An exposé of drug smuggling and terrorism reads like a first-rate thriller

The crucial moment in this vivid exposé of the murky world of transnational crime comes in 2015. Mustafa Badreddine, one of two Lebanese Shia cousins who for three decades had led the deadliest Iranian-linked terrorist network in the Middle East, was finally indicted by a UN special tribunal investigating the assassination of the Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri a decade earlier.

After an extraordinary career of mayhem, Badreddine had spent the previous three years leading an elite Hezbollah militia shoring up President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. But the tide had turned, and in July 2015 Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Quds force in Syria, secretly flew to Moscow to beg for Russian military support. Otherwise, he argued, Assad would fall, mortally damaging the Shia axis between Syria, Iran and Hezbollah that kept the regional balance of power.

At almost exactly the same time Salvatore Pititto, a second-division hoodlum from Mileto in Calabria, southern Italy, was sweating because a huge drugs deal he had set up with a leading cocaine-producing cartel in Colombia was reaching its climax.