Book excerpt: Since the end of the Cold War, liberal capitalism has spread worldwide without any significant ideological rivalry, characterized by the frenetic search for an ever-increasing return on capital and constantly-increasing profits, a generalized un-concern for the moral values of liberalism, and for social inequalities and human misery.The book, Servants of the Devil: The Facilitators of the Criminal and Terrorist Networks, shows that this evolution has been possible, thanks to legitimate actors equipped with the legal, financial, technical, and influential means to facilitate the legitimization of criminals and the justification of such a criminal economy — the 'Servants of the Devil' acting as the 'legitimate' facilitators of the criminal and terrorist economies.The book aims to alert security authorities, government officials, business, professional and financial leaders, and the media that criminal and terrorist networks have thoroughly penetrated the political, economic, and social structures of the contemporary world, and they could not operate without the extensive and willing cooperation of these facilitators.Recommendations are made in this book to alter the targets of law-enforcement forces and the justice system, by putting more emphasis on the facilitators by naming, shaming, and prosecuting them to seriously disable the criminals and terrorists. The legal structure needs to be altered, detailing procedures to be used by critical institutions, as well as the intelligence and analytic techniques to be developed to stay ahead of the criminals' own constantly altered techniques.The book provides a detailed account of the problem and how it is corrupting the Western society, enhancing the need for a new economic paradigm that displays a real and actual economic understanding of the world and of any individual country's economic activity, and shifting the ways of economic analysis to bring out the actual strength and role of criminal and terrorist activities in local, regional, and international governance from the shadows.