If you read just one book in your entire life about global crime, this is the one you must read. The various subtitles McMafia has had over the years - Crime Without Frontiers, A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld and Seriously Organised Crime - are just some of the many ways to summarise it in something shorter than a full sentence. This book came together after an assassination attempt that was so perfectly planned, the wrong woman ended up dead answering for a pizza that was never ordered. And to understand how this came to happen, you have to go back to where this all started - the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Glenny takes the reader on a journey through the world, by taking us through various regions of the world and how organised crime might fit into the culture, politics and daily lives of ordinary citizens regardless of how aware they are of its presence. Region by region, we are shown not only how organised crime operates but where the opportunity arose - we find out how the collapse of the Soviet bloc left a gap that crime bosses soon filled, how their human trafficking operation leads to Middle Eastern diplomats and millionaires, how that leads to the drug trade operation in the Golden Triangle until we find out just how embedded the Yakuza is in the daily life of a Japanese citizen. It begins to make sense when you learn that 15% of the world's GDP is made up by the money organised crime makes - and that's just the obtainable statistic. It could be more.
The book itself is quite beautifully formatted - it's divided into sections by organised crime in different regions and further divided into chapters detailing elements of said crime. As you read through each chapter, you begin to see every connection in every corner and find that no matter what, our daily lives are connected to some form of organised crime in some manner and they have become such normal parts of our lives that we don't realise the criminal connections until we look closer. There are more ties than we think we know between imitation goods we can easily spot and trafficking, there are more ties than we think we know between stolen goods and the drug trade. In fact there was such a chapter that reminded me of time when street corners were occupied by East Asians selling pirate copy DVDs of films that had only just come out in the cinema and occasionally seeing them pack up their conveniently foldable/portable display in a hurry when the police were sighted. I think I recall seeing a chase on foot on one of our weekend outings.
It is quite enjoyable to read as well. Non-fiction can sometimes be dull, it can be written in a way that is just spewing out the facts and information to you. However, Misha Glenny has spent a lot of his career as a journalist and that experience leant itself well to how the book is written. At times I forgot I was reading a very detailed account of organised crime and felt like I was reading a crime thriller. The vivid details of how the criminal underworld works is intertwined with personal accounts of people Glenny interviewed over the years as well as his own experiences during his time as a journalistic correspondent for Eastern European affairs at a time when former Soviet states were still in the very early stages of recovery. There is a lot of truth to the sex trafficking operation you see in the 2008 film Taken - but that doesn't even scratch the surface of just how embedded it has become in the world.
Reasons to Recommend:
- The perfect book for any true crime enthusiast
- The book about global organised crime EVERYONE should read
- Non-fiction that's enjoyable to read
I rate it a 15/10. McMafia is the most enjoyable and eye-opening non-fiction I have ever read. It is a book that truly opens your eyes to the world around you in a way you never would have expected. But don't forget that these are true stories, they are the history of the people who got hurt and were traumatised, people who got killed and they are the stories of people who are still suffering at the hands of organised crime today. Always remember that it isn't far from you. Six degrees of separation is something we talk about in terms of social connections - organised crime operates on a scale closer to three degrees or less.
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