From the Times Literary Supplement, November 28:
In March last year, two small-time British criminals set fire to a warehouse in Leyton, east London, containing aid and satellite equipment destined for Ukraine. The arsonists were callow. One of them even live-streamed the blaze on his mobile phone. But while the perpetrators were swiftly arrested and convicted, their paymasters were never tried – because the fire had been orchestrated by the Russian mercenary group Wagner.
The Leyton blaze was not a one-off. Kremlin intelligence services have been recruiting criminals to carry out covert operations for years. Speed cameras stolen in Sweden have reportedly been used to build Russian military drones. Embargoed microchips have been smuggled across borders. In 2019, the anti-Russian organizer Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was shot dead by a contract killer in a Berlin park. Other foreign states are likely to follow suit in adopting such tactics – if they haven’t already.
All of this might sound distinctly modern, but, as Mark Galeotti argues in his pacy, entertaining new book, Homo Criminalis, crime has long been intertwined with the rise – and fall – of state power. Crime “maps the gulfs between the moral economies of the state and its people. Criminals flourish in the gaps between the law and what communities think is justice”.
Galeotti, whose previous books include Putin’s Wars (2022) and The Vory (2018), a history of the Russian mafia, sets out to show “how crime organises the world”. What results is a work of interdisciplinary scholarship “in the sense that I have self- indulgently followed my interests where they will”. Over the course of fewer than 300 pages, we move from the bandits and raiders at the end of the Sumerian, Hittite and Egyptian empires in the second millennium BC to the rise of cryptocurrency and international financial fraud.
Along the way, Galeotti presents the reader with myriad fascinating nuggets about the changing shape of crime across time and space. Piracy was once such a threat that the US Navy had to be founded to protect post-revolutionary American ships. By 1800, an eye-watering one-fifth of the US federal government’s entire budget was going on paying off Barbary pirates. The subsequent Barbary Wars ended the practice, cementing naval power in the nascent American state.
Criminals will always find ingenious ways to break laws, especially involving banned goods that can profitably be traded. This includes cocaine smuggled in semi-submersibles or hollowed-out pineapples and, as startled Kuwaiti police found flying over the Iraqi border in 2017, a homing pigeon wearing a tiny backpack filled with 178 ketamine pills. The line between the state and organized crime can be diaphanous: North Korea is a global hub for fake Viagra. Before its toppling, Bashir al-Assad’s Syria was underwritten by a multibillion-dollar trade in captagon, a mix of caffeine and amphetamine dubbed “the poor man’s cocaine”.
As states became more formalized, so too did the spaces where criminals could live, and work, beyond the reach of law enforcement. Galeotti takes us on a whistle-stop tour of these “rookeries”, from the slums of seventeenth-century London and Seville to the “no-go” zones of contemporary Bogota and Cape Town, and into the lawless domain of the dark web. Paradoxically, the existence of such “states of exception”, to borrow from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, shows the power of central authorities: “for there to be rookeries, it means that there must be other, wider parts of the cities which are under lawful control”.
Crime and corruption are not synonyms, but the latter is probably the most serious threat to any state. Where the bandit – or online fraudster – might steal all your money, corruption can steal the state itself. Galeotti rightly gives short shrift to Samuel Huntington’s argument that a degree of back-handing and rule-breaking provides “a welcome lubricant easing the path to modernization”. Corruption costs. In 2015, it emerged that some $3.5 billion may have been stolen from Malaysia’s 1MDB development fund, a figure later revised to $4.5 billion. (Some of the money has since been recovered and various legal actions connected to the case continue.) In all, the UN estimates that states lose $3.6 trillion per year through corruption, mostly in funds and public money stolen through corrupt activities....
....MUCH MORE
