Our new puppet-masters

This book is about large-scale organised crime. The Sicilian mafia was the prototype which gave its name to a whole class of criminal activity. Hence Misha Glenny’s title. But he is not much concerned with these declining mastodons of the international crime scene. The focus of the book, and its main strength, is its coverage of the rising international gangs of eastern Europe and the former USSR, regions where Glenny was based for a number of years as a correspondent of the Guardian and the BBC. There are sections on Latin America, the Far East and other regions as well. But they are a good deal less substantial.

The rise of international crime since the 1980s is an extremely complicated phenomenon. The efficiency of modern communications has combined with the free flow of money and people across international borders to create unprecedented opportunities for growing rich, by legal and illegal means alike.