McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld -- Book Review
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
by Misha Glenny (2008 [2009]) New York: Random House/ Vintage, 375pp.
It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white. It only matters if it catches mice." -- Deng Xiaoping, (quoted p. 317)
"It doesn't matter whether the mice are white or black, as long as they avoid the cat." -- popular rejoinder to Deng Xiaoping, (p. 318)
McMafia is an excellent, enthralling read -- very illuminating for a rube like me who hasn't been outside the United States since 1976. Reading this book made me realize what a sheltered life I have lived in America. Compared to people who grew up in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Central Asia, the Middle East, China, Latin America, or Africa, I've had it easy, and am thus much less sophisticated, and perhaps less cynical, about how the world actually works and how things get done -- and what one has to do to survive and make one's way. The criminal organizations Glenny describes are not the Sopranos, or the Godfather, the home spun Sicilian mafia groups that we grew up with in the United States and which stem from the Capone era and Prohibition. The groups Glenny describes were born in the modern era in response to modern developments in politics and economy -- in particular the breakup of the Soviet Union and the globalization of finance and the economy.
"Something was very new and very different in the world -- money was being shifted about with an unimagined ease, and nobody was keeping track of it. Fraud and organized crime were in the vanguard of the brave new world of globalization. Technology and deregulation had changed the global financial markets beyond recognition." (p. 173)
"The end of the cold war and the rise of globalization that has often failed to address the imbalance in wealth between north and south have allowed transnational organized crime to flourish as never before. The trade in the two most lucrative illicit commodities, weapons and drugs, has benefited in a variety of ways from these two developments." (p. 223)
Today's criminal organizations are global in scope. They have great international sophistication. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime the proceeds from organized crime amounted to at least $2.1 trillion in 2009, which is about 3.6% of global GDP. (Estimating illicit financial flows resulting from drug trafficking and other transnational organized crimes. UN Office on Drugs and Crime. October, 2011, p. 9)
There are a number of profound lessons that I took away from this book. The most important is that organized crime is an integral part of modern life. The "otherness" of organized crime is thus reduced. This is particularly clear in international politics and the global economy. Criminal organizations provide products and services that are desired and needed, but that are not available in the mainstream society. They provide employment and opportunity for people for whom the legitimate businesses and institutions of society have no use. They include the excluded. They counterbalance the extreme inequalities that have resulted from globalization.
"Ordinary people around the world may think that they have no relationship to transnational criminal syndicates, but anyone who has used a cell phone or computer notebook in the past decade has unwittingly depended on organized crime for his or her convenience." (p. 202)
"The workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious -- sometimes deadly -- safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple's products, and the company's suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers' disregard for workers' health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning." (Charles Duhigg, "The IEconomy in China: the Human Costs that are Built into an i-Pad" New York Times, January 25, 2012)
How one defines "organized crime" depends in large part on where you sit and what you think your interests are. One man's criminal is another man's benefactor, mentor, champion. The distinction between the "legitimate" world and the "underworld" is not a sharp, well-defined line, but rather, a broad gray spectrum that moves and shifts like a shoreline on a beach. The straight world and the illicit world are intertwined and interdependent. It is probably fair to say that one cannot exist without the other. It is certainly clear that government policies which define certain goods or services as illicit create the markets in which the criminal gangs thrive.
"In the absence of the rule of law, corruption renders the distinction between legitimate and criminal business opaque and sometimes completely obscure. Within China itself, this has developed into a political problem for the party, the authority of which is threatened by the political criminal nexuses that rule most cities." (p. 330)
"Combating organized crime is very difficult in part because in areas such as banking or licit commodity trading, the actors, motives, processes, and objects of commercial exchange move back and forth between the light and the shadow so fast that it renders moral or legal definition impossible." (p. 203)
"Global Witness has successfully highlighted that organized crime is not about sinister corporations planning on taking over the world. It is about a complex interplay between the regulated and unregulated global economy that defies simple solutions but need not be left to fester as it was until Global Witness finally forced Western governments to acknowledge their co-responsibility for the problem. The team also raised the issue of how ordinary citizens in the West are much more closely connected to major criminal industries than they might otherwise realize. If Western governments want to do something about organized crime, they need to . . . curb the behavior of corporations and the consumer." (p. 204-05)
"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." (p. 41-42)
"[Nigeria] creates all the external attributes of a bureaucratic state -- flags, UN speeches, forms to fill out, grand buildings with big golden plaques saying CENTRAL BANK or MINISTRY OF LABOR -- but they are mere scenery on a stage. The Central Bank has no money, the Ministry of Labor, no jobs. But a small group used the illusion to divert national income into their pockets and those of their families and friends. . . . The state was effectively privatized . . . but the recipients of the money were under no obligation to provide the services that the state might otherwise be expected to deliver." (p. 170)
"The corporations wanted to buy land in clusters, big plots," continued Miyawaki, "but things didn't always go that smoothly. A lot of people didn't want to sell, and so the companies and banks turned to muscle -- the yakuza . . . First the yakuza would offer financial inducements for tenants to leave their apartments while negotiating with the owner to buy the land. And if either the tenant or the owner refused to budge, then the yakuza would issue verbal threats or a physical warning. . . . The final stage of intimidation was of course physical assault and murder. . . It didn't take the yakuza long to figure out that their role as policemen to this shameful larceny was a modest ambition. If the big corporations and their political cronies were making money hand over fist by speculating on land, why shouldn't the yakuza? Japan's legal and illegal worlds were steadily becoming indistinguishable." (p. 293-94)
"Traditionally, of course, the yakuza has always been involved in prostitution and gambling. Everyone more or less accepted this state of affairs, and that accounted for the bulk of its income. But in the 1960s, it started getting involved in civilian affairs, and this soon grew to be one of its greatest revenue sources. . . . This move into civilian affairs began with the collection of outstanding debts -- this is all because if anybody went to court in order to get a debt paid, it would take an eternity and if a judgment was finally passed down in a case, it often resulted in nothing. The yakuza are able to offer a much quicker solution to the problem . . . It was only a short step before people realized that they could use the yakuza for resolving a host of things -- they have since developed a close involvement with all manner of transactions in the property business of course; but they also act as bankruptcy assessors; in anything, really, where the courts ought to be responsible, such as insurance claims after car accidents." (Yukio Yamanouchi, quoted p. 303)
"In its core activity, the [Japanese] yakuza is not only a privatized police force; it is a self-contained judicial system as well -- criminal syndicates as cops, attorneys, judges, and juries. [The general public's] demand for law enforcement and conflict resolution is what keeps the yakuza in business. And although in many cases the yakuza will provide a good and efficient service, they are accountable to nobody if they don't." (p. 304)
"This warm, urbane man laughed and spoke animatedly in the cafe, later offering perceptive comments on contemporary social and economic issues facing India, then dropping in to a mosque to say prayers before talking lyrically about Mumbai and its traditions. It was almost impossible to reconcile this with the knowledge that he was a calculating, cold-blooded killer. I felt deeply perplexed -- how can I warm to a murderer? I wondered. My experience in the Balkans led me to conclude that most murderers are not congenital psychopaths but people (usually men) whom circumstances and authority encourage, persuade, enable, in short "permit" the violation of the ultimate commandment, Thou shalt not kill. But this man still made a choice. And his choice was all the more shocking precisely because he seemed both normal and intelligent." (p. 146)
The effort that Glenny put into researching this book is awe inspiring. He did it the hard way -- traveling the world, going into dangerous, unstable places, seeing things first hand, talking personally to the principals, establishing a rapport, and an intuitive feel for a very daunting subject. This book is an important primary source for anyone interested in politics, international relations, economics, or crime. Each chapter takes up a different geographical region with different political and economic parameters that define the nature of the criminal gangs that flourish in that area. He has also included a very useful index, for which I compliment him. I won't try to summarize each chapter, but I will say that each is absorbing and each has its own distinguishing peculiarities that draw one into the complexities of these societies that give rise to their own unique brand of criminal organization. Instead I will focus on broad, overarching factors that are the most far reaching in defining the nature and scope of organized crime. The dependence of organized crime on the state and its policies is fundamental to any clear understanding of it.
"In order to prosper, most criminal syndicates are obliged to attempt to "capture" or "semi-capture" the state at some level. This embraces a broad range of corrupt activities from paying off the official in the vehicle licensing office to installing your allies in senior cabinet or civil service positions." (p. 196)
"Organized crime and corruption flourish in regions and countries where public trust in institutions is weak." (p. 74) This happens to cover much of the world.
"No organized criminal is as successful as the one who enjoys the backing of the state." (p. 80)
"Europeans and Americans can scarcely conceive of life without the state. But for many Africans, when the state arrived it was a superfluous imposition that was hard to reconcile with their own traditions. . . The Europeans erected the facades of their states, but behind them traditional societies remained very different." (p. 169)
"In 1979, Dubai had learned a valuable lesson from the Iranian Revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: trouble has a bright side." (p. 131)
"Dubai had become so useful for terrorists, the superrich, the United States, dictators, Russian oligarchs, celebrities, Europe, and gangsters that . . . if it didn't exist, the global elites would have to invent it." (p. 149)
Glenny notes that there is dispute over the amount of revenue generated by the various illegal sources, but it is clear that it is all about the money. "On the whole, these traders do not judge a commodity by its social function in its place of origin or consumption. They judge it by its profit margin." (p. 177) "The five key commodities from which organized crimes makes its profits [are]: diamonds, arms, narcotics, energy products, and cigarettes." (p. 119) The UN estimates that 70% of the revenue accruing to organized crime worldwide stems from narcotics (p. 223) -- that is 70% of $2.1 trillion. The profit margins on narcotics are staggering. Glenny quotes a 2002 report of the British government on narcotics trafficking that concluded: "Over the past 10-15 years, despite interventions at every point in the supply chain, cocaine and heroin consumption has been rising, prices falling, and drugs have continued to reach users." (p. 230)
The prohibition of narcotics in the United States and Western Europe is the biggest worldwide stimulus to organized crime.
"The marijuana industry in British Columbia is worth $6 billion. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police 75-90% of that marijuana ends up in the United States. But the United States and Canada both agree that this amounts to merely 2% of American consumption of marijuana." (p. 231)
"Because of the system of financial incentives that is built into the war on drugs, and because of the protection from prosecution . . . that the white communities enjoy, this war in the United States is waged against blacks and Hispanics." (p. 236)
"Slowly the American people may be realizing that after almost four decades of the war on drugs, dependency levels and usage are higher than ever before; that the prices of all major recreational drugs have been declining resolutely over that period; and that the state has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in a criminal justice system that delivers a lot of crime but very little justice." (p. 239)
"The havoc that the cocaine trade wreaks on Colombian society is wildly disproportionate to coca's economic value. Bombings, massacres, and motiveless killings perpetrated by all sides are well documented." (p. 252)
"According to Jan Egeland, head of humanitarian affairs at the UN in 2004, the Colombian drug wars had resulted in 'the biggest number of killings; the biggest humanitarian problem; the biggest human rights problem; the biggest conflict in the Western Hemisphere.' He also warned that the government in Bogata had run out of funds to deal with the most dramatic expression of that crisis -- the 3 million refugees driven out of their homes since the mid-1990s -- the largest refugee population in the hemisphere and the third largest anywhere in the world." (p. 252)
"It is now more than a quarter of a century after Ronald Reagan announced the Colombian cartels to be the prime target in a war on drugs that the president defined as a national security issue for the United States. And yet cocaine from Colombia is cheaper and easier to acquire in the United States than ever before. Billions upon billions of dollars have been spent in an attempt to root out an industry that has merely grown in size, in scope, in profits, and in human sacrifices -- tens of thousands of people have lost their lives; millions more lives have been shattered." (p. 251)
"In 1973, inspired by President Nixon's war on drugs, Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, introduced a new set of drug laws, which remain in force to this day, continuing to bear his name. For possessing a risible amount of any drugs, New Yorkers risk draconian sentences of between fifteen years and life in a state penitentiary. And New York State pays out more than $500 million every year to keep incarcerated those who have run afoul of this regime." (p. 233)
"On the whole, governments do not argue that drug prohibition benefits the economy. They base their arguments instead on perceived social damage and on public morality." (p. 225)
"Prohibiting a market does not mean destroying it. Prohibiting a market means placing a prohibited but dynamically developing market under the total control of criminal corporations. . . . Prohibiting a market means giving the criminal corporations opportunities and resources for exerting a guiding and controlling influence over whole societies and nations." ( Lev Timofeev, quoted p. 225)
"Prohibition is a godsend to terrorist networks. Organizations such as the Taliban and al Qaeda fund their activities through the narcotics trade." (p. 226)
In the 1990s the Columbian rebel group FARC shifted the production of bananas in the territory under its control to coca. "The logic was simple -- a kilo of bananas during the 1990s would fetch $2 on average; a kilo of coca base . . . was worth between $750 and $1000." (p. 256)
"Some argue that there is a difference between today's illegal narcotics and alcohol. There may well be a cultural difference, but with regard to the relationship between drugs and organized crime, the economic argument is central -- and here there is absolutely no difference between illicit alcohol and drugs." (p. 226)
The basic problem in American society is a legal structure and enforcement apparatus that has been shaped by a primitive moral vision that is at war with intractable needs and desires of human nature. Our laws and thus our government have criminalized the inner lives of vast segments of our population, which is what the pursuit of personal vice amounts to. This is a disastrous public policy that disenfranchises people, sets them permanently at odds with society and the government, and creates enormous strife and conflict throughout society. It corrupts officials and institutions and impedes effective governance. The quality of social living in America has been in serious decline for at least the last forty years and it is due in large part to wrongheaded government policies that attack large segments of the population in their private, personal lives. The resulting absurdities are becoming so stark that the government's ability to deliver basic services is breaking down all across the country.
Just very recently as I was composing this review, the entire staff at the Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles was dismissed pending an investigation of the entire school because two teachers allegedly committed "lewd acts" with some of the children (Associated Press, February 6, 2012). We will close down a whole school over a little bit of sex. But how much damage was caused by the lewd acts? Is a little bit of lewdness with kids worse than closing down a whole school and replacing the entire staff? America's values are perverse to the point of being ludicrous. This kind of frenzied persecution of sexual vice used to be reserved for homosexuality. However, through a long struggle and widespread resistance, this official persecution of homosexuality is receding. Homosexuality is becoming increasingly visible, open, and accepted in American society -- although not uniformly. However, sex with minors now bears the full brunt of American anti-sex viciousness. But it is costing society too much, and at some point will have to be curtailed. It is a telling illustration how the legal and moral vision that prevails in the United States today is creating an environment of suspicion, alienation, and disenfranchisement among broad elements of the population.
Glenny's recounting of sex trafficking stories are painful to read. Not because commercial sex is so revolting, but because the women are usually seduced and betrayed by people they know and trust (who are themselves often under heavy coercion) and then they are essentially captured and enslaved with the most callous, ruthless brutality.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, nearly 80% of the victims of human trafficking are women and girls, with the vast majority of them being adult women (Global Report on Trafficking in Humans, June, 2009, p. 48-49).
70% of Japanese visas to Russian women in the last ten years have been "entertainment" visas. Japan is also the top destination for trafficked Colombian women. (Glenny, p. 309)
So the human trafficking issue is very much a women's issue, and the root of it is the prohibition on commercial sex in the industrialized countries, led by the United States, through whose influence it has been spread around the most of the world since the end of World War 2. This has created a scarce commodity, namely easily accessible women specifically for sexual recreation, but the demand for their services has not decreased, and therefore an illicit market has been formed that always draws the worst sort of people and fosters the most ruthless business practices.
"Women are attractive as an entry-level commodity for criminals. They can cross borders legally and they do not attract the attention of sniffer dogs. The initial outlay is a fraction of the sum required to engage in car theft; overhead costs are minimal; and as a service provider, [she] generates income again and again. Just one woman can make between $5000 and $10,000 per month for her trafficker." (p. 19)
This figure is consistent with what I have heard myself from an owner of several massage parlors in San Francisco that provide optional sexual services.
According to the U.S. State Department's own study,
"From Brazil to Cambodia, anti-trafficking experts and advocates have attempted for years to gain a better understanding of demand sources for the commercial sexual exploitation of children. In countries where this crime is prevalent such as Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, India, Brazil, Jamaica, and Kenya, popular perception attributes the main source of demand to foreign and predominantly Western child sex tourists. In Cambodia, for example, the media focus on sex crimes committed by foreigners, leading to a misconception that there are fewer local offenders. Such a perception leads to a disproportionate focus on addressing the
issue of child sex tourism as opposed to the equally significant issue of child prostitution. In a 2010 study conducted by End Child Prostitution and Trafficking (ECPAT) in Cambodia, all but one of 43 prostituted children surveyed in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh said their regular purchasers were Cambodian men. Of the 13 prostituted children who reported having been sold as a virgin, eight said their rapists had been Cambodian. A recent UNICEF study found that in Kenya, it is Kenyans who make up the majority of purchasers of children in prostitution. A 2008 ILO study found that there was widespread local tolerance in Central America and the Dominican Republic for the commercial sexual exploitation of teenage girls. Sixty percent of the survey’s respondents attributed responsibility for the crime to the victim or the victim’s family, rather than to the purchaser. Law enforcement responses to the commercial sexual exploitation of children often reflect popular perception, leading to a lack of efforts to focus on local demand for child prostitution. . . . While foreign sex tourists are still a source of demand for child prostitution and must be held accountable, they are often not the main source. (Trafficking in Persons Report. US Department of State, June, 2011, p. 22)
What the State Department has documented is that this desire for sex with minors is not a peculiarity of American culture, and that our official preconceptions of horror and revulsion toward this activity are not universally shared. Even the UN has difficulty keeping its own peacekeeping forces from patronizing the sexual services of minors and local prostitutes in the areas where they are deployed.
"The UN requires peacekeeping personnel (civilian, police, and military) to sign a code of conduct on sexual exploitation and abuse that forbids sex with minors regardless of the local age of consent, sex with persons in prostitution, and offering favors or goods in exchange for sexual favors. . . Many UN peacekeeping missions have prevention measures such as 'off-limits premises and areas,' curfews, and telephone hotlines, and require mission personnel to wear uniforms at all times." (Trafficking in Persons Report, US Department of State, June, 2011, p. 406)
If such elaborate measures are required against the very soldiers who are supposed to be enforcing the rules, how effective can the policy be? How deep is the commitment to these prohibitions? The UN is even making efforts to increase the number of women deployed on peacekeeping missions in the hope that the women will police the men's sexual inclinations. "The presence of female personnel may foster greater adherence to the zero-tolerance policy for sexual exploitation and abuse." (Trafficking in Persons Report, p. 406) A dubious assumption in my opinion.
Erotic interest in the young is commonplace in every society and not every society regards it with the anathema with which it is regarded by the United States government. Sex tourism is an outgrowth of the severe sanctions that the United States imposes upon its own citizens for this behavior, but they are not the root of the trade. It further implies that the punitive, persecutory stance of the United States government toward this phenomenon is unlikely to succeed in eradicating it, and probably won't even make a dent in this relentless demand. But it will force the commercial trade in this lucrative service into the hands of the hardest, toughest, most ruthless exploiters -- which is exactly what is happening. Moral indignation is not an effective policy toward commercial sex, whatever the age of the participants.
It is very clear what need to be done here, but I don't think it will happen until women in the wealthy, industrialized countries begin to see the problem as something other than a war on evil male sexual desires. In any case, human trafficking, however heinous and lucrative, is not really where the most money is to be made in the economy of the criminal underground.
If I had to choose one chapter as my favorite -- and it is a difficult choice to make in this book -- I would probably choose chapter 12 which deals with cybercrime and Brazil. This is the newest form of organized crime, the area with the greatest growth potential, and the area that can potentially affect the everyday person who uses a computer, but about which the everyday computer user has the least sophistication. Everyone who uses a computer should read Glenny's account of e-mail scams. The first half of the chapter gives a very revealing look into the world of cybercriminals, a world of which few computer users have any inkling, and yet are very vulnerable to in their daily lives as computer users. Glenny likens them to virtuoso pianists in relation to all the many people who take piano lessons. It is an apt comparison.
"It was soon after the millennium that Brazil started creeping onto the radar of cybersecurity firms. With Russia and China, it now forms a mighty triumvirate of the virtual underworld." (p. 273)
"The only safe computer is the one that is switched off, I am assured by Kau, a Brazilian of Lithuanian parentage who specializes in testing computer security." (p. 269)
"The most popular method of invading computers is through downloads and websites that many users find irresistible -- music and pornography." (p. 269)
"E-mails carrying messages like 'someone loves you! Find out who!' encouraged the recipient to click on a hyperlink to a website. 'As soon as that screen comes up, you had a key logger on your computer, said SuperGeek. 'You were finished.'" A key logger monitors every stroke of your keyboard and sends back the information to whoever placed it there. Using that information, the cybercriminal is then in a position to extract your passwords and enter your bank account and clean it of funds." (p. 268)
Although the percentage of suckers for these scams is low -- merely 0.4 percent of the many millions of spam e-mails sent out -- yet the harvest can still be many millions of dollars in a fairly short time. Much cybercriminal activity is aimed at filching small amounts of money from large numbers of people.
"If I can get one credit card from you and I do a twenty-five dollar buck transaction, will you notice? Will you report it? Will they do anything with it? Twenty-five dollars -- no police force in the world is going to chase twenty-five dollars." But if you take twenty-five dollars from a million people, you will become rich." (p. 270)
Glenny lists three important prerequisites for a concentration of cybercrime: steep levels of poverty and unemployment; a high standard of basic education for the majority of the population; and a strong presence of more traditional organized crime. (p. 273) The four nations that best fit these criteria are: Russia, China, Brazil, and India. About midway through the chapter he shifts gears and begins to talk about vast, imposing criminal culture of Brazil beyond just cybercrime. It is also fascinating and illuminating, but I was left hungering for more development of the cybercriminal world. He provided a tantalizing introduction, but moved on a little too soon. He wrote another book recently (2011) dealing with exactly this topic called DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops, and You. I might have to take a look.
He described being able to buy a pirate copy of Windows Vista on a Sao Paulo street for $2 long before it was available on the licit market. The vendor called to him "Don't be an American slave, be a patriot and buy fake goods!" "This commercial anti-Americanism helps to sustain popular support for the trade in illicit goods in Brazil and, indeed, throughout South America. Other than the police and lawyers involved in the struggle against piracy, not a single Brazilian to whom I spoke considered the trade immoral." (p. 281)
The final chapter is titled The Future of Organized Crime and deals appropriately with China. It was this chapter that gave me the greatest sense of foreboding. The outreach of the Chinese criminal enterprises are only beginning to be felt around the world, and I think in coming years the extension of their power will exceed anything seen before. Glenny mentions that the Japanese yakuza are already worried about the encroachment of Chinese gangs into Japan's underworld. (p. 311)
"There is nothing the Chinese will not copy. Whether it is Harry Potter involved in entirely new adventures . . . Swedish bathroom fittings; spare parts for aircraft; furniture; non-toxic paints (the fakes made, of course, with highly toxic materials); foodstuffs; clothes -- anything that is produced is fair game for Chinese counterfeiters. The European Union Commission estimates that fake goods around the world are worth between $250 and $500 billion a year. Of these about 60% originate in the People's Republic of China -- between 20 and 25 percent of exports from China are counterfeits, while between 85 and 90% of products sold in the domestic Chinese market are fake. . . The producers and retailers of these goods are organized criminal syndicates." (p. 333-34)
"North Korea is also discovering the joys and riches of counterfeiting -- mainly cigarettes, methamphetamines and $100 bills." (p. 338)
Glenny gives three reasons why it is difficult for the Chinese authorities to crack down on the counterfeiters. (1) Although China is a one party police state, its various police forces suffer from shortfalls in funding as well as from huge inefficiencies and corruption. (2) the government is reluctant to launch a concerted campaign against counterfeiting companies that employ an incalculable number of workers who might otherwise be on the streets. (3) The Political Criminal Nexuses that run the provincial economies are even less interested than the central government in playing by the book, even if it means alienating Western partners. (p. 334)
"The only people you are afraid of in this country are the Party or the police -- nobody else. So you have to keep them onside. Nobody gets rich here by being 100% clean. I'm not 100% clean and nobody else is. If we did everything by the book, nothing would ever get done. But of course these guys who are getting megarich know that the government has stuff on them." (Paul French, British businessman in Shanghai, China, p. 316)
"The anarchic collapse of the Soviet Union struck terror into the hearts of China's bureaucrats . . . They have located the multiple sources whence this chaos might burst forth: the Political Criminal Nexus groups, peasant unrest, fragmentation along provincial and regional lines, mass social and religious movements such as the Falun Gong cult, excessive foreign influence in the economy, democratization, or a significant economic downturn." (p. 316)
Glenny is one of the few people I've read who see the relationship between membership in the criminal gang and masculinity. Criminal gangs are almost exclusively male. There are a few women who have played important roles in the activities of criminal gangs such as Virginia Hill, Arlyne Brickman. Judith Exner, and Dorothy Fiorenza. But they are a rarity, and even they were not part of the inner, decision making circle, and did not carry any direct authority. Membership in a criminal gang offers a sense of masculinity and a sense of inclusion to young men who are otherwise disenfranchised and excluded from the mainstream of society.
"It was instantly clear to me why young Japanese guys who do not have any other means of making a career get hooked by this lifestyle. They will do everything for their yakuza mentors because their ego has been bloated in a unique way. All of a sudden they are somebody big and powerful, just by walking in a group of yakuza. If we think about, say, Koreans or people without any education, society has been shitting upon them for a long time and suddenly they ain't being shat on. And they need no qualifications -- it is almost effortless. So emotionally for them it is not only this feeling of being something important but having found a group where they are at home. I felt the psychodynamics of it quite intensely." (Wolfgang Herbert, quoted p. 299-300)
"The criminals and oligarchs emerged from communities who inhabited the twilight periphery of the Soviet Union -- although usually denied access to the central institutions, they were not pariahs." (p. 113)
"A disproportionate number of the most influential Russian oligarchs and gangsters were Jewish." (p. 112)
"In virtually all the central party and state offices, in almost all industrial branches, and in most places of learning, Jews were systematically prevented from reaching the top." (p. 112)
"It is no coincidence that among organized crime bosses, the other two chronically overrepresented nationalities in Russia were the Chechens and the Georgians." (p. 113)
"With social disparities and tensions akin to South Africa and Colombia, Brazil is well known for its high level of crime. Foreigners are warned to keep wallets well guarded and told not to resist when confronted by a knife or gun-wielding assailant. The favelas of Rio and other major cities mix extreme poverty with drugs, guns, and violence -- sometimes less than a mile from the most fabulous dwellings overlooking the beaches of Ipanema or Copacabana. It is this profound division that lies at the heart of Brazil's hugely powerful criminal culture." (p. 274)
Organized crime is an understandable outgrowth of institutionalized inequality and injustice. It is open revolt against an oppressive and disenfranchising legal and institutional order. Because it caters to widely held public needs and desires, it has tacit tolerance, if not broad support, within society. The limitation and the threat of organized crime is that it is all about the money. Criminals for the most part lack a social vision beyond enriching themselves. Their personalities are highly paranoid, self-centered, alienated, and exploitative. When criminals rule, the kind of governance that results is the authoritarian police state laced with corruption. This can create a brittle stability, but it is oppressive and stifling for the vast majority of people in the society. There is some tolerance for personal vice, but opportunities tend to be limited, dissent is ruthlessly quashed, and life in general is rather dull. The problem of modern societies is that they have instituted a legal regime that offers the criminal elements in society the opportunity to amass previously unheard of levels of wealth and power, to the point where they are able to actually challenge the legitimate authorities, or they are able to corrupt legitimate institutions to the point where they are becoming indistinguishable from the criminal.
The most sobering realization that this book left me with is that the cultural malaise of the United States that has been a lingering pall over our society since the early 1900s, in the form of the persecution of personal vice as a matter of public policy and legal sanction, is being spread around the world and magnified to an unimagined scale. It is distorting economies, corrupting governments, funding armies and revolutions, and wreaking havoc in the lives of millions of people around the world in very disparate societies and cultures. These modern organized crime groups are not marginal. They are becoming central players in the governance of many societies. It is clearly the responsibility of the United States to take the lead in checking this malignancy. It is not a problem of policing. The criminals and the police are becoming integrated. The problem is internal. We must reform our laws and our thinking to corral what is now a vast regime of outlaws into legitimate institutions that can be regulated and controlled by bureaucratic governance. It would radically change the nature of our own society -- which in my view, would be an improvement. Many of the social problems in American society stem from this effort to purge the society of personal vice. It has been a breathtaking failure over the course of a century. There is plenty of evidence that our official policies attempting to enforce personal moral purity have chronically failed. We cannot continue to allow people beholden to a narrow, ascetic moral vision to dominate our public policies and impose unrealistic and perverse proscriptions on the entire society. Glenny's book sheds a powerful beacon on the misguided course we have been following for over a century. Although he does not spend a lot of time arguing public policy, his book is a primary source for anyone who is thinking about the foundations of our public life.