Bloodstains on the Cocaine Trail

A homicide crisis began sweeping America after massive quantities of cocaine first began their journey into America in 1986. Drugs were trucked along the highways of the Cocaine Trail to every city in America. This influx of a deadly new drug led directly to a series of record deaths from overdoses, suicides and crime-related murders, family breakdowns and destroyed lives. Drugs are credited with driving the highest homicide rates in American history and a raging turf war between street gangs.

Crack cocaine unleashed a brutal era of violence, placing newspapers under enormous pressure to provide coverage. Relations with police were breaking down everywhere and crime coverage was in its death throes. Newspapers could not cover the homicides or give any context or explanations to such a social upheaval. Editors, reporters and police now reveal the shocking truth behind this agonizing episode in American history, when crime reporters had to re-invent journalism to get behind the police blue code. This book combines investigative journalism and narrative style to produce a rare portrait from within the secret inner world of newspapers.

Peter Clack is an award-winning Australian journalist and author of Firestorm
Trial by Fire, providing crucial revelations into the causes of a bushfire that
destroyed 500 Canberra homes in 2003. This was the worst natural disaster in
Canberra’s history. Clack worked in newspapers in Queensland and Victoria
before joining The Canberra Times in 1989, where he was later appointed as
police reporter. He developed networks of trusted informants across the police,
fire and emergency services and this opened the way for extensive coverage of
police and crime. He realised it was impossible to cover on-going crime without
access to inside information from police, and that it was only possible by hiding
their identity. This sparked his intrigue in finding out more. He was awarded a
Churchill Fellowship in 1995 to study police reporting at prominent newspapers
in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.