McNugget from McMafia

Nuggets mined from Misha Glenny’s McMafia (link--but I do wish he had sourced it better):

• Sources for organized criminal operations: (a) prisoners (think Soviet Union, South Africa); (b) government security services (think Bulgaria, South Africa). And where exactly to put “popular entertainment”—think pro wrestlers in Bulgaria, Bollywood n India.

• Underworld organizations with something near cult status: Soviet Union, Japan (think tattoos, elaborate founding mythologies.

• On topic scarcely mentioned in McMafia: the Mafia, traditional vanilla Sicilian-style. An oversight? Too small to worry about? Or largely defanged?

• But speaking of Italy—“In 2005, Italian scientists measured the River Po for a chemical derivative found in urine only after cocaine usage. The highly accurate procedure recorded that the 5 million people in the Po Valley were consuming 1.5 metric tons of the drug every year. This is twenty times previous estimates.” (343, and footnote, please?)

• “…in 1992, the KGB’s financial situation deteriorated to such an extent that officers were forced to sell lightbulbs and toiler paper stolen from their headquarters in Lyubyanka Prison…” (68, and footnote, please?)

• Principal source of Ecstasy for the United States: Israel—“the DEA reported.”

• Brazil is he only country in Glenny’s long peregrination where no interviewee asked him to turn off his tape recorder.

• The third-biggest bank theft in history: the denuding of Banco Noroeste of Brazil, through the instrumentality of one Nelson Sakaguchi, a bank director who is (a) a master criminal; or (b) a candidate for the Mt. Rushmore of doofuses—all via a Nigerian 419 fraud. Glenny ranks the first two as “Nick Leeson’s destruction of Barings Bank and the looting of the Iraqi National Bank aater the U.S. invasion of March 2003…” (164, which again cries out for detailed justification).