Heavy Allies

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

In his new novel, 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. 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.

Author Bio

Wayne Grogan was born in Sydney in 1953. He was a member of the Waterside Workers Federation for sixteen years. He was a guest of Sydney and Byron Bay Writers' Festivals. He lives with his wife and children in Sydney and works as an antiquarian book dealer. His previous publications, published by Brandl & Schlesinger were Junkie Pilgrim, winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Crime and Vale Byron Bay. Grogan's own familiarity with the underworld - coming from 16 years of working on the Sydney waterfront - gave him access to NSW Drug Squad detectives who were working at the time of Nugan Hand's explosive crash.