McMafia

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
Author: Misha Glenny 2008 348 pp
My rating: 1.5*
Started July 17 2008, Finished July 24 2008

Aside from a sense that globalization has been a boon to large scale criminal operations, I did not get much out of this book which I found this book very annoying, a combination of overly ambitious, under researched and endlessly digressive wherein. The first section of the book dealt with the emergence crime networks in eastern Europe and was relatively focused and informed but marred by the chapters’ independence from the others and failure to build upon each other – they could have been randomly rearranged without much affecting how they read. The rest of the book is worse with some chapters having little to do criminal networks, instead being filler/digression concerned primarily with the author’s take on globalization.

The writing is generally characterized by TV docudrama-like suspenseful interruptions as if heading to commercial and sudden lapses into the most jarring slang.

For this book to be more successful, much more research would have been required which would have been an admittedly difficult task – showing how many of the world’s criminal networks operate and interact; such an expose seems beyond even the combined abilities of all the world’s law enforcement agencies. Glenny probably would have been better off focusing his efforts on Eastern Europe where he seems the most knowledgeable.


[During the Yugoslavian civil war] “ … “Bosnians, Croats, and Albanians [were] more than happy to sell oil to their Serbian enemies because of the extraordinary profits that a sanctions regime generates.” (29)

“Bulgaria’s main route to the rest of Europe was through Serbia. The UN Security Council had already told Sofia to kiss good-bye the $1 Billion it was owed by Saddam’s Iraq when it imposed sanctions on Baghdad. Now the UN was telling Bulgaria it could not send its trucks through Serbia. This was devastating, as the country’s most important exports to Western Europe were perishable. ‘Bulgaria had a GDP of $10 billion and on the fruit and vegetables alone they lost $1 billion of income annually, explained Bill Montgomery. ‘I proposes that we allow the Bulgarians to send a weekly convoy through Serbia [escorted by UN forces]. The UN signed off … the Europeans signed off …; but Leon Furth, advisor to … Al Gore … blocked it.’ [This provided a] boost to organized crime, which thrived on the economic distress such myopic policies promoted.” (31)

“Despite the murders and the shoot-outs, the Russian mob actually ensured a degree of stability during the economic transition [from Communism to Putinist stability] (61)

Tomas Machacek, head of the Czech anti-Russian organized crime unit “is a real life Arkady Renko … engaged in a quixotic struggle with much more powerful and darker forces.” (71)

Sloppy writing: “Gazprom .. [has] an annual turnover of just less than $30 billion” (78)

Pakistani ISI trains Indian Moslem criminals to plant explosives for a terrorist act in which hundreds die. (138-9)

Clinton administration had an anti money-laundering initiative which the Bush administration eliminated as being anti business. “After 9/11 no AML regime is too strong for the US. Any kind of concerns about secondary effects go out the window. … everybody has to have this regime, and the stronger, the more onerous, the better – no cost is too high.” (147-8)

“Gangsters from Mumbai to the Balkans began pouring money into Dubai’s property market in an effort to launder their money and, where possible, to launder their reputations as well.” (153)

The last 20 pages of Chapter Seven, ostensibly about the Mumbai underworld, is instead a long digression about globalization and Dubai containing digressions within digressions such as an account of the author’s summer job in Carbondale IL in the 1970s.

Page 167, in the midst of a wandering discussion of Nigerian 419 scammers, contains a nearly full page and absolutely irrelevant aside about a Macumba priestess.

Page 170 contains another annoying aside, one paragraph about McNamara and the World Bank.

Page 176 contains another big digression, this time about the history on international trade including the “mercantile period of the 16th to 18th century.”

(184) Of a South African drug courier imprisoned in a US minimum security federal prison where a guard manipulated her into having sex: “ … if she reported it, she said, he would have killed her.” Author presents this claim of ultimate retribution as if it were a likely consequence in a US minimum-security prison as if no one would have noticed or cared and the guard would have gotten away with it.

Page 206 the country China is spelled with a lower cased ‘c’.

Page 216. Account of marijuana growers in British Columbia running large artificial 24/7 indoor growing environments on electricity illegally tapped from grid. Doesn’t the BC power company notice the loss of such a large amount of power?

218 contains unsubstantiated generalizations about Canadian attitudes towards Americans that have nothing to do with the ongoing discussion of drug cultivation in the Pacific northwest.

Chapter ten is essentially a recitation of the failure of the War on Drugs and has very little to do with organized crime.

Logic attempting to indicate that growing coca plants is far more lucrative to the Columbian farmer than bananas would be: “a kilo of bananas during the 1990s would fetch $2 on average; a kilo of coca base … was worth between $750 and $1000.” (256) This is a meaningless comparison as it gives no idea of the amount of acreage or effort required to produce a kilo of each product – if, say, an acre could yield 1000 kilos of bananas or enough coca to produce a kilo of coca base, then bananas would be more profitable on a per acre basis.

Page 272 claims that each peripheral attached to a computer has its own IP address. This is not necessarily true.

301 paragraph long digression on how tattoos are created.

“… pachinko [in Japan] … has an annual turnover estimated at about $300 billion, twice the value of the entire Japanese automobile industry …” (308)

“Health concerns and legislation aimed at reducing smoking in the United States and Europe may have dented tobacco companies’ profits in the West, but in China and Asia, it’s party time!” (336)
“One man well known both to the ‘baccy mafia and the Chinese police was Tun Yan Yuk …” (337)

The last chapter, about China, again has very little to do with organized crime and is mainly a discussion of how Chinese manufacturing has prospered in the last 15 years.