Abali: Every Empire Has an Architect
Every empire has an architect. Most are designed to be forgotten.
Chicago, 1920.
Sam Giancana learns early that power does not belong to the men who stand in front of the crowd. It belongs to the men who understand who controls the room, who owes whom a favour, and which doors must never be seen opening.
Over the next five decades, Giancana builds something far larger than a criminal organisation.
He builds a system.
From the back rooms of Chicago politics and the machinery of organised crime to the corridors of Washington and the covert operations of the CIA, Giancana becomes part of an invisible network where money, intelligence, political influence and violence move between worlds.
Then comes Iran.
At the foot of the Alborz Mountains, an extraordinary project is taking shape: the Abali Casino, a secluded playground for the Shah's court, international financiers, intelligence chiefs and some of the most powerful men in the criminal underworld.
For Giancana, Abali represents something unprecedented.
Not merely a casino.
A place where the people who officially govern the world can meet the people who actually make things happen.
But systems built on secrets have a weakness.
Eventually, someone starts asking who built them.
ABALI is a historical espionage thriller spanning five decades of organised crime, covert intelligence, political power and international intrigue-from the violent streets of Prohibition-era Chicago to the final, glittering years of the Shah's Iran.
What happens when a man spends his entire life becoming indispensable-and discovers that history has no obligation to remember him?
For readers of Robert Harris, Frederick Forsyth, Charles Cumming and Don Winslow.
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