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| McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld | 
 enlarge | Author: Misha Glenny
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $14.59
You Save: $13.36 (48%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 5469
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081115221554T
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| Customer Reviews:
 Good worldwide overview of global crime, marred by author's biases May 17, 2008
8 out of 15 found this review helpful
Misha Glenny took on a great task in attempting to provide an overview of organized crime around the world. On the whole, he does a good job in describing the nature of organized crime in various countries. Glenny makes it clear that virtually every nation has organized crime and that it is intertwined to one degree or another with government. This incestuous relationship is not news; rather the news is the growing scale of organized crime.
The subject matter of each chapter (a different nation or kind of crime, i.e., drug trade) is interesting, but Glenny'a verbiosity and penchant for smothering the reader in minute detail rob the book of true vibrancy. Reading it, I found, was a bit of a slog.
Where Glenny fails is in allowing his own political views to color his narrative. Glenny's hostility to the United States and, particularly, its current administration is palpable - and obnoxious. His remedy to the problem of world wide crime comes from the left: more global governance. His comment that "organized crime aand corruption will combine with protectionism and chauvinism to engender a very unstable and very dangerous world" is almost laughable. The world's mechanism for "global governance" for the past sixty years, the United Nations, has proven itself to be very corrupt, chauvinistic, protective of its own ever expanding mandate and an abetter of crime among even worse sins.
The intelligent and sophisticated reader will easily filter out Glenny's politics and appreciate "McMafia" for what it is: a reasonably competent, if wordy, overview of organized crime around the world. In that regard it is well done. I would say it is frightening, but the truth is that this kind of crime and its love-hate relationship with government has always existed. It is more the scale that has changed than anything else.
Jerry
 Vicious, Lucrative, Corrupt, and Global July 25, 2008
6 out of 6 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.
An engrossing and comprehensive portrait of trans-national crime May 18, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
The title of Glenny's book, McMafia, encapsulates the reality of the modern phenomena of organized crime: in our globalized world, organized crime has attained a size, sophistication, wealth, and reach that is comparable to the most successful multi-national corporations. In a series of engrossing vignettes that detail the inner workings of the most prominent trans-national criminal syndicates, Glenny illustrates that in many instances, criminal syndicates surpass multi-national corporations in influence, efficiency and wealth. Glenny's book traces the origins of the globalization of organized crime to the destabilizing effects of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and the utter unpreparedness, and apparent unwillingness, of national governments and global institutions to contain the ensuing chaos. The reluctance to act, motivated in part by political expediency, and in part by a willingness to look aside when criminal activity results in greater profits for legitimate corporations, has created a situation where a system of global racketeering threatens to eventually subsume the system of global trade. Already, according to Glenny, criminal activity accounts for nearly one-fifth of global GDP.
Glenny delineates a criminal economy that is sustained by a set of interlocking core criminal enterprises: smuggling; drug-trafficking; counterfeiting of goods and currency; human trafficking; illegal mineral extraction; arms trafficking; and financial fraud. Glenny's richly detailed portrayal of the operations of trans-national criminal syndicates paints a stark portrait of the wide and ever-growing gulf between men and women, the ultra-rich and the desperately poor, and ethnic majorities and ethnic minorities. Ineffective or non-existent financial controls, combined with irrational policies governing labor migration, drug prohibition, and commercial trade--as well as an insatiable appetite for illegal drugs, illicit sex, and cheap luxuries--exacerbate these divisions, and nurture an environment in which criminal activity not only thrives, but is often the only resort if an individual wishes to survive.
As McGlenny's sober assessment of the corrupt state of the global economy makes clear, until national governments, international institutions and civil society come to terms with the reality that the economic and political fates of the world's nations are inextricably interwoven and devise a coherent regulatory regime that governs the international movement of capital, goods, services and labor in a just and rational manner, our descent into global anarchy will only accelerate.
fascinating eye-opener May 3, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I read this book like a novel and will never look at the world in quite the same way again. A bit of what Misha Glenny reports, I had intuited, much I was ignorant of, all I believe. It openned for me new layers of awareness about how the world works, and his style has so much forward momentum that no sooner have you finished reading about the Ukraine than you are launched into Israel, Dubai, India, and on and on. Each time based human stories of frightening and fascinating reality.
The globalization of organized crime May 23, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Glenny's McMafia records a host of examples of organized crime that burst loose after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fall of authoritarian states in Eastern Europe allowed organized crime to step in and take over the economy. Former officials transferred state assets into private wealth. People who had lived on the margins of society took the chance to engage in selling illict goods abroad to amass a fortune.
Glenny articulates how the fall of the communist state and the concomitant opening up of hitherto isolated countries created new organizations that took control of domestic economies but also pervaded western economies that were attractive markets for illicit products like drugs, taxfree cigarettes, prostitution and the like. Lack of rule of law in the East combined with Western regulation made for a toxic mix of exploitation and extertion. The UN trade sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro also created opportunities for smugglers. Globalization further unleashed an exodus of people from China and elsewhere towards western countries to try their luck. The rise of prices of oil and other natural resources contributes to profits from organized crime. Glenny sketches a fascinating picture of the grim realities of the underworld with a keen view of the interdependence of law and lawlessness, state and criminal organizations.
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