Product Description

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the deregulation of international financial markets in 1989, governments and entrepreneurs alike became intoxicated by forecasts of limitless expansion into newly open markets. No one would foresee that the greatest success story to arise from these events would be the globalization of organized crime. Current estimates suggest that illegal trade accounts for nearly one-fifth of global GDP.

McMafia is a fearless, encompassing, wholly authoritative investigation of the now proven ability of organized crime worldwide to find and service markets driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for illegal wares. Whether discussing the Russian mafia, Colombian drug cartels, or Chinese labor smugglers, Misha Glenny makes clear how organized crime feeds off the poverty of the developing world, how it exploits new technology in the forms of cybercrime and identity theft, and how both global crime and terror are fueled by an identical source: the triumphant material affluence of the West.

To trace the disparate strands of this hydra-like story, Glenny talked to police, victims, politicians, and members of the global underworld in eastern Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan, and India. The story of organized crime’s phenomenal, often shocking growth is truly the central political story of our time. McMafia will change the way we look at the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10290 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-08
• Released on: 2008-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Amazon.com
Amazon Significant Seven, April 2008: In McMafia, Misha Glenny draws the dark map that lies on the other side of Tom Friedman's bright flat world. That connected globe not only brings software coders and supply-chain outsourcers closer together; it's also opened the gates to a criminal network of unsettling vastness, complexity, and efficiency that represents a fifth of the earth's economy, trading in everything from untaxed cigarettes and the usual narcotics to human lives and nuclear material. Glenny's a Balkans expert, and he begins his story there, with the illicit--but often state-sponsored--underworld that grew out of the post-Soviet chaos, but he soon follows the contraband everywhere from Mumbai and Johannesburg to rural Colombia and the U.S. suburbs. It's not just a hodgepodge of scare clips, though: Glenny reports from the ground but follows the leads as high as they go, showing how the dark and bright sides of the flat world are more connected than we imagine. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Former BBC World correspondent Glenny (The Balkans, 1804–1999) presents a riveting and chilling journey through the myriad criminal syndicates flourishing in our increasingly globalized world, which make up as much as 20% of global GNP. Tracing the growth of organized crime—ranging from the burgeoning sex trade in volatile, postcommunist Bulgaria to elaborate Internet frauds in Nigeria—Glenny expertly combines interviews with key players, economic studies and sociological analysis. He argues that the chaos and political upheaval following the demise of communism in Eastern Europe, along with increasing demand in the West and the easy flow of money and people provided the perfect opportunity for organized crime to gain a foothold on the dark side of the globalizing economy. Glenny's achievement is in introducing readers to the less familiar aspects of global crime, from Kazakhstan's caviar mafia to the flourishing marijuana trade in British Columbia. Consequently, his interview subjects are equally varied: sex slaves in Tel Aviv, a co-conspirator in the deadly 1993 Mumbai bombings and top Washington policy makers share the pages. Readers yearning for a deeper understanding of the real-life, international counterparts to The Sopranos need look no further than Glenny's engrossing study. 16 pages of photos; maps. 100,000announced first printing. (Apr. 10)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Citing estimates that the world’s illicit economy accounts for nearly twenty per cent of worldwide turnover, Glenny tracks the spread of sophisticated transnational criminality. The collapse of Communism and the deregulation of financial markets have created rich opportunities for the criminally entrepreneurial in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, and even fleece-wearing British Columbia. Meanwhile, criminal organizations, cannily mirroring the practices of their legitimate counterparts, have exploited economies of scale, developed worldwide partnerships, and cultivated new markets. As a result, bank fraud, human trafficking, protection rackets, narcotics smuggling, state-sanctioned embezzlement, assassinations, and even old-fashioned political corruption are practiced today on a scale previously unimaginable. Without "some form of global governance," Glenny grimly concludes, the prosperous West’s appetites will insure the continued existence of the flat world’s sordid and dangerous flipside.
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Customer Reviews

Where are the european mafias ?
In his account of globalized crime, the author forgot to give a fair description of the european mafias.
Where are the British, French, Spanish, German mafias ?
The sample selected by the author is incomplete and biased.

Vicious, Lucrative, Corrupt, and Global
You sponsor organized crime. There isn't a thing you can do to stop. These are among the dismaying messages of _McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld_ (Knopf) by Misha Glenny. A big book with an extremely broad, world-wide vision of the latest in global criminality, it presents a daunting picture of lucrative and lethal crime in China, Serbia, Chechnya, Columbia, Israel, Russia, and all over the place. The U.S., the land where Don Corleone and his family prospered, gets surprisingly little coverage as a scene of crimes, but that does not keep it from playing a role all over the globe. Let's say (for the sake of argument) that you are an American who doesn't hire illegal foreign workers and never does illegal drugs and never launders money, so you think that gets you off the hook. Not quite. Do you use a cell phone? If so, most likely it contains coltan, a mined compound that efficiently conducts electricity at very high temperatures, and which comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, so you are tapped into mine pillaging and organized crime there. There are countless other examples given here, but most important is what the American government and other governments are doing. They are interested in prohibition, criminalization, and interdiction, but with the lifting of restrictions on free movement of capital (Glenny blames Reagan and Thatcher for allowing what the corporations wanted), criminals "... became inextricably bound up with globalization - it was here in the huge reservoirs of the international banking system that the liquid assets of the corporate and criminal worlds mixed and mingled." Glenny's book details his travels to crime scenes of different countries, and he is guided by criminals themselves, smugglers, and a few police officers. It is an eye-opening and disheartening view of the world.

_McMafia_ hops around the world, Glenny gives pictures of a huge, more-or-less well organized crime network routinely allied with governments (efficient and inefficient governments, not just governments that are our friends or our enemies), police, and corporations. The book is often uncomfortable reading, as in the tale of a woman from Moldavia who was sent against her will to be on call at an Israeli brothel, manhandled by Moldavians, Ukrainians, Russians, Egyptians, and Bedouins before the Israelis could get their hands on her. The mafia in Chechnya was so ruthless and feared that it made money allowing criminal rackets in other towns to call themselves "Chechen". If those licensees did not themselves ferociously prosecute local violations of protection, the Chechen mafia would come after the racketeers themselves, so that the brand name did not get devalued. Oligarchs and mobsters from Russia united to make worldwide launderettes for cleaning cash from growing and exporting drugs. Glenny shows how to buy contraband gasoline in Serbia, counterfeit DVDs in China, or illegal caviar in Kazakhstan. He rides with marijuana smugglers from British Columbia, describes being propositioned in sex clubs in Dubai, or tells how pachinko fiends in Tokyo feed their habit. Glenny interviews a member of the famous _yakuza_, Japan's traditional mafia, who says, "Like all organizations we are facing problems encouraging young people to join." Well, it's just a management problem: the _yakuza_ subcontract their mob hits to Chinese gangs.

Sometimes _McMafia_ is scattershot in its jumps all over the globe, but the big picture is perhaps just too complicated for anyone to understand fully. Glenny knows he is writing about scary and dark subjects, but there are a few points of light. There are academics who have done sociological studies on gangs and gang members, some even joining to get data. One of them says, however, "Scholars do not like to waste time with uncooperative sources who refuse to talk, and, alternatively, they do not like to be shot." There is a small organization called Global Witness, which had documented the human suffering in the African diamond trade and has arranged a protocol to assure buyers that diamonds come from sources that meet humane standards. David Soares is the District Attorney in Albany, New York, who has realized that his state is wasting millions to arrest and keep in prison drug offenders from a futile war on drugs, and was elected with a view of changing drug laws. According to Glenny, this sort of change is going to be essential if the disheartening global picture he presents is ever to change. The United Nations reports that 70% of the financing of organized crime comes from the sorts of international drug sales described here. Forced eradication is not going to work, despite the billions that is spent on it; a more prudent and less costly policy would be some legalization of the drug trade and provision of treatment for drug abuse. There are few other recommendations in Glenny's book, other than a sensible call for stricter international regulation of current financial markets to end the untraceable flow of criminal funds. It might be that the world is realizing that the unregulated trade and finance that was supposed to bring us all prosperity is more contributing to the world's misery instead. The reforms can happen, or it can all be left to the gangsters.

Great book on global criminal enterprises
This is a global journey through organized crime. The first thing I thought of when I read this book was "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. This book succeeds in every regard where Friedman's book fails. Glenny shows how criminal organizations take advantage of corrupt and inefficient systems to create smooth enterprise. Crime all over the globe is profiled, from Russia to India. Rather than reading like an encyclopedia, Glenny's anecdotes show the insidious nature of global criminals and the large part they play in the world's economy.