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McMafia
Seriously Organized Crime
- Author: Misha Glenny
- Category: Non-fiction
- Publisher: Random House (UK)/Knopf (US)
- Pub date: March 2008
- Length: 432 pages
About McMafia
it is a substantial book that features, among a gallery of extraordinary crime scenes, some of the most compelling analyses of the Balkan tragedy and the creation of a post-Soviet economy
- OBSERVER
MCMAFIA is the first book to chart the course of the globalizing mafia through the vivid stories of individual mafiosi, their victims, their clients and their foot soldiers. It provides first-hand reports from the main centres of the new mafia – Russia, the Balkans, China, South-East Asia, West Africa, Israel, Dubai, Colombia, Mexico and Canada (yes, Canada) – to explain its rise over the past 15 years; its peculiar relationship with the West (one of mutual dependence as well as hostility); its strict adherence to liberal principles of supply and demand; its magnetic attraction to terrorism; how it is being combated by policing methods; and how major new thinking in foreign policy may prove the most effective antidote of all.
The book demonstrates the connection between the massive rise in organized crime over the past two decades and both the deregulation of the global financial system and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. It examines the relationship between the system of global trade and organized crime as well as the links between the arms trade, crime and terror. And it argues that organized crime can be successfully combated only if it is regarded as an economic force that feeds off the poverty of the developing world and exploits the prohibition of commodities and services in the West.
By following people or goods as they travel as victims, couriers, gangsters or police, ascertaining their motives, detailing their experiences and reliving their dramas, Misha Glenny blends colourful and dramatic individual stories into the broader picture of how crime in the underdeveloped world seeps into the Western world. In doing so, he sheds light both on the human dimension and on the guiding principles of an extraordinary global phenomenon.
About the Author
Misha Glenny is the author of THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY, THE RISE AND FALL OF YUGOSLAVIA and A HISTORY OF THE BALKANS. An acclaimed journalist and historian, he contributes regularly to the Guardian, Observer, The New York Times and New York Review of Books as well as specialist journals and books dealing with south-eastern Europe. A regular broadcaster on radio and television, he has most recently advised several southern European countries on policy-making and legislation and is informally consulted on a regular basis by the British Foreign Office, the US State Department and the British Army, as well as by US, European and south European think-tanks. He is also a regular keynote speaker at conferences on organized crime, globalization, south-eastern Europe and US–Europe relations.