I'm unsure whether it was because I couldn't really get a feel for how reliable the person talking about all of this was, or if there were places I felt that it was just...not quite entirely true, but I didn't enjoy this book. It took a long time to settle and enjoy the book itself, and it was compelling enough, but there was a niggling 'how much disbelief do I suspend' the whole time I read this book. Sometimes that's great, but the book had lulls that felt like were a bit unnecessary, so that was hard to do.

Very Bad People is The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption human rights and saving our environment. by Patrick Alley.
This book is about money laundering, corrupt politicians, and how the group called global Witness go undercover and risk their own life’s to help stop the most corrupt people around the world. The group go to work at what could be a great cost to themselves, as they venture with hidden cameras into war zones and go undercover into jungles and collect the evidence to bring these people to justice. Global Witness are the true heroes who try to fight the people at the top where so many corrupt rich and powerful people hide behind there love for money and power.
They hurt, rape, murder or maimed humans for there own selfishness and they do not care about the most vulnerable of human kind. I thoroughly enjoyed following everybody and there stories and this book brings true incite into the organisation willing to do the work and bring the corruption into the light. We need more organisations all over the world to help do this work.
I highly recommend this book and I would like to thank NetGalley for providing the ARC of this book and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Very Bad People
The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption
by Patrick Alley
This was a true story so at times when I was getting bored, I tried to think about how this was real. But the fact the telling of the story got boring at times was real too.
The rest was really good. The intriguing part of discovering corruption, and trying to put a stop to it wss deadly business. This was the realistic version of what they went through too. Once he had bowel trouble in South America I believe and the place for him to relief himself was not ideal or away from others at all! Everyone heard everything! They don't put that in James Bond movies and you know that has to happen to even good ol' Jim Bo! Lol!
It's an interesting story worth the read. I want to thank NetGalley and the publisher for letting me read this story!

I just did not enjoy reading this book. I found it to be rather boring, and the stories to be rather heavy handed. I could not finish it. I understand others have read it, and found it to be very appealing. Just not to me. It's really not fair for me to penalize the authors with a bad review for a book that I did not finish. Therefore, I will not be posting this to any of my usual review sites. Best of luck to the authors.

I read a lot of non-fiction books and very bad people by Patrick Alley it’s one of the best I have come across. It is about regular people. Doing astounding things getting justice in a country where there isn’t any justice, Stopping those who profit off of war and bullies who created I especially love the guy Brennan who worked for the environmental nonprofit and filed a documented tear down St. Patrick’s Church to dig under it for minerals all because someone wanted to do that with a tribes mountain it wasn’t just any mountain it’s where they believe their God was in people from the west wanted to dig for minerals and probably thought nothing of it. I absolutely love this book and think it should be read by high school students I am definitely going to get my local library to get a copy. This should be mandatory reading just to be an adult and a citizen of the earth we live on. I especially agree that companies should be billed for the environmental damage they do if they did so much damage wouldn’t happen. I love this book and can’t believe it all started over pints in a pub. I was given this book by Net Gally and I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any grammar or punctuation errors as I am blind and dictate my review but all opinions are definitely my own.

Free ARC from NETGALLEY

I love the truth that reads like fiction, and vice-versa

Look GLOBAL WITNESS and the things that they uncovered should scare you and educate you

Primarily because it shows the g reed of the little gods of our ties but also you can bet there is twice as much that is twice as bad that they missed. Fantastic!!!!

Quick Take: Illegal organizations around the world fund their activities through shady transactions. The NGO, Global Witness, works to uncover these sources of income and bring them to light.

Very Bad People by Patrick Alley is the story of how corrupt forces fund their illegal enterprises. in the 1980’s, Patrick Alley and a few friends decided to start an NGO called Global Witness. Global Witness’ main objective was to bring to light how corrupt organizations fund their activities.

Global Witness’ first foray was into the jungles of Cambodia. They had heard that the Khmer Rouge was funding their organization with illegal timber sales. Posing as European timber purchasers they headed to the border between Vietnam and Cambodia. They soon obtained camera and video footage of the illegal timber that supposedly didn’t exist and publicized it in Europe and the US. This led to the actual closing of the timber trade. After their first success they moved to uncover the secrets of the diamond trade in Africa.

According to Alley, “Corruption is a cancer that eats away at societies. It chews the innards out of the rule of law; it favors the rich and powerful at the expense of the world’s most vulnerable people: it undermines international efforts to protect the environment and it gnaws away at the foundations of democracy itself.” In fact, to a greater or lesser extent, we are all victims of corruption. The trouble is that most of us don’t know it.”

I thoroughly enjoyed following Alley and his fellow Global Witness compatriots on their adventures into dangerous places. The world needs more organizations willing to do the challenging work to uncover corruption and bring it to light. I would recommend this book to anyone.

Rating: 4/5
Genre: Non-Fiction

I thought harder about asking to see this book than any other this year. Did I really want a self-righteous, "greed is bad" economics book railing about the state of the world and the people in it, and peddling interventionist, and even worse, Marxist, market ideas at me? Wasn't it just some bonkers look at a "shadow network" of people running the world from behind closed doors, pulling diplomatic and business strings alike without scrutiny, and being one step from David Icke's lizard rulers? Well, I got completely the wrong end of the stick.

This is more or less a "my life at work" autobiography of our author, who was one of three people to found something called Global Witness, almost as an offshoot of another body I'd never heard of. And while their railing against the world and the people in it is concerned with money, it's so much more, and so much easier to get behind. Their very first case was going to the borderlands of Cambodia in order to prove that the Khmer Rouge were still dealing in timber from the rainforests, and that corruption was still allowing them to trade over the allegedly sealed border with Thailand, thus funding their war machine. The second big case (I say big, I only have it on authority here as a heck of a lot of this has passed me by) brought blood diamonds to the fore, and ever since then they have meshed the environmental campaign with the political. This destructive ecological activity is the only reason someone can afford these weapons. This country would be so much better if the people knew their country's oil wealth was being spent their on them and not on $380m megayachts for corrupt presidential sons.

The writing, which is excellent if slightly too keen on describing people's style of spectacles, and which loves giving friendly people a first name appellation and sticking everyone else with their surname, is generally following the path from three-people-meeting-round-pub-tables start-up to big package, with journalistic nous, lawyers and so on. That said, it covers issues in concise yet forensic manner, so the African "oily-garch" is separate from the diamond monopoly, and so on. It both builds as one solid narrative and yet branches out into the individual campaigns, some of which are sustained for decades.

And not one bit of their ideology did I find objectionable. From proving how much of London is owned by ex-Soviet political families, none of which paid themselves anything like enough to afford that lifestyle, officially, to proving how damnably dangerous it is to be an indigenous campaigner for the rainforests under that nutjob in Brazil, this is all worthwhile, never sounding worthy on the page, and done in ways that seem to make a firm, inarguable point. But what it can find no way to do is to swipe an answer across the world, and the only seeming solution is for us all to just buy less. If we could use a heck of a lot less fossil fuels the bribery money sweeping to and fro in Africa's extraction industries would not be needed. No family group would have 80% of the world's trade in diamonds, and pretend they can't tell ones from war zones from ones from safe areas. The Brazilian beef growing on deforested land, soon to be desert, has an environmental cost 18 times what little income it generates.

Of course, that's all said and done (and when I say 'buy less' I don't apply that to this book, OK? It's perfectly worth a purchase). From this evidence none of the major European banks are safe to use, for the way they bankroll said Brazilian beef producers. So we're going to have to be pretty much Luddites if we can't buy anything, bank anywhere and cannot use social media for the extreme political ferment it's seemingly designed to produce.

So, no answers, but no screeching wokery and Marxist tripe-waffle (I used the word tripe instead of another word in my misquote there). And let's face it, anybody who gets funding from someone as iffy as George Soros (who famously made a billion dollars, back when a billion dollars actually meant something, overnight by headbutting the British currency) is never going to be that left of centre. There's a huge irony in these guys being in bed with that oligarch, his charities and endowments notwithstanding, but in a world where there's dirt, dodginess and dastardliness wherever you look, the author here and his colleagues do end up seeming very much like the good guys.

Very Bad People by Patrick Alley This is a very interesting book about the formation of Global Witness an NGO established by three young people who felt they could make a difference for the good in the world. Established with no money on November 15 1993, they first were able to tackle, expose, and put in place stronger rules to prevent the Khmer Rouge from selling timber harvested in Cambodia transported to Thailand and then sold on with the proceeds used to fund their war effort. To do this Patrick and his team traveled to very dangerous places along the border between these two countries filming and speaking to truck drivers, bar tenders and others to get the complete story. The book is about these type of exposures they did in Angola on Blood Diamonds and lumber, East New Guinea and Kazakhstan on Oil as well as all the money laundering occurring within the US and UK. In all cases the key was to follow the money. One of the interesting points Alley discusses is the extraction of natural resources with global consequences to the environment and the cooperation in this rape of countries by Western banks and lawyers as well as frequently the US and European governments. Reading this book will bring out anger as you can see where the lip service paid by 1st world countries just not match their actions to support this looting of natural resources from poor countries. I recommend this book to open your eyes and perhaps find a way to support their work. Global Resources has an excellent website where you can learn more about their efforts.