BY MISHA GLENNYBodley Head, 432pp, £20
EVERY YEAR, IN SEPTEMBER, a bunch of men and women gather at Jesus College, Cambridge, to discuss fraud and organised crime. Drawn from law enforcement agencies and universities around t
he world, for a week they swap stories and ideas.
In the 26 years the Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime has been going, it has grown like Topsy. Some themes have remained constant, however. Each year there is a new twist on an old trick – so the notorious Nigerian fraudsters, for instance, will come up with a further refinement.
Another vein is the sheer frustration the police and prosecutors face in busting the criminals. While places exist that make a nice living out of total secrecy – the likes of Monaco, the Isle of Man, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles and Liechtenstein – they will face an uphill task.
Then there are the ever-shifting nationalities of the bad guys. One year, everyone is talking about the Russian gangsters, next it's the Colombians, Chinese or Serbs.
Misha Glenny's excellent book could be a set text for the Cambridge conference. It's a quite terrifying dissection of the world in which we live – or rather, its underbelly. What i striking is the sheer breadth and depth of the mob – we've moved a long way from the concept of a few dodgy families in rural Sicily – and the apparent ease with which they cross international borders.
A BBC journalist with a distinguished record of reporting the Balkan conflicts, Glenny is strongest when describing the break-up of that region and the myriad hardened gangs it has spawned. But he ably extends the idea that weakened, impoverished, often conflict-ridden societies elsewhere in the world – the former communist Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia – have become the breeding grounds for new groups of villains.
We have only ourselves to blame. We do nothing to close the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, allowing the unscrupulous to exploit the poverty of others. We don't move against the offshore centres that launder ill-gotten gains. Our police forces are under-resourced and ill-equipped for the task.
Just as commerce has embraced globalisation, so has crime. The perpetrators might be beneath contempt but we're also guilty. A challenging conclusion but one I suspect that would raise a cheer of recognition among the weary delegates in Cambridge.
The full article contains 402 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
