Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in the International Drug Trade

Strange Trade reveals in cinematic detail the lives of Mary, a Liberian drug courier with a college education, and Pauline, a Ugandan wife, mother, and drug cartel boss. One of the world’s leading experts on women and organized crime, author Asale Angel-Ajani spent more than ten years interviewing these women in Italy’s notorious Rebibbia Prison — gaining unprecedented access into the narcotics trade — and researching their lives. Herself the daughter of a drug trafficker, Angel-Ajani brings a wrenching, deeply personal perspective to the account of these women’s lives, and offers a nuanced understanding of the global context within which African women are entering the drug trade in ever-increasing numbers. The book follows Pauline and Mary as they traverse three continents, survive wars, poverty, and shattered families, swallow drug pellets, secure drug shipments, negotiate with members of the Mafia, and commit murder. Angel-Ajani paints rich, intimate, and profoundly surprising portraits of their lives . . . all without glamorizing, sanitizing, or offering judgment. The result is an unvarnished, riveting journey into a world that, until now, has always remained hidden — and a glimpse into the motives that led these women to risk, and ultimately lose, everything to be part of the drug trade.