Description

poster in poor conditions Backed on paper.

Interesting the subject, well described by Wikipedia:

“In 1935, Commissioner Michael Barrows, agent of theFBN, from San Francisco, is investigating the international traffic of opium conducted by a criminal organization headed by the one (or she) who is known under the name of Gene (or Jean) Hawkes, responsible among other things for the enslavement and extermination, if necessary, of numerous persons involved in the sowing and harvesting of the plant from which the drugs are produced.

The investigation leads Barrows to the four corners of the globe. In Shanghai the plant extract had to be refined, and here Barrows meets the teenager Shu Pan Wu, orphaned following a war, about to be taken to America by his governess Ann Grant, and who becomes attached to him.

In Egypt , clandestine opium poppy plantations are discovered, the irrigation systems of which appear to have been designed by the late husband of Ann Grant, an engineer. Barrows follows the track to Beirut, to which drugs were routed, hidden in the stomachs of camels that were then slaughtered, and to the Suez Canal, from which several ships departed to sort the drug in various countries. In each of the stages of the investigation, Barrows, in a virtuous supranational collaboration with the various members of local intelligence , comes to identify some minor links in the Hawkes chain, which, once seen unmasked, prefer to take their own lives rather than let Hawkes himself eliminate them.

The last stop is Havana, from where the finished product, worth a few million dollars, in the form of three boxes marked as containing butter, must reach New York on a ship. Barrows embarks on the same ship with Grant, Shu Pan Wu and, among others, his uncle who had invited them to the island, and manages in extremis to recover the illicit goods and arrest the notorious unsuspected head of the criminal organization, the person named Hawkes.