Hamburglars!

In McMafia, Misha Glenny puts a value meal on crime

By John Hood

Those of a certain age will recall when a masked man in a black-and-white striped convict suit roused fear among our fast-food nation. They called him the Hamburglar, and when he struck, he stole what was then the most valued part of our meal: the hamburger. When he showed strong with his sidekicks — The Fry Kids — we lost the whole damn value meal itself.

Of course, in those days, Americans still didn’t object to paying full price for their greasy foodstuff, so there was no such thing as a value meal. Now, though, with globalization permitting Mickey D’s to set up shop in every corner of the world, the value meal is about as ubiquitous as air — or crime.

All of this is but a flippant way to get with Misha Glenny’s McMafia: A Journey through the Global Criminal Underworld (Knopf, $27.95), a book that, other than the allusion in its title, never once mentions those not-so-Golden Arches. It does, however, seem to chronicle everything Mickey D’s bad guy stood for — and for which he set the stage.

I mean the meeting of minds both licit and illicit. The multinational conglomerate that foists its bad goods on an unsuspecting market, and the shadow players who foist their own good bads right back at them, and us, and everyone else with an appetite for drugs, guns and sex.

To Glenny, the halcyon days began when the Soviet Union collapsed and untold thousands of soldiers, cops and bureaucrats were left out in a whole new cold. The first fast-market commodity was stolen cars, and they were heisted with such frequency that European insurance companies stopped issuing Eastern bloc policies.

The hot rides, for the most part, traveled along a road that runs from Dresden to Prague. Originally mapped as E55, the throughway would come to be known as “The Highway of Shame,” because while it may have begun as the quickest route to disappear vehicles, it quickly transformed into a bi-way of brothels full of slave women and the former Olympiad bodybuilders who pimped ’em.

With a network in place, it was only natural that the kleptocrats started running even more or less perishable commodities like drugs and guns. It was only natural as well that the E55 would end up being but one of a series of interchanges linking the black market East to the insatiable West.

But Glenny doesn’t stop his chronicle amid the gangsters of Southeastern Europe. Smuggling Bedouin camel kids, Nigerian advance-fee fraudsters and Victorian BC Bud boys all get their due; so too do bold-faced evil-doers like India’s Dawood Ibrahim (who was Dubai’s most conspicuously consuming money launderer before his role in the ’93 Bombay blasts was discovered and he was driven underground) and South African-based ex-Soviet Viktor Bout (the “Merchant of Death” who gained extra renown with both Blood Diamond and Lord of War).

Even Pyongyang gets a shout-out, not so much for its nuclear subterfuge, but because it manufactures both the most untraceable counterfeit $100 bills on the black market as well as enough meth to keep the Japanese flitting about their offices till the 22nd century.

But by far the most gangster of all the world’s hot spots has gotta be a place called Transnistria. A breakaway province of the Republic of Moldova, Transnistria is neither a recognized country nor a truly formed state. It is, however, home of Russia’s old 14th Army, which does its best to a) make the region safe for heavy trafficking, b) shield every lammed outlaw it can and c) provide much of the arms with which most Africans get killed.

There’s more, of course, ingloriously gory and vaingloriously cruel. And Glenny delivers each meal-sized chunk as if it was thrown off the back of a paddy wagon. People lie, people steal, people cheat and people get dead, again and again and again — all under shadow government supervision.

Sounds to me like the world’s getting the swing of this globalization thing after all.

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