Amid rising gang violence, the crack epidemic, and police brutality, a group of unlikely voices cut through the chaos of late 1980s Los Angeles: N.W.A. Led by a drug dealer, a glammed-up producer, and a high school kid, N.W.A gave voice to disenfranchised African Americans across the country. And they quickly redefined pop culture across the world. Their names remain as popular as ever - Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube. Dre soon joined forces with Suge Knight to create the combustible Death Row Records, which in turn transformed Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur into superstars.

Ben Westhoff explores how this group of artists shifted the balance of hip-hop from New York to Los Angeles. He shows how N.W.A.'s shocking success lead to rivalries between members, record labels, and eventually a war between East Coast and West Coast factions. In the process, hip-hop burst into mainstream America at a time of immense social change, and became the most dominant musical movement of the last thirty years. At gangsta rap's peak, two of its biggest names - Tupac and Biggie Smalls - were murdered, leaving the surviving artists to forge peace before the genre annihilated itself.

Featuring extensive investigative reporting, interviews with the principal players, and dozens of never-before-told stories, Original Gangstas is a groundbreaking addition to the history of popular music.

A remarkable four-year investigation into the dangerous world of synthetic drugs--from black market drug factories in China to users and dealers on the streets of the U.S. to harm reduction activists in Europe--which reveals for the first time the next wave of the opioid epidemic

A deeply human story, Fentanyl, Inc. is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape, writes Ben Westhoff. These are known as Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and they include replacements for known drugs like heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. They are synthetic, made in a laboratory, and are much more potent than traditional drugs--and all-too-often tragically lethal.

Drugs like fentanyl, K2, and Spice--and those with arcane acronyms like 25i-NBOMe-- were all originally conceived in legitimate laboratories for proper scientific and medicinal purposes. Their formulas were then hijacked and manufactured by rogue chemists, largely in China, who change their molecular structures to stay ahead of the law, making the drugs' effects impossible to predict. Westhoff has infiltrated this shadowy world. He tracks down the little-known scientists who invented these drugs and inadvertently killed thousands, as well as a mysterious drug baron who turned the law upside down in his home country of New Zealand. Westhoff visits the shady factories in China from which these drugs emanate, providing startling and original reporting on how China's vast chemical industry operates, and how the Chinese government subsidizes it. Poignantly, he chronicles the lives of addicted users and dealers, families of victims, law enforcement officers, and underground drug awareness organizers in the U.S. and Europe. Together they represent the shocking and riveting full anatomy of a calamity we are just beginning to understand. From its depths, as Westhoff relates, are emerging new strategies that may provide essential long-term solutions to the drug crisis that has affected so many.

Raw, authoritative, and unflinching ... An elaborately detailed, darkly surprising, definitive history of the LA gangsta rap era. -- Kirkus, starred review

A monumental, revealing narrative history about the legendary group of artists at the forefront of West Coast hip-hop: Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur.

Amid rising gang violence, the crack epidemic, and police brutality, a group of unlikely voices cut through the chaos of late 1980s Los Angeles: N.W.A. Led by a drug dealer, a glammed-up producer, and a high school kid, N.W.A gave voice to disenfranchised African Americans across the country. And they quickly redefined pop culture across the world. Their names remain as popular as ever -- Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube. Dre soon joined forces with Suge Knight to create the combustible Death Row Records, which in turn transformed Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur into superstars.

Ben Westhoff explores how this group of artists shifted the balance of hip-hop from New York to Los Angeles. He shows how N.W.A.'s shocking success lead to rivalries between members, record labels, and eventually a war between East Coast and West Coast factions. In the process, hip-hop burst into mainstream America at a time of immense social change, and became the most dominant musical movement of the last thirty years. At gangsta rap's peak, two of its biggest names -- Tupac and Biggie Smalls -- were murdered, leaving the surviving artists to forge peace before the genre annihilated itself.

Featuring extensive investigative reporting, interviews with the principal players, and dozens of never-before-told stories, Original Gangstas is a groundbreaking addition to the history of popular music.

This book is so evocative, you can actually smell vomit.
-Gavin McInnes, co-founder, Vice magazine

Ben Westhoff has compiled an absolutely splendid list of NYC miracles...These spots are all perfect places to party and to party hard.--Andrew W.K.

Every pubcrawler in the NYC Metro area should be grateful for Ben Westhoff's New York City's Best Dive Bars.--Geoffrey Bartholomew, longtime McSorley's barman and author of The McSorley Poems.

Sponsored by Village Voice, New York's Best Dive Bars takes you on a tour of the dingiest, awesomest watering holes in the five boroughs (and Jersey City and Hoboken), from downtown relics to surreal joints in Queens and Staten Island where time seems to stop. You'll read wild, firsthand accounts of English-optional ethnic dives, bikini bars, spots that belong on the National Register of Historic Places, and lawless hellholes where cops and firefighters duke it out. You'll learn where to get free grub and cheap drinks, and where you can go to avoid the hipsters. Whether you're looking to live dangerously or simply get plastered on a budget, New York's Best Dive Bars is your guide to both the classic pubs and those joints so off-the-beaten-path joints that you'll need a team of sherpas to find your way back.

Ben Westhoff is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. (Don't hate.) He writes regularly for The Village Voice and others. He likes blended whiskey neat, gin and tonics with the cheap stuff, and Budweiser in a bottle.

This intimate exploration of race and inequality in America tells the story of a journalist's long-time relationship with his mentee, Jorell Cleveland, through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and investigates Jorell's tragic fatal shooting.

In 2005, soon after Ben Westhoff moved to St. Louis, he joined the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and was paired with Jorell Cleveland. Ben was twenty-eight, a white college grad from an affluent family. Jorell was eight, one of nine children from a poor, African American family living in nearby Ferguson. But the two instantly connected. Ben and Jorell formed a bond stronger than nearly any other in their lives. When Ben met the woman who'd become his wife, she observed that Ben and Jorell were a package deal. They were brothers.

In the summer of 2016, Jorell was shot at point blank range in broad daylight in the middle of the street, yet no one was charged in his death. Ben grappled with mourning Jorell, but also with a feeling of responsibility. As Jorell's mentor, what could he have done differently? As a journalist, he had reported on gang life, interviewed crime kingpins, and even infiltrated drug labs in China. But now, he was investigating the life and death of someone he knew personally and examining what he did and did not know about his friend. Learning the truth about Jorell and the man who killed him required Ben to uncover a heartbreaking cycle of poverty, poor education, drug trafficking, and violence. Little Brother brilliantly combines a deeply personal history with a true-crime narrative that exposes the realities of life in communities like Ferguson all around the country.

Rap music from New York and Los Angeles once ruled the charts, but nowadays the southern sound thoroughly dominates the radio, Billboard, and MTV. Coastal artists like Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, and Ice-T call southern rap garbage, but they're probably just jealous, as artists like Lil Wayne and T.I. still move millions of copies, and OutKast has the bestselling rap album of all time.

In Dirty South, author Ben Westhoff investigates the southern rap phenomenon, watching rappers make it rain in a Houston strip club and partying with the 2 Live Crew's Luke Campbell. Westhoff visits the gritty neighborhoods where T.I. and Lil Wayne grew up, kicks it with Big Boi in Atlanta, and speaks with artists like DJ Smurf and Ms. Peachez, dance-craze originators accused of setting back the black race fifty years. Acting both as investigative journalist and irreverent critic, Westhoff probes the celebrated-but-dark history of Houston label Rap-A-Lot Records, details the lethal rivalry between Atlanta MCs Gucci Mane and Young Jeezy, and gets venerable rapper Scarface to open up about his time in a mental institution. Dirty South features exclusive interviews with the genre's most colorful players.

Westhoff has written a journalistic tour de force, the definitive account of the most vital musical culture of our time.

Spannend wie ein Krimi: Die Panama-Papers des globalen Drogenmarkts. Mit dem heutigen Wissen lassen sich beinahe unbegrenzt psychoaktive Substanzen entwickeln, darunter auch das Schmerzmittel Fentanyl. Es ist etwa 100 Mal starker als Morphin und fuhrt jedes Jahr zu Tausenden Drogentodesfallen, vor allem in den USA, aber zunehmend auch in Europa. Ben Westhoff hat vier Jahre zum globalen Netzwerk der Produzenten und Profiteure der neuen Drogen recherchiert und erzahlt daruber in einem packenden Bericht - ebenso wie uber die meist erfolglosen Versuche, sich den Kartellen entgegenzustemmen. Westhoff ist uberzeugt: Strafen und Repression helfen nicht, wichtig sind vielmehr Aufklarung, Unterstutzung und Angebote, um Schaden an Leib und Leben zu minimieren.