The BBC’s new flagship drama is already said to be 2018’s The Night Manager before the first episode has even aired. A chillingly sumptuous portrait of globalised crime, McMafia’s first episode will be broadcast on New Year’s Day, before being streamed worldwide on Amazon Prime. The eight-part series stars James Norton as an urbane, privately educated hedge fund manager who is trying to pursue a legitimate career free from his Russian gangster father’s criminal network – but becomes compromised when tentacles of violence stretch all the way from Moscow, drawing him in.
The author of the book upon which the show is based will be holding a party every week in honour of each episode. “Because,” as Misha Glenny says with a bemused smile, “this doesn’t happen very often, does it? For a nonfiction author of a nonfiction minor cult book to go to a big fictional TV series – well it’s just kind of dreamland.”
The reality of organised crime is more like a nightmare. A former BBC foreign correspondent, Glenny wrote the book 10 years ago, tracing the modern networks of international crime back to a lethal intersection of the lawless chaos of the post-Soviet bloc and the sudden mobility of finance after deregulation. In the intervening decade, I ask, has anything changed?
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Law enforcement is, Glenny says, simply becoming overwhelmed. What does he think can be done? “If you want to do something about organised crime, the quickest way to do it is legalise drugs, or decriminalise, or at least start down that road. In Latin America, more than 100,000 people are murdered every year because of drug laws fashioned in Washington. It’s unconscionable. It’s the most immoral thing that I’ve come across. Anyone who has worked in Central and South America, if they don’t come out demanding drug law reform then in moral terms they’re criminals as far as I’m concerned. It’s appalling.”
It’s true, he concedes, that if drugs were removed from the black market, criminals would diversify into other forms of contraband. “But nothing – nothing – comes even close to an equivalently valuable income stream. The key thing is that you’d get sufficient tax revenues to deal with the associated health problems of drugs. You’re no longer having to deal with people who were getting that revenue and buying weapons with it, so you also reduce the violence. For example, in 2016 Colorado accrued in taxation from marijuana about $140m on sales of almost $1bn. That is more than twice the amount from alcohol sales and part of that money is hypothecated for the education and health systems. Has civilisation collapsed in Colorado? No, it hasn’t, because they’re smoking as much dope as they were before. It’s just that’s it’s no longer organised crime who are getting the benefit, it’s the state.” He shakes his head. “It’s just a no-brainer.”
