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McMafia: coming soon to a location near you

The global underworld is a greater threat than terrorism. We ignore it at our peril.

from the April 22, 2008 edition

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Likewise in post-Soviet economies, where countless 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" – and only organized crime was hiring.

For women in today's struggling states, the threat is more intimate: kidnapping and sexual exploitation, often facilitated by friends or relatives. In the cold language of the global marketplace, women forced into prostitution are often "an entry-level commodity" for criminals, because "the initial outlay is a fraction of the sum required to engage in car theft" and "they can cross borders legally and do not attract the attention of sniffer dogs."

Glenny reserves his most undisguised contempt for their tormentors.

He has no love, either, for the Russian oligarchs – with their ludicrous Soviet-nostalgia parties, complete with toiling peasants – who have pillaged the country's mineral resources and laundered billions beyond its borders while the majority of the populace struggles to eke out a living. Neither does he spare any patience for the rapacious Western appetites so much of today's illegal trafficking aims to satisfy.

But certain criminals, Glenny writes, make good points: the Nigerian e-mail scammers who see robbing greedy, gullible Westerners as payback for an ugly colonial legacy, or the Chinese snakeheads who bring a needed, albeit illegal, labor force to shrinking European economies. What's more, in cities like Odessa, enlightened criminal leaders have helped to maintain order in the face of political and economic catastrophe.

For all these reasons, policing global crime is an unprecedented challenge. The most urgent need, Glenny says, is for greater regulation of financial markets, because "the deeper the involvement of shadow funds with the licit money markets, the harder it becomes to follow the cash that is the key to the successful policing of international organized crime."

Meantime, like their licit counterparts, many criminals see their future in outsourcing to China.

Although his story becomes increasingly disjointed as it progresses, Glenny's journey through the international underworld is, on the whole, a rich and illuminating one. The problem of crime in a globalizing world may have no quick fix – but in "McMafia," it has quite a strong introduction.

• Mary Wiltenburg is a freelance writer in Atlanta.

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