McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (Borzoi Books) Reviews

• An absolutely terrifying study of the oncoming future

  
  By A18URICJOUDWDG on 2008-04-18
  To make a long story short, this book is essentially the history of the mafiacation of soverign states during the turbulent phase of the 1990s. Numerous case studies are presented which map out the ways, shapes, and forms of organized crime penetration from unstable regions and societies into the the formal structures of stable and legitimate governments.
  
  For glaring example, the Yakuza crime syndicates gradually evolved into a parallel legal system in Japan, then foundering in their own inefficiencies, began subcontracting their day to day rough work to the Chinese Triads.
  
  The lesson here is disturbing to the idealist mentality, because Misha Glenny is clearly pointing to the inescapable conclusion. Mafia like organizations are becoming increasingly interlinked and coordinated and resultantly imposing their values, tastes, methods, and derangements on a world order poorly equipped to monitor them, much less curtail their activities.
  
  Many luxury items such as caviar and cocaine are now thoroughly controlled through distribution networks that seem actually more sophisticated than their legitimate corporate counterparts, while just as many counterfeit luxury items are manufactured and distributed by the same organizations.
  
  Without belaboring the point, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the world is on the brink of a regulatory crisis phase where tax evasion, counterfeiting, human trafficing, militarized organ harvesting operations, wholesale corruption, social brutalization and cultural degeneracy are inseparably intertwined.
  
  A grim prognosis is ever there were a grim prognosis, and yet the general public seems blissfully unaware of the plague spreading around them, while the political class seems all to happy to sweep these metastasizing social carcinomas under the rug and furiously debate the most inane of trivialities instead.
  
  Which is either shockingly unshocking, or unshockingly shocking, while we numb out to unreality TV and the semiotics of Britney.
  
  

• A new "Criminal World Order" is already in the making.

  
  By A3RFXU3P0XKKF4 on 2008-05-01
  Misha Glenny has tapped into a deep and dark undercurrent that is sweeping the globe: from Eastern Europe, to Africa, to the Middle East, to Japan and China, to the West including the U.S., and most places in between: corruption and organized crime both with and without government complicity, has become a silent grime reaper that must be reckoned with, lest it sweep our own civilized way of life down into the undercurrents with it.
  
  The stories in this book are mind-blowing not just in the creative ways that international criminals get around legalities and quickly learn to exploit the latest laws and technology, but also because they are so widespread and so injurious to what we have come to respect as a normal, ordered civilized and moral existence. Organized international criminals are resourceful, intelligent and intent on colonizing the world with a new set of decadent values. A new "Criminal world order is already deep in the making.
  
  In most of the rest of the world, a reliance on an underground economy is an existential imperative (in post-Communist Russia, for instance, Nigeria, or Albania and indeed most of the poorer countries in the Middle East). The King of the underground economy, whether in the first or the third world is drugs: The West seems to be the carriers of a disease that makes drugs a necessity, and the rest of the world is all too anxious to apply a remedy for us.
  
  But even if drugs were shutdown completely there is still trafficking in pirated goods, in humans, mostly young women being forced to go from poorer to more advanced countries; and now also computer and identity thefts.
  
  What to do? While the UN has shown an interest in "trafficking in humans," has had the issue on its agenda for a number of years, the larger phenomenon of international organized crime is too large even for that international body to get its hands around: Misha Glinny has seen the future and given us a glimpse into it, and it is very dark indeed.
  
  An outstanding read. Five stars
  
  

• Good overview of global crime but can stand less commentary

  
  By AIK7I9BYWV9Q1 on 2008-05-20
  I must give Mr. Glenny credit for writing a very comprehensive and encompassing overview of the global nature of organized crime. He makes the point very clear that a number of crime organizations exist with the knowledge of, or as an extension to, many governments. Furthermore he does a good job of showing how some countries, such as India, are making attempts to combat this global plague.
  
  This book does have two major shortcomings. The first is that the author does not do a good job of showing crime as more than a local feature with spot international implications. He uses human trafficking and drugs as one example of the international reach but fails to connect the dots on how country A's criminal syndicate works with country B's. There is also hardly a mention of the U.S. as anything more than an annoying pest. He goes to great lengths to avoid mentioning U.S. help in cutting Columbia's murder rate in half, eliminating opium from Vietnam and Cambodia. Reducing crime in the Philippines not to mention at home.
  
  So despite what the book pretends, the criminals are not always winning. If you don't buy the U.S. look at the UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, Finland and Sweden as some examples of countries where organized crime has been dealt strong set backs. He also fails to mention Canada's defeat of its strongest criminal gang, the Hells Angels. All in all an interesting, but highly unbalanced work.
  
  

• A Massive Education

  
  By A34PAZQ73SL163 on 2008-05-11
  Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/RN6OUHJHOY2DQ Bernard Chapin saying hello and glad to report on a book I couldn't put down.
  
  

• Drugs - engine of the McMafia

  
  By A1BRKP4II6WM2V on 2008-04-24
  McMafia is an argument for the legalisation of drugs. Without explicitly demanding such a thing, it gives the best possible argument for legalising all narcotics; that drug money is the engine of the McMafia.
  Misha Glenny covers many more McMafia activities; cigarette smuggling, investment scams, slavery, fake goods, intimidation etc, but behind them all lies drugs and the massive profits they engender.
  He points out that we in the west are largely to blame. We buy the fake DVDs, hire the slaves and turn a blind eye to the sweatshops. Mainly, we buy the drugs.
  The author's point is that so long as the drug barons grow fat on human misery, so will the McMafia thrive.
  A hypnotic read.
  
  
  
• Good worldwide overview of global crime, marred by author's biases
  By A680RUE1FDO8B on 2008-05-17
  Misha Glenny took on a great task in attempting to provide an overview of organized crime around the world. On the whole, he does a good job in describing the nature of organized crime in various countries. Glenny makes it clear that virtually every nation has organized crime and that it is intertwined to one degree or another with government. This incestuous relationship is not news; rather the news is the growing scale of organized crime.
  
  The subject matter of each chapter (a different nation or kind of crime, i.e., drug trade) is interesting, but Glenny'a verbiosity and penchant for smothering the reader in minute detail rob the book of true vibrancy. Reading it, I found, was a bit of a slog.
  
  Where Glenny fails is in allowing his own political views to color his narrative. Glenny's hostility to the United States and, particularly, its current administration is palpable - and obnoxious. His remedy to the problem of world wide crime comes from the left: more global governance. His comment that "organized crime aand corruption will combine with protectionism and chauvinism to engender a very unstable and very dangerous world" is almost laughable. The world's mechanism for "global governance" for the past sixty years, the United Nations, has proven itself to be very corrupt, chauvinistic, protective of its own ever expanding mandate and an abetter of crime among even worse sins.
  
  The intelligent and sophisticated reader will easily filter out Glenny's politics and appreciate "McMafia" for what it is: a reasonably competent, if wordy, overview of organized crime around the world. In that regard it is well done. I would say it is frightening, but the truth is that this kind of crime and its love-hate relationship with government has always existed. It is more the scale that has changed than anything else.
  
  Jerry
  
  
• Vicious, Lucrative, Corrupt, and Global
  By A1XXJ6I7K2I7SI on 2008-07-25
  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.
  
  
  
• fascinating eye-opener
  By A20NXCJ6DI93SF on 2008-05-03
  I read this book like a novel and will never look at the world in quite the same way again. A bit of what Misha Glenny reports, I had intuited, much I was ignorant of, all I believe. It openned for me new layers of awareness about how the world works, and his style has so much forward momentum that no sooner have you finished reading about the Ukraine than you are launched into Israel, Dubai, India, and on and on. Each time based human stories of frightening and fascinating reality.
  
  
• An engrossing and comprehensive portrait of trans-national crime
  By A172FVEA83DHOP on 2008-05-18
  The title of Glenny's book, McMafia, encapsulates the reality of the modern phenomena of organized crime: in our globalized world, organized crime has attained a size, sophistication, wealth, and reach that is comparable to the most successful multi-national corporations. In a series of engrossing vignettes that detail the inner workings of the most prominent trans-national criminal syndicates, Glenny illustrates that in many instances, criminal syndicates surpass multi-national corporations in influence, efficiency and wealth. Glenny's book traces the origins of the globalization of organized crime to the destabilizing effects of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and the utter unpreparedness, and apparent unwillingness, of national governments and global institutions to contain the ensuing chaos. The reluctance to act, motivated in part by political expediency, and in part by a willingness to look aside when criminal activity results in greater profits for legitimate corporations, has created a situation where a system of global racketeering threatens to eventually subsume the system of global trade. Already, according to Glenny, criminal activity accounts for nearly one-fifth of global GDP.
  
  Glenny delineates a criminal economy that is sustained by a set of interlocking core criminal enterprises: smuggling; drug-trafficking; counterfeiting of goods and currency; human trafficking; illegal mineral extraction; arms trafficking; and financial fraud. Glenny's richly detailed portrayal of the operations of trans-national criminal syndicates paints a stark portrait of the wide and ever-growing gulf between men and women, the ultra-rich and the desperately poor, and ethnic majorities and ethnic minorities. Ineffective or non-existent financial controls, combined with irrational policies governing labor migration, drug prohibition, and commercial trade--as well as an insatiable appetite for illegal drugs, illicit sex, and cheap luxuries--exacerbate these divisions, and nurture an environment in which criminal activity not only thrives, but is often the only resort if an individual wishes to survive.
  
  As McGlenny's sober assessment of the corrupt state of the global economy makes clear, until national governments, international institutions and civil society come to terms with the reality that the economic and political fates of the world's nations are inextricably interwoven and devise a coherent regulatory regime that governs the international movement of capital, goods, services and labor in a just and rational manner, our descent into global anarchy will only accelerate.
  
  
• The globalization of organized crime
  By A3L7M9PLVUX05E on 2008-05-23
  Glenny's McMafia records a host of examples of organized crime that burst loose after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fall of authoritarian states in Eastern Europe allowed organized crime to step in and take over the economy. Former officials transferred state assets into private wealth. People who had lived on the margins of society took the chance to engage in selling illict goods abroad to amass a fortune.
  Glenny articulates how the fall of the communist state and the concomitant opening up of hitherto isolated countries created new organizations that took control of domestic economies but also pervaded western economies that were attractive markets for illicit products like drugs, taxfree cigarettes, prostitution and the like. Lack of rule of law in the East combined with Western regulation made for a toxic mix of exploitation and extertion. The UN trade sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro also created opportunities for smugglers. Globalization further unleashed an exodus of people from China and elsewhere towards western countries to try their luck. The rise of prices of oil and other natural resources contributes to profits from organized crime. Glenny sketches a fascinating picture of the grim realities of the underworld with a keen view of the interdependence of law and lawlessness, state and criminal organizations.
  
  
• Global Disorder
  By A10M4YNI47USJU on 2008-06-02
  Glenny dutifully documents, in exquisite detail, the rise of transnational criminal organizations in every global region.
  
  Simple formula: morally neutral global economic platform + economic/social distress = the rapid proliferation and unabated growth of transnational criminal organizations.
  
  Without a fundamental revision of global governance (not very likely), we will soon become very familiar with local variants of the stories he documents.
  
  John Robb, author of: Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
  
  
• mcmafia
  By ALFF45OCENFIH on 2008-05-31
  The book was ok.Its actually alot of short story type chapters.Different criminals around the world.
  
  
• engaging book
  By AJZMTE1XG0CW0 on 2008-06-09
  This is a very engaging book, so well written that it seems like fiction - but sadly its not. Are you perplexed by the glitzy storefronts and countless luxury cars on the city streets of Kiev and Moscow? Are you curious about how guns get into the hands of warlords in Africa or where the demand for slave labor could possible come from? Do you wonder how the fall of the Soviet Union really played out? This is a riveting account of our alter world - the one thriving and evolving in the shadows of mainstream economies and governments - and how all of the nefarious activites around the globe tie together and relate to each other. It does get a bit repetitive towards the end of the book, but you still feel the urge to read on and finish. I strongly recommend it.
  
  
• quality reporting
  By AKQ5BS4ZTTFF4 on 2008-06-19
  Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Glenny's book is how well he traces the births of organized crime groups, what enables them and why they do what they do. This book isn't a comprehensive manual of all organized crime in the world for Interpol use as some may expect, but a tour through environments that spawn criminal groups. After describing the scams, crimes, how they're executed and how the criminals make a profit, he traces the groups' origins, analyzes their social environment, why their service is in demand and what keeps them in business (no real rule of law, people want to buy their wares/services no matter what, etc.). If you wan to know where and why organized crime gets its steam and its profits, this is definitely a book for your reading list.
  
  
• Anecdotal Information
  By A2J0GY3O9E1205 on 2008-07-05
  Very good read with tons of information but just could not shake the feeling like the book was more a collection of stories told that relied too much on primary sources to recount what they knew than any overarching investigative effort. The stories in their singularity are true, especially those about Eastern Europe, but I am not so sure they fit as part of a bigger puzzle; the author sounds too much like a Friedman on some issues and a union leader on others. The good is that book is definitely eye opening and a must read to get an idea of the criminal world.
  
  
• Great book on global criminal enterprises
  By A2Z4WO6M9NQOLB on 2008-07-17
  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.
  
  
• Where are the european mafias ?
  By ARJRR0C1D7QBS on 2008-08-03
  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.
  
  
• The Internationalism of Crime
  By A2NN6H2RZENG24 on 2008-04-17
  
  This is a big, sprawling chaotic book, one of the most important books I've read in the past year. Misha Glenny has spent three years interviewing criminals all over the world in an effort to understand them on their own terms. His experiences as a reporter and author have given him the skills to make these people come alive on the page and to give the reader a good understanding of how they practice their crimes.
  
  It is hard to find a common explanation for the genesis of this business, estimated to constitute 15 to 20% of the world's income. Two themes: crime flourishes when a strong central government disintegrates (e.g. USSR, Bulgaria) or when crime and government work hand in hand (e.g. Japan, Dubai, Israel.)
  
  One story in Tel Aviv weaves the two themes together. After the fall of the USSR, over a million Russian Jews immigrated into Tel Aviv, a swinging city with a culture quite different than the more conservative European Jews already in Israel. Drugs and illicit sex were common, and the Russian influx institutionalized the business. Even today, Glenny writes, there are many brothels in Tel Aviv. One haunting story: a prostitute manages to escape from her captors and goes to the police station. The booking officer is a patron of the brothel and returns her to the owner of the brothel.
  
  Many of the other examples are equally fascinating and frightening:
  
  Transnistria, smaller than Rhode Island, broke away from Moldova and is a source of illegal arms from the former Soviet Army and two unmonitored weapons factories. "These spew out of Transnistria via Odessa and into the world of war -- the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, western and central Africa."
  
  The collapse of the Soviet Union released many state employees into the labor market. "All manner of operatives lost their jobs: secret police, counterintelligence officers, special-forces commandos and border guards, as well as homicide detectives and traffic cops. Their skills included surveillance, smuggling, killing people, establishing networks and blackmail."
  
  Albania was released from a repressive regime, but was unable to export its citrus fruits into Europe in the face of the heavily subsidized orchards in Greece, Spain and Italy. The farmers and the national economy moved to the production of marijuana, Glenny argues almost by necessity. (The Taliban is funding its weapon purchases in the same way.)
  
  The Japan's yakuza has an aging membership and a lack of young recruits; solution: outsource murders to Chinese gangs.
  
  "The illegality of labor smuggling lies in the illogicality of globalization. The European Union has a labor shortage and an aging population that is not being replenished because of low birthrates. But restrictive immigration policies remain in force. The result? An open invitation to far-reaching criminal enterprises."
  
  Glenny moves from one criminal activity to another: marijuana traffickers in British Columbia, snakeheads who "export" poor peasants from China, brothels in Tel Aviv, pachinko parlors in Tokyo, sex clubs in Dubai, a complex flow chart of an energy scam run by the Hungarian company Eural Trans Gas, a Nigerian stealing $242 million from Banco Noroeste, a Brazilian private bank. ("When surveying the undulating landscape of Nigerian crime, it is hard not to develop a sense of admiration for the loving care and creativity with which it is fashioned.")
  
  This fascinating book argues that organized crime is a major threat to all of us: drugs, prostitution, arms trafficking, identity theft, internet crime and fake goods cause great misery and threaten to do so for many years to come.
  
  Robert C. Ross 2008
  
  
• A quickie on the Mafia
  By A3M7UV3A714LY on 2008-09-03
  This is a fairly breezy romp through the world of organized crime, from Russia to Brazil, and from Japan to Canada.
  The author looks at mafias and the conditions that allow for their rise: in Russia, for instance, it was the withering of the state; in Yugoslavia, the war and the embargo; in Brazil the weakness of the state and the corruption; in Columbia the civil war and demand from the United States. The book is easy to read and abounds in anecdotes and thumbnail descriptions. If you think of this book as offering a comprehensive description of the mafia, you will be disappointed: for that you will need many volumes, and a more in-depth (and probably more wearying) approach. As a quickie guide, however, it is perfect. He even gives a few explanations for why organized crime seems to thrive; there isn't one cause, but a variety: when the state is too weak (too little regulation, incapable of protecting ordinary folk) or too intrusive (trying to regulate the substances people put in their bodies, or the kinds of pleasures they want). In a nutshell, organized crime thrives when there is sudden demand, but no legitimate way to satisfy it.
  Read and enjoy.
  
  
• McMafia
  By A1XE6HZVRR379Q on 2008-08-22
  For innocent people, like me, this is a rude awakening of the magnitude of crime there is. As the economies globalize, so is organized crime. What fascinated me about this book is why and how the criminal activities flourish. In business, when a market gap is discovered (need or demand) enterprises fulfill the gap with a product or service. There is no different for the criminals. In short the entrepreneurs play by the legal rules, where the criminal-entrepreneurs (and they are entrepreneurs) play by any rule or no rules at all. Prostitution or drugs, to name a few, are in demand so a criminal organization will fill that need.
  What is tragic is that the market gaps are created by us. Yes, you and me. Either through our governments' actions and laws, such as taxing excessively a product or prohibiting it. Or, by some of us that demand illegal products. The even darker side of all this, is that the criminals acquire such vast amounts of money, that buying entire governments, or branches of governments is a piece of cake. So, with globalization, how long will it be before most governments are run by the criminal element? A new world order? A la Columbia, and soon to be a Mexico? Scary and real.
  This book is worth reading.
  
  
  

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