Upsizing Crime: Misha Glenny on McMafia Culture

Darknet agents in Brazil. Money-launderers in Dubai. Gun-runners in Ukraine. And drug syndicates in Canada. Whether it’s phishing scams, black-market pills or black-hat hacking, organised crime has reached beyond state borders to become a truly global phenomenon. 

Covering the fall of Yugoslavia as the BBC’s Central Europe correspondent, Misha Glenny, journalist and author of McMafia: crime without frontiers, saw the predatory growth of organised crime in the political instability that followed. Since then he’s followed the mafia trail, writing DarkMarket: how hackers became the new mafia and, most recently, Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio.

Now, Glenny argues, destabilising political forces – like Trump and Brexit – have given modern organised crime syndicates an unprecedented opportunity to grow, reaching the most powerful positions in the world. ‘…McMafia culture is visible at the very highest instances of state now,’ Glenny cautions, ‘whether you’re looking at the Kremlin or the White House.’ 

Join Misha Glenny for a fascinating  journey through cyber crime, geopolitics and international syndicates, and how they are affecting the world around you.

Sun Bookshop will be our bookseller for this event.