Australia didn't have a drug problem until the Nugan Hand merchant bank - with its shadowy tentacles to the CIA - opened in Sydney in the 1970s, financing heroin trafficking through money laundering on a mammoth scale. Its intricate chessboard of crime had two grandmasters: Michael Hand, a mysterious former Green Beret, and Bernie Houghton, a gregarious wheeler-dealer who was a product of the US secret intelligence network.

Award-winning Asutralian author Wayne Grogan tells the almost unkown story of how the United States inflicted a heroin plague on its closest ally, with ruthless military precision.

Grogan paints his dark canvas by applying a fictional brush inside a frame of factual Nugan Hand material gleaned from official Australian investigations. Heavy Allies is a disturbing study of state-sanctioned criminality incubated in the apocalyptic jungles of Vietnam and Chiang Mai to infect the streets of Sydney with heroin forever.