty, derelict and distinctly pigeon filled in there. If you really wanted to hide a body that wouldn’t be found, that would be your place.

7) Cicek Pasaj. In English this the ‘Flower Passage’ which is a small curving alleyway that leads from Istiklal Caddesi to the Balik Pazar (Fish Market). It’s a very lively area full of small restaurants and bars which, you might think, would be a very bad place to do a murder or hide a body. But I disagree. I see Cicek Pasaj as the perfect location to bring back my favourite poison, arsenic, and here is why. At most of the little restaurants and bars in that area a delicacy known as Cig Kofte, raw lamb meatballs, are served. I have eaten this dish in people’s homes but never ‘out’. Because the meat needs to be very fresh and absolutely spotless those who do eat it ‘out’ tend to come unstuck, as it were. And like arsenic poisoning, food poisoning via raw meat acts very quickly on the human body necessitating a flight to the toilet in very short order. And when one is groaning in pain in the bathroom how can people tell whether one has been struck down by Cig Kofte or whether one is in fact a rare modern arsenic victim? And think of how hard it would be in such a crowded place to discover who put the arsenic in the food anyway? Or why?

8 ) In the Bosphorus (or the Golden Horn, or the Sea of Marmara). Taking a leaf out of the old Sultans book of murder, take one inconvenient person, tie up in a sack and throw into a deep body of water. Simple.

9) The Four Seasons Hotel. Again this is a case of appropriateness. This impressive and somewhat forbidding building used to be Sultanahmet Prison. It was only converted into a hotel in 1992 and I am so old and gnarly that I can remember both human and animals guards on the roof (they used to use peacocks as guards because they screech). One can, even now and especially when one looks at the scratches of prisoners past on the walls, imagine all too easily a modern day ingenue dying of fright within those thick walls.

10) Kiz Kulesi, the Maiden’s or Leander’s Tower is a small tower on an island just off the Asian shore of the Bosphorus at Uskudar.  Probably originally constructed as a tollbooth and defence point it is also thought, by the more romantically inclined, to have been built to commemorate the youth Leander’s doomed swim across the strait to Europe to be with his love, Hero. Now the tower contains a small restaurant and is rather uninteresting except for that fact that it is frequently cut off from the rest of the world. Where better to hide a dead body than on a tiny island in the middle of the Bosphorus that gets cut off?