Heavy Allies

“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. In his new novel, Heavy Allies, award-winning Australian author Wayne Grogan worms inside Nugan Hand to tell American readers the almost unknown story of how the United States inflicted a heroin plague on its closest ally, with ruthless military precision.”