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McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers

Our new puppet-masters

Misha Glenny
The Bodley Head, 426pp, £20,

Jonathan Sumption

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Jonathan Sumption on the new book by Misha Glenny

This book is about large-scale organised crime. The Sicilian mafia was the prototype which gave its name to a whole class of criminal activity. Hence Misha Glenny’s title. But he is not much concerned with these declining mastodons of the international crime scene. The focus of the book, and its main strength, is its coverage of the rising international gangs of eastern Europe and the former USSR, regions where Glenny was based for a number of years as a correspondent of the Guardian and the BBC. There are sections on Latin America, the Far East and other regions as well. But they are a good deal less substantial.

The rise of international crime since the 1980s is an extremely complicated phenomenon. The efficiency of modern communications has combined with the free flow of money and people across international borders to create unprecedented opportunities for growing rich, by legal and illegal means alike. But the main factor behind the rise of international crime has been the failing state. Once a problem of the third world, the failing state has become a commonplace of regions characterised by a large educated class, elaborate bureaucracies and the possession of great natural resources. It is an explosive mixture.

Russia and the countries of its former empire in Asia and Eastern Europe are perhaps the paradigm cases. In these places totalitarian governments with powerful ideologies and a high level of social control have been replaced by a variety of unstable and politically agnostic democracies or quasi-democracies, and in some cases by new tyrannies coming to power in alliance with the criminals. The administration is either impotent in the face of organised crime, or actually placed at its disposal. The situation is not unlike the one which enabled the Sicilian mafia in its heyday to infiltrate the state and then disable it in a country at the heart of western Europe. But the scale and range of operations of the new mafias is far more imposing and destructive.

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