Michael V. E. "Misha" Glenny [1] (born 25 April 1958) is a British journalist and broadcaster, specialising in southeast Europe, global organised crime, and cybersecurity. He is multilingual. He is also the writer and producer of the BBC Radio 4 series, How to Invent a Country. [2]
Glenny was born in Kensington, London, the son of Juliet Mary Crum and Michael Glenny, a Russian studies academic. [3] Glenny described his ancestry as "three-quarters Anglo-Celtic and a quarter Jewish". [4]
He was educated at Magdalen College School in Oxford and studied at the University of Bristol and Prague's Charles University before becoming Central Europe correspondent for The Guardian and later the BBC. He specialised in reporting on the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. While at the BBC, Glenny won Sony special award in 1993's Radio Academy Awards for his "outstanding contribution to broadcasting". [5] He has published three books about Central and Eastern Europe.[ citation needed ]
In McMafia (2008), he wrote that international organised crime could account for 15% of the world's GDP. [6] Glenny advised the US and some European governments on policy issues and for three years ran an NGO helping with the reconstruction of Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo. Glenny appeared in the documentary film, Raw Opium: Pain, Pleasure, Profits (2011). [7]
Glenny's later books continue an interest in international crime. [8] DarkMarket (2011) concerns cybercrime and the activities of hackers involved in phishing and other activities. [9] Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio (2015) about the leading Brazilian drug trafficker Antônio Francisco Bonfim Lopes (known as "Nem") in Rocinha ("Little farm"), a favela (slum). [10] [11]
From January 2012, Glenny was visiting professor at Columbia University's Harriman Institute, [12] teaching a course on "crime in transition". In an interview in October 2011, he also spoke about his new book, DarkMarket; assessing cybercriminals with Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge; the Stuxnet cyberattack which resulted in "gloves off" attention from governments; and other more recent cyberattacks. [13]
Glenny was an executive producer of the BBC One eight-part drama series, McMafia , inspired by his non-fiction book of the same name (2008). [14]
Glenny is a producer and the writer of the BBC Radio 4 series, How to Invent a Country, [15] also made available as a podcast. An audio book of the same name was published by Penguin Random House in January 2021, consisting of the series' first 28 episodes broadcast October 2011–March 2019. [16]
In 2019, Glenny presented a podcast on the life of Vladimir Putin titled Putin: Prisoner of Power. [17]
In 2022, Glenny presented a five-part series, The Scramble for Rare Earths, on BBC Radio 4. In the programmes he says, “In this series I’m finding out why the battle for a small group of metals and critical raw materials is central to rising geopolitical tensions around the world.” [18]
Glenny is married to British journalist and broadcaster Kirsty Lang and has three children, two by his first wife (their daughter took her own life in 2014) [8] and one by Lang. [3]
A gangster is a criminal who is a member of a gang. Most gangs are considered to be part of organized crime. Gangsters are also called mobsters, a term derived from mob and the suffix -ster. Gangs provide a level of organization and resources that support much larger and more complex criminal transactions than an individual criminal could achieve. Gangsters have been active for many years in countries around the world. Gangsters are the subject of many novels, films, television series, and video games.
The Russian mafia, otherwise referred to as Bratva, is a collective of various organized crime related elements originating in the former Soviet Union (FSU). Any of the mafia's groups may be referred to as an "Organized Criminal Group" (OPG). This is sometimes modified to include a specific name, such as the Orekhovskaya OPG. The "P" in the initialism comes from the Russian word for criminal: prestupnaya. Sometimes, the Russian word is dropped in favour of a full translation, and OCG is used instead of OPG.
"Mafia" is an informal term that is used to describe criminal organizations that bear a strong similarity to the organized crime groups from Italy. The central activity of such an organization would be the arbitration of disputes between criminals as well as the organization and enforcement of illicit agreements between criminals through the use of or threat of violence. Mafias often engage in secondary activities such as gambling, loan sharking, drug-trafficking, prostitution, and fraud.
A protection racket is a type of racket and a scheme of organized crime perpetrated by a potentially hazardous organized crime group that generally guarantees protection outside the sanction of the law to another entity or individual from violence, robbery, ransacking, arson, vandalism, and other such threats, in exchange for payments at regular intervals. Each payment is called "protection money" or a "protection fee". An organized crime group determines an affordable or reasonable fee by negotiating with each of its payers, to ensure that each payer can pay the fee on a regular basis and on time. Protections rackets can vary in terms of their levels of sophistication or organization; it is not uncommon for their operations to emulate the structures or methods used by tax authorities within legitimate governments to collect taxes from taxpayers.
Rocinha is the second largest favela in Brazil, located in Rio de Janeiro's South Zone between the districts of São Conrado and Gávea. Rocinha is built on a steep hillside overlooking Rio de Janeiro, and is located about one kilometre from a nearby beach. Most of the favela is on a very steep hill, with many trees surrounding it. Around 200,000 people live in Rocinha, making it the most populous favela in Brazil.
ShadowCrew was a cybercrime forum that operated under the domain name ShadowCrew.com between August 2002 and November 2004.
The Chechen Mafia is one of the largest ethnic organized crime groups operating in the former Soviet Union next to established Russian mafia groups.
Serbian organized crime or Serbian mafia are various criminal organizations based in Serbia or composed of ethnic Serbs in the former Yugoslavia and Serbian diaspora. The organizations are primarily involved in smuggling, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, assassinations, heists, assault, protection rackets, murder, money laundering and illegal gambling. The mafia is composed of several major organized groups, which in turn have wider networks throughout Europe and across the world.
Semion Yudkovich Mogilevich is a Jewish Ukrainian-born Russian organized crime boss. He quickly built a highly structured criminal organization, in the mode of an American mafia family; many of the organization's 250 members are his relatives. He is described by agencies in the European Union and United States as the "boss of all bosses" of most Russian Mafia syndicates in the world, he is believed to direct a multibillion-dollar international criminal empire and is described by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as "the most powerful and dangerous gangster in the world," with immense power and reach at a global scale, and connections to prominent government, military, and law enforcement officials, and powerful politicians around the world. He has been accused by the FBI of "weapons trafficking, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking, and prostitution on an international scale."
The Solntsevskaya Organized Crime Group, also known as the Solntsevskaya Bratva, is a Russian crime syndicate group.
The Bulgarian mafia is a series of organized crime elements originating from Bulgaria.
DarkMarket was an English-speaking internet cybercrime forum. It was created by Renukanth Subramaniam in London, and was shut down in 2008 after FBI agent J. Keith Mularski infiltrated it using the alias Master Splyntr, leading to more than 60 arrests worldwide. Subramaniam, who used the alias JiLsi, admitted conspiracy to defraud and was sentenced to nearly five years in prison in February 2010.
Max Ray Vision is a former computer security consultant and hacker who served a 13-year prison sentence, the longest sentence ever given at the time for hacking charges in the United States. He was convicted of two counts of wire fraud, including stealing nearly 2 million credit card numbers and running up about $86 million in fraudulent charges.
Emmanuel Nwude Odinigwe, popularly known as Owelle of Abagana, is a Nigerian advance-fee fraud expert artist and former Director of Union Bank of Nigeria. He is known for defrauding Nelson Sakaguchi, a Director at Brazil's Banco Noroeste based in São Paulo, of $242 million: $191 million in cash and the remainder in the form of outstanding interest, between 1995 and 1998. His accomplices were Emmanuel Ofolue, Nzeribe Okoli, and Obum Osakwe, along with the husband and wife duo, Christian Ikechukwu Anajemba and Amaka Anajemba, with Christian later being assassinated.
In politics, a mafia state or pakhanate is a state system where the government is tied with organized crime to the degree when government officials, the police, and/or military became a part of the criminal enterprise. According to US diplomats, the expression "mafia state" was coined by Alexander Litvinenko.
S. Hussain Zaidi is an Indian author and former investigative journalist. His works include Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia, Mafia Queens of Mumbai, Black Friday, My Name is Abu Salem and Mumbai Avengers.
Antônio Francisco Bonfim Lopes, better known as Nem or Nem da Rocinha, is a Brazilian drug lord and one of the leaders of "Amigos dos Amigos". Lopes had a net worth of R$100 million, was the undisputed head of all drug trafficking operations in Rocinha and branded by the Brazilian government as "Public Enemy #1".
McMafia is a British crime drama television series created by Hossein Amini and James Watkins, and directed by Watkins. It is inspired by the book McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by journalist Misha Glenny (2008). The series stars James Norton as Alex Godman, the British-raised son of a Russian mafia boss living in London whose father is trying to escape from the world of organised crime. It is co-produced by BBC, AMC Networks, and Cuba Pictures. It premiered in the United Kingdom on BBC One on 1 January 2018, and in the United States on AMC on 26 February 2018.
An unexplained wealth order (UWO) is a type of court order issued by a British court to compel the target to reveal the sources of their unexplained wealth. UWOs were introduced by sections 1–2 of the Criminal Finances Act 2017 and are governed by sections 362A–362T of Part 8 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Persons who fail to account are liable to have assets seized after an enforcement authority, such as the National Crime Agency (NCA), makes a successful appeal to the High Court.
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld is a nonfiction book written by Misha Glenny and published in 2008 by Random House. Glenny is a former correspondent for the BBC World Service who covered Central Europe.
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