10 Questions for Misha Glenny — Goodreads Exclusive
(reprinted from goodreads.com)

A former correspondent for the BBC and an expert in Balkan history, Misha Glenny talked his way into the darkest, nastiest corners of international crime and interviewed many crooks, mobsters and racketeers along the way. Glenny gives us the dirt on a widespread community of transgression in his new book McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Underworld.

Goodreads: You traveled the world, conducting research in Bogota, Bombay, Dubai, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and countless other criminal hotspots, and talked firsthand with many criminal masterminds (who are represented anonymously in the book) involved in drugs, arms deals, prostitution, and all forms of fraud and extortion. Did you find yourself in any dangerous situations?

Misha Glenny: I must confess that having covered the wars in Yugoslavia during the 1990s, I had found myself in more obvious clear and present danger when dodging mortars and bullets in Sarajevo than ever was the case researching McMafia. Having said that, I thought for the book to offer both credibility and authenticity, I had to speak to some of the guys involved in organized crime. And that meant taking real risks...from Mumbai to Tokyo, from Cape Town to Cali, I engaged in the tortuous process of establishing contact with these people and then reassuring them that I was not working either for the police or for their competitors. Everything depended upon finding the right intermediary in each country — I called these people (usually, but not always, local journalists known as fixers) my portals into the underworld. Creating trust between me and them with the help of the fixers was at the heart of the process. The gangsters were most open in India, South Africa, Japan and Brazil, and most closed (and frightening) in Colombia, Dubai and Ukraine. I never felt truly threatened, but the meets were usually the most nerve-racking moments of the research trips — might the FARC representatives kidnap me? Would I be mugged and left for dead in a South African township at night? Would anyone care if my body turned up in Odessa harbor? But at the same time, this was the core of the book, and so on completing the interviews (and getting out in one piece), I felt a huge sense of relief combined with real excitement!

GR: McMafia describes the shadow economy of organized crime, which plays a larger role in the global economy than many people may think (a whopping 20% of global GDP). How pervasive is it and how is organized crime like McDonald's? Why did you choose this title?

MG: Organized crime is extremely pervasive in the Western world, but it is much less visible than it is in the developing world or in countries like Brazil or South Africa, not to mention Colombia or Afghanistan. The West lies at the retail end of the chain of highly flexible criminal operations — their profits derive in part from the high demand for the drugs, trafficked women or counterfeit goods that they sell primarily in North America and the European Union, but also from the fact that operating in illegal markets, they don't pay any taxes, their business costs are signficantly lower than in other industries. They have two basic risks — getting busted or getting whacked by competitors.

With regard to the name, a prominent interviewee described the way the Chechen mafia in Moscow worked, explaining how they offered their name for franchise in other Russian cities. So as mobsters in Vladivostok or St. Petersburg, you could call yourselves Chechen (even if you had no members who were actually Chechens) as long as you paid the Moscow franchisers but also provided you maintained the high standards of intimidation upon which the Moscow group's reputation was built. He described this as "a McMafia if you like," and I thought "Bingo! That's the title!" The prefix "Mc" now implies a globalized phenomenon, and as far as I can ascertain, even McDonald's has given up claiming that it represents a breach of copyright. If anything, I should think the company might feel flattered!

GR: Although most of us will never encounter a member of the Russian mafia, what are Western consumers doing to enable the shadow economy? Is it buying drugs, turning a blind eye to sex trafficking, or something more systemic that empowers the black market?

MG: In its simplest form, we are implicated because we are the consumers, and it is that demand in the West which is the most powerful driver of organized crime. Some of our relationship with organized crime is obvious — if we purchase cocaine, heroin or other controlled substances. But there are also products we purchase entirely unaware that they have been involved in a criminal chain. I consider one of the biggest crimes of the 20th and 21st centuries to be the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The paramilitary formations responsible directly and indirectly for the death of 5.5 million people bought their weapons from West and East European, Israeli and South African syndicates from the stockpiles of munitions left over in the former Soviet Union. They bought them with the extraordinary wealth of the DRC's mineral resources. One important resource was coltan, a metallic ore which includes material used in the production of cell phones, laptops and games consoles. At the turn of the millennium, 80% of the world's coltan was mined in the eastern DRC. The same gangs who sold the weapons into the DRC exported the coltan before selling it into the legitimate markets controlled by electronics manufacturers. These latter claimed to be unaware of the origins of this material, but it is high time that international agencies introduce a system which will ensure the ethical sourcing of such critical elements.

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