The Shoukri brothers -- Andre and Ihab -- were both Brigadiers in the Province's biggest paramilitary organisation -- the Ulster Defence Association. They were also gangsters and drugs Godfathers who enjoyed the high life: flash cars, flash women, flash jewellery dangling round their necks and wrists. They were the living embodiment of how Northern Ireland's terror gangs turned to criminality: from the paramilitaries to the paraMafia. In one year alone, Andre Shoukri blew almost £1 million on the horses, earning him the soubriquet of 'The Bookies Brigadier'. But before the UDA eventually booted him out and he went to jail, Andre Shoukri sat on the Inner Council of the 'loyalist' organisation. Their lineage -- their father was Egyptian -- earned both Shoukris the nickname of The Mummy's Boys. They didn't like it. And they certainly didn't like Jim McDowell, the Northern Editor of the Sunday World and his staff in Belfast.

Neither did a lot of other paramilitaries. And in this book McDowell charts not only the rise and fall of 'The Mummy's Boys', he also exclusively exposes the other threats and menaces endured by himself and his staff because they ruthlessly exposed what they called the paraMafia, loyalist and republican, right across Ulster's terror gang spectrum.