How does a young woman from Moldovan Transnistria, a particularly bleak breakaway province of a former Soviet state, wind up enslaved in a Tel Aviv brothel above a pizza parlor, forced to work 12-hour shifts and “service” as many as 20 clients a night?

The answer, explains the globe-trotting Misha Glenny in “McMafia,” is organized crime’s embrace of global capitalism.

Ludmila Balbinova (a pseudonym) was reeled in by the promise of a food-service job in sunny, seaside Israel and the sympathetic words of a friend-of-a-friend “recruiter.” En route, handlers locked her and 10 other women in a Moscow apartment and confiscated their passports. Egypt was the last stop before being trucked across the Negev Desert and marched across the Israeli border by Bedouin smugglers. One woman tried to make a break for it; they shot her in the knees. “They just left her there in the desert to die,” recounts Ludmila.

By the time Ludmila arrived in Tel Aviv, notes Glenny, she had been passed through the hands of Moldovan, Ukranian, Russian, Egyptian, Bedouin, Russian Jewish and Israeli criminals.

This is the new face of international crime.

Terrorist explosions in India are orchestrated from Bahrain’s beaches. Chechens reach out to Surrey to murder a BBC producer, the former wife of an Armenian money launderer who ratted out weapons dealers selling Stingers to Azerbaijan. (The murder was botched; the assassin killed her sister instead.) Serbians traffic in duty-free American cigarettes, illicitly diverted in Montenegro and then sold throughout Western Europe at bargain-basement prices. Meanwhile, China is flooded with counterfeit everything, much of it destined for export. Through a maze of markets, some of those profits end up in the pockets of terrorist groups.

Glenny makes his point about globalization’s seamy underbelly with dozens of tales of crime, by turns horrific for their brutality and incredible for their complexity, reaching across all the world’s borders. Today’s capos are corporate dons, at the helm of diversified criminal empires, far removed from the world of street-wise brawlers.

Even putting aside Russia’s quasi-criminal current regime, the disintegration of the Soviet Union is responsible for the greatest of these corporate criminals. When the rule of law fell with the state, gangs stepped in to fill the void, providing businesses “protection” and even mediation. At the same time, Russia’s oligarchs sought out ex-KGB agents to protect themselves and their newfound wealth from competitors and the state. The result: all-out war.

Those left standing expanded their operations. Counterfeiting, sanctions-breaking, drugs, money laundering, gambling and human trafficking became their most important industries. The black and gray markets are the source of enormous wealth for a new generation of “Eurotrash,” far gaudier than the last.

For this spectacular growth in organized crime, Glenny fingers two distinct causes: “Global markets that are either insufficiently regulated, especially in the financial sector, or markets that are too closely regulated, as in the labor and agricultural sectors.”

Glenny makes a good case that well-meaning government policies often backfire. High taxes, tariffs, sanctions and outright prohibitions on certain industries force economic activity underground, where law enforcement does not tread. And that is what undermines Glenny’s other argument. What’s lacking isn’t “a global regulatory regime of the financial markets,” which he advocates, but the basic institutions that support a civil society. Nearly all the states that are hotbeds of organized crime are, in one way or another, participants in it, too. Public corruption enables global crime. A bigger United Nations – itself no model, corruption-wise – won’t help.

The only good answer, unfortunately, is to redouble existing efforts. This includes going after state enablers of terrorism and crime, cracking down on foreign bribery, and targeting foreign aid and assistance to improve the rule of law. If we’re lucky, “McMafia’s” terrifying tour of the violent underworld of globalized crime will force this issue onto the political agenda.

Andrew M. Grossman is Senior Legal Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

McMafia

A Journey through the Global Criminal Underworld

by Misha Glenny

Knopf