The New Gangsterism

At 9 o'clock on the evening of April 30, 1994, the door bell rang at 31 Willow Way, Woking, a commuter town near London that epitomizes southern England's suburban landscape. Karen Reed, a 33-year-old geophysicist who analyzed seismic data for a living, was enjoying a glass of white wine with a friend when they heard a man's muffled voice through the window. "Have you ordered a pizza?" Karen opened the door — whereupon the pizza deliverer drew a 0.38 pistol and shot her several times in the head with calm deliberation. The killer then ran back to the car and drove off.

Reed was the victim of mistaken identity. The killer's real target had been her sister, Alison Ponting, a producer at the BBC World Service. Alison was married to a chubby Armenian charmer, Gacic Ter-Oganisyan, whom she had met while studying Russian at university. But the marriage triggered a chain of improbable events which eight years later unleashed the whirlwind of death, imperialism, civil war, oil, gangsterism and nationalist struggle that is otherwise known as the North Caucasus upon sleepy Woking.

Ter-Oganisyan had been working as a translator and fixer with two brothers who were envoys from Chechnya, a Caucasian region that has long sought independence from Moscow. They had been sent to London by the charismatic but volatile Djokar Dudayev, Chechnya's self-styled President. Ter-Oganisyan tipped off Armenia's security service that the two Chechens were planning to buy 2,000 Stinger missiles. The Armenians believed the weapons were destined for their archenemy, Azerbaijan. To stop the trade, two agents arrived in London to murder Dudayev's envoys. (The murders were uncovered when a packing case fell out of a truck in a North London high street to reveal the elder brother's dismembered body.) Ter-Oganisyan is now serving a life sentence for the killings, while a co-defendant hung himself at Britain's Belmarsh prison while awaiting trial.

Not satisfied with the sentence meted out by a British court, the Chechens wanted to avenge the deaths of their envoys in blood. That sealed Karen Reed's fate. It is hard to imagine a family less likely to be involved in a political mafia killing from the former Soviet Union than Karen and Alison's. But as one of the officers involved in the case pointed out at the time, "We were suddenly dealing with crime and politics from a part of the world that, to be honest, none of us in the Metropolitan or Surrey police had ever heard of. We knew nothing about the wars or about the politics — we were frankly all at sea."

The new world of global crime had arrived in Britain.

The last two decades have witnessed an astonishing proliferation in organized criminal activity around the world. From Mumbai to Odessa and from South Africa to Canada, cities and countries that were never associated with the "classical" mafia in the postwar period have been swamped by syndicates shifting huge quantities of illicit goods and services around the world. "We have an exponential growth in serious and organized crime," said Commander Sharon Kerr, head of the specialist crime directorate of Britain's Metropolitan Police, at a conference in Liverpool earlier this year, "manifesting itself in all kinds of ways; from Chinese DVD sellers — which can involve murders, trafficking and kidnap — to Romanian gangs of bag snatchers using young children trafficked into the United Kingdom."

Kerr's examples of organized criminal activity in Britain represent the final retail link in a vast chain of production, distribution and sale of criminal goods that is every bit as entrepreneurial and growth-oriented as the most dynamic global corporations. There are now few major crimes which do not involve syndicates in several countries, usually in more than one continent. Israeli crime groups, for example, have for some time controlled the export of ecstasy tablets into the U.S. In a perfect example of globalization, a gang headquartered in Tel Aviv was able to mastermind the export of drugs manufactured in Northern Europe, chiefly in Holland and Belgium, to Las Vegas, New York and Florida in shipments expedited by Latin American carriers.

What I call the McMafia — the new international criminal networks — now dominates a shadow economy which accounts for around 15% of the world's GDP. Inextricably bound up with straightforward criminal markets is a spiraling level of corruption throughout much of the world. For a common strategy of criminal syndicates is the "capture" or "semicapture" of a state. American and European law-enforcement agencies now categorize the West African country of Guinea-Bissau as the world's first "narcostate," a place where the levers of official power are now entirely at the disposal of operations moving cocaine from South America to Europe.

A Very Different Model
What has triggered the extraordinary rise of international criminal activity in the last 20 years? Two key factors are at play. The first is globalization — the liberalization of financial and commodity markets that has created huge new opportunities for the world's most adventurous entrepreneurs. The second is the fall of communism. When the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union imploded, they left a power vacuum that was filled by a swath of failing states that stretched from the Balkans across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia as far as the Chinese border.