These days, dirty money makes the world go round, says Misha Glenny, an award-winning former BBC World correspondent, in his new book. Glenny spent three years travelling across five continents investigating international crime like a “journalistic Indiana Jones”, as Jonathan Maitland, who deems this “the most important non-fiction book of the year so far”, puts it in The Mail on Sunday.
Hence his “entertaining and often shocking” accounts of meetings with crooks, ranging from Japanese property scammers to Kazakhstani caviar traffickers and sex traders in Egypt.
He concludes that such is the extent and variety of the shadow economy that it may now be worth as much as 20% of the world’s GDP. The statistics are startling. Fake goods are worth up to £250bn a year; China is behind 60% of the market in stolen intellectual property; 57% of Afghanistan’s GDP stems from opium trading; more than 5% of British Columbia’s GDP is accounted for by marijuana cultivation and selling, with more workers involved than in the traditional industries of logging, mining, and oil and gas combined. Nigerian gangsters steal 150,000-250,000 barrels of oil every day. In 2005 alone, citizens in 38 industrialised countries admitted to losing more than $3bn on one of the most notorious fraud schemes of them all, the Nigerian 419 scam.
The chaos following the demise of communism in Eastern Europe played a major role in allowing organised crime to flourish on a global scale. Some countries effectively became gangster states, such as Ukraine before the regime change in 2004, while the Russian oligarchs committed the “grandest larceny in history”.
Rising demand in the West and increasingly globalised (and poorly regulated) markets have also engendered “a vigorous springtime… for transnational organised crime”, says Glenny. Indeed, organised crime is now so established that it resembles large multinationals, such as McDonald’s.
How to stem the tide? This “racy… and highly entertaining book” makes a compelling case for legalising drugs, which comprise 70% of organised criminal activity, notes Conor O’ Clery in The Irish Times; prohibition has been a boon for crooks. More effective regulations, especially of the movement of money, are also crucial.
It’s hard to be confident that global crime will be tackled effectively, said Max Hastings in The Sunday Times. “Too many people, including rulers of China, Russia and lesser nations, are gaining too much” from it to make reform seem “credible”.
McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers is published by Bodley Head.