illicit: reviews

The Week (November 18, 2005)

It took 400 years to import 12 million African slaves into the New World. Yet in the last decade alone, about 30 million women and children have been trafficked in Southeast Asia. Thanks to the 21st century's international economy and our increasingly open borders, illegal trade has never been more lucrative. According to Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím, the $10 billion human-trafficking racket is just the tip of the iceberg. Today there's a black market for everything, from internal organs to nuclear bomb fuel, from stolen van Goghs to fake Viagra. Fueling this vast apparatus is an equally vast reservoir of dirty money. By some estimates, up to $1.5 trillion in cash is illegally laundered each year.

Naím's book is “light on original reporting” and heavy on newspaper and magazine clippings, said James Pressley in Bloomberg.com . Fortunately, the material is still compelling. “Naím's skill lies in synthesizing information, not in ferreting it out.” Perhaps his most disturbing observation, said Megan McArdle in The New York Sun , is the way crooked enterprises intertwine and intersect. For example, the shadowy masterminds who sneak Mexicans immigrants into the U.S. also coerce them into becoming drug mules. Similarly, “terrorists finance their operations by selling smuggled cigarettes.”

In this kind of tangled system, said Anne-Marie Slaughter in The Washington Post , it's easy for ordinary people to become complicit. Illegal trade, Naím says, isn't some kind of hidden underworld. “It is more like the veins of mold running through Roquefort, not only visible but indispensable for making the cheese what it is.” The respectable executive “seeking a paid escort on a business trip” is as much a part of the system as shopaholics who buy “a fake Louis Vuitton on New York's Canal Street just for knocking around town.” Unfortunately, Naím offers “only a grab bag of incremental responses.” Some of his suggestions, like “new technology for tracking criminals,” are obvious. Others, like legalizing drugs, are contentious at best. Naím makes a good case that the sheer volume of illegal trade threatens “the fabric of society itself.” Fair enough. “So what's our plan?”