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to listen to Misha Glenny talk about McMafia and why organised crime is a
bigger threat than terrorism
Should you strike up a conversation with a sophisticated Russian in a luxury
hotel on Lake Geneva, and he invites you to join him in a joint trading
venture, says the author of this book, there are four possibilities. The man
may indeed be the trading-company executive that he claims. Or he could be a
Russian intelligence officer working under trade cover. He might also belong
to an organised-crime group. Or he could be all three, an exotic mix'n'match
that troubles neither his employers nor, apparently, Vladimir Putin.
Once upon a time, we thought we knew what a criminal looked like: a lurking
scoundrel who might steal a wallet or attack a bank in a stocking mask with
the aid of a shotgun. Today, however, the scale and variety of crime is
stupendous: it straddles the world, embracing illegal labour, smuggling,
drugs, gun-running, prostitution and computer fraud. Instead of inhabiting
seedy New York bars or London pubs, the organisers of these enterprises are
most likely to be found at the counters of Gucci or Hermès. Their rewards
are measured in billions. The EU estimates that identity theft generates £25
billion a year in profits worldwide. Fake goods, from aircraft spares to
spurious Harry Potter stories, are worth up to £250 billion annually. China
is responsible for 60% of the market in stolen intellectual property.
Misha Glenny made his reputation as a BBC reporter during the break-up of the
Soviet empire and in the Balkan wars. Those experiences introduced him to
the murky, bloody, terrifyingly successful operations of the East European
mafias, dominated by Russians. For this book, Glenny has extended his
researches worldwide. He describes gang operations in Bombay, sex slavery
and money-laundering in Israel, the Canadian marijuana trade, Nigerian
investment scams, Brazilian cyber-crime and much else.
His message is that the global marketplace has empowered criminals on a huge
and terrifying scale. Demand for cheap manual labour, prostitutes, drugs and
cut-price copies of prized consumer goods fuels huge industries. Inadequate
financial regulation (which, heaven knows, recent events have brought home
to us all) enables those who run illegal markets to transfer and launder
funds at will.
Israeli police, says Glenny, reckon that up to £5bn passed through their
country's banks from eastern Europe following the collapse of communism.
This is small potatoes alongside Switzerland's take (an estimated £20bn) or
even that of the Republic of Cyprus, which as early as 1994 was processing
£500m of Russian money each month.
Nigeria loses 150,000-250,000 barrels of oil every day, stolen and transferred
to tankers by the country's great gangsters, who are also among its most
prominent citizens. At a humbler level, Nigerians have become world stars in
exploiting the avarice of gullible westerners by offering juicy “investment
opportunities” through the internet. It is amazing, is it not, that
apparently sensible, prosperous middle-class citizens can be such damn fools
as to give money, sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds, to con men who
offer their services through the net?
The beneficiaries of crime are, unsurprisingly, big spenders. Colombian
narco-traffickers long ago ceased to be content with outdoor and indoor
swimming pools at their ranches. Nowadays, the key status symbol is a
full-size floodlit soccer pitch. In 2004, a Russian oil executive threw a
“Soviet Union nostalgia party” at a chateau outside Paris. French peasants,
dressed as Soviet collective farm workers from the 1930s, drove tractors
round the fountain in front of the mansion. Heroic Soviet-era music boomed
from a speaker system. Guests wore fancy dress of greatcoats and Soviet
Komsomol uniforms - with modern designer clothes underneath. Meanwhile,
Moscow itself, observes Glenny, who remembers the capital in its drab Soviet
days, has been transformed into “a breathtaking Babylon of guns, enterprise,
money, violence and fun”.
Reading the author's catalogue of international banditry and murder, I found
myself pausing to ask: Is all this fundamentally different from the past?
Throughout history, smuggling and piracy have flourished, often with state
support. British seamen in the era of Elizabeth I were regarded by the rest
of Europe as no better than freebooters, preying on the galleons of richer
nations. Successive 19th-century emperors in Beijing watched in impotent
rage as British merchants waxed rich by shipping Indian opium into China.
Like modern Russian oligarchs, such men lorded it in London and Hong Kong,
and in many cases died honoured by their own societies. Ruthless men have
always exploited commercial opportunities, heedless of the ill effects on
humanity. Glenny, understandably preoccupied with the present, does not
address this comparison. But if he did, no doubt he would argue that the
scale and sophistication of modern crime is now so great as to pose an
unprecedented threat.
Certainly, our absolute dependence upon electronic communication renders
vulnerable every citizen who uses a laptop. Russian mobsters have perfected
copies of Windows programs, packaged in perfect imitation of the real thing,
with spyware built in. Brazilians vie with Russian expertise in cyber-crime,
which is growing much faster than the effectiveness of the pitiful
anti-virus programs that we buy to combat it.
In the 1990s, the giant US investment bank Merrill Lynch discovered that
overnight cleaners and security guards at its New York offices were
labouring through the small hours to steal details of clients' personal
files. To be sure, that loophole was plugged. But the ingenuity and
determination of criminals marches ever faster than society's reinforcement
of its defences against them.
America today gives Colombia billions in aid to help stem the drug trade. Yet
Glenny suggests that within a few years the cocaine and heroin producers are
likely to be redundant. Amphetamines and synthetic drugs, hugely dangerous
and much more readily consumed as pills, will dominate the market.
Glenny concludes with a plea for vastly more effective national and
international regulation, above all of the movement of money. In the past
few years, he says, American opposition to stronger banking regulation has
allied with EU incompetence, Russian cynicism, Japanese indifference and the
ambitions of China and India “to usher in a vigorous springtime both for
global corporations and for transnational organised crime”.
He tells a grisly story very well. It is hard to cherish much hope of
mitigation of the manifold evils that he exposes. Too many people, including
rulers of China, Russia and lesser nations, are gaining too much from crime
for reform to seem credible. q
McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers by Misha Glenny
Bodley Head £20 pp426
