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McMafia
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McMafia (2008) (edit title/settings)

A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

by Misha Glenny (Author) (edit contributors)

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With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the deregulation of international financial markets in 1989, governments and entrepreneurs alike became intoxicated by forecasts of limitless expansion into newly open markets. No one would foresee that the greatest... read more

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Guns, Drugs and Women – Misha Glenny travels from Eastern Europe to South America, Africa, Israel, India, Dubai, Canada, China and Japan tracing the globalisation of crime since the early 1990s. The globalised economy may well be ‘Flat’, but it also casts one hell of a shadow.

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  • “One of the most violent and feared groups to emerge in Moscow and elsewhere was the Chechen mafia. Their mere reputation for being both fearless and gruesome was often sufficient to cow an opponent or persuade a businessman to take them on as his Krysha (literally ‘roof’).But their members were not drawn exclusively from the Caucasus, let alone from Chechnya: ‘The Chechen mafia (who should not be confused with the guerrillas fighting in the Chechen war) became a brand name, a franchise – McMafia if you life,’ explained Mark Galeotti, who has devoted the last fifteen years to studying the Russian Mob. ‘They would sell the moniker “Chechen” to protection rackets in other towns provided they paid, of course, and provided they all ways carried out their word. If a group claimed a Chechen connection, but didn’t carry out its threats to the letter, it was devaluing the brand. The original Chechens would come after them”
  • “All manner of operatives lost their jobs: secret police, counterintelligence officers, special-forces commandos and border guards, as well as homicide detectives and traffic cops. Their skills included surveillance, smuggling, killing people, establishing networks and blackmail.The Police and even the KGB were clueless as to how one might enforce contract law. The protection rackets and Mafiosi were not so clueless – their central role in the new Russian economy was to ensure that contracts entered into were honoured. They were the new law-enforcement agencies, and the oligarchs needed their services.By 1999, there were more than 11,500 registered ‘Private Security Firms’, employing more than 800,000 people. Of these, almost 200,000 had licences to carry arms. The Russian Interior Ministry has estimated that there were at least half as many again that remained unregistered.”
  • “One group of people.. saw real opportunity in this dazzling mixture of upheaval, hope and uncertainty. These men understood instinctively that rising living standards in the West, increased trade and migration flows, and the greatly reduced ability of many governments to police their countries combined to form a goldmine. They were criminals, organised and disorganised, but they were also good capitalists and entrepreneurs, intent on obeying the laws of supply and demand.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • According to figures culled from the IMF, the World Bank, and research institutes in Europe and North America, it now accounts for between 15 and 20 percent of global turnover.
    Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers
  • The collapse of the Communist superpower, the Soviet Union, is the single most important event prompting the exponential growth of organized crime around the world in the last two decades.
    Highlighted by 20 Kindle customers
  • Organized crime is such a rewarding industry in the Balkans because ordinary West Europeans spend an ever-burgeoning amount of their spare time and money sleeping with prostitutes; smoking untaxed cigarettes; snorting coke through fifty-euro notes up their noses; employing illegal untaxed immigrant labor on subsistence wages; stuffing their gullets with caviar; admiring ivory and sitting on teak; and purchasing the liver and kidneys of the desperately poor in the developing world.
    Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers
  • The whole process was dramatic testimony to how venality and myopic stupidity are always likely to triumph in the absence of regulatory institutions.
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • The coupling of a privatized foreign trade mechanism with the retention of rock-bottom subsidized commodity prices gave birth within months to an entirely new species of robber baron—the Russian oligarch. The logic of this life-form is simple: buy Siberian oil for a dollar a barrel and sell it for thirty dollars in the Baltic states and before long you become a very, very rich citizen. The state was no longer getting its cut from the deal. Instead, that vast profit was going to a few individuals.
    Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
  • Organized crime and corruption flourishes in regions and countries where public trust in institutions is weak.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • Not a penny of assistance or compensation was offered to Yugoslavia’s neighbors—they were all expected to shoulder the costs of the international community’s moral indignation about Serbia’s behavior in Bosnia.
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • Maxwell was in the vanguard of a criminal industry that would run out of control in the 1990s: money laundering. Together with Prime Minister Lukanov, Maxwell arranged the transfer of $2 billion from Bulgaria into Western tax havens—subsequent Bulgarian governments were unable to trace what happened to this cash, although we do know that it did not end up in the London Daily Mirror’s pension fund, from which Maxwell was also stealing hundreds of millions of pounds at the same time.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • If a country supports prohibition, it is also guaranteeing that on the supply side all profits will accrue to underground networks; and on the demand side it is guaranteeing that any social or public health problems associated with drug taking will in the great majority of cases only come to light once they are out of control. If the UN is right and drugs account for 70 percent of organized criminal activity, then the legalization of drugs would administer by far the deadliest blow possible against transnational organized criminal networks.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • Each developed a reputation for being especially good in the trading of particular commodities. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, it was arms and cigarettes. In Bulgaria, it was cars. In Ukraine, it was the trafficking of migrant labor as well as women. Everyone shifted narcotics.
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
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Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Misha Glenny (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: Add the language.
Publisher: Knopf
Country: Add the country of publication.
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-1400044115
Page Count: 400

Classification edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
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  • Almanac of World Crime
  • Organized Crime
  • Five Families
  • Organized Crime in Our Times
  • An Illustrated Chronological History Of Organized Crime Volume 1. 1863-1949
  • The Encyclopedia of Gangsters: A Worldwide Guide to Organized Crime

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

   
  • The Fall of Yugoslavia

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