“The gang was disciplined, ruthless, well ordered. Its thugs swaggered around the city as if they owned it. Maybe they did: everyone knew who they were, and the corrupted police never dared take them on.” Mark Galeotti, 60, opens his latest book, Homo criminalis. How Crime Organizes the World, with a fictionalized scene from Miguel de Cervantes’s tale Rinconete y Cortadillo, about a brotherhood of thieves that evokes The Godfather or Peaky Blinders. It was the year 1613.
Galeotti, an honorary professor at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, a Russia expert who has written several books about the country, and former head of the European Security Centre at the Institute of International Relations Prague, examines how organized crime has accompanied the formation of states throughout history.
For the author — who went on patrol with the New Jersey state police, visited Ciudad Bolívar in Bogotá, a refuge for narcoterrorists from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and interviewed criminals, police officers, spies and military personnel — organized crime has been intrinsically linked to the rise and fall of state power and is an inseparable element in the social and technological evolution of societies, as he unpacks in this video-call interview with EL PAÍS.
Question. An analyst from the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency told you: “Everything changes so fast when technology drives society that we face a terrible choice: either we put all our effort into crimes of the past or we try to guess what tomorrow will bring.”
Answer. It’s the classic problem for the police. If only we could be more prepared rather than constantly having to respond, constantly thinking, there’s some new designer drug that’s on the streets, a new cybercrime technique that’s being used.… Until we take law enforcement as seriously as we treat national defense — and that will be hard now that European countries have committed to increasing defense spending — it will keep being a struggle.
Q. Organized crime generates around $2 trillion a year. How is that sum divided?
A. It’s actually becoming increasingly difficult because so many criminal enterprises are multi-activity: they launder money for themselves and for others, they sell drugs, they swap drugs for other criminal commodities. Broadly speaking, it’s clear that drugs are still the number one earner. There are different estimates for how much of the total pie they account for, and we’ve had anything from 40 to 60%. The problem is that the more we try to slice this into segments, the less accurate our assumptions become, because so many of these really powerful criminal enterprises have — like any good multinational — diversified.
Q. You describe a certain sense of cohesion within organized crime and how this underground world has functioned as a mirror of “normal” society throughout history.
A. It’s difficult the further back we go, but through archaeology and local records and things, there was clearly a form of organized crime, for example, within the Roman Empire. But then with the collapse of the empire, there isn’t really room for organized crime because it’s a much more lawless era. And when do we see organized crime as we understand it today reemerging? It’s in Italy and it’s in the Netherlands during the period of the Renaissance — again, it’s directly connected to where we start to see more sophisticated political systems, social systems, economic systems emerging. Organized crime is just the dark shadow of our organized societies. And I think in some ways this is one of the reasons why we’re never really going to be able to defeat it.
Q. The ways we criminalize and prohibit give us a peculiar knowledge of our darknesses, both individual and societal…
A. What we decide to prohibit says a lot about us. Back in Roman times, it was a crime to release a slave. These days it’s a crime to have a slave. In some ways, it tells us about how successful our societies are, how much are we really able to control those darker sides of our behavior. And in particular, what is the gap between state and society. In a democratic society, in theory, that gap is small. In authoritarian regimes, it can often be much bigger. That is the gap in which organized crime thrives.
Q. It’s comforting to read that, to some extent, we are all thieves and con artists…
A. There is always the danger of “othering”: the criminals, that’s them, that’s these thuggish guys who drink in the pub that I would never go to, sort of thing. But our modern, advanced, comfortable Western lives are built on counterfeit goods, illegally logged timber, drug money that has been laundered through the construction industry... One of the most depressing chapters for me to write was the one about environmental crime. Because until I actually started looking at the way that beaches are disappearing because of sand theft and the almost military measures that are used for the poaching of Siberian tigers, I hadn’t appreciated the full scale of it, and humanity’s capacity to destroy its own life and its own planet is always shocking. Do we like that? No. But are we demanding that, as a priority, our governments crack down on all of that? Not really, because we like our cheap stuff and our nice, comfortable modern lives.
When [Russian President] Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, he made it clear that there was going to be essentially a social contract with the gangsters. You carry on with your business; the police will try to catch you, but so long as you do nothing that challenges the state, we will not treat you as an enemy, with all the extra pressure and punishment that entails. In a way, I could almost say less honestly, but certainly less overtly, modern Western societies do the same.
Q. You’ve interviewed many criminals — what did you learn about them?
A. It was fascinating. Most criminals are not exactly sophisticated thinkers; they are usually deeply broken people; they’re not people we should in any way be romanticizing. But there are also those who, whether you’re meeting them in a prison or in a café, can be surprisingly almost thoughtful about their place in society. One of the classic patterns is the sense that as you accumulate underworld power, you want to convert that into not just security, but also respect within upper world society. Even in Ancient Greece and Rome — where we only have fragmentary sources — it is clear that the direction of travel is that you build up money, power and influence in the shadows and then you want to convert that into a position in the sunlight.
Q. Criminals have often been very quick to adopt technological advances. In the book you talk about pirates, coin forgers, art forgeries, tea smuggling, the use of drones for drug trafficking, cybercrime…
A. Gangsters are not usually very clever, but some are. They are in this very Darwinian struggle for survival, always looking for the new market, the new opportunity, the new edge, the new advantage, because if you don’t take advantage of that, your rivals will, and your rivals are not your friends. All you need are a few criminals to adopt a new technology successfully or take advantage of new financial instruments, and everyone else will suddenly join in. They usually have lots of spare cash that they don’t know what to do with, so they can quickly invest in new things if they regard that as an opportunity. Whether we’re talking about modern cybercrime, the use of drones, increasingly used to smuggle drugs across borders, the adoption of the Tommy gun submachine gun back in the interwar eras of America or piracy, because pirates often were actually driving new naval technologies and techniques to avoid being sunk by government ships — there is an underlying evolutionary driving force: the unsuccessful ones get sunk, successful ones pave the way for the next generation.
Q. But today’s cybercrime is a huge technological leap: it evolves constantly and very rapidly. What can states do?
A. It’s like all warfare in that there’s a constant pendulum swing between the attack and the defense. At one point, suddenly the attacker has the advantage because of some new technology or whatever, and then the defender has. The problem lies in two aspects. It can be done at a distance. Many of the hacks are coming from countries like Russia or China, where it’s actually pretty much impossible for our police to really investigate them because either it’s simply not physically possible or else the governments will not allow it. It is one reason we should be reinstating law enforcement cooperation with Russia.
Q. And the other?
A. Scale. We have created a society of scale where we rely on so much data, so many transactions happening all the time, that there is just no way at present that we can properly secure it. We have to accept that our data is necessarily vulnerable. There is an odd parallel. I remember once talking to a Soviet dissident who was active in the late 1980s. And he said, “We knew that the KGB was this huge force, so we had to operate always on the assumption that any phone conversation we made was being tapped, that any letter we wrote would be intercepted and opened, that anyone we met could be a government informant.” That’s a very depressing way to live, but in some ways, that’s actually where we are now. We have to operate on the defensive principle that any information can ultimately be broken.
Q. You write: “It is certainly possible that, exploiting fear of the terrible dangers of future crimes, forthcoming technologies — also with mind-blowing capacities — will be used to justify repressive regimes.”
A. We live in the age of constant surveillance. Moscow is also extraordinarily well surveilled. And in some ways people like it because it makes your life easier. For example, to take the Moscow Metro you don’t even need to tap your payment card. You’ve got an account linked to facial recognition systems. But it also means that the system knows exactly where you are at any one point in time if the system wants to know. Russia is much more of an authoritarian regime, whereas we’re a nice, warm, fuzzy democracy, aren’t we? Well, yes, but again, in the name of security, it’s amazing what can be done after 9/11. The degree to which the United States massively expanded its eavesdropping capacity and not just of Americans. The Echelon system allowed them to intercept calls made on international fiber optic cables. Again, it was all in the name of spotting al-Qaeda and cutting it down. But once you’ve got that capacity, you never let go of it.
We want to be safe. And the risk is that — not because states are evil structures that are trying to look for excuses to become authoritarian techno police states — but just simply because of the natural creep, that capability, “we can do that” very quickly becomes “we will do that.” We see the threats, but the trade-offs are potentially just as dangerous. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. So is the path to techno-authoritarianism.
Q. Are you worried about the future?
A. One characteristic of humanity is that it’s always muddling through. We just have a tendency to do all the bad stuff first, and then scramble to fix it. So that counts as a kind of optimism these days.
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