Name: McMafia
Rating: 3.777777777777778 (9 reviews)
ISBN: 9781400044115

Misha Glenny

A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

McMafia

Tim Pendry

I was initially wary of this account of contemporary organised crime. Misha Glenny's 'Fall of Yugoslavia' had frustrated me as good narrative but weak analysis. I need not have been so concerned. Yes, Glenny still does not quite 'get' that he is being fed a line sometimes by people who have an interest in extending their own power. And, yes, he still trots out liberal-imperial cliches in the short epilogue. However, the vast bulk of the book rises above the ‘given’ ideology. It provides an excellent account, travelling from the Balkans through every theatre of criminal enterprise and ending up in China, not merely as a narrative of crime, the supplier of illegitimate needs and desires in a globalised world, but as an account of how the state system is beginning to crumble under the pressures of these trades. There are sub-texts here that are immensely valuable for students of international affairs – above all, that imperial exploitation has left a culture of resentment in which non-Western criminality can not only thrive but develop an alternative moral compass that cannot easily be dismissed. This will pass but the thieving of the British Empire in Africa, India and from China in the Opium Wars may be forgotten at home but it is not forgotten where the thievery actually took place. Victorian Britain was once a drugs dealer using violence in ways little different from the cartels of Medellin. The bottom line is that once trading barriers were eliminated by globalization and massive demands unleashed – including demands for drugs, risk-taking and sexual pleasure as well as jobs and cheaper versions of expensive consumer goods – no police or security force was resourced or skilled enough to counter the operation of the laws of supply and demand on a global scale. The perfect idiocy of the West was not merely to drop all trade barriers without adequate planning for the consequences – including mass migration – but to think that destroying rival state structures such as the Soviet Union would not bring the organizational muscle of a degraded security apparatus into alignment with criminal gangs whose main motivation would be purely economic. The starting point for all criminality, across the world, is for state structures to try to ban rather than manage some human requirement (mind-altering substances, pleasures, status-driven wants or simply the need to cross a border to earn a living). These are the fools who think that an ‘ought’ is an ‘is’ and that the law, being self-evidently representative of the ‘good’, works without immense costs when it works against human instincts and needs. There is a difference between law as protector of persons and property from other persons and law as code of conduct to meet pre-set cultural or religious standards. While those standards subsist, everything is secretive but it is still happening. Once those standards cease to hold for great tracts of the population, a market opens up where state terror is no longer sufficient to counter the demands of desire or need. Economic interests then emerge to exploit these needs and desires and these interests are not always the bad guys. Sometimes, they resort to violence simply because they cannot rely on the state to regulate their markets, while those markets are often the only way economic forward for depressed populations. Even if a Western State ‘takes out’ a gang boss or gang, the system simply re-assembles and re-connects, much like the nuclear-proof internet, albeit with short term violence and the lacuna actually results in improved production methods and increased supply. Warlord gangsters with a monopoly have an interest in keeping prices high and restricting supply. Break the monopoly and everyone is driving down price and increasing supply. But what makes the situation so much worse is that the ideological basis for state attempts to deny the population what they want ‘in their own interest’, which might under normal circumstances motivate public servants and public to contain criminality, collapses under post-modernity. It is the wider public that wants what the gangs provide and, in a way, why shouldn’t they? By what right do states dictate our pleasures, certainly not by divine right? Glenny seems to think that we are naughty for wanting these things (the message clearly purveyed to him by the 'authorities'), but we might as easily say that the bureaucrats are very naughty indeed for not allowing us these things on fair and safe terms. On the one hand, in the US in particular, we see the emergence since the 1920s of special interests who rely on public cash (as taxes) being voted them year in year out, in increasing amounts, to deal with threats that they themselves define and popularise. They extend their remit internationally because, like all imperial markets, they must otherwise expand or die. Glenny tells the story of the ultimate in bureaucratic stupidity where US Homeland Security's container monitoring took place in China at source to check nuclear smuggling but under conditions where none of the Americans spoke Chinese and the cops were, shall we say, not always exactly not corrupt – what was being signed off was a steady flow of cheap production from North Korea stamped ‘made in china’. On the other hand, when a State is finally degraded by its own economic failures, the pauperized security apparat finds that it has the sudden need and means to engage in the market itself, either directly or in alliance with criminal gangs. By the time we reach China we have a working Political Criminal Nexus. What is the common denominator here? Why, the State, of course, and its self interest and failures. The gangsters, though barbarous and cruel, are merely taking things from one place where people are very poor and giving them to people who are much richer in return for cash. Clearly the States do not seem to be doing much about helping the very poor people and Glenny's account of how FARC in Colombia got into coca productions ends up making one see FARC in a new and positive light and the Colombian state thugs (backed by the US) in a rather less positive one. The poor coca or opium producer, the Fukien peasant or the educated but dirt-poor Nigerian, the beautiful East Asian village girl or the Balkans youngster get the cash they desperately need to survive, albeit smaller than the worth to the gangsters further down the line. At the other end, the Westerners get what they want. The Westerners get doubly taxed – high prices for their illicit pleasures and high ‘legitimate’ taxes to keep thousands of security men and bureaucrats slaving away to keep those prices high by disrupting the supply lines. Meanwhile, the lack of legitimacy means that the poor do not get full value (‘fair trade’) and there is no regulation of the health and safety aspects of what is supplied. Liberal and faith-based moralists are almost certainly central to the rotten core of the politics involved here. Similarly, without legal protection, there is no recourse but to the gun and corruption so that the whole security apparat gets suborned by people whose capital accumulation is substantial and who are always one step ahead of any attempt by over-paid bureaucrats to deny then access to their loot. Losses are budgeted into the game, driving down benefits for the poor and prices up for the rich. It is a mess but no one wants to face the fact that you cannot buck the market except within a tough authoritarian state (which means a sclerotic economy) and that world government is just not going to happen (and that it would simply be a sclerotic authoritarian state writ large if it did). And so it goes on – thuggish stupid state security systems claiming the moral high ground but building huge prison systems like gulags and destroying the freedoms and wealth of their own peoples in their drive to control the market and thuggish entrepreneurs who claim the same market ideology as their opponents and never have to give true value to the two ends of the supply chain. Glenny follows the Western liberal party line at the end about more global governance but it is not convincing. It is just a job creation scheme for increasingly inept administrators and some very brave but misused grunts on the ground. Imagine the tax take for Governments if those grunts were administering the trade themselves! Glenny gets to the nub of the issue at one point: the stupidity of the war on drugs. One solution would be the legalization of human pleasures regardless of the priests and ideologues in order to give fair value to the peasants and young women who provide the services. From this point on, regulation could improve health and safety and punish not the small user but exploitative bosses in between. But, regardless of all this, the reality is that globalization has, in around 30 years, broken the back of one Empire (the Soviet) and is placing two others (the Atlantic and the Chinese) under severe strain. The ‘alternative economic system’, now operating as both gangsterdom and increasingly anarcho-capitalist trading across the internet, is simply no longer something that can be beaten like Hitler or Mussolini. It has to be adapted to. It has to be out-thought. Why? Because it is not a perversion of humanity but the very essence of humanity – the seeking of trading advantage and arbitrage opportunities between sets of desire and want. It is the sclerotic state systems that originally unleashed this chaos by going for economic growth over social cohesion that are the perversion of humanity, still trying to contain and control what is essentially human for the sake of bureaucratic order. It may not be an exaggeration to say that what we are seeing compressed (alongside the insurgencies that grow year on year, the collapse of small nation states such as Afghanistan and Syria under Western pressure, and the internal resentments and institutional cynicism within the West) into a relatively few years is a systemic breakdown like that of the late Roman Empire. Once empires stop expanding, they freeze up and then they crumble. Mexican gangsters are now at the very gates of the American South West, insurgencies with criminal aspects spread from Mali to Central Asia, from Somalia to Southern Italy, and the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Congress is faced with direct challenges to its authority from PCN elements. We are only a few steps from warlordism. So, despite the failures of analysis (or perhaps the lack of courage or interest in critiquing the analyses of his establishment sources), this book is an invaluable primer in how the world really works. And if the world does work like this (and we think it does), it merely confirms that we have been ruled by idiots for far longer than we all deserve. The gangsters are only half the problem – the other half is our less than competent political class.

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 A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

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