Anti-organised crime czar Michael Barnes

“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.”

 – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

ATO targets 93,000 SMSFs in $1trn sector crackdown

Tariffs - There’s no grand plan, no 3D chess. All this admin understands is pay to play. Quid pro quo. What’s in it for me. That’s it.

NSW Crime Commission chief becomes Canberra’s intelligence toecutter

Anti-organised crime czar Michael Barnes has been sent to Canberra to oversee ASIO, plus other things. The appointment has been made on eve of the Bondi royal commission.

The head of the most powerful and far-reaching crime agency in NSW has been picked to become the Commonwealth’s intelligence agency disciplinarian. 

It’s a quiet changing of the guard on the eve of the commencement of the royal commission into the antisemitic mass murder shooting of 15 people at Bondi Beach in December.

Michael Barnes, who is presently the NSW crime commissioner, has been named by Commonwealth Attorney-General Michelle Rowland as the next inspector general of intelligence and security (IGIS), succeeding Christopher Jessup.

Barnes’ new appointment commences on April 7 and goes for five years.

Barnes’ selection for the Commonwealth’s intelligence services watchdog is a significant changing of the guard, as it represents the recruitment of state government talent into what is arguably Canberra’s most sensitive role.

The IGIS retains statutory standing investigative powers of spy agencies on par with those of a royal commission that include own-motion probes.

The IGIS is also charged with regular auditing and governance of intelligence services, including checking adherence to the limits on intrusive powers, such as surveillance warrants, and investigating complaints against the authorities it polices.

These include the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Australia’s foreign intelligence collection agency; the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation; and offensive and defensive cyber operations carried out by the Australian Signals Directorate.

The IGIS oversight also extends to the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation, the Defence Intelligence Organisation, and the Office of National Intelligence, with the oversight agency’s boilerplate noting that the “the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Act 2021 expanded the IGIS’s jurisdiction to include oversight of the use of network activity warrants by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and the Australian Federal Police.”

In the context of the Bondi atrocity, the appointment of an IGIS head with current state-based experience creates a bridge between jurisdictions that might otherwise retreat to disparate jurisdictional corners.

The NSW Crime Commission has been instrumental in seizing assets of major criminal interests, including unexplained wealth and alleged proceeds of crime, as part of its mission to disrupt major crime.

The NSW Crime Commission also retains so-called star chamber powers, similar to those of a royal commission, including the statutory compulsion of evidence.

“Barnes holds a bachelor of arts, bachelor of laws, and a master of laws. He has held the role of NSW crime commissioner since 2020, where he has been responsible for leading a multidisciplinary team of approximately 160 staff,” a statement from Rowland said.

“As commissioner, he was a member of the NSW Joint Counter Terrorism Taskforce and the NSW State Security Group, which leads and coordinates NSW government strategic policy and intergovernmental arrangements on counter-terrorism and national security.”

“Prior to his current role, Mr Barnes was the NSW ombud (2017-2020), NSW state coroner (2014-2017), inaugural Queensland state coroner (2003-2013), head of the School of Justice at the Queensland University of Technology (2000-2003), and chief officer of the complaint section in the Queensland Criminal Justice Commission (1994-2000),” Barnes’ official rap sheet cites.

That’s a whole bunch of experience that could become operationally relevant as the royal commission unfolds.

“On behalf of the Albanese government, I congratulate Mr Barnes on his appointment as Australia’s next Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. Mr Barnes brings extensive experience which will support the Office of the Inspector-General to continue its work providing robust oversight over the National Intelligence community,” the attorney-general said.

“I thank Dr Christopher Jessup for his distinguished service as inspector-general following his appointment in 2021.”

Juvenile Justice. Caging children while corporate criminals go free

by Aleta Moriarty 

In Australia, children as young as ten can go to prison for shoplifting, while a corporate executive responsible for multimillion-dollar bribery gets away with 

Ilya Somin Prevails in Tariffs Case

The Epstein files could destroy the global ultra-elite 

 The British monarchy won’t escape the reputational stain of Andrew’s complicity in one of the defining cases of moral bankruptcy in the 21st century

Photos contradict Trump's claim not to know Prince Andrew This article is more than 6 years old US president’s statement easily disproved as prince faces pressure to give evidence in US

Epstein offered chance to buy Pentagon and FBI buildings ITV News

 

Goldman Lawyer, Epstein Conferred on Secret Service Prostitution Scandal Bloomberg

 Your Car Is Spying on You – and Israeli Firms Are Leading the Surveillance Race Haaretz

 Legendary director Steven Spielberg is latest billionaire to flee California in another blow to state.

Exploring ‘Other People’s Money’

SBS on Demand - Other People's Money MiniseriesDrama 1 season English A network of investors, banks and lawyers exploit a loophole in tax law to embezzle over a 100 billion from European taxpayers

Other People's Money (2025)

 An eight-part European drama series (originally titled  Die Affäre Cum-Ex

Inspired by the true events of the "Cum-Ex" tax fraud scandal, which defrauded European treasuries of €146 billion.

• Plot: Follows the masterminds of the fraud and the women from Germany and Denmark determined to bring them to justice.
• Cast: Stars Lisa Wagner, David Dencik, and Karen-Lise Mynster.

Pay a tax, get it refunded twice, and claim it's legal: that's a Cum-Ex deal. Young lawyer Sven Lebert and his boss Dr. Bernd Hausner expand this scheme to private investors in Germany, developing a global network of banks, lawyers, and investors that steal billions from European citizens.

 

In Denmark, tax officials Inger Brøgger and Niels Jensen watch helplessly as state funds vanish, with little support from bankers or politicians. When Niels faces financial struggles and personal pressures, he loses his moral compass and joins the scheme. 

In Germany, District Attorney Lena Birkwald uncovers the massive fraud and faces fierce resistance from banks and politicians. Determined to prevent the usual outcome – where minor players are caught while the masterminds walk free – she fights tirelessly to bring those truly responsible to justice.


Inspired by “Die Cum-Ex-Files” & “Die Akte Scholz” by Oliver Schröm, Research by Christian Salewski and “Det Store Skatterøveri” by Niels Fastrup & Thomas G. Svaneborg, published by Politikens Forlag.

Exploring ‘Other People’s Money’: 

Jan Schomburg Talks Tax Fraud Drama Series, Beta Film Launches Sales By Stewart Clarke 

February 20, 2025 

'Other People’s Money' premieres at the Berlin Film FestivalBeta Film

 Tax-fraud drama 'Other People’s Money' 'Other People’s Money' premieres at the Berlin Film Festival Beta Film Other People’s Money plays in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival. 

The series premiere will be a full circle moment for Jan Schomburg – his first film, Above Us Only Sky, played in the same Berlinale sidebar in 2011. 

 The German writer and director is speaking to Deadline from his Berlin Film Festival base. 

The warehouse-like space will serve as the venue for the after party following the premiere of the series that he wrote, and upon which he was showrunner. 

 Other People’s Money takes in a tax fraud that centered on so-called cum-ex trades, and the work of those seeking to expose the wrongdoing. 

The shorthand explanation often used for those not familiar with the complex financial machinations is it’s “a bit like parents claiming a child benefit for two children when there is only one child in the family.”

The series was inspired by the CumEx files, the investigation by a host of European journalists and news outlets into the tax double dealing, as well as the Oliver Schröm book ‘Die Akte Scholz’ and research by Christian Salewski and “Det Store Skatterøveri” by Niels Fastrup and Thomas G. Svaneborg.

Schomburg says he did not pay close attention when news of the multi-billion Euro scandal first broke – “I thought, oh, it’s just some stupid shit where some rich people stole some money from us,” he says – but Michael Polle, who produces Other People’s Money with Ole Søndberg, urged him to look closer.

“I started to do some research and I found the characters involved in the real case really interesting. I had the feeling it was as if Shakespeare and [German-American director] Lubitsch had teamed up in a writers’ room and created these characters.”

Part of the story revolves around an older tax lawyer, Bernd (Justus von Dohnányi) and his younger counterpart, Sven (Nils Strunk). The duo team up to illegally work the angles on the tax rules. Schomburg’s take was to give their relationship a rom-com spin.

“If you if you look at the structure of the storytelling closely, it is built up a little bit like a romantic comedy,” he says. “They team up together, and this whole process of them forming a company together is a little bit like a marriage and I really wrote that part like a love scene. [Bernd] says: ‘You know, I thought about something, maybe we could form a company together. You don’t have to say yes, immediately. You can think about it.’ [Sven] says: ‘I don’t have to think about it, yes, I do.’”

Tom Tykwer’s X Filme produces with True Content Entertainment and, fittingly for a drama that spans Europe, a host of broadcasters from across the continent. These broadcasters will air the show in their respective countries: ZDF (Germany), DR (Denmark), NRK Norway), SVT (Sweden), RUV (Iceland), YLE (Finland), NPO (Netherlands), VRT (Belgium). Beta Film is distributing and the series is a highlight of its London TV Screenings lineup.

CHRISTINE FENZL

Other People’s Money opens with a man walking into a garage full of expensive cars and lying naked, face down, on the bonnet of one of the luxury automobiles. But that is not a sign of what follows. As the drama unfolds, Schomburg says he set himself a guideline: “I don’t want to show the villains in a sexy way.”

He speaks of a “weird philosophical emptiness” at the heart of the perpetrators of the fraud. “I always asked myself, why are they doing it? They already have a lot of money. Then they get more and then they don’t do anything with it. They just pay it into some bank accounts.”

Making a TV series was the hardest work Schomburg has ever done, he says. “It’s like, okay, episode six is finished, but in one week it’s the deadline for episode seven. It’s crazy industrial work and it’s also nice somehow. You don’t think: ‘Do I feel like writing?’ You get into this industrial process. You just have to do it.”

The story that inspired Other People’s Money is public record. For Schomburg, a tale of greed and disregard for the wider population is actually inspiring given the actions of the people who came together to expose the fraud.  

“It’s possible to think that the financial markets are not just there for themselves or for some rich people, they are there to serve us,” he explains. “I also tried to convey this idea that now is the time to think in a collective kind of way. There are some very inspiring people who show us that we can fight and we can win.”

‘Other People’s Money’ Team Explain How They Told the Story of Europe’s Biggest Ever Tax Fraud as Trailer Debuts (EXCLUSIVE)

Why are people angry?

A clearer, terrifying view of the liquefied gas tanker crash in Renca, Chile, moments before the explosion.

Four killed after truck carrying liquid gas overturns and explodes in Chile

16

Why are people angry?

People in the UK are angry, and they have good reasons. Stagnant wages, housing costs, collapsing public services and growing inequality are real. But the

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Code references include intelligence program codenames "Project SHADOW" and "Project LEGION."

Scientists Say Earth’s Core Could Be Hiding the Equivalent of up to 45 Oceans of Water ZME Science

Palantir’s Departure from Colorado is a Hard-Earned Community Victory Ziggurat

Police investigation into Andrew continues as former prince released from custody

The Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s IEEPA Tariffs

Ilya Somin Prevails in Tariffs Case

Yesterday, the USA took a step away from fascism

There are moments when the institutions of law have to remind governments that they are not kings. Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on the legality of
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App How An E-mail Glitch Exposed A $90 Billion Russian Oil Smuggling Ring 

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Is Australia’s $100 million investment in Palantir beyond the pale?

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake The Register

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Police investigation into Andrew continues as former prince released from custody BBC

 

Cyber criminals use self-managed super as ‘getaway vehicle’, as illegal access rises

Criminals are targeting the $1 trillion SMSF sector as they try to steal Australians’ retirement savings, regulators say.

Cyber criminals are using the $1 trillion self-managed super sector as a “getaway vehicle” to take off with Australians’ nest eggs, as regulators go after dodgy superannuation promoters.

The Australian Taxation Office and Australian Securities & Investments Commission have noted rises in illegal early access from super, cyber attacks, prohibited loans from self-managed super funds and questionable attempts to get super on compassionate grounds.

ATO deputy commissioner Ben Kelly said the regulator was concerned about SMSFs being used by criminals stealing people’s superannuation.

“Probably the thing that we’re more concerned about is where the SMSF’s the getaway vehicle,” Mr Kelly told the SMSF Association National Conference in Adelaide.

“This is probably more in the APRA-regulated fund member space where cyber criminals are basically committing identity fraud and then set up an SMSF, roll over the money, and then get away with the money.

“For SMSF members, the general advice you have around your own cyber security applies equally when it comes to your fund.”

ASIC and the ATO are working together to target illegal early access to super, and Mr Kelly said there was also a focus on educating Australians about SMSF rulesand consequences.

He said that as of July last year, more than $1 trillion was sitting in SMSFs, “nearly a quarter of the assets held in Australia’s superannuation system”.

The latest ATO data, from the 2022-23 financial year, shows while illegal early access rose slightly over 12 months to $252m, prohibited loans to SMSF members surged from $231m to $398m.

“Our analysis indicates that most cases of illegal early access and prohibited loans involve newly established funds that never intended to operate as genuine superannuation funds,” Mr Kelly said.

“Instead, they were set up as conduits for short-term finance, often facilitated by promoters who target vulnerable individuals and charge exorbitant fees.

“We also know that SMSFs with balances below $200,000 are the most likely to engage in illegal early access, with just over 80 per cent of all cases coming from this group.”

ASIC senior executive leader, financial advice, Leah Sciacca said ASIC and the ATO were conducting “joint regulatory engagements” including investigating suspected promoters of these illegal schemes.

“Individuals who access their retirement savings before a condition of release has been met not only impact their own retirement outcome but also impact the integrity of the system,” she said.

ATO statistics also show a surge in people accessing their superannuation on compassionate grounds, such as for medical treatment, disability, palliative care, funeral expenses and preventing a forced sale of a home.

Applications for compassionate release doubled between 2021-22 and 2024-25, to 112,400, but only 60 per cent were approved last financial year.

Mr Kelly said while most requests were genuine, “some of the things we are seeing with dental are indicating that super is the way you can get a new set of teeth … I think that should just raise some flags for people”.

“The conditions are clear – you’ve got to be in acute or chronic pain, you’ve got to have acute or chronic mental disturbance, or it must be a life-threatening illness or injury, and everyone needs to be really clear about that.”

Ms Sciacca said ASIC was conducting “a range of surveillance activities” and this week announced a new review of businesses involved in lead generation for financial advisers.

She said ASIC was continuing investigations into individuals and entities connected to the Shield Master Fund and First Guardian Master Fund collapses.

“That includes the lead generators, the financial advisers and financial firms that authorised them, the superannuation trustees that made Shield and First Guardian available via the platforms, the auditors and the operators of the managed investment schemes.

“In these matters, around 11,000 people invested their money, including their superannuation retirement savings, into First Guardian or Shield.”

Ms Sciacca said cybercrime was another key focus for ASIC.

“We are seeing more in AI impersonation scams,” she said.

“It’s evolving all of the time and the risk environment is shifting pretty quickly. You have to be vigilant and taking all precautions that you can.”

"I'm David," was how the one gentleman introduced himself.

"David liked what he saw in '78 but it was confirmed for him when he came back in '83. So he went looking around and found an apartment he liked in a building called Kincoppal at Elizabeth Bay overlooking Rushcutter's Bay and bought it. He kept that until 1992 and it was another place that he went when he disappeared, which he often did”

David Bowie on why you should never play to the gallery

After filming the videos for Let's Dance and China Girl in Australia in 1983, David bought an apartment in the Kincoppal complex in Elizabeth's Bay, Sydney. In 1989, Bowie's apartment was the base he kept returning to.

David Bowie in Sydney

 

David Bowie's secret life in Australia: How the music icon lived in a Sydney apartment for 10 YEARS before falling in love with a local waitress and immersing himself in Aboriginal culture

Australians warm to a star who doesn't display a huge ego and the trappings of fame. For a brief time in the 80s more than a few of us got to experience that with David Bowie. Just ask my two friends, Simon Tatz writes.

Vale David Bowie (Jones) Berlin Trilogy: Fired Memories

Mafia: A Global History …Giuffre … Wexner at al

In reviews and discussions of the book, Gingeras is noted for observing that "Mafias will be with us until men turn into angels," suggesting that organised crime is an enduring byproduct of human society and state power…

 

The SCOTUS majority nearly sent all of us spiraling into bankruptcy. 

But by dint of his unfathomable brilliance, Trump will save us. 🙄

Without tariffs US 'would be bankrupt': Says the king of bankruptcies.

With US President Donald Trump ever more eager to push the limits of the powers of his office, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to rule illegal the bulk of his totemic tariff agenda is a reassuring demonstration of enduring checks and balances in American democracy. Trump’s decision to invoke the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act last year, citing a “large and persistent” trade deficit and a supposed fentanyl “crisis”, to justify sweeping import duties was dubious from the start. Besides, as the justices noted, although IEEPA enables the executive to “regulate” imports, this does not extend to tariffs.

Trumpin’ tariffs

The connections in this one interview. Virginia Giuffre reveals Epstein trafficked her to Andrew. She’s hit by a bus then “commits suicide.” The interviewer’s mother gets kidnapped and is still being held for ransom. And today, Andrew was arrested.

BREAKING: An explosive deposition clip just surfaced of Les Wexner revealing that Jeffrey Epstein claimed he was the financial adviser to Élie de Rothschild and the Rothschild family in France. Wexner says he personally verified it: "Well specifically, I talked to Élie de Rothschild. I mentioned that earlier. So he represented their whole family." Wexner also describes Epstein boasting that he advised Google’s founders, Google’s chief technologist, and Jeff Bezos — but admits he never confirmed those claims. Beyond Élie, documents show Epstein helped facilitate a $45 million DOJ settlement involving Ariane de Rothschild and the Edmond de Rothschild Swiss private bank. How deep were Epstein’s financial ties to the Rothschild family?

 The mafia’s biggest supporters? Middle-class people like you From Robin Hood to Al Capone, Ryan Gingeras explores how our enduring fascination with the ‘everyman’ bandit built a global criminal empire

From Robin Hood to Al Capone, Ryan Gingeras explores how our enduring fascination with the ‘everyman’ bandit built a global criminal empire

Ryan Gingeras grew up hearing Mob folktales courtesy of his grandfather Charley, who worked in a tough bar in the Bronx after serving in the Second World War. Among the dubious regulars was Willie Moretti, an underboss of the Genovese crime family. One day, a man known only as “The Beak” rang the bar and asked for Moretti, who was too drunk to take the call. So, The Beak told Charley to pass on a message: “Deliver the five large, or Willie’s going for a dip in the Hudson in cement shoes.”

Years later, having binged on mafia films, Gingeras worked out that Moretti was probably the inspiration for Luca Brasi, the Corleone enforcer in The Godfather who ends up “sleeping with the fishes”. Whether Moretti heeded The Beak’s message is unknown, but it certainly left an impression on the young Gingeras, who has been fascinated by mafias ever since.

Hence his ambitious new book, Mafia: A Global History, which takes in organised criminals everywhere from Noo Yawk’s goodfellas through to the Chechen mob and the Medellín cocaine cartel, via Ned Kelly, Jamaican Yardies and the Yakuza. We visit the French Connection drug labs that, in the middle of the 20th century, channelled heroin from Turkey to New York; we tour speakeasies, brothels and drug dens in 19th-century San Francisco and 1950s Beirut.

Early mafias, Gingeras says, were little more than gangs of roving bandits, and probably included the likes of Robin Hood. He and his Merry Men, it seems, probably weren’t that charming after all. The first 13th-century ballads, we learn, suggest that he was just another violent highwayman, apparently fond of beheading his victims. While he may well have targeted the rich, “it is far less clear whether he stole or killed for the benefit of the poor”. The idea of his being a medieval social-justice warrior, Gingeras explains, doesn’t arise until the 16th century, when the men of Sherwood Forest were repackaged as “champions of the common people”. Then, as now, the public couldn’t help but have a sneaking admiration for those who take on the system. As Gingeras puts it: “This kind of bandit, like the gangster or mafioso of popular media today, is the everyman.”

Early nation states, he points out, were practically mafias themselves. The basic social contract, whereby citizens lay down their arms in exchange for protection by a sovereign, is itself a grand form of “protection” racket, the only difference being that taxes sound nicer than an extorted “tribute”. Back in those more lawless times, sovereigns often co-opted local brigands as lieutenants anyway, capitalising on the fear they inspired.

An early example, Gingeras says, was Ali Pasha, a powerful Albanian bandit whom Lord Byron met on his Mediterranean travels. Pasha was by then an Ottoman-appointed governor, despite being, in Byron’s words, “a remorseless tyrant, guilty of the most horrible cruelties”. From the perspective of Turkey’s Ottoman sultans, who didn’t need him to do much except keep order, he was a canny appointment. “Having the likes of Ali Pasha on the government’s side,” Gingeras writes, “was better than gambling that he could somehow be defeated or crushed.”

A ‘remorseless tyrant’: the powerful Albanian bandit Ali Pasha Credit: Louis Dupré /V&A

As governments grew stronger, old-school banditry died out. Roads, railways and the telephone network opened up the forests, deserts and mountains that had served as the outlaws’ hideouts. But the more rules the modern state imposed on people’s lives, the more there was money to be made by breaking them – particularly in the markets for booze, prostitution and drugs.

A watershed moment was Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Much as De Quincey intended it as a cautionary tale, temperance-minded Victorians noted how much fun he suggested it could be to get stoned. The book, Gingeras says, became “a milestone for the movements that compelled states to punish anyone found dealing in ‘dangerous’ intoxicants”. From this was born the first war on drugs, with the Hague Convention of 1912 restricting the trade of both morphine and cocaine. Contrary to the claims of many drug-legalisation campaigners today, these steps weren’t taken to protect the business interests of alcohol sellers, but they, in tandem with Prohibition in the US from 1920 to 1933, did give mafias worldwide a fresh shot in the arm, and led to the first use of the term “organised crime”.

American mafias would become as powerful as corporations. (Gingeras likens Al Capone to “a hyper-malevolent Henry Ford”.) Post-war, they grew even more so: in the socially permissive 1960s, the black market for narcotics boomed. By 1988, American organised crime was making an estimated $25bn in profit a year – more than Exxon, then America’s largest firm.

A ‘hyper-malevolent Henry Ford’: Al Capone (right) exits a Chicago building with an associate during the height of Prohibition in the 1920s Credit: Chicago History Museum/Getty

At the same time, drugs helped to dissolve the old mafia codes of “family ties, trust, loyalty, obedience”, sparking violence that made the old mafia bosses look as respectable (in Gingeras’s phrase) as “company men at IBM”. And America’s modern mobsters, in turn, were mere children compared with the new cartels in Colombia and Mexico, whose feuds would wipe out not just individual mobsters but their entire families.

Well-armed, well-financed and ruthless, today’s cartels are as hard to tame as medieval bandits were. The European market for cocaine alone is now worth several billion pounds a year; much of it arrives in industrial quantities via Dutch and Belgian ports. Gingeras doesn’t cover this, but the cartels importing the drugs have also started to flex their muscles, bribing customs officers and threatening law-enforcement officials; in November, eight people were arrested for a plot to kill Brussels’s chief prosecutor. Some modern nation states have even become mafias themselves: take Venezuela, whose erstwhile leader, Nicolás Maduro, was last month arrested by the US on cocaine-trafficking charges – entirely plausible, whether a convenient pretext or not.

In general, Gingeras writes well and joins the historical dots. For instance, the drug chemists of Marseille who ran the “French Connection” heroin labs in America later set up cocaine-processing plants in Colombia. But covering so many mafias, or mafia-like groups, in 400 pages means a lot of jumping around, with some characters reduced to pencil sketches. And while a collective history may have its place, it’s up against classic books from Honor Thy Father, Gay Talese’s insider look at the Bonanno family, to Roberto Saviano’s Italian mafia exposé Gomorrah. Nonetheless, for those who want to know how mafias began – especially those as fascinated by it all as Gingeras – this book may prove to be an offer they can’t refuse.

★★★☆☆

Mafia: A Global History is published by Simon & Schuster at £25. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books

A globe-trotting history of organised crime from the Mafia to the Yakuza

HISTORY
Mafia: A Global History
Ryan Gingeras
Simon and Schuster, $37.99

American professor and historian Ryan Gingeras charts a steady course between academic respectability and formulating the odd unexpected sentence that will rock you on your heels. Try this for an original thought: “Young states are often born resembling a protection racket. Demands for taxes, tribute or spoils are among the essential features of a proclaimed state.”

“Mafia” is a term that appears to have existed in post-Renaissance Italy, although Gingeras admits that after the arrival of many North African Muslims in Sicily over the centuries, it may actually be derived from an Arabic root meaning “braggart”. To his credit, he rejects a semantically restrictive view of the term and generally treats it almost as a synonym for any form of gangsterism – practicing the dark arts of violence to satisfy one’s greed or, in the most notorious cases, bloodlust. Ned Kelly earns his rightful place in this pantheon.

His more expansive definition allows the author of Mafia to bring the creation of an entire generation of criminal confederates in Stalin’s Russia within his purview. And that is surely justified on scale alone: “Between 1934 and 1952, an estimated 18 million Soviet citizens were interned in the country’s massive gulag system.”

American historian Ryan Gingeras.

Unfortunately for the Russian people, the rise of oligarchs and a recognisable “Russian Mafia” after the fall of communism enabled a British reporter to announce that by 1994 Moscow had become “the world’s crime capital”, with “more mafia victims per week than in the worst days of Chicago, more casinos than Las Vegas per head of population, [and] more prostitutes and massage parlours than anywhere else” on the globe.

Long before they were called mafia (capitalised or lower-case), they were known as bandits or, in medieval England, highwaymen. In the Middle Ages, and indeed in ancient times, bandits roamed the countryside. Ironically, civilisation – in its technical sense of city-building – is to blame for mafiosi replacing banditry. As Gingeras says: “The dual forces of industrialisation and urbanisation created increasingly difficult environments for bandits to survive [in].”

Brigandage can be spurred on by the disintegration of a state: China’s triads flourished in the anarchic vacuum created by the breakdown of the imperial state in the early 20th century. Or, paradoxically, by the opposite tendency, the formation of a state. Naples’ camorra and Sicily’s Mafia were both borne aloft by the revolutionary forces that unified the Italian nation – in 1861, not 1860 as the author twice mistakenly asserts. (That incorrect dating of an important historical event is one of several to mar an otherwise exemplary work. To cite but two, Egypt wrested its independence from Britain in 1922, not 1919, and Mikhail Gorbachev came to office in 1985, not 1986.).

In Japan, as Gingeras adroitly points out, the yakuza had long operated unobtrusively “but matured alongside Japan’s reinvention as a nation state”.

Apart from a wholly understandable focus on the history of Mafia activities in America, Gingeras gives special (and equally understandable) weight to its machinations in Italy.

We are reminded how the brave mafia-hunting judge Giovanni Falcone was assassinated, and of just how unequal a battle it is when the state – which might be presumed in favour of upholding the law – cultivates criminal operatives. In the 1970s Silvio Berlusconi hired the services of a Sicilian gangster to guarantee his safety. “As Italy’s three-time prime minister, he raised eyebrows when he watered down anti-Mafia laws and declared magistrates who fought organised crime mentally disturbed.”

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In Mexico, nine decades of one-party rule proved an ideal seedbed for fascist actions when the government’s will was thwarted. The eagerness of new president Felipe Calderon (in office from 2006 to 2012) to unleash the Mexican Armed Forces in built-up areas, though ostensibly aimed at stamping out cross-border drug traffic, “resulted in an orgy of violence unlike anything the country had seen since 1910”.

The predominant tenor of this impressive book is not doom and gloom but sober realism. Mafias will be with us until men turn into angels. Gingeras also records what the global community has achieved in its fight against darkness. On the cusp of the new millennium, the United Nations convened a conference in Sicily’s main city, Palermo, where governments of 120 countries inked a fresh Convention against Transnational Organised Crime.

The Italian government was in self-congratulatory mode, boasting that it had the Cosa Nostra on the run. Maybe so, but Gingeras adds, without the need for further comment, that the meeting took place under the watchful gaze of 10,000 security officers

Epstein offered chance to buy Pentagon and FBI buildings ITV News

 

Goldman Lawyer, Epstein Conferred on Secret Service Prostitution Scandal Bloomberg