Book Review: Misha Glenny McMAFIA: Crime without Frontiers London: Bodley Head Ltd, 2008. 432 pp. ISBN—10: 022—4—07503—9 (hbk)
| DOI | 10.1177/17488958080080040603 |
| Date | 01 November 2008 |
| Published date | 01 November 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
and practice in relation to criminal finance and asset recovery, and makes
recommendations intended to advance strategic policy making. However,
despite reference to ‘its’ deviant structures, as long as Leong fails to show
how empirically we can know that ‘international organized crime’ as a
coherent entity has been successfully ‘combated’, this contribution makes
modest analytical progress relating to the ‘extent, scope and impact’ of
what we do and plausibly can know about ‘organized crime’ phenomena.
Reference
Levi, M. and M. Maguire (2004) ‘Reducing and Preventing Organised Crime:
An Evidence-Based Critique’, Crime Law and Social Change 41: 397–469.
Misha Glenny
McMAFIA: Crime without Frontiers
London: Bodley Head Ltd, 2008. 432 pp. ISBN-10: 0224075039 (hbk)
•Reviewed by Michael Levi, Cardiff University, UK
Thirty-five years ago, Mary McIntosh and I had a discussion about what
was the point of writing about organized crime if all we did was to produce
a more turgid account than journalistsc. Reading McMAFIA, one is
prompted to ask the same sort of question. Bankrolled initially by the BBC
(and therefore by us UK licence payers) as its correspondent in the Balkans,
Misha Glenny takes us on the sort of global tour of criminal hot spots at
which ESRC, the Home Office and university insurers would certainly balk
on the grounds of cost and personal risk, and without having to get all his
interviewees to sign ethical prior consent forms before meeting and/or
observing them. His vividly and well-written book is a Mrs Beeton’s cook-
book on the toxic mix of criminal ingredients that together make ‘transna-
tional organized crime’. One could imagine: ‘Take two parts Bulgarian, three
tablespoonfuls of Chinese and Russian, and a teaspoonful of Colombian;
add a hint of Serb and infuse with an Albanian; and then serve it up to your
American and British guests’ . Along the way, we have well chosen illustra-
tions—based on interviews in situ— of the global reach of internet fraud,
illicit deals in energy and weapons, drug ‘cartels’ (a term he uses without the
inverted commas that are needed), counterfeiting of intellectual property,
prostitution and car-theft rings, human trafficking and smuggling, and stur-
geon poaching. The book is good on the unintended consequences of polit-
ical changes: two of the key ones were (1) active enforcement of the
prohibition of drugs and (2) the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent
deregulation, making unemployed in the legitimate economy, but not in the
illicit one, secret police, counterintelligence officers, special-forces soldiers
and police and customs officers, whose skills included surveillance, smug-
gling, homicide, blackmail and the establishment of criminal networks.
Book Reviews 513
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