The New Gangsterism

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By the end of the last century, 80% of coltan's global production was mined in the D.R.C., and so the deposits became bitter battlegrounds in a four-way struggle (and sometimes more) between the armies of Rwanda and Uganda, as well as the Hutu Interahamwe and the Mai-Mai militias — all of whom forced peasants to mine the material. Arms dealers such as the Russian, Viktor Bout, who is now in a Thai jail awaiting extradition to the U.S., funneled weapons from former Soviet stockpiles into the D.R.C. South Africa became a key transit route for this trade, with the arms paid for by the proceeds from coltan, which was then recycled by criminal groups from Europe, South Africa and Israel into licit markets.

International crime touches all of us. Most of us may think that we have no relationship with transnational criminal syndicates, but anyone who has used a cell phone or computer notebook in the past decade has unwittingly depended on organized crime for the convenience of consumer goods. And while the most notorious new crime groups hail from the developing world or the newly industrialized economies, this has nothing to do with a supposed predilection for organized crime in these regions and much more to do with a market assessment. In the 1990s, illicit goods and services — whether trafficked women, blood diamonds, drugs or illegal migrant labor — streamed toward their most lucrative markets, which were the European Union, Japan and the U.S. Organized crime is such a rewarding industry in developing nations because those in the old rich world spend an ever-increasing amount of their spare time and money sleeping with prostitutes, smoking untaxed cigarettes and sticking €50 notes up their noses. Gangs tend to originate from the producer countries, but the consumption of criminally produced goods and services is key — yet neither the E.U. nor the U.S. have ever seriously addressed the demand-side part of the international crime equation.

As it happens, many producer zones or transit regions, such the Balkans, have now become important criminal markets in their own right. And as international drug networks shift from organic products such as cocaine and heroin to synthetics like amphetamines, so the cost of getting drugs to market is likely to plummet. The law-enforcement headache which Commander Kerr shares with her colleagues around the world is about to become even more intense. The financial resources available to organized crime have risen hugely since the early 1990s. But, as all senior law-enforcement officers reminded me repeatedly as I worked on my book, there has been no concomitant increase in money available to the good guys to combat the problem. Since Sept. 11, 2001, hundreds of billions of dollars in the West have been poured into the War on Terror — everything from NATO forces battling the Taliban in Afghanistan to the new security systems in airports with which we have all become familiar. But terror is only a very small part of a much bigger problem to do with the dark side of globalization. The next quarter-century could belong to organized crime.

Misha Glenny's latest book is McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers, published in the U.K. by The Bodley Head