Criminals of the world, unite and take over
In 2003, a joint operation of British intelligence, the Bulgarian police, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Spanish police and the Bolivian Special Antitrafficking Force pulled off a bust that netted the largest amount of cocaine ever seized. The drug was hidden among blocks of medicinal clay destined for Madrid and also, authorities soon discovered, mixed into 770 boxes of powdered mashed potatoes set to be shipped to Varna, Bulgaria, via Chile. A couple of years earlier, a Colombian drug cartel (the source of the shipment) had smuggled a chemist into Bulgaria, where he trained Soviet-educated chemists to extract the coke from various seemingly innocuous substances. For Misha Glenny, a journalist specializing in the Balkans and author of the new book "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld," the smuggling operation was a prime example of what he calls the "internationalization of organized crime," a phenomenon that has flourished over the past two decades. Estimates suggest that crime accounts for almost one-fifth of the planet's gross domestic product, he reports, and "McMafia" is a sprawling, pell-mell tour of the world's shadow economies, ranging from Russia to Israel to the Mideast, as well as India, Africa and Latin America. Glenny even makes it to western Canada, a seemingly mellow region that, due to the proliferating industry of marijuana cultivation, "is home to the largest per capita concentration of organized criminal syndicates in the world."
Of course, there are criminal syndicates and then there are criminal syndicates. The mild-mannered British Columbian pot entrepreneurs (whose livelihood, Glenny makes it clear, ought to be legalized) seem a long way from the white hot centers of international gangland like Russia and Colombia. Alas, not far enough; one of the pot smugglers Glenny interviewed felt compelled to break with his longtime business partners when they opted to make a kilo-for-kilo trade with cocaine dealers in Florida -- whose sources were no doubt some pretty scary people.
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posted by Tom Jackson @ Wednesday, April 16, 2008
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