Swordfish: A True Story of Ambition, Savagery, and Betrayal.

• Author: Rothchild, John

To the surprise of the publishers who paid a $1 million advance for it, this long-awaited bombshell of a book, eight years in the making, has been a dud at the sales counter. Indecent Exposure, McClintick's earlier expose of wheeler-dealers in the movie industry, caused a great fuss that put Hollywood on the momentary defensive. This time around, he exposes the bumblers in the Drug Enforcement Agency, but nobody seems to care.

Even in Miami, the national capital of smuggling where Swordfish is set, the book appeared on the best-seller list for only two or three weeks. The titillation of McClintick's naming names - crooked lawyers, money-laundering bankers, inept DEA officials engrossed in petty disputes, several of whom still live in the area - has not been enough to draw people into local bookstores. All of this is shame. Ignore the unconvincing policy prescription at the end of this book and you've got a terrifically engrossing tale with a cast of characters Hollywood would be hard-pressed to imagine.

Swordfish is devoted to a single DEA sting: Operation Swordfish. (In South Florida, narcotics cases and sports franchises are both named after marine life.) What makes this a gripping story is that McClintick infiltrates the feds as well as the bad guys and gives details that you've amazed he could have discovered. Many of these come to him through tape recorders and hidden microphones that are the stock in trade of narcotics agents. When agents aren't wiretapping their suspects, they are taping their own conversations with co-workers, informants, and their bosses at the DEA. Since nobody in this business seems to trust anybody else, people are bugging each other constantly. So when McClintick reconstruct a dialogue, it's verbatim.

Between the Columbian drug kingpins and their U.S. representatives, the informants and their aliases, the long list of government bureaucrats assigned to the case and their overlapping jurisdictions, this is a complicated adventure. Other equally complicated adventures involving international crimes, banks, and government bureaucrats - the BCCI scandal, for example - have produced books in which it's impossible to keep track of who is doing what to whom, so the reader loses interest. In Swordfish, this doesn't happen, because McClintick can tell a story, as opposed to simply hanging the quotes around the facts and calling the result a narrative.

Swordfish begins in the early eighties, when certain factions in U.S...