Crime city where to get guardian vest

Over the years, Dolly Blake has become a dab hand with the concealer, as her unstable Vietnam-veteran husband, Samuel, frequently assaults his family. Elder son Noah, who is in love with Romanian immigrant Rat, is a frequent target of his wrath — Pastor Lewis preaches homophobia along with other forms of intolerance. As her friend Emma tries to discover what happened, long-held secrets and resentments come to light.

Beautifully written and very moving your heart will ache for a set of people trapped by ignorance, cruelty and trauma , this is an assured debut. T he Costa del Sol is home to more than different criminal organisations.

They range from extremely powerful, tightly structured mafias, like the Serbian, Morrocan and Dutch groups, to gangs of small-time burglars. Most groups specialise in one or more of the various activities that revolve around trafficking drugs: buying merchandise, protection and security, transportation, distribution, money laundering.

Almost none of these groups can manage the whole process by themselves, which makes collaboration essential. The groups make alliances based on country of origin. Lower down the hierarchy are the smaller criminal gangs who often act as subcontractors.

And some of them, like the youth gangs from Naples or Marseille, or the gangs from Romania or Bulgaria, travel to Marbella for a few months of the year to work the season, then return home. Meetings take place in discreet locations: shopping centres, fast-food restaurants or parks, or during a stroll through a public garden in a luxury development. While there might not be any clearly marked territories on the Costa del Sol, each group has its own stomping grounds — the businesses and other locations they frequent and control.

The police know a lot of these places by name. Beyond its own frontiers, Marbella is inextricably linked to Dubai by crime. Most of the top bosses live there, and then they spend the summer in Marbella. A cold wallet is an essential tool for anyone who wants to store large quantities of illicit money in a discreet place.

Cold wallets are the latest trend in money laundering, an essential tool for criminal organisations who wish to convert illegal earnings into legal wealth. A lot of the mansions on the Costa del Sol have companies with ties to organised crime behind them, a regional expert on money laundering with the Guardia Civil told me matter-of-factly. The tactic that gives security forces the biggest headache is false invoicing and fraudulent accounting. A criminal organisation signs an investment contract with a development or real estate company that it controls in some opaque way.

The contract includes a clause stipulating that if payments cease, the contract is terminated. Over time, the organisation stops issuing invoices and the contract is rescinded. This is where police often lose the trail, because everything paid up to that point gets registered as profit and the money becomes clean. So a criminal living in Marbella sets up a company in Germany.

That company buys cars from an official dealer in Germany and pays in cash. The company then ships the cars to Spain, where a partner based in Costa del Sol buys them. Mission accomplished: the seller keeps their commission, and the rest of the money, now clean and legal, gets sent back to Germany.

The global trafficking networks connecting Colombia, the Netherlands, Italy and Dubai sooner or later all converge in Marbella. The organisations behind these operations are based in Marbella. Cocaine is almost always smuggled in shipping containers through the port of Algeciras, while the bosses go about their lives only a few miles away.

And not just Marbella, but other resorts along the coast. In Morocco, large organisations oversee the preparation of massive shipments of hashish, often in the thousands of kilos. The fewer people who know about it, the better. To protect against vuelcos, groups will sometimes hire security, which, on the Costa del Sol, is usually contracted out to the Naples Camorra.

Usually, the shipment has a GPS tracker. The Delaneys are a tennis family: Stan and Joy met as champions and toured the circuit together before setting up an academy. Now retired, Stan and Joy find themselves rudderless, and when a young woman turns up on their doorstep, distressed, they allow her to move in — much to the dismay of their children, who soon begin to suspect that she is not, as she claims, a victim of domestic violence.

This is a complex and satisfying tale of the sacrifices we make, the way we betray one another and the slippery nature of memory: perfect holiday reading. Struggling with issues of identity, Virgil acts on behalf of those failed by the unsatisfactory combination of toothless tribal police and a US criminal justice system that all too often declines to prosecute wrongdoers.