The story focuses on the struggle of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs Service, and New York Police Department to cripple the Mafia's drug trafficking. The activities of the FBI agents assigned the case, Russo and Rooney, are traced. Together with an expanding army of investigators in the United States and abroad, they follow a trail of drugs that leads from sidewalk pizzerias and pay phones in Long Island, New Jersey, and rural Illinois, to bank vaults and hideouts in Miami, the Bahamas, Zurich, Palermo, Rio, Madrid, Turkey, and Bulgaria. Thousands of hours of wiretapped conversations and surveillance photos expose coded messages, midnight heroin dropoffs, and fortunes laundered through some of America's largest brokerage firms. The book also focuses on impediments to the investigation within law enforcement bureaucratic and frontline ranks. Chapter notes, subject index. (Publisher summary modified)