The Merger: How Organized Crime is taking over Canada and the World - Hardcover

Robinson, Jeffrey

3.79

58 ratings by Goodreads

9780771075650: The Merger: How Organized Crime is taking over Canada and the World

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771075650 ISBN 13: 9780771075650

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1999

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Book by Jeffrey Robinson

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Review:

When telecommunications companies merge, the news is immediately analyzed by the media and government agencies. Owners of the companies' stock immediately vote on the wisdom of the move by buying or selling. But when criminal organizations merge and make their operations global, it takes years for law enforcement to figure out what happened, who was involved, and what the implications are. Ever since Italian-American mobster Lucky Luciano linked Mafia families in Sicily and the U.S., crime cartels have been finding ways to expand their operations across national borders, making those countries' policemen play an extended game of catch-up. Jeffrey Robinson is an authority on international crime, especially money laundering, and his book The Merger sometimes reads like a crime novel. It seems strange to imagine that Mexican drug traffickers would be working closely with Thai postal workers; that a billion dollars a month in drug money would be laundered from Russian gangs through Greek Cypriots and then moved on to respectable financial centers such as London and New York; that Colombian drug cartels would get kerosene--an important ingredient for making cocaine--from Turkmenistan by way of Argentina; that Eastern European criminals would claim to be Jewish so they could get Israeli passports and launder money in the Holy Land. And that's just for-profit criminality--politically and religiously motivated crime has long been international and is rapidly branching out into cyberterrorism.

Robinson concludes with a note that international drug trafficking is growing so fast it now represents 2 percent of the world's economy. However, while criminal organizations think globally, Robinson writes, most law enforcement is set up to act locally. Nations can't decide how to deal with the problem because none wants to be the first to sacrifice national sovereignty for the greater purpose of slowing crime. If this book doesn't keep you up at night, or at least raise some serious goose flesh, you're made of pretty stern stuff. --Lou Schuler

About the Author:

Jeffrey Robinson is the international bestselling author of eighteen books, including the acknowledged leading work on the subject of money laundering, The Laundrymen. An expert on international crime, he has been a keynote speaker on the subject for the United Nations, Interpol, U.S. Customs, the FBI, and many other organizations.

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