Five Great Books on Drugs and Thugs

A March shout to subscribers

Mar 06, 2025

I love to do my reading of books in the morning with a fuck-off mug of coffee. Over the decades, I’ve slurped that dawn caffeine and soaked up glorious volumes (as well as shitty ones) from dirty-realism novels to revolutionary history to football journalism. I read far and wide but often come back to the focus here at CrashOut: drugs and thugs.

Subscriber David Iraola shot me a message asking, “If there’s any other books on the drug trade that have influenced you and which you’d be willing to recommend.” I get asked this a lot so I thought I’d bang out a list in this “March shout to subscribers.” (For new readers, I publish these subscriber notes every quarter.)

There are truck-loads of tomes on gangsters and psychedelic substances but I want to start with five bangers. These classics were all written in English, and I might focus on Latin American narco literature in a different post, as well as more specifically on the Mexican cartel wars. But the titles cover broad themes of crime and drugs and they are genuinely fantastic reads to accompany that cuppa Joe.

Before I unleash the list, just the compulsory shout out. Since Donald Trump got back in the White House and upped the ante on Mexico and cartels, CrashOut has been blowing up like a frag grenade. We have shot past 12 K subs and followers, get several times that in views and get widely cited (I’m honestly getting so many media requests right now that I can’t begin to attend to them).

I’m happy to focus my work here as an independent journalist free of a billionaire boss or a New York newsroom. And I’m stoked to be publishing upcoming and veteran talent and working on more video reports to reach an even bigger audience. Check out the great CrashOut crew work from Juan Alberto Cedillo, Niko Vorobyov, Katarina Szulc and Omid Visua this quarter.

I really push to make this newsletter a non-partisan search for the truth in an important historical moment, and I’m proud to have readers from across the spectrum. Here are the words of five of them.

I want to make sure we keep digging up authentic and exclusive info, and genuine journalism requires cash even if we cut more costs than most. I’m grateful for every one of you reading, but it’s still you hardcore paid subscribers who make this happen. So if you like the flavor then don’t think too hard, just flick the button and, “boom,” you are in the CrashOut community of the most informed players in the room.

Now, the CrashOut drugs and thugs reading list, installment one.

Wiseguy (later changed to Goodfellas), 1985
The book behind the Scorsese movie is not only amazing for the colorful character of protagonist Henry Hill, starting with his iconic line “As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster” (and most of these Goodfellas movie quotes are straight from the page). It also offers dazzling insight into organized crime in America, really showing how the mob ticks. As Henry says: “That’s what the FBI can never understand—that what Paulie and the organization offer is protection for the kinds of guys who can’t go to the cops. They’re like the police department for wiseguys.”
Killing Pablo, 2001
I’m wary of authors trying to pen detailed narratives of mobsters if they don’t have a genuine front seat into their lives. But Mark Bowden, who also wrote Blackhawk Down, is just so good at digging up details and crafting an account that flows but doesn’t try to be a movie script with a POV inside the kingpin’s head. The alignment of forces to get Pablo back in 1993, from pissed-off gangsters to the post-Cold War CIA, teaches us lessons for today. Unlike the Narcos series, it makes Colombians the central heroes. “In the world's most dangerous country, the job of going after Pablo was the most dangerous position of all.”
3. Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, 2002
Dominic Streatfield’s history of blow (or “Charlie” for old-school Brits) is an underrated classic in the genre, finely mixing reportage, story-telling and solid archival research. He manages to nail interviews with large characters in the cocaine story, like LA crack king Ricky Ross, Boston George Jung, the Ochoa brothers and now deceased journalist Gary Webb. The ride takes us from Robert Louis Stevenson scribbling Doctor Jekyll on a cocaine binge to the origins of crack in the Bahamas to the cocaine coup in Bolivia. It’s perhaps been outdated by the bloodbath in Mexico of the last two decades, but it stands as a great read and reference.
4. Havana Nocturne, 2007
T.J. English is one of the true heavyweight writers on the American mob, giving us such diamond quotes as, “Whenever I encounter boozing, whoring, gambling, drug taking, or a dead body, I call it research and write it off on my taxes.” But he not only understands the gangster life, he nails the context and larger forces at play. Havana Nocturne is a luscious read into when the mobsters ran Cuba, the subject of Godfather II; it makes me want to get a time machine and travel back there.
5. Chaos, 2019
Chaos is only on the fringe of drug trafficking and organized crime, centering on Charles Manson, LSD experiments, sixties Los Angeles and the CIA. But I just loved this book so fucking much, I wanted to include it. Tom O’Neill took decades and drowned in debt to make this happen and just dug and dug and dug. He doesn’t paint a clear conspiracy as you might fear (or hope) but gets reluctantly pulled into the hall of mirrors. “I’d come to feel like a prisoner of my own story,” he says. Encouraged by many CrashOut subscribers, I’m very glad I got to read that story.