Thieves' World
Sterling, Claire
/ n 1991, Soviet Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov charged that Western banks and intelligence agencies were engaged in a treacherous global conspiracy to destroy the Soviet Union by undermining the...
...It was the collapse of Communism in Russia that led to the KGB's transformation into a criminal mafia...
...The heart of Thieves' World is a recounting of this strange episode in the death of the Soviet Union...
...and what Sterling calls "secret criminal brotherhoods in planetary communion...
...The second question is how these dubious and seemingly small-time Western businessmen could get their hands on such quantities of dollars, or even credibly argue that they could...
...The Soviet Union in its final days was filled with shady Western businessmen who talked big but could deliver nothing...
...My own suspicion is that a "criminal U.N.," far from being an efficient and ruthless organization, would end up as shambolic as the real U.N.—you gather to traffic in heroin...
...One has the impression that for much of the book, Sterling merely collected clippings and wrote to fit them in...
...Crime is not just a problem in Germany, but "an obsessive German concern...
...Whenever Russian or Lithuanian customs authorities launch one of their periodic crackdowns—during which time they actually police their borders—they seize huge quantities of metals, lumber, military hardware, and such...
...Sterling merely argues that the intelligence agencies must have been aware of what was going on...
...It was the lowering of trade barriers in Europe that made drug distribution much easier...
...S terling did conduct her share of interviews...
...T he ruble scam is the heart of this book, but Sterling does not begin to discuss it until page 167, two-thirds of the way in...
...Europe doesn't merely import cocaine, it is "drowning" in it...
...Financial Group, with declared capital of $17,000, offered to buy 140 billion rubles for $5 billion...
...And why would a Russian factory manager possessing, say, aluminum sell his stock for rubles, when so many other businessmen were offering dollars or marks...
...Now comes the Italy-based investigative journalist Claire Sterling to say that Mr...
...Sterling presents a series of documents in which Western businessmen offer to buy huge quantities of rubles in exchange for dollars...
...The upshot is that the Mafia, the KGB, the Triads, the Colombian drug cartels, and other criminal organizations have formed a world criminal alliance, something between a rogue's U.N...
...We took them as a sign that the Soviet Union had finally gone gaga...
...Sterling's taste runs toward chief investigators issuing declarations on the awesome size of the crime problem, and buttressing these claims with impressive and ultimately meaningless statistics—how many thousands of criminal organizations exist in Russia, how many hundreds of billions of dollars were earned in heroin sales worldwide...
...Please...
...Trade policies are discussed...
...EC politics are described...
...0 The American Spectator November 1994 77...
...n 1991, Soviet Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov charged that Western banks and intelligence agencies were engaged in a treacherous global conspiracy to destroy the Soviet Union by undermining the ruble...
...Indeed, many of the sources refer to Italian newspapers...
...Sterling notes that it was roughly during this period that Soviet gold reserves, estimated at 23,000 tons, disappeared...
...During the Cold War, she did invaluable work on the KGB, world terrorism, and the Mafia...
...An underlying theme of Thieves' World is that crime rides on the coattails of freedom...
...Billions of dollars do indeed flow to Russia in exchange for raw materials...
...Or, as Sterling writes, "in effect, Western Europe lay like a vast open city under murderous criminal bombardment...
...Sterling brings a lot of prestige to this argument...
...Certainly the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to an upsurge of Russian mafia activity...
...In the end, Sterling's account must be taken as informed speculation...
...One of the iron rules of journalism seems to be that it is better to have an important person weigh in with a dull quote than to have an unknown person contribute something interesting...
...The P2 scandal is summarized...
...A British businessman named Paul Pearson was arrested at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport on January 23, 1991, with a contract signed by the government of the Russian Republic for a swap of 140 billion rubles for $7.8 billion...
...In 1990, five men were arrested in Geneva trying to broker a swap of 70 billion rubles for $4.6 billion...
...he first question is why anybody T in his right mind would want to own rubles, which were then in free fall...
...Pavlov may have been right...
...it's the "global communion" part that strains credibility...
...In the first place, it is impossible to underestimate the scale of corruption in the former Soviet Union...
...At times Sterling seems like someone who is afraid of too much freedom, who thinks that it is but a short step from a society that lacks central control to one given over to thug-dominated anarchy...
...Sterling's documents show only that deals were struck, not that they were actually carried out, which is the exception in that part of the world...
...The owner of a condom factory in New York with six employees signed a letter of intent with the republic's prime minister Ivan Silaev to buy 300 billion rubles for $50 billion...
...These rantings were greeted with general hilarity by Western diplomats, academic experts, and those of us in the Western press corps...
...Sterling quotes Russian investigators, who noted that the unidentified "buyer company" behind one Western businessman "could use its ruble account to make massive purchases of raw materials, recyclable products, and fixed assets—the whole national wealth—at extremely low prices...
...The preceding text is a meandering and overwrought narrative that spans the globe, from Russia to Italy, Belgium, Uzbekistan, Philadelphia...
...But she tended to meet with the men and women with the big offices—heads of departments and police chiefs, rather than with cops and detectives on the street...
...you end up shooting each other over where to have lunch...
...One hundred and forty billion rubles was equal to all of the cash in the Soviet Union at the time...
...Furthermore, there is no evidence that any Western government participated in the offers, let alone knew of them...
...Sterling implies that these were narcodollars, traded for rubles, which were used to buy raw materials, which in turn were sold for hard currency on world markets...
...It is the loosening of capital controls around the world that paves the way for massive money laundering...
...The leaders of this criminal conspiracy THIEVES' WORLD: THE THREAT OF THE NEW GLOBAL NETWORK OF ORGANIZED CRIME Claire Sterling Simon and Schuster/304 pages / $23 reviewed by DAVID BROOKS 76 The American Spectator November 1994 are said to gather at conferences to coordinate activities, allocate turf, and cooperate on global money-laundering schemes...
...An organization called New Republic David Brooks, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal Europe, is features editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...Sterling's prose does much to reinforce one's skepticism...
...If these offers were genuine, the Soviet premier was right to be alarmed...
...This is certainly a plausible version of events...
...On the other hand, there are crucial links in the story for which evidence is lacking...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
