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Criminals Without BordersThe revolution in smuggling and international crime.

By Moisés Naím
Posted Monday, April 28, 2008, at 7:49 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

As Glenny reports, in many countries crime not only pays but is often the most lucrative game in town, and its players are some of the most influential members of society. He also documents how the profits involved stimulate creativity, innovation, and risk-taking to an extent that is rarely, if ever, matched by the government agents who battle the traffickers. The Bulgarian Ilya Pavlov, one of many characters profiled by Glenny, epitomizes the intertwining of crime, government, and business that threatens democracy, economic progress, and security in a growing number of countries.

A former wrestler who married the daughter of a high-ranking secret police officer, Pavlov began his career as a small-time thug. In the 1990s, the combination of a collapsing state, unregulated markets, and lawlessness created enormous opportunities, which he exploited with entrepreneurial zest and murderous violence. Glenny explains that in less than a decade, Pavlov had created a conglomerate that spanned many sectors (extortion, prostitution, smuggling, drug trafficking, car theft, and money laundering) and many countries, including the United States, where his subsidiary Multigroup U.S. owned two casinos in Paraguay, then the Latin American epicenter of the illicit trades (since displaced by Venezuela). By describing the thousands of mourners who attended Pavlov's funeral in 2003, Glenny conveys how deeply entangled his criminal enterprise was with Bulgaria's power elite. Everyone who mattered in business, politics, government, trade unions, sports, religion, the media, or the military seemed to be there.

The world is slowly beginning to realize that global crime in the 21st century is not merely more of the same. Continuing to call crime-fighting a "war" is not unlike employing the term "war on terror": It is a misnomer that leads to wrongheaded efforts and failed strategies that add to the problems instead of alleviating them. The governmental emphasis on prohibition, criminalization, and interdiction very often serves to boost prices and criminal incentives. Of course, the most dangerous and intolerable illicit trades—for example, in children, nuclear materials, or lethal fake medicines—demand comprehensive attention. But burdened as struggling governments currently are with enforcing a plethora of prohibitions, it's hardly surprising that their efforts are diluted and largely ineffective.

Thanks to their global reach, immense financial muscle, and ruthless inclination to rely on harrowing violence to advance their business interests, international criminals have acquired new political potency, which creates unique dangers and poses a new challenge. This threat cannot be tackled by traditional, nationally based law-enforcement techniques. In some instances, for example, the more realistic goal is not to build a jury-proof criminal case against a few kingpins but to disrupt the far-flung networks on which criminals depend for their international operations—no small undertaking. Deregulating and decriminalizing some of these trades is another obvious move that most governments still don't recognize as necessary and, in some instances, even inevitable. In general, the supply of fresh ideas on how to deal more effectively with this new global scourge is not surging.

McMafia will disappoint readers interested in solutions or original analytic insights, but it is a welcome addition to a growing genre. A spate of books (Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, Loretta Napoleone's Rogue's Capitalism, Kevin Phillips' Knockoff, Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun's Merchant of Death, Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelman's Policing the Globe, Peter Reuter and Edward Truman's Chasing Dirty Money) and many films (Traffic, Blood Diamond, Eastern Promises, Maria Full of Grace) are heightening our awareness of the unprecedented threats posed by the new forms of global crime. As we all know, no problem was ever solved before it was recognized as such—and this hydra-headed danger can't receive too much attention.

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Moisés Naím is editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and the author of Illicit: How Smugglers Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy. To watch a clip of a documentary based on Illicit, click here.
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