McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (Borzoi Books) | 
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Author: Misha Glenny
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 2878
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6 x 1.4
ISBN: 1400044111
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.106
EAN: 9781400044115
ASIN: 1400044111
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
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Amazon.com
Amazon Significant Seven, April 2008: In McMafia, Misha Glenny draws the dark map that lies on the other side of Tom Friedman's bright flat world. That connected globe not only brings software coders and supply-chain outsourcers closer together; it's also opened the gates to a criminal network of unsettling vastness, complexity, and efficiency that represents a fifth of the earth's economy, trading in everything from untaxed cigarettes and the usual narcotics to human lives and nuclear material. Glenny's a Balkans expert, and he begins his story there, with the illicit--but often state-sponsored--underworld that grew out of the post-Soviet chaos, but he soon follows the contraband everywhere from Mumbai and Johannesburg to rural Colombia and the U.S. suburbs. It's not just a hodgepodge of scare clips, though: Glenny reports from the ground but follows the leads as high as they go, showing how the dark and bright sides of the flat world are more connected than we imagine. --Tom Nissley
Product Description
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 success story to arise from these events would be the globalization of organized crime. Current estimates suggest that illegal trade accounts for nearly one-fifth of global GDP.
McMafia is a fearless, encompassing, wholly authoritative investigation of the now proven ability of organized crime worldwide to find and service markets driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for illegal wares. Whether discussing the Russian mafia, Colombian drug cartels, or Chinese labor smugglers, Misha Glenny makes clear how organized crime feeds off the poverty of the developing world, how it exploits new technology in the forms of cybercrime and identity theft, and how both global crime and terror are fueled by an identical source: the triumphant material affluence of the West.
To trace the disparate strands of this hydra-like story, Glenny talked to police, victims, politicians, and members of the global underworld in eastern Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan, and India. The story of organized crime’s phenomenal, often shocking growth is truly the central political story of our time. McMafia will change the way we look at the world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Vicious, Lucrative, Corrupt, and Global July 25, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
You sponsor organized crime. There isn't a thing you can do to stop. These are among the dismaying messages of _McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld_ (Knopf) by Misha Glenny. A big book with an extremely broad, world-wide vision of the latest in global criminality, it presents a daunting picture of lucrative and lethal crime in China, Serbia, Chechnya, Columbia, Israel, Russia, and all over the place. The U.S., the land where Don Corleone and his family prospered, gets surprisingly little coverage as a scene of crimes, but that does not keep it from playing a role all over the globe. Let's say (for the sake of argument) that you are an American who doesn't hire illegal foreign workers and never does illegal drugs and never launders money, so you think that gets you off the hook. Not quite. Do you use a cell phone? If so, most likely it contains coltan, a mined compound that efficiently conducts electricity at very high temperatures, and which comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, so you are tapped into mine pillaging and organized crime there. There are countless other examples given here, but most important is what the American government and other governments are doing. They are interested in prohibition, criminalization, and interdiction, but with the lifting of restrictions on free movement of capital (Glenny blames Reagan and Thatcher for allowing what the corporations wanted), criminals "... became inextricably bound up with globalization - it was here in the huge reservoirs of the international banking system that the liquid assets of the corporate and criminal worlds mixed and mingled." Glenny's book details his travels to crime scenes of different countries, and he is guided by criminals themselves, smugglers, and a few police officers. It is an eye-opening and disheartening view of the world.
_McMafia_ hops around the world, Glenny gives pictures of a huge, more-or-less well organized crime network routinely allied with governments (efficient and inefficient governments, not just governments that are our friends or our enemies), police, and corporations. The book is often uncomfortable reading, as in the tale of a woman from Moldavia who was sent against her will to be on call at an Israeli brothel, manhandled by Moldavians, Ukrainians, Russians, Egyptians, and Bedouins before the Israelis could get their hands on her. The mafia in Chechnya was so ruthless and feared that it made money allowing criminal rackets in other towns to call themselves "Chechen". If those licensees did not themselves ferociously prosecute local violations of protection, the Chechen mafia would come after the racketeers themselves, so that the brand name did not get devalued. Oligarchs and mobsters from Russia united to make worldwide launderettes for cleaning cash from growing and exporting drugs. Glenny shows how to buy contraband gasoline in Serbia, counterfeit DVDs in China, or illegal caviar in Kazakhstan. He rides with marijuana smugglers from British Columbia, describes being propositioned in sex clubs in Dubai, or tells how pachinko fiends in Tokyo feed their habit. Glenny interviews a member of the famous _yakuza_, Japan's traditional mafia, who says, "Like all organizations we are facing problems encouraging young people to join." Well, it's just a management problem: the _yakuza_ subcontract their mob hits to Chinese gangs.
Sometimes _McMafia_ is scattershot in its jumps all over the globe, but the big picture is perhaps just too complicated for anyone to understand fully. Glenny knows he is writing about scary and dark subjects, but there are a few points of light. There are academics who have done sociological studies on gangs and gang members, some even joining to get data. One of them says, however, "Scholars do not like to waste time with uncooperative sources who refuse to talk, and, alternatively, they do not like to be shot." There is a small organization called Global Witness, which had documented the human suffering in the African diamond trade and has arranged a protocol to assure buyers that diamonds come from sources that meet humane standards. David Soares is the District Attorney in Albany, New York, who has realized that his state is wasting millions to arrest and keep in prison drug offenders from a futile war on drugs, and was elected with a view of changing drug laws. According to Glenny, this sort of change is going to be essential if the disheartening global picture he presents is ever to change. The United Nations reports that 70% of the financing of organized crime comes from the sorts of international drug sales described here. Forced eradication is not going to work, despite the billions that is spent on it; a more prudent and less costly policy would be some legalization of the drug trade and provision of treatment for drug abuse. There are few other recommendations in Glenny's book, other than a sensible call for stricter international regulation of current financial markets to end the untraceable flow of criminal funds. It might be that the world is realizing that the unregulated trade and finance that was supposed to bring us all prosperity is more contributing to the world's misery instead. The reforms can happen, or it can all be left to the gangsters.
 Great book on global criminal enterprises July 17, 2008
This is a global journey through organized crime. The first thing I thought of when I read this book was "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. This book succeeds in every regard where Friedman's book fails. Glenny shows how criminal organizations take advantage of corrupt and inefficient systems to create smooth enterprise. Crime all over the globe is profiled, from Russia to India. Rather than reading like an encyclopedia, Glenny's anecdotes show the insidious nature of global criminals and the large part they play in the world's economy.
Anecdotal Information July 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Very good read with tons of information but just could not shake the feeling like the book was more a collection of stories told that relied too much on primary sources to recount what they knew than any overarching investigative effort. The stories in their singularity are true, especially those about Eastern Europe, but I am not so sure they fit as part of a bigger puzzle; the author sounds too much like a Friedman on some issues and a union leader on others. The good is that book is definitely eye opening and a must read to get an idea of the criminal world.
quality reporting June 19, 2008
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Glenny's book is how well he traces the births of organized crime groups, what enables them and why they do what they do. This book isn't a comprehensive manual of all organized crime in the world for Interpol use as some may expect, but a tour through environments that spawn criminal groups. After describing the scams, crimes, how they're executed and how the criminals make a profit, he traces the groups' origins, analyzes their social environment, why their service is in demand and what keeps them in business (no real rule of law, people want to buy their wares/services no matter what, etc.). If you wan to know where and why organized crime gets its steam and its profits, this is definitely a book for your reading list.
engaging book June 9, 2008
This is a very engaging book, so well written that it seems like fiction - but sadly its not. Are you perplexed by the glitzy storefronts and countless luxury cars on the city streets of Kiev and Moscow? Are you curious about how guns get into the hands of warlords in Africa or where the demand for slave labor could possible come from? Do you wonder how the fall of the Soviet Union really played out? This is a riveting account of our alter world - the one thriving and evolving in the shadows of mainstream economies and governments - and how all of the nefarious activites around the globe tie together and relate to each other. It does get a bit repetitive towards the end of the book, but you still feel the urge to read on and finish. I strongly recommend it.
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