The Dark Art

A highly decorated DEA agent recounts his incredible undercover career and reveals the shocking links between narcotics trafficking and terrorism.

What exactly is undercover?

From a law-enforcement perspective, it’s the art of skilfully eliciting incriminating statements. From a personal and psychological standpoint, it’s the dark art of gaining trust — and then manipulating that trust.

Edward Follis mastered the chess game —the dark art —over the course of his distinguished 27 years with the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he was one of the driving forces behind the agency’s radical shift from a limited local focus to a global arena. Follis bought eightballs of coke in a red Corvette, negotiated multimillion-dollar deals on board private aircraft, and developed covert relationships with men who were not only international drug traffickers, but — in some cases — operatives for Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Mexican federation of cartels.

Spanning five continents and filled with harrowing stories about the world’s most ruthless drug lords and terrorist networks, this memoir reads like a thriller. Yet every word is true, and every story is documented. The first and only insider’s account of the confluence between narco-trafficking and terrorist organisations, The Dark Art is an electrifying page-turner.