Big Business and Body Bags: A Journey Into the Deadly Drug Business

Lincoln R. Peters 
Outskirts Press (2011)
ISBN 9781432770297
Reviewed by Beverly Pechin for Reader Views (1/12)

Article first published as Book Review: Big Business and Body Bags: A Journey Into the Deadly Drug Business by Lincoln R. Peters on Blogcritics.

The last lines of “Big Business and Body Bags” truly do sum the main character up in a few short words, “You were just born to be a loser.”

The big city streets tend to swallow up people and Johnny was among the many that seemed to be swallowed up without really being seen. Sometimes that was good, other times it made him feel a lot less of a man than he wanted to be. He was born without a golden spoon in his mouth and lived off the streets of Chicago. Johnny Howell was one of those people that never seemed to stay put or grow roots. He loved women and left them and very few left true memories in his mind or chipped through to his heart. He knew that women meant trouble usually so he would never get too involved for good reason.

Johnny really was a ‘nobody’ with big dreams. Those dreams pushed him through the gutters of Chicago and the people that hung there. Slowly he moved up the ranks, taking on different jobs doing different things, very few of them legal. He slowly found a niché in the drug business, first off as a small guy with little threat to anyone up in the ranks; but with Johnny’s determination and subsequent lack of morals, it seemed he found himself working up in the ranks faster and faster. Suddenly this drug thing was paying off well and when that begins to happen people take notice, not the people you want to take notice either. Suddenly you’re hated by everyone, needed by many, and in the cross marks of those aimed to take you down. But Johnny wasn’t that stupid, or was he?

The story of Johnny is like the story of many who get wrapped up in drugs. Somehow he ends up battling those that are much bigger and much stronger than him. You find yourself wanting to dislike him, while sometimes still pulling for him. You can’t decide how you can find a speck of kindness and liking in your heart for someone like him, yet you still do. Then he acts like the thug he is and you find your reason for liking him and pulling for him going away and being replaced by disgust. In the end Johnny takes on everything from the Mexican Drug Cartel to the street thugs and while one sounds more dangerous than the other you quickly realize that anyone in the business uses a gun to solve their problems and Johnny has become a problem.

“Big Business and Body Bags” is well written and with an amazingly detailed background you wonder how the author knows so much about the drug world and its dealings. You realize the amount of research and literally keeping track of everything in the news helped him get a better understanding of the world these people live in. The book gives you not only an inside look at the local street pushers but all the way up the ladder to the top dogs who, if you step on their toes will kill you without thought. Johnny stepped on many toes and yet always seemed to be one step ahead of them all. But is he only biding his time or does he end up getting out of it all alive and rich to live the life he has always wanted and the respect he has always dreamed of? After all, he was born a loser.

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