Name: McMafia
ISBN: 9788381106443

Misha Glenny

Wznowienie głośnej książki, na podstawie której BBC One nakręciła w tym roku popularny serial sensacyjny pod tym samym tytułem. McMafia to panoramiczna opowieść o rozwijającej się i coraz bardziej globalizującej przestępczości zorganizowanej w Rosji, krajach byłego ZSRR, na Bliskim Wschodzie, w Indiach, Afryce i Kanadzie. Autor skupia się na tym, co łączy gangsterów Wschodu i Zachodu. Pokazuje ich żądzę pieniądza, bezwzględność i cynizm oraz ujawnia niebezpieczne powiązania środowisk mafijnych z polityką.

McMafia

A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

Bryan Alexander

A fascinating survey of recent international crime. Misha Glenny visits a variety of nations, from Japan to Canada, Serbia to Nigeria, Israel to China, exploring how new criminal organizations have emerged and prospered. The end of the Cold War opened borders, and crime natually seized the many resulting opportunities. The Russian mafiya are but one example of ambitious, global crooks.

McMafia is very accessible, structured and styled as a travelogue. We ride along with Glenny as he visits warlords, convicts, brothels, police officers in many nations, sometimes at some peril, often with a wry glance at social mores.

Glenny links the development of global organized crime to the simultaneous boom in transnational finance capital, partly by way of money laundering. "The new freedom for capital to travel around the world was not restricted to money... the laundering of profits from illicit activities was also about to enter its golden age." (120; see also 289) 

The flip side of financialization is the way it accelerates inequality. Charismatic displays of wealth lure those without into crime, especially officials tasked with its suppression: "One may denounce corruption in the developing world and the developed world alike, but in the age when billionaires stalk a globe o which 50 percent of its people live on less than two dollars a day, can one really be surprised that customs officers, policemen, judges, politicians, and bureaucrats are often tempted?" (283) Viewers of The Wire will understand.



A key part in global crime is the US-led war on (some) drugs. The huge human demand for what is prohibited or strongly regulated (cocaine, tobacco, prostitutes) is what feeds these enterprises. Glenny takes pains to show us the many, many instances where prohibition makes drug production lucrative and criminal. And this war interacts badly with a newer one: "Since 9/11, the war on terror has been the overriding priority of American foreign policy. The war on drugs, by nurturing a huge ad unmanageable criminal swamp in which all manner of undesireables roam freely almost guarantees that the war on terror can never be won." (262)

Part of McMafia's power is its quiet insistence on a connection between crime and putatively non-involved citizens. For example, one metal, coltan, neatly bridges the two worlds, being mined and marketed through multiple criminal networks. "Ordinary people around the world may think that they have no relationship with transnational criminal syndicates, but anyone who has used a cell phone or computer network in the past decade has unwittingly depended on organize crime for his or her convenience." (202)

At times McMafia seems to call for the increased application of governmental force against newer and more effective criminals, even hoping for global alliances towards this end (341-346), what my friend Tim Pendry dubs "liberal-imperial cliches". But Glenny is cannier than that, noting many instances where local police commit crimes against both criminals and civilians (144). 

One side effect of this armed struggle between cops and criminals is the capacity of the latter to fight back successfully. McMafia describes several incidents of this type, from drug-mafia-run communities to one spectacular Brazilian anti-police insurgency (276).

For all of its transnational ambit, McMafia climaxes on a startlingly nationalist focus. Glenny sees China as a kind of global supervillain in the making. Chinese workers abroad are entering the ranks of criminal organizations, lowering the price of services much as they "undercut the wages and the capacity for work in the licit sectors" (284). Notes one Japanese police official, "'A Chinese gangster will do three jobs for the price a yakuza will charge for one.' Just like everyone else, the yakuza are worried about the influence and strength of Chinese organized crime in Japan." (311) Meanwhile the Chinese mainland has apparently seen criminal organizations networked deeply into everyday life, both in economics and governments local and central. Glenny hints that Chinese crime will become a very important global force in the future.

Overall: recommended.

Joline Hordijk

A Journey Through the Global Underworld

Sara Piteira 

Manoj Nayak

Drugs, weapons, migrant labour, women — these are just a few of the many goods that effortlessly cross national borders in this globalized age, often without the knowledge or permission of the nations concerned. How is this remarkable criminal feat managed?From gun runners in the Ukraine, to money launderers in Dubai, cyber criminals in Brazil, racketeers in Japan, and the booming marijuana industry in western Canada, McMafia builds a breathtaking picture of a secret and bloody business.Internationally celebrated writer Misha Glenny crafts a fascinating, highly readable, and impressively well-researched account of the emergence of organized crime as a globalized phenomenon and shows how its secret and bloody business mirrors both the methods and the rewards of the legitimate world economy. Employing his journalistic talent and his prior experience covering organized crime in Eastern Europe, Glenny reports on his travels around the planet to investigate this worrying and worsening situation. After comprehensively surveying the criminal scene, Glenny ends by considering the future of organized crime. McMafia is an important book that assembles all the pieces of this worldwide puzzle for the first time.

McMafia

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