McMafia, by Misha Glenny

Originally published on Josh's Goodreads

For some reason I thought this was a book about gangsters in the Balkans (where the author has reported from for a long time), but as the book went on more and more locations came up, and eventually I realised the theme was just "global organised crime". The title is intended to compare today's criminal gangs to McDonald's: multinational, vertically integrated, highly efficient; but it just came across as a loosely connected collection of reportage about criminals. Which is fine - it's all pretty interesting! Some of it is multinational, some of it is in failed states, some of it is stomach-churningly violent; while other parts read more like business reporting except about crime, with prudent, sensible criminals handling production and distribution networks, regulatory constraints, competition and cartels, and even (in the case of the Yakuza) struggling to get young people interested in the job.

The book begins in the former Soviet states. In one of several broadsides against globalisation, Glenny calls out the West for using free trade selectively. While Western goods flooded the post-Communist sphere, its own agricultural produce was kept out by tariffs, and its shoddy manufactured goods could not find buyers, leading to a massive balance of payments crisis. Only a few developing countries with large economies of scale, such as China and India, have been able to succeed within this system as cheap manufacturing hubs. Glenny explains the surprisingly simple origin of the oligarch class: in the USSR, goods were sold at fixed low prices within the country, and exports would gain a much higher price from the open market, with the difference going to the state. After the collapse of communism, most price controls were lifted but a few connected insiders arranged for these commodities (eg oil) to continue to be sold to insiders at controlled prices, and then resold them on the open market, keeping the difference for themselves. (He also discusses how Gazprom is an arm of Russian foreign policy, which no-one will need reminding of in 2023.)

As a result of this, you have a lot of young women being lured into sex trafficking with false promises of high salaries overseas for "waitressing", and the details are pretty horrifying. Glenny covers this from Israel, where a lot of Russian oligarchs and gangsters washed up (along with plenty of honest people!) fleeing the post-Soviet anarchy. (Within the Balkans, the main clientèle is UN peacekeepers and other internationals.) He mentions the uncomfortable fact of the high proportion of Jews among the oligarch class, something which anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongers make too much of, but is politely ignored by everyone else. The reason seems to be, basically, that the Soviet economy functioned thanks to people called  tolkachi, fixers who could find the right quantity of steel tubing or whatever in a pinch. These people were disproportionately likely to come from minority groups such as Chechens, Georgians and Jews.

Discussion of trafficking leads Glenny to Dubai, whose meteoric rise came along with a lot of dirty money (and a ton of construction: at one point, it had one third of the world's supply of cranes). As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush mocked European anti-money laundering (AML) laws as a way to make doing business as hard as possible. After 9/11 the U.S. government did a 180° turn and to this day it remains the world's enforcer.

The following chapters discuss Nigerian 419 scams - which have inspired the admirably blunt rap  I Go Chop Your Dollar -

Nigerian criminal gangs in South Africa, weed growers running drugs across the US border, the war in drugs in American inner cities, which includes this story about a black DEA agent:

Dispirited at hauling in hundreds of men and women from his own community, Fogg came up with a new proposal for his boss at the DEA. "I suggested we go out to Potomac, Maryland, and to Springfield, to places where whites live, and out to Alexandria, because our job was to find the drugs and white folk do drugs too. The DEA ASAC, the [assistant] special agent in charge, got hold of me and said, 'We gotta talk about this.' He said, 'Fogg, you're right. People do drugs everywhere. White folks do drugs too. But, buddy - we start going out into those areas with the task force, those people know judges, lawyers, politicians, and let me tell you something, they'll shut us down and there goes your overtime. We'll go after the weakest link instead."

Also: the Colombian drug cartels, Japan's Yakuza and their odd association with Pachinko (Japan's national obsession, a cross between pinball and slot machine), Chinese "snakeheads" from Fujian who smuggle people to rich countries, blood diamonds, and the army of Chinese forgers who, often with tacit state support, run out knockoffs of Western luxury brands or other IP, leading to the term "real fake", something which professes to be at least a reliable copy of the original.

If there's one takeaway from this book - besides, that there is a lot of crime in the world, comprising perhaps 15% of global GDP - it is that some things which are seen by society as (at worst) peccadilloes, such as buying illegal cigarettes in the street, doing cocaine at a party or visiting a brothel on a stag weekend are actually really bad. Narcotics, cigarettes and women are staples of gangs, and most of the consumer price goes to the distribution network, which involves some unspeakable cruelty.