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The Rise of a New Global Criminal Class

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Reviewed by Steve Weinberg Posted Thu, May 15 2008

Globalization is a common word in the lexicon of journalists who write about occurrences across borders. Misha Glenny — a former BBC World Service correspondent for Central Europe who was educated in England and the former Czechoslovakia, a current resident of London, and author of a book about the former Yugoslavia — is a globalization beat journalist. But while many journalists crank out stories about the positive socioeconomic effects of globalization, Glenny focuses on the dark side — the globalization of organized crime.

To understand the dominance of organized crime in locales both unsurprising and surprising, Glenny has taken major risks. To gain access, Glenny had to promise anonymity more often than ideal in the realm of investigative journalism. His reporting seems credible, however, so it is unnecessary to dwell on the risks of granting anonymity to subjects and sources.

Besides demonstrating Glenny’s courage, his book exhibits at least two other characteristics of special importance to fellow international journalists: First, he provides insightful sociological perspectives about why certain nations spawn especially widespread and virulent organized crime networks. Second, he explains how policies in certain nations (mainly, but not exclusively, the United States) generate unanticipated ripple effects in the structures of other nations’ criminal underworlds.

Glenny’s investigation is an excellent complement to Global Outlaws by Carolyn Nordstrom, which was reviewed in the previous issue of Global Journalist. Nordstrom examined untraditional global movements of illegal products, with a focal point on rural Africa as the crossroads. Glenny focuses more on nations outside Africa, and on the urban centers of those nations. Furthermore, Nordstrom’s participants in the underground economy are frequently non-violent. The same cannot be said of Glenny’s sources and subjects.

Glenny’s overview is worthy quoting in part, before we begin his country-by-country tour. After the fall of Communist governments in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and after the unraveling of apartheid in South Africa, turmoil prevailed. Many benefited, many felt despair, and some without consciences saw opportunity for riches. Glenny further explains:

“These men, and occasionally women, understood instinctively that rising living standards in the West, increased trade and migration flows, and the greatly reduced ability of many governments to police their countries combined to form a gold mine. They were criminals, organized and disorganized, but they were also good capitalists and entrepreneurs, intent on obeying the laws of supply and demand.”

Glenny says he noticed the rise of criminal classes while covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia. “The booty paramilitary units brought home with them after destroying towns…in Croatia and Bosnia was used as capital to establish large criminal enterprises. The bosses of those syndicates became rich very quickly. Soon they established smuggling franchises that conveyed illicit goods and services from all over the world and into the consumer paradise of the European Union.” The goods and services they consumed included cigarettes untaxed by governments, illegal narcotics, and sex with prostitutes who had been kidnapped then enslaved.

The country-by-country tour conducted by Glenny begins in Bulgaria, where newly unemployed police officers banded together to form criminal syndicates, bolstered by the fallen weight lifters, boxers and wrestlers once lionized for their training meant to bring Olympic Games glory to Bulgaria. One of their early criminal enterprises involved stolen cars, including Glenny’s Audi.

“Every month thousands of cars would be stolen from the streets of northern Europe in preparation for their illegal export to Eastern Europe and the Balkans,” Glenny reports. “In 1992, I watched a huge container ship regurgitate the contents of its hold into the decrepit Albanian port of Durres. Onto a quay of chipped stone and rust rolled dozens of BMWs, Peugeots, Hondas, and above all Mercedes…Customs officers barely awoke from their slumber as excited, dusty and dirty men took possession of vehicles still with their original number plates…”

The remainder of Glenny’s tour covers lots of territory. Perhaps the most surprising is British Columbia, where the large-scale growing and smuggling of cannabis is beyond the control of law enforcement.

In section after section, Glenny shares some searing big-picture information, including this: In the former Yugoslavia, well-intentioned but naïve United Nations-imposed economic sanctions transformed a war-ravaged, impoverished region “into a smuggling and criminal machine that had few if any parallels in history,” Glenny reports. “While the world wrung its hands and fretted over the terrible nationalist urges of the Yugoslav peoples and their leaderships, the Balkan mafias started putting aside their ethnic differences to engage in breathtaking criminal collaboration. This would in turn reach out to counterparts across the globe, bringing together the mafias of Colombia, Russia and the Golden Triangle, to name but the most influential. It took the ‘international community’ years to get even an inkling of what was going on.”