To write this book, Misha Glenny spent three years investigating international organised crime. The result is on of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time, by turn horrifying, humourous, and bizarre; factual and completely compelling.
Glenny is less concerned with long-established organised crime groups, such as the Sicilian and American Mafias, and more with the comparatively recent emergence of a new globalised form that has grown to an estimated 20 per cent of world GDP. He links personal stories of major and minor participants, victims and law-enforcers into a wider narrative, crossing Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Sub-continent, the Americas, and East Asia.
He begins with the fall of communism and the opportunities this opened up for enterprising people in Eastern Europe. Different Eastern Bloc countries developed different strengths in organised crime, stemming from geography, tradition, and human resources. For example, the Balkan countries’ proximity to Italy made them ideal for smuggling cigarettes in small boats; while the Czech Republic’s road links to Germany and Austria made it an ideal base for prostitution; and Bulgaria’s human resource base in chemical processing made it an ideal base to manufacture drugs.
Common to all forms of organised crime that arose in the Eastern Bloc was the participation of former secret police forces. Under communism, these groups had dominated typical activities such as smuggling; and Glenny argues that the rise of East European gangs can be better understood as just another privatisation of a formerly state-run enterprise (in this case, more successfully that many others). He also argues that these organised crime groups played a crucial role in maintaining some stability during the transition to capitalism: in the absence of property rights, and with a police force traditionally devoted to combating political rather than property crime, criminal gangs offered some degree of protection that the transitional State was unable to provide.
Once they had established monopoly control of certain enterprises, East European gangs began to expand internationally, driven mostly by the need to launder money. Glenny traces this globalisation first to Israel, where many Russian and East European criminals could gain citizenship*, where the police force was concentrating more on the Palestinian problem than on general crime, gambling was widespread enough wash money clean, and where a growing and wealthy middle class spread an appetite for drugs.
However, needing to launder larger sums of money, the oligarchs soon moved east to Dubai. Bent on attracting foreign investment, Dubai did not ask many questions about the provenance of funds entering the country. With a light tax regime, it was also an ideal base for anyone seeking to import and re-export (to smuggle) high value goods, particularly gold aimed at the insatiable (and highly taxed and controlled) Indian market.
The second half of McMafia lacks some of the focus and direction of the first. It moves through a series of countries describing the different operations of organised crime within each, without there being strong links between. There’s the Indian underworld, mostly concerned with gold and drugs, Nigerian 419 scams, drug smuggling in and out of South Africa, the War on Drugs in the Americas (including some interesting statistics), and people smuggling from China to the west.
Glenny meets some interesting peple, like Lev Timofeev, the dissident Russian mathematician who now studies the economics of the drug trade; and Wolfgang Herbert, a sociologist who joined the Yakuza for his PhD thesis. He dabbles briefly in cybercrime and the darknet. In the epilogue, he argues that organised crime has flourished in the age of globalisation not only through failures in policing (particularly in countries where law enforcement is transitioning from a focus on political crime to crimes of property); but because of a failure of regulation. Tightly regulating the movement of labour and addictive and other valuable goods (whether through immigration laws, tobacco, gold, and car taxes, or prohibiting drugs) pushes the trade in these into the hands of criminals. At the same time, loosening restrictions on the flow of capital allows these criminals to function more efficiently. To really fight crime, he says, politicans need to resist the tempations of a law-n-order agenda, and show the courage to tackle the sturctuarl inequities in teh global economy which allow instability and crime to flourish.
I’m not usually into true crime, but this was one of the most fascinating and interesting books I read in 2009. Highly recommended (I would also recommend his book The Balkans, which was recommended to me by my former flatmate from Montenegro, as the only book in English on the Balkans worth reading).
An earlier article by Misha Glenny
McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers
Misha Glenny
The Bodley Head (2009)
*Interestingly, a high proportion of Russian oligarchs are Jewish, seemingly because, excluded from rising very far in the Communist system, they had worked the black economy in the USSR 70 years
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