The Telegraph reviews Misha Glenny's book McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
, which reveals how closely governments and organized crime are linked.
By the Mafia, Misha Glenny means any group of organised criminals, not just those with their roots in Sicily. Balkan cigarette smugglers, Nigerian internet phishers, Russian oligarchs, Chinese snakehead people-traffickers, South African drug lords, Bombay extortion-racketeers, Israeli money-launderers and Brazilian cyber-thieves are among the many who play their part in a complex network of links that the author estimates makes up nearly 20 per cent of global trade.
[D]uring the mid-Nineties the volume of trading on the currency markets exceeded $1 trillion a day, more than 40 times the value of daily global trade. Of course, some of this trading was legitimate, but much of it was merely money-laundering, as criminals sought to legitimise their ill-gotten gains by swapping them into another currency.
But where did all this money come from?
In a word, Russia.
Link (via The Day They Tried to Kill Me)
