What’s more, the gang in The Dragonhead isn’t part of the Italian Mafia, which The New Yorker says is nearly irrelevant and Sammy the Bull in Underboss agrees is on the ropes, and it isn’t part of a fifteen-minute sensation like the Russian, Jamaican or Mexican Mafias. The gang I’ll be writing about is part of the Mafia that the police and the FBI predict will be number one ("It has the potential to make the Italians look like wimps") by the time this book comes out—the Mafia that even now is being driven from Hong Kong and is eagerly relocating in the United States. It’s part of that "unapproachable" and "unfathomable" conglomeration of secret societies, the Chinese Mafia, and it’s that most vicious and violent part, the Big Circle. 

Yet very few people who I’ll be writing about will be Chinese men with Chinese names who do wicked things in China while talking Chinese. The top brass, it’s true, lives in Hong Kong, but for fifteen years the Big Circle has also committed fraud, extortion, robbery, counterfeiting, smuggling, gun-running, heroin-cocaine-amphetamines, kidnapping and murder in North and South America, Europe and the rest of Asia. Of the crimes in this book, about a third occur in the United States and at American bases in Vietnam, and Americans like General Abrams, General Cushman, and Sergeant John Ruotolo of the NYPD, as well as British in the Hong Kong Police, are significant characters. Most of the conversations that I’ll report (even some conversations among the Chinese) were originally in English or Pidgin English.

For the past eight years, I’ve hung out with the Big Circle. I’ve been to its haunts in such civilized places as Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Milan and New York. I’ve slept at the homes of its members—its "brothers"—out on Long Island, and they’ve slept at mine in the Rockies. With five burly bodyguards watching us, I’ve dined with the Dragonhead of all Dragonheads, the capo di capi of whom no other reporter knows the identity. I’ve interviewed many of these mobsters, even one who was hiding out, and I’ve interviewed some of their victims and one victim-to-be, an American businessman with a contract on him (he asked me to intercede for him, and I did, unsuccessfully). One brother even invited me to watch him rob an unspecified jeweler (I sent regrets). My edited interviews with these otherwise tight-lipped people come so far to five hundred single-spaced typewritten pages.

I don’t think I’m being immodest to call this a journalistic coup. Up until now, the Chinese underworld has been so impenetrable that in one well-known movie the metaphor for the impenetrable is Chinatown. Not even the FBI pretends to understand it. "It’s hard to get a handle on it," admits the federal prosecutor known as the Dragon Lady, and it’s "an oriental maze" according to one standard book: it defies penetration, the author writes, its canaries don’t sing. Peter Maas, who sold seventy-five thousand copies of China White, his own recent book on the Chinese Mafia, was forced to write fiction rather than fact. "I didn’t have a Serpico. I didn’t have a Valachi," said Maas on CBS This Morning. "This world is so arcane, so mysterious, that I had to create characters." 

Maas’s chief character ("He killed nineteen men") is more or less based on Johnny Kon, the elusive and fugitive dragonhead for the Big Circle in the United States. And this same Johnny Kon—the real one, the man who The New York Times called the "Top U.S. Target" and who NBC in a week-long documentary called King Kon—is the man whom I know best, whom I’ve known all this decade, whom I’ve interviewed for four hundred hours, and who’ll be my own chief character in The Dragonhead.