The New Ethnic Mobs tells the story of the blood-drenched 1980s when the crack wars introduced an anarchy that had not been seen in the underworld since before Prohibition. Jamaican gangs known as "posses" murdered 1,400 people in less than five years in their battle to control the crack trade in cities across the country. Kleinknecht details how the ethnic gang wars of the 1980s closely paralleled those of the 1920s, another era when several ethnic groups battled for criminal supremacy.

He also explains the lucrative operations that the new ethnic crime groups conduct in the 1990s. While they still operate traditional rackets like gambling, loansharking, and extortion, they also commit sophisticated white-collar crimes that victimize an unsuspecting public. Credit card rates have been driven up by the multimillion-dollar frauds perpetrated by Chinese crime groups, while fuel-tax evasion schemes engineered by Russian mobs have cost federal taxpayers billions of dollars.

Vietnamese gangs in California specialize in computer chip theft, Medicaid fraud, and other high-tech crimes. But this is also a book about the future. It marshals compelling evidence that the twenty-first century will confront a global crime syndicate in which overseas groups like the Colombian cartels, the Hong Kong triads, and the Russian and Sicilian Mafia will join in pillaging the United States and Europe.