Present at the pandemic

MISHA GLENNY (RALPH GLENNY)

Journalist and historian Misha Glenny reported on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s for the BBC and is the author of "The Rebirth of History," "The Fall of Yugoslavia," and "The Balkans." His chilling new book, "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld," charts the rise and proliferation of the new brand of organized crime, largely spawned by the fall of communism, the advent of globalization, and the deregulation of international financial markets. Glenny, who traversed continents and conducted over 100 interviews with criminals and prosecutors, superbly conveys the complexity, the ingenuity, the pervasiveness, and the horrific human cost of this shadow side of global capitalism.

He spoke from his home in London.

Q. How does the underworld you describe differ from the old Mafia?

A. The one we're most familiar with, the Sicilian Mafia, was one of the biggest casualties of the fall of communism because once the Berlin Wall came down, the Western strategy of keeping the communists out of power in Italy also collapsed. The whole raison d'être of the Christian Democrats in Italy dissolved, and without their political protectors in Rome, the Mafia couldn't withstand the backlash prompted by their killings of anti-Mafia magistrates. They were also vulnerable because of their insistence on family and clan loyalty. When the new Mafia began to emerge, following the fall of communism and the advent of globalization, clan and family loyalties were discarded. The structure of the new syndicates - the largest emerging throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe - was much more decentralized. If you decapitate this organization, it keeps on living. There was also a far more astute analysis of where markets lie, of the creation of markets, not just in a few US cities but across the globe. In the UK, for example, you find women who have been trafficked from Eastern Europe in very small towns. The new Mafia has moved along the veins and into the capillaries of Western society.

Q. What are its most lucrative commodities?

A. The standard one is narcotics. Trafficking of women in large numbers is relatively new; the supply increased dramatically once the Soviet Union collapsed. What strikes me is how, with globalization, cultural ideas spread so rapidly. With prostitution, for example, I look at Israel, which was a relatively pious society, nothing like the heaving den it is now where the consumption of prostitutes, drugs, and so on is pretty astonishing. It's part of a worldwide shift. When I was a student in the '70s, for example, the idea of going to a prostitute was unthinkable, both ideologically and practically. Now when you go for a stag weekend to Lithuania, visiting a brothel is part of the package. Globally there is a phenomenal trade in untaxed cigarettes. Cyber-crime is growing at a rate of knots. The weapons trade . . .

Q. And energy?

A. Absolutely. Because it's such a corrupting commodity it attracts all sorts of lowlife. Interestingly, in Russia . . . the Putin-Medvedev team has been systemically cutting out the gangsters from the gas and oil trade and occasionally throwing them in prison. They're bringing it under the purview of the state and making it somewhat more transparent.

Q. Which society is most penetrated by organized crime?

A. It depends how you define it. There's the organized crime of Russia and the Balkans, which is closely linked to the political elite, not visible on the ground. In places like South Africa, in addition to elite crimes, you also have anarchic violent petty crime combined with communal tensions. So there your senses are surrounded by crime and criminals much of the time. Kosovo, by contrast, is an entirely criminalized economy, but nobody is going to beat you up in Pristina unless you're singing Serbian songs.

Q. Which syndicate is on the rise? Or is that an outdated question?

A. It is, really, because everything is very fluid. Chinese organized crime is certainly expanding, because it's difficult to distinguish between much of legitimate and illegitimate Chinese trade. In Brazil, for example, the Chinese have created a huge market for electronic goods in Sao Paulo, a lot of it legitimate but most of it coming through a very shady route through Paraguay. The great majority [of these goods are] counterfeit. [Chinese] crime is much less visible because they have such a tight, and also linguistically fragmented, society. So police penetration is terribly difficult.

Q. You penetrated many of these worlds. How did you approach these criminals?

A. The key thing is finding the right people to get to them for you. In the Balkans it was relatively simple, because I'm known there. In some places, such as Russia, it was really hard. In Odessa, Ukraine, I did meet a serious Mr. Big. He was frightening. It was tense. He questioned me a lot to see if I was working for his competitor. It depended on me having a trusted intermediary, and that was almost always the case. In Colombia, meeting an urban representative of the FARC guerrillas, it was a little easier, because they are eager to publicize their point of view. In Eastern Europe and Africa there are quite a few major organized crime figures who are not only vain, but also want you to understand that they are the only ones putting bread into people's mouths. They want to get that across.

Q. Why do you repeatedly stress the link between this criminal underworld and our daily lives?

A. I didn't want to write about organized crime in a familiar way, saying we're good people and those bad people make our lives difficult. I wanted to show that this is a complex, integrated - and huge - part of the global economy. I wanted to understand how it works, what the motives of those involved are, but also how it interacts with the more innocent world we presume we inhabit.

Anna Mundow can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.