PICTURE the scene. It's the dog hours of the night shift on the Romanian-Serb border, and a bored customs officer is out for a bit of extra unearned income. That westerner at the barrier? He'll just have to be told that his hired car is in fact stolen, so no, he can't possibly be let across the border – or at least not without a halfway decent bribe.
Unfortunately for the Romanian, the westerner has friends in high places. "I just rang up the foreign minister," says Misha Glenny with a wry smile, "and he insisted on speaking to the customs officer. Who went white as a sheet when he realised who h
e was talking to. I've had to do that sort of thing quite a bit in the Balkans."
In that patchwork of fissiparous states, which he first started reporting on back in 1984, Glenny must have the best contacts book in the business. His reports on the drift to war in the early 1990s for the BBC World Service, and then on the conflict itself, were exemplary models of informed objectivity. But even as he filed those stories of violent political meltdown, he was starting to notice something else: that as states were growing weaker through sanctions or fighting, organised crime was blossoming.
That hapless customs officer's would-be scam was only the infinitesimally small part of the new crime wave. In fact, it's not even typical. As Glenny argues in McMafia, his fascinating investigation of organised crime, globalisation means that the bulk of it no longer stops at national borders.
For his research into the illicit businesses that, he argues, amount to at least 15 per cent of global economic activity, Glenny reckons that he spent nearly £250,000.
"I made dozens of trips, sometimes going back to the same country to check up on things, sometimes going to countries I didn't even write about. I spent a week in Botswana, for example, looking for one of the Mr Bigs in a cocaine story who had been hiding out there, although by the time I arrived the trail had gone cold."
He started off in the Balkans, where in 2003 his friend the reformist Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djinjic was assasinated. His killers were for a while protected by rival Croat paramilitaries. "It soon became obvious that even the most fervent nationalists had very different loyalties in private," he says.
"As I looked at these networks I started to realise that even sworn enemies were collaborating, especially under sanctions. The main source of revenue in the Balkans in the 1990s was criminal, but Djinjic's killing showed that this was getting out of control. The Balkans had become this huge transit zone for illicit stuff from all over the world – from untaxed cigarettes to heroin, cocaine and trafficking women. I thought I'd got to start looking at the illicit world with the same focus as the licit one."
As crime grew more globalised, the collapse of communism gave it an extra boost. Take for example, Bulgaria. "That's where I started out, and three weeks into my investigation I realised I was further ahead than the CIA had ever been – if only because after 9/11 they were so stretched."
In Bulgaria, the fall of communism freed the secret police – who had controlled the supply of 80 per cent of Europe's heroin – to go private. Prostitution, car theft, money laundering and extortion were soon added to the new gangs' enterprises as they found themselves competing with their equivalents throughout the former Soviet Union. Including, of course, Russia.
The rise of Russia's criminal gangs, he says, shows just how out of touch our image of organised crime is. Russia's oligarchs had benefited from a dole-out of resources on a scale unprecedented in history, paying sometimes a fortieth of the market price to get their hands on vast amounts of natural resources. The criminal gangs they gathered around them then started turning their attention to deals with the rest of the world's black economy big players.
Suddenly, trails were leading all over the place. "You'd be investigating a Russian oligarch, for example, and you'd uncover a connection with Brazil that seemed incomprehensible, so you'd go there and check that out too."
Thanks to friendly foreign correspondents and his own contacts, in each country Glenny had his own network too. These were the "fixers", the people who could take him on to the fringes of major league criminal activity, who could help him join the dots with intercontinental crime.
These are such an improbable collection of people that they deserve a book to themselves. In Tokyo, for example, Glenny's guide to the triads was a small, wiry, German professor of philosophy who taught at university by day and was a yakuza (gangster] by night. "He also happens to be a karate champion, and he had a bearing of complete poise and a sense of alertness, that was almost a sixth sense. He said he got a buzz out of hanging around with the gangsters."
Sprawled out on the settee of his London home, tired from a recent bout of non-stop travel, Glenny isn't quite the physical opposite of his Japanese minder, but near enough so for me to ask whether he too got a buzz from talking to those working alongside the globalised godfathers of crime.
"No, but I had to go there without prejudice. Say for example, when I was in Colombia talking to some seriously scary people, I just wanted to hear what they had to say about how they became a drug-dealer, extortionist or assassin and then I'd place that in the context of what I was finding out.
"That was where I felt in the most danger of all. My Colombian contact was coked out of his head, such a regular user that he'd a burnt-through septum, and he was talking so fast that I had to go back afterwards and go through the whole interview again. And the people he works with are truly dangerous: they've knocked off quite a few journalists. Colombia has one of the highest murder rates in the world and coke is such a nasty narcotic in its effects on people that of course I was worried."
With gangs like this, he argues, the old Godfather image no longer holds water. Like me, he's a Sopranos fan, and he argues that the US TV series perfectly illustrates his thesis that the old family-based crime syndicates are losing out to the new, ruthless organisations.
"Compared to them, the Five Families are just chickenfeed. The Russians, by contrast, represent something they just can't confront. To me, David Chase (the series's creator] is the Shakespeare of organised crime. He shows that the family network is the weakness of old-style mafia organisations and that the new, more ruthless ones do away with the whole notion of clan loyalty. The key moment in the series to me is when Tony Soprano (the small-town New Jersey crime boss] does away with his nephew Christopher because he realises that he causes him too many problems, and that the old-style Five Family politics are no longer any good. Which they're not, because anti-racketeering laws have proved tremendously effective."
What else will work? "All the real solutions are impossible and long-term, like bringing an end to poverty. In the short term though there are some measures that can help. The EU single arrest warrant, for example, has helped us get back about 450 criminals in the last four years – including one of the 7 July bombers who fled to Italy. It was passed in 2005 in the face of a lot of resistance from Eurosceptics, but it's one of those examples in which holding on to our sovereignty would damage our well-being."
Globalised crime, he insists, demands a globalised response but he hasn't much confidence that it will happen. But the terms of the war on drugs, he insists, need rethinking. "I'd argue for a very swift legalisation of cannabis, because it's negligible in terms of the social damage it causes by comparison with alcohol."
How far would he push for all drugs to be legalised? "I'd see in five years if western civilisation had collapsed or not and then I'd have a look at it drug by drug. You've got to be scientific about it, and the problem is that all the debate about drugs is completely irrational.
"You've got to take moral considerations out of it and just look at outcomes. The narcotics industry inflicts far more damage than any other crime and is also the best way of providing criminals with quick capital. To me the most telling interviews in the whole book are those with the big Canadian and Colombian drug distributors. They're among the biggest supporters of the war on drugs because they understand that is what enables them to earn such ludicrous amounts of money."
• McMafia is published by Bodley Head, price £20. Misha Glenny is at the book festival tomorrow night.
