"They say it’s the victors that write the history—the “Live Outside the Law” series bucks the trend. Simon McCoy smuggled cocaine for longer than Pablo Escobar and lived to tell the tale.

The “Illimani Chronicles” documents the early years. From five-star hotels, cocaine kitchens, the favelas of Rio and South America’s most feared jails.

Outlaws, not gangsters. Simon and his crew skate over thin Andean ice in style, until the cracks appear. “Finding Peace,” is the first book of the “Illimani Chronicles.” Determined to pick himself up after a disastrous year smuggling cocaine out of Brazil. Simon’s broke and in debt. So he gambles everything on a solo trip to La Paz Bolivia, cocaine’s capital city. While struggling to contact a supplier, he meets Sofia, a stylish knitwear manufacturer, and has his big idea. Working for days in a hotel room, he creates an invisibility cloak for three kilos of pure cocaine. Will his alchemists cloak work this time? Can he get home to Rotterdam, build a team, and beat the house?

About the Author

Born London’s East End and brought up an Essex boy. Simon joined the merchant navy at fifteen, jumping ship in New Orleans and hitchhiked across hippy America in the early seventies. The original gap year. Married at nineteen, he built a successful business in his twenties. The recession of the eighties broke him, and he decided the game was rigged.

Simon spent much of the next four decades making up for lost time, having outrageous adventures, making and losing obscene amounts of money. While searching for happiness in all the wrong places. Married twice with two children, he’s an ordinary bloke who’s led an extraordinary life. A practising Buddhist, Simon now lives in the tropics. An old man writing his memoirs.