Merchants of Men
The kidnapping industry today is bigger than the illegal drug trade and worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Merchants of Men is based on exclusive access to hostage negotiators actively involved in ransom negotiations and rescue missions, counter-terrorism experts, members of security services, and former hostages, among many others. The reader will discover that the protocols of prevention and rescue change according to the type of abduction and the designated targets and will come to know first hand the range of experiences of kidnapping victims.
Praise for Merchants of Men
"Loretta Napoleoni has cast a light on the disturbing evolution of the criminal and jihadist kidnapping rings in the Middle East, a multimillion-dollar-a-year business, to the even more lucrative trafficking of migrants to Europe. The traffickers extort as much as $100 million a month from tens of thousands of desperate families. These traffickers are our creations. They are the logical outcome of industrial death and destruction. They are the product of failed states and widespread chaos. We are responsible. And the insatiable lusts we have spawned among these human predators will not end with kidnapping and human trafficking alone. This is the new world order."
— Chris Hedges, author of Wages of Rebellion and former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times