Today's international crime syndicates are more powerful than ever, and likely to become more so. So warns Glenny (The Balkans: Nationalism, War & the Great Powers, 1804-1999, 2000, etc.), formerly a BBC correspondent in Central Europe. That region's particular brand of organized crime is spreading around the world, he demonstrates in persuasive, alarming detail. When ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia finally subsided, it left in its wake "a wrecked local economy and a society dominated by testosterone-driven young men who [were] suddenly unemployed." This combination, which quickly led to society-wide corruption and crime in the Balkans, proved just as toxic in parts of the disintegrated Soviet Union and civil war-ravaged Africa and Latin America. Glenny's animated prose describes a slew of countries stretching from Bulgaria to Brazil and Nigeria in which the shadow economy of protection, kidnapping, gambling and smuggling threatens to overtake legitimate business--if it hasn't already done so. (Globalization and web-based technologies have opened opportunities for gangsters as well as entrepreneurs.) Based on the author's skillful investigative journalism, this survey of international wrongdoing makes for fantastic reading that surprises on more than one occasion: Who knew that western Canada had more organized criminal syndicates per capita than any other nation? In this world, gangsters and politicians, criminals and law-abiding citizens are rarely far apart. Highlighting those links, Glenny writes, "no organized criminal is as successful as the one who enjoys the backing of the state." He loses his cool when tying all the bloodletting back to those who consider themselves quite apart from such things: Western consumers who, wittingly or not, feed the beast with their appetites for everything from drugs to prostitutes to cheap plastic goods. In his view, globally organized crime is a worldwide crisis linked to and nearly eclipsing terrorism as a threat. A bracing, frightening ride through a dark world experiencing "a vigorous springtime." Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Organized crime goes global, with Glenny (The Rebirth of History) reporting. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Former BBC World correspondent Glenny (The Balkans, 1804-1999) presents a riveting and chilling journey through the myriad criminal syndicates flourishing in our increasingly globalized world, which make up as much as 20% of global GNP. Tracing the growth of organized crime-ranging from the burgeoning sex trade in volatile, postcommunist Bulgaria to elaborate Internet frauds in Nigeria-Glenny expertly combines interviews with key players, economic studies and sociological analysis. He argues that the chaos and political upheaval following the demise of communism in Eastern Europe, along with increasing demand in the West and the easy flow of money and people provided the perfect opportunity for organized crime to gain a foothold on the dark side of the globalizing economy. Glenny's achievement is in introducing readers to the less familiar aspects of global crime, from Kazakhstan's "caviar mafia" to the flourishing marijuana trade in British Columbia. Consequently, his interview subjects are equally varied: sex slaves in Tel Aviv, a co-conspirator in the deadly 1993 Mumbai bombings and top Washington policy makers share the pages. Readers yearning for a deeper understanding of the real-life, international counterparts to The Sopranos need look no further than Glenny's engrossing study. 16 pages of photos; maps. 100,000 announced first printing. (Apr. 10) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The title provides a glimpse into what Glenny successfully conveys in his book: globalization, political forces, and new sources of wealth and power have created a different generation of organized crime. Drawing from personal experience as a former BBC correspondent, the author reveals an international web of organized crime, political power, and violence. He divides his book into four sections, exposing how major crime syndicates in Asia, the Balkans, and Europe developed following the fall of communism and the introduction of global markets, and their impact on the world community. Criminal activity, including drug, oil, and arms smuggling as well as human trafficking and money-laundering schemes, have infiltrated every continent, linking countries that once had no ties, while modern technology has made the execution of many crimes easier, faster, and, most importantly, faceless. Glenny delves deep into this underworld, providing biographical anecdotes. The book reads much like fiction, but well-cited facts make readers uncomfortably aware that these tales of horror are, in fact, very real. Black-and-white photographs and several charts and maps help to illustrate points, providing helpful support for the reader. Summing Up: Recommended. Most levels/libraries. L. L. Vucic formerly, Chatham College

A look at the global phenomenon of organized crime. AROUND the time the Soviet Union ceased to exist, I was waiting in the entry queue at Fiumicino Airport in Rome when I noticed a party of several dozen young Russian girls being fast-tracked past a freshly opened control window. By young I mean perhaps 15, and by Russian girls I mean beautiful adolescents with pale gold hair, perfect skin and the figures of child ballerinas. These wide-eyed coltish kids weren't dancers or on a school trip. They were hustled along by a stocky middle-aged man with a short mustache and a stash of passports in his hairy hand. It was an unforgettable image of lambs to the slaughter - or, more precisely, of children to the brothel. You sometimes glimpse them, older now, dispersed around the world, and how they were engulfed by the criminal universe is one of the things Misha Glenny describes in "McMafia," his dizzy tour of the forms of global crime born in the late '80s, when finance capital shook off restraints and the Soviet Union collapsed. After a telling little prologue from 1994 involving a doorstep killing in leafy English suburbia, Glenny - a former BBC reporter who has written on the Balkans - begins his tour in territory he knows well. His reporting from the ruins of the Soviet world and its periphery is engrossingly dense with remembered anecdotal detail. In Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia, Glenny knows dealers on the streets and bosses in the government. He also knows what happens when his new Audi is stolen in Zagreb. Glenny's criminal geography centers on the post-Soviet countries, whose influence he sees spreading outward to "countries as far away from one another as India, Colombia and Japan." He signposts but doesn't travel a "new Silk Route, a multilane criminal highway" linking the old Soviet periphery with central and eastern Asia. None of this is quite as new as he implies. The distant countries have long and busy criminal histories of their own, and their own international trading links. Heroin was traveling across Asia into Europe in a big way from the time of the Vietnam War, and cocaine was moving north through the Americas and across the Atlantic not long after. Cosa Nostra in Italy and the United States, the Colombian cartels and the Asian crime syndicates were all operating internationally long before the world went global. So was the arms trade. The patterns and the influences were as variable as in the above-ground economy. Glenny is good on some connections of the gangsters without borders, like the Russia-Israel link. His account of how Israel was colonized by Russian organized crime is memorable, and his fleeting image of the unutterable squalor of Tel Aviv's brothels, staffed by captive girls from the former Soviet Union and frequented by obese American teenage tourists, is unforgettable. He is grippingly ambivalent about Dubai, the Middle East's newly created Switzerland, and how it is energized by Indian organized crime and the subcontinent's Hindu-Muslim violence. After its sections on Eastern Europe and the Soviet fringe of Asia, this is the book's best part. In Dubai, the former coastal village with a dying pearl fishing industry, we see everyone - "Arabs, Iranians, Baluchis, East Africans, Pakistanis and west coast Indians" - converge. In his "journey through the global criminal underworld," Glenny flits from place to place, mostly avoiding Western Europe and North America. Each stopover has a fresh cast of players and a new criminal specialty. The fragmentation obscures some terrible global patterns, like the huge return of slavery as the trafficking of people. Glenny looks at prostitution rackets out of Eastern Europe, indentured labor in the Gulf states and migration rackets out of China - where he sees "the future of organized crime" - but hardly suggests how far people themselves have become merchandise, as indentured laborers, domestic slaves, child thieves, child soldiers, child prostitutes, babies for sale and children for adoption, pharmaceutical guinea pigs or organ suppliers. All move around the world with the collusion of customs, immigration, police, social services, charities and aid agencies. Prostitutes in Moscow, 1997. Traveling through the global underworld and - with the splendid exception of Dubai - flying high over points where the licit and illicit economies meet, Glenny tends to forget that one man's crime is another man's legitimate business opportunity. The otherness of the criminal world is, of course, a premise of true crime books, offering readers both thrills and reassurance, but today's crime is tomorrow's history. A birth pang, perhaps, of democracy. The criminality in the oil and gas industries gets space in "McMafia," but in the countries of the former Soviet Union rather than Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria or Angola. And like the rest of history, true crime is written by the winners. "McMafia" runs on the insight that money is a lot easier to move around than it used to be, but doesn't consider how the first world's financial systems are linked with the proceeds of the third world's business horrors - the car bombs, the decapitations, the endless targeted killings, the flayings alive - it describes. "As consumers, we are all involved," Glenny frets at the end, calling for "greater regulation in the financial markets" and "strong, well-equipped law enforcement agencies." But "McMafia" ignores a dense network of complicity in the institutions of the West. Neither, after some vague talk at the outset of "global reach as criminal corporations aspire to penetrate markets the world over" does it identify a global crime corporation, or explain how its activities might be "mirroring the global goals of legal entities such as McDonald's." Glenny coins the term "McMafia" to describe the franchising system of Chechen organized crime, which makes sense, but the notion has nothing to do with the larger story. This is less about a new globalized criminality than the old one of interplay between criminal and political interests. Colombia, Afghanistan and the "war on drugs" might be good places to start telling it. A model for all this remains the Sicilian Mafia, which is ignored here. Mafia is about control on the ground. It maintains order locally, and its reward is a free hand in business. Mafia is government and crime intertwined, and so, below the surface, are most of the instances Glenny describes. A dozen or more years ago, the mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, drew my attention to two things about organized crime in Italy. One was Cosa Nostra's bulwark role in keeping the Italian Communist Party out of power during the cold war decades. When the Soviet world imploded Cosa Nostra no longer mattered quite so much and began, like the politicians it had kept in office for half a century, to feel the rule of law. That, Orlando continued, was when Cosa Nostra globalized its business in a way that made its earlier drug dealings with Asia and South America look rather timid. Now it involved heavy arms, enriched plutonium and toxic waste. Orlando flew to Moscow and was horrified at the faces he recognized in business class. "McMafia" has great anecdotes but lacks structure and is fatally weakened by global overstretch. There's no big picture here, no corporate brand, no franchise. In global crime, the structures, the methods, the personnel, the channels, the merchandise, the alliances change even faster than they do in the world of legal business. There are patterns of complicity, however, and closer to home than Glenny's nightmare settings. Glenny's criminal geography centers on the post-Soviet countries, whose influence spreads outward worldwide. Peter Robb is the author of the investigative travelogues "Midnight in Sicily" and "A Death in Brazil," and "M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio."