MARK GALEOTTI - HOW CRIME ORGANISES OUR WORLD
James Kennedy interviews historian and security expert Professor Mark Galeotti about his book Homo Criminalis. They explore how organized crime is embedded in the global economy, money laundering, how gangs become governments, Russian power and disinformation, and modern geopolitical dynamics.
James Kennedy Mr. Mark Galeotti. How are you doing, sir?
Mark Galeotti Hi there, I'm well, thanks. Good to talk to you.
James Kennedy You too. Thank you so much for doing this, Mark. I really do appreciate it, and I am fascinated by the world that you explore and explain. So before we do the deep dive into the detail, I wanted to start big and ask you, could you explain the global power structure and dynamic as it currently is, involving the hierarchy of superpowers and how organized crime slots into that? How would you describe that?
Mark Galeotti Gosh, okay. Well, I'm glad this is a four-hour podcast, so we actually have a chance to talk about this. No, I think for me the interesting thing is, on one level, we know what the power structure is. You know, there are the big countries like China, the United States, and to a lesser extent, Russia, which can throw their weight around, and there are the big beasts of the economic order—whether we're talking about Elon Musk or Apple or Microsoft—who also have disproportionate weight. So in some ways, the world is as it looks, but at the same time—and again, this is a key theme of the book—what we have to understand is the degree to which, almost running like capillary veins through all of these structures, there are these channels of criminality. And it's not about—I mean, I would love to think that there was some kind of global criminal combine like Spectre, whose members meet in some kind of base, probably in an extinct volcano, who decide how operations in Asia proceed and that kind of thing. It's not like that. It's actually about markets and understandings. And a whole bunch of people who, in and of themselves, aren't that important or powerful or smart, but nonetheless, put them together, and they represent an additional force that in so many ways works with, not against, the overpowers of the world.
James Kennedy Well, it's interesting that you refer to this organized crime as veins that run through the entire global power system, because that's quite a presence, if that's the case. And I'm wondering, just for clarity, are we talking still about the Hollywood version of organized crime—mafia, gangsters, and drug barons with machine guns—or are we talking about the more boring kind of offshore banking and all that sort of stuff?
Mark Galeotti Well, the point is, they're all part of one criminal ecosystem. Yes, you've got these drug cartels in Latin America, Afghan heroin barons, you name it. And increasingly now, the people whose underground laboratories create synthetic drugs. Yes, they're doing what we might think of as the sharp end, the obvious crime. But what do you do when you have not just sacks, but almost carloads of cash? You have to launder that. You have to move that into the legitimate financial system so that you can hide its origins and then actually use it safely. And that means it goes into the hands of precisely these accountants, lawyers, and other facilitators. Then a lot of that gets reinvested. Some of it gets reinvested in totally legitimate activity, and some gets invested in halfway house stuff—counterfeit goods, for example. Once upon a time, it would have been CDs. Now, obviously, it's often designer goods and such like, which a lot of people think is crime, but not really crime. But the point is, these are all interconnected. This is the thing: we like to think that crime is "the other," that it's in other countries, or it's guys called Nobby with broken noses conspiring in that pub that you wouldn't dare go into.
James Kennedy East End of London, yeah.
Mark Galeotti Exactly, all of that stuff. And yeah, there is all that that goes on. But the point is, it comes all the way into our own homes. Even to the point where—although clearly the big furniture makers claim to have very reputable sources—there's a lot of illegal logging that goes into making furniture that may well be in large, well-known brand stores. Again, I'm certainly not going to name names because we live in litigious times. And we don't tend to think of illegal logging as a crime like human trafficking or these very obvious, horrible things. But actually, a lot of the money that comes from illegal logging may well go into drug production, or a lot of drug money might go into illegal logging. And the same bankers will happily launder the lot of it.
James Kennedy And when it comes to the money laundering thing, I've always wondered about the level of awareness on behalf of these major high street banks. Many of them have been openly guilty of laundering massive amounts of criminal money through their systems. Are they aware that they're doing so? What's the level of complicity in this whole house of cards?
Mark Galeotti Yeah, on one level, I'd say we should never underestimate the capacity of human beings to rationalize what they do. The thing of the matter is, look, if you turned up to a bank in the city with a suitcase full of cocaine-smeared $100 bills, they're going to call the police, obviously. The thing is, you don't do that. You've had the courtesy to pre-wash it. What you do is there's a whole chain. First of all, you get your original money and you move it into a banking system, even one in a very dodgy jurisdiction. Often it's by what's called smurfing, because if you put in $10,000 at once, that has to be recorded, registered, and notified. So, you have lots and lots of smaller sums being paid in. You have a bunch of people whose job is literally to go from bank to bank, paying money in. Anyway, so you've got your money into the system, but it's in a very dodgy jurisdiction. So, you slowly, bit by bit, move it up the food chain. It then moves to slightly less dodgy ones, but they're still not going to be very stringent about all that know-your-client sort of stuff. And then, after you've done a whole bunch of these transactions—first of all, you ping your money all around the world. Remember, money isn't a physical thing now; it's a bunch of ones and zeros being moved around virtual space, because you want to make it as difficult as possible for the police to prove what it is. After a certain point, you move it into places like Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, or the UAE, where you're then just a jump or two away from the gold star jurisdictions like London, New York, or Frankfurt. So anyway, you're moving it up. And by the time it reaches there, in some cases, yes, the bankers may well have no idea. In other cases, they may well have an idea, but they have deniability. Someone I was at university with went into the city to get a very well-paying job in compliance, and then about 10 years in, actually left the city. He said, "Look, actually, the problem is this: in theory, my job is to make sure that my bank complies with all the various rules and regulations. In practice, my job was to ensure that no one can prove that the bank doesn't comply with all the regulations." And this individual decided that they'd had enough—admittedly, after they bought their nice house in central London and paid off the mortgage. But I can't blame them for that. So, I think the thing is that some people don't know, some people don't care, and some people might have a bit of a concern, but as I said, all the t's have been crossed and the i's have been dotted. When it comes down to it, their annual bonus depends on the business they handle, so they just close their eyes and think it's probably fine. Also, they think, "Well, if it doesn't come to me, it's going to go to a different bank in the city, or it's going to go to Frankfurt, New York, Paris, or wherever." Again, that's always a great rationalization.
James Kennedy Okay, so it's not eight dudes sitting at a table in a darkened room smoking cigars with a single light bulb, consciously conspiring to do these things knowingly. It's much more just that typical human ability to convince yourself that it's happening elsewhere and change the subject.
Mark Galeotti Look, you do get those cases. I mean, every now and then there's big cases like the Bank of New York case, which was a massive case of organized money laundering. Its great virtue and unique selling point when you have that is that you cut out a lot of the intervening stages. It costs a lot of money to launder your money because you're paying cuts all along the line. If you actually have dodgy bankers who are willing to expedite the process, they can offer you a much better rate. The point is, they're also much more likely to get caught, and they tend to. But these cases tend to involve tens or hundreds of millions of pounds, and we think, "Oh my gosh," but that is a drop in the ocean compared with the total sums being laundered, because most of it just happens in this much more gentle circulatory process of the global economy and gets lost in that.
James Kennedy So from the perspective of the system at large then, is organized crime seen as just another very valid, morally neutral working part of the system—a contributing factor that is bringing in this massive amount of money that's being laundered into the system you're talking about, and the ability to move certain goods around the place? Is it not really a moral issue as far as the system is concerned, because organized crime is just seen as a valid and normal part of the working machinery?
Mark Galeotti It's unlikely that that many of these companies deal directly with organized crime. Again, it's all through intermediaries; it's all through people who swear blind that this is legitimate. If we take the example of logging, they'll say these are trees from certified sustainable forests, and they'll have nice brochures to prove it. The question is, when someone's offering you a good deal, do you probe too deeply, or do you accept the deal and then, if it blows up in your face, say you were shocked to discover there was anything dodgy about it? If we really pull it back to the macro level, I once talked to someone from the IMF (the International Monetary Fund) and said, "Look, I know that nowadays it's impossible to disaggregate, but if you could wave a magic wand and instantly take all the dirty money out of circulation, would you do it?" And he said, "God no, that would crash the global economy," because of the degree to which everything has now become dependent upon that. And you may well not know it. You may well not know that part of the pension pot you're collecting is actually invested in the economy through one of its subsidiaries that is using trafficked labor or questionable materials. But the point is that if all of a sudden you try and take that out, the result is catastrophic. If we think of the 2008 global financial crisis, that was a liquidity crisis—there wasn't enough cash in the system to lubricate the workings of the global economic machine. Although it is something that is very hotly disputed, as far as I'm concerned, the case has been made that although ultimately this was turned around by huge amounts of government intervention (especially U.S. government intervention), governments don't move quickly. In fact, the initial moves that helped stop the entire global financial system from just seizing up was—and we ought to offer up a little prayer to them—the drug barons. Because they spotted this as an opportunity. They had huge amounts of cash that they hadn't yet been able to launder; they literally were sitting on houses where every room was stacked high with banknotes. In those circumstances, they thought, "Well, this is a good opportunity, because at this point no one's going to question where money comes from." In aggregate terms, this wasn't a huge amount compared to what the governments eventually would spend, but the point is criminals can move fast. They could move in hours and days where governments take weeks, and that probably helped stop the worst impact of the 2008 financial crisis. Now, not that we should therefore be raising statues to the heroic drug lords, but it's a reminder of the degree to which these days you can't really unpick the legal from the illegal.
James Kennedy Yeah, that's fascinating stuff, man. Well, using a current example then of the very real world of the drug industry and the recent U.S. invasion of Venezuela under the pretext of wanting to curtail the flooding of American streets with illegal drugs: is that legit, or is there something much more nefarious happening under the hood there?
Mark Galeotti I think that there's something much more politically nefarious. Criminal, maybe with a small 'c' or in a moral sense, but not what we typically think of. For a start, it's worth noting that, yeah, do drugs, particularly cocaine, pass through Venezuelan ports? Yeah, of course they do. Is that the main conduit? No, absolutely not. If you really want to address the flow of drugs, particularly fentanyl, fentanyl doesn't come from Venezuela. You'd actually have to decide to invade Mexico—and Donald, if you're listening, I'm not advocating that. It's clear that this was about oil, this was about ego, and this was simply about a U.S. president with little impulse control who's got all these cool toys to play with and wanting to play with them. But the interesting thing is this: there's now talk about how basically Venezuela will be forced to trade with the United States, and U.S. companies—although U.S. companies don't seem that interested in Venezuelan oil because of the huge amounts of money they'd have to invest, much of which would then be embezzled or stolen—nonetheless, what is clear is that if there are sweetheart deals between the United States and Venezuela, this is all perfect territory for corruption. The market is a very imperfect beast for handling economic allocation, but the only problem is all the other mechanisms seem even worse. As soon as you start distorting the market, you create opportunities. Smart guys in the market in both the United States and Venezuela are going to be thinking, "How can I make money off this?" That's what we saw in Iraq after the invasion; it's always what we saw in Afghanistan. So, basically sit back and wait, because almost anything that happens in the world—every tax that is levied, every ban that is introduced, every invasion—there will be smart, morally bankrupt, but imaginative individuals who will be thinking, "How can I make money off this?" A lot of them are going to fail, but enough of them are going to succeed.
James Kennedy So is there an interest then in the system maintaining the status quo as it is with regards to the illegal status of certain industries such as drugs? If the U.S. government really wanted to remove the criminal elements of this issue, they could just legalize drugs, for example. But is there a mutual benefit to the legal world and the illegal world of things staying as they are? Are there certain benefits the legal world derives from that?
Mark Galeotti That's a really interesting question, and it's a really big one. In some cases, there are some drugs which absolutely we shouldn't be legalizing because they are incredibly dangerous—there's a difference between marijuana and heroin. There's also the problem of the moral stature of various things. Although we have internalized the idea that tobacco and alcohol are the acceptable drugs, others will say, "Has nobody thought of the children?" and all that. But even once you put aside those concerns, there is this issue about who benefits from the continued illegalization not just of drugs, but of all sorts of commodities. One of them is clearly the criminals themselves. Criminals don't want legalization, because then you've got all sorts of new competition, you haven't got these artificially jacked-up prices, you're going to face regulation, and all that kind of thing. If that's what you wanted, you wouldn't have been a gangster. But then also the enforcement agencies: if you ask in the UK, on the whole, there are a good number of senior police officers who would see a certain amount of decriminalization because they think at the moment it's pointless and a waste of resources. However, if you think of a country where you actually have a specialist anti-drugs force like the DEA in the United States, legalize drugs and that's it—they have no rationale anymore. You also have institutional interests. I don't want to say that every DEA agent is thinking that, but on the other hand, there is clearly an institutional drive to say, "No, what we need is more policing, and that means more budgets," because in a bureaucracy, essentially your budget is your sign of virility and machismo. You also have it from the financial perspective: legalized drug movers do not need to launder their money, which means that they won't be willing to pay way over the odds in order to have a blind eye turned to their financial transactions. There's a whole variety of these little interests. None of them are critical—it's not like you've actually got the City of London turning to the British government and saying, "You must not legalize the following drugs because..." But all of these things act in some ways as a break on movement and debate. A subtle little resistance. Given that, particularly in democracies, governments essentially tend to go for the line of least resistance, this is one of the reasons why no one really wants to tackle these tricky issues.
James Kennedy And I suppose it does make for convenience as well. It's handy if you want to put your hands on a shedload of dough, like you just mentioned in the financial crisis, but also as a cover for illegally invading countries at will under the guise of drug policy. Or if you're a government and you want to do some covert operation off the books and you need some dudes working in the shadows to pull it off for you behind the scenes, I suppose it's handy to have a few friends in the organized crime world to call on.
Mark Galeotti Yeah, exactly. And then you can always, if need be, distract the populace with some more dramatic videos of a ship being boarded, blown up, or another drugs raid.
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James Kennedy Well, I want to come onto the orange man himself in just a bit, because I would love to ask you some questions about what's happening there. But before we do that, I want to stay at home for a second and ask you: what role specifically does Britain play in this whole global web?
Mark Galeotti Britain, as you'd imagine given its role as a crucial player that punches above its weight in global financial and wider business circles, is an interesting one. Because we've been talking about this for a long time. You do what you're told. And yes, we have all kinds of icing on the top of that cake that says you pay your tax, and that's why there's a fire brigade that will come if your house burns down, and that's why all sorts of other benefits accrue. But when it comes down to it, you don't get to say, "Actually, I'll take my chances. I don't need a fire brigade, thank you. I'm going to pay for private healthcare, so I don't need an NHS." No, you don't get to say that, because the state ultimately says, "That's your choice, but you still have to pay your tax, or else bad things will happen to you." States are engines for collecting revenue and then spending them, and if need be, backing all that up with force.
James Kennedy Well, I think that also perfectly covers the second question on the back of the book, which I was going to throw back at you, which is: when does a gang become a government? Because there are similarities, aren't there, in how the two things function? Gangs have extortions and protection money and things like that, which has parallels with the way a government functions.
Mark Galeotti Yeah, and particularly, I mention in the book a case when I went on a ride-along with New Jersey State Troopers into Newark, New Jersey. It's weird and always a bit confusing—there's Newark right next to New York. In some ways, Newark is a miserable, impoverished, downtrodden place, really. I lived there for two weeks, and we had multiple fatal shootings in that street. But the point is, it's also the place where a lot of the people who do the poorly paid night work for New York live. And this is a place in which, frankly, there are very high levels of corruption, even within the local police and so forth. But nonetheless, this is really where gangs control. Once it was the Italian mafia that was dominant, but they've largely moved out. There are still a few places—I was once taken to go and have a drink in what was one of the remaining mafia hangouts by a couple of local cops. But now, essentially, it's African-American and Latin American drug gangs that control the streets. We were doing an arrest warrant, and the interesting thing is that within Newark, there were quite well known not just the boundary lines between different gangs' territory, but also a sense of each different gang's characteristics. And there were clearly the "good" gangs and the "bad" gangs. The bad gangs were just simply predatory and exploitative; you didn't mess with them because otherwise they would do horrible things to you. But then there were the good gangs, who were still predatory and exploitative, but who understood that there was a need for some kind of social contract. So that if you were a shopkeeper and you paid your protection, that's it—you were fine until the next protection was due. They weren't going to come tomorrow and say, "I changed my mind, pay us again." You could, for example, claim a degree of protection from other gangs if they tried to come into the turf. So even at that stage—and I should stress these are all deeply unpleasant individuals—for pragmatic reasons, they had realized that it is worth developing some kind of relationship with the local community because you were thinking long term. You were fully aware that it's not just that the local community could band together against you—that's unlikely in an age of automatic weapons—but what they could do is inform on you to the authorities. And the authorities, after all, are the biggest gang in town; they have more guns and more people when they want to deploy them. So it just makes sense. In the same way as the Kray twins in the East End created a myth about the fact that, yeah, they were bad lads, but a granny could collect her pension in peace—none of that was true, but nonetheless, it was part of the myth that they built. You go into a pub, you buy a drink for everyone, that kind of thing, as a way of trying to say, "Yeah, these are not nice people, but they are somehow connected to us, and it could be worse, so we'll settle for these." So this is really how gangs become governments. It's often when they realize that it's in their interests to at least convince the people that they are plundering that, to a degree, they are better than the alternatives—much like how the Italian mafia framed itself in New York as Cosa Nostra, "our thing."
James Kennedy Well, the third and final question on the back of the book that you pose—and it's an interesting word in this, which I want to highlight—you say: "Is organized crime at the heart of every modern state?" You use the word "heart" there, which I think is important because that's quite a central component to a system, isn't it? Is that your feeling?
Mark Galeotti Yeah, I mean, it's a bit provocative. Provocative because, obviously, we want to sell books, so you stick a comment like that on the back. I often find when I go out and give public talks that people say, "Oh, they're all corrupt and they're all rotten." That's not true, and that's not fair, however little I like standing up and defending our politicians and so forth these days. But I think it is this sense that we don't appreciate the degree to which all the structures of the modern world are underpinned by and penetrated by criminality. I give the example in the book of the sand mafia. Construction needs certain high-grade sand, and therefore that becomes a scarce commodity. Therefore, you have organized crime gangs that essentially hoover up sand from beaches and riverbeds so much so that you've got whole beaches in India that are disappearing. And the struggle over sand is actually something that people fight gun battles over. Now, we don't necessarily think of that when you see another development going up, another block of flats, or another shiny office building. But it may well be that amongst the sacks of sand being used for its foundations are ones that have come from these kind of criminal activities on the other side of the globe. Globalization has become such a buzzword these days that means everything and nothing, but it is true that we now all live in one economic space, one information space with the internet and the relative ease of the movement of people and goods. To this end, everything is interconnected. Your street corner pusher who is selling little bags of heroin may well never have left the country and doesn't have a passport. But if you look at the economy that has got that heroin to him, let's say that heroin has come from Afghanistan. Maybe it was processed there, or maybe it was processed just across the border in Central Asia or in Pakistan. Then perhaps it was moved all the way along the so-called southern route via Iran and Turkey. It's an incredibly complex global infrastructure that has led to that one rather unimpressive individual selling the drugs. That person doesn't look like they're representative of a global economy, but like it or not, they are. And likewise, modern states—the finances that drive them, the economies, the calculations they make, and the degree to which we often accept criminality abroad for our own national interest. Until not so long ago in Germany, if you paid a bribe or were corrupt in Germany, that was a criminal offense. But if you were a German company that paid a bribe abroad, that was tax deductible. I should stress that that has been changed, but nonetheless, for a long time that was the situation. How many of our big contracts for exports end up with all sorts of facilitation fees—in other words, bribery—being paid? But we accept that because we want to sell our goods abroad and we know that all of our rivals are going to be doing the same thing. There's a lot of furor at the moment about the degree to which Russia, in its conflict with the West, is essentially weaponizing criminality and hiring gangsters to carry out sabotage attacks like the arson that took place in Leyton recently. But in some ways, that's just a particular extreme end of a way in which states have used criminals as agents abroad whenever they've needed to—whether it was the Sicilian mafia helping the Allies invade Sicily during the Second World War (which they did for their own interests), or today, intelligence services using the services of hackers to carry out cyber operations against other countries. Now, of course, I'm sure the British intelligence community doesn't do that at all, but there are certain other countries that don't have quite the same standards.
James Kennedy Of course. Well, I'm so glad you mentioned Russia there, because I wanted to come onto that. We're living in very interesting times now, and we did talk at the start about the global power structure that we live within currently. And we have a very interesting leader of the West right now—the orange one himself—who seems to have more in common with our traditional rival in the east, Russia. He seems to have more in common with their main guy, Putin, than he does with working people or the people he's supposed to represent. What the hell is going on with those two? What is their relationship? Is Russia as powerful as we are led to believe? Does it pose a genuine threat to Western hegemony? Are those guys in a bromance? What the hell is going on there?
Mark Galeotti Yeah, loads to unpack there. To start with the Trump-Putin relationship: however much it would be fun, I don't believe any of the stories about compromising materials, corrupt payments, or anything like that. I think it's much simpler than that: Trump is a wannabe strongman. Remember, it's not just Putin—Trump basically hasn't met an autocrat he doesn't like. If he met Maduro, they'd probably hit it off perfectly fine. I think Trump has a certain vision of the world which means, firstly, big powers get to tell smaller countries what to do, and secondly, history is essentially shaped by a handful of great men (and I would stress men), and he obviously regards himself as that. In that context, he looks at people like Putin or Xi Jinping in China and thinks, "Yeah, that's how it should be—the great and benevolent leader gives an order and people obey." None of this faffing around with checks and balances and supreme courts and everything else. So, he actually shares a worldview with Putin, which is why they can get on more, but ultimately Trump is interested in Trump. The interesting thing is, if you look at the Russian press and the Russian expert commentary, they have never believed that Trump is on their side. They have always said that Trump has his interests and we have ours, and in some cases they coincide, which is great, but then they're going to eventually diverge. More broadly in terms of Russian power, you often get this stat brought up: "How can Russia be a great power when its economy is only the GDP size of Spain's?" or whatever. It's a totally meaningless, bullshit kind of analogy because it doesn't work that way. It's not like the Russians are buying their weapons from the West, so the ruble to pound/euro/dollar exchange rate doesn't really matter. Also, Russia is not a superpower—it's not the Soviet Union. Sure, it has one particular capacity, which is its nuclear arsenal that can blow up the world, but that's all it can really do. It's a very limited thing. At the same time, what Russia does have is a kind of perverse power of inconvenience. What Russia can do is just basically mess things up for other people. It can cast inconvenient votes in the Security Council of the United Nations, and it can support various disruptive powers around the world, which attracts attention and distracts Western politicians. I have a particular axe to grind because I was in the first batch of Brits who were banned from Russia in June for my supposed "Russophobia." And I think, actually, the greatest Russophobe, the greatest hater of Russia, sits in the Kremlin because of what Putin is doing to Russia's long-term prospects. But in the short term, if you really don't care—if you don't care if you're going to get a Nobel Peace Prize, if you don't care what people are going to say about you, and if you don't ultimately value the soft power ties that so much of the modern world is connected by—then you have a considerable degree of autonomy. But when it comes down to it, sure, Putin is fighting his war in Ukraine, and he's slowly and at huge cost winning. Or rather, the way I tend to frame it is both Russia and Ukraine are losing, but the Ukrainians are losing a bit faster. On the other hand, he's also essentially having to sacrifice all of Russia's stake in the global world. They couldn't do anything about Venezuela even if they'd wanted to. They weren't able to ultimately protect Assad in Syria, except personally—his regime fell, but Assad himself has a nice flat in Moscow. Even within what was once their sphere of influence of the post-Soviet states in the South Caucasus and in Central Asia, they're no longer the deciding power the way they were then. Now, essentially, China and other countries like Turkey and Iran are increasingly encroaching. So, yes, Putin has the power to continue to resist doing what we want, but it's at a cost. God knows when I'll ever get back to Russia. I'm still optimistic—I feel I'm going to have to outlive Putin, but I do have numbers on my side in that respect. But I do wonder what kind of a country it will be by the time I'm able to get back.
James Kennedy Yeah, that sucks, man. Well, one of the other inconveniences that we're seeing with regards to Russia as well is their ability to create tension in the narrative and to cause confusion, stress, arguments, and division, primarily online through the use of social media and the intensive use of these bot farms and click farms to flood social media with misinformation and disinformation, just to confuse the hell out of everybody and kind of enjoy the mess that unfolds. I'm thinking, of course, about Brexit, and the supposed influence that Russia had in the Brexit vote. Is that accurate? Is that Russian power on display there, or is their role in Brexit in particular blown out of proportion?
Mark Galeotti It's both true and blown out of proportion. I would dearly love to be able to blame Brexit on Putin. People who do these very deep calculations have suggested that Russian propaganda changed the result by about 0.2 percent. The vote was close, but it wasn't so close that that really matters. What the Russians can do—and again, there's a lot of mythology about how they use misinformation, disinformation, and amplify narrative lines—is radicalize. The Russians haven't got magic mind control powers; they can't change your view. What they can do, to use the language of terrorism studies, is to radicalize. If you take Brexit, it is clear that the Russians were trying to support Brexit because, from their point of view, it was great: Brexit was a wonderful idea because it helped disrupt the European Union and created a lot of hassle, fuss, and distraction in the West. A lot of this is about distracting us and dividing us. They couldn't target people who were Remainers and change their minds. What they could do is take people who were soft Brexiteers—people who broadly speaking thought that the European Union wasn't a good thing, but didn't really care that much or weren't certain if they were actually going to go out and vote—and persuade them that this was an existential moment for Britain, that it was really important, and that they absolutely should go and vote. We see that generally. Putin's Russia has no real ideology; there's all this nationalist, patriotic stuff, but there isn't anything like the Communist Party. That's very liberating for them, because it means that they can essentially amplify every single convenient voice. They just look for disruptive voices. If you look at America, at the same time as they were supporting Black Lives Matter, they were supporting the National Rifle Association. If you look at Europe, they can support extremists of the left and of the right—people who talk about the need to have a stronger state, and people who are secessionists like the Basques or the Scots. They don't care; what they want to do is disrupt us. So, every single convenient radical voice that they think might help, they will try and big up and amplify. It doesn't mean these people are in any way pawns of the Russians, but simply the fact that we are democracies with all kinds of different shades of opinion and disagreements works to the Russians' advantage. Now, the real disruptive things are nothing to do with the Russians—they're to do with the algorithms that shape our social media bubbles. Elon Musk, rather than Vladimir Putin, has a much greater role in shaping narratives in Western democracies. However, what really does worry me is that we are getting to see that the Russians in some ways are learning tricks from the advertising business in the West, and they are turning to artificial intelligence to micro-target. Once upon a time, targeting was fairly broad: you'd find a particular online community that supported a view and try to amp it up. Now they can say, "When we have a constituency of people who are Brits from the West who supported Brexit, are feeling disillusioned with the Labour government, and are middle income but worried about whether their kids are going to be able to buy a home, we can focus it down to that level and create messages that are actually targeted for that constituency and send it to them." Because this is what advertisers have been starting to do. So, the Russians are going to do it. My concern is not so much about what the Russians are going to do with this; the Russians actually are very imaginative and very tech-oriented. Russia is a lot more cyberpunk than any Western country. One day I want to write a book about Russia as a cyberpunk country, but anyway—too many projects, not enough time. But what happens if the Chinese, with hugely greater resources, start thinking, "Huh, this looks quite neat. How can we spread disaffection, disarray, and disunity in the West using these technologies?" Because this is stuff which is relatively cheap once you've got the computing capacity to do so. Who knows who's going to be the next antagonist nation over the horizon? At the moment we focus on the Russians and the Chinese, with a little side order of Iran and North Korea, but we don't know. Are we going to be fearing the Brazilians, the Belgians, or whoever? God knows. But the idea is that once these techniques and technologies start to get developed, they can be applied by others.
James Kennedy Yeah, and very difficult to untangle and unpick that from legitimate forms of information as well, because it's all delivered through the same noisy platforms.
Mark Galeotti Yeah, and because again it often doesn't depend on lies. We tend to have a focus that's all about disinformation and lies, and the trouble is that that has a tendency to lead to a game in which we look at inconvenient truths that don't fit our particular mindset and call them lies and disinformation. I always find this bizarre: sometimes I'll write an article that appears online, and you look at the comments—which is always a big mistake, you should never ever do—and there'll be one comment that says, "Who is this neocon, anti-Russian NATO shill?" and another one off the same article that says, "Oh, I hope you've been collecting those checks from Moscow." (I wish!) We have the capacity to read different things into what people say. But also, from the Russians' point of view, what they have realized is that while there is sometimes a place for a strategic lie, even more powerful is an inconvenient truth brought to people's attention. Sometimes they will even create those truths. For example, in France, the Russians paid some locals to put anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish cemeteries. So that actually happened—yes, it happened because they basically paid people to do it—but then the Russian troll and media misinformation machine used the footage of that to try and prove, "You see, France is an anti-Semitic country; it proves the rise of Nazism in the West." So, sometimes you create a truth and then you spin that truth, and that's harder to fight because it's not just simply saying, "No, it didn't happen." Until you know the actual facts of how it happened and who did it, it's something that really did happen.
James Kennedy I think the problem is that finding the facts takes time and energy, whereas flooding the internet with clickbaity, emotionally triggering, salacious video content takes seconds. Certainly with AI now, that can just be an unstoppable tsunami of disinformation and misdirection coming our way. I think that, for me, feels like the real battleground of the future is going to be in information. Do you think it is?
Mark Galeotti Horrific. Insofar as none of us actually have answers—if one looks at the current debate over Grok and its capacity to create pictures of people undressed, Grok as an AI tool just simply made it easier. But if you want to do that, you can with a whole variety of other tools already, and no one's going to stop it. I think this is the problem precisely: technology is moving at such a pace that it's not just that we can't regulate what's happening in the future, we can't regulate what's happening tomorrow. We have no idea what's happening tomorrow. My view is, frankly, if you want to know what's happening tomorrow, you just read the best science fiction books out there, because they're probably going to tell you more than any number of government reports about what's going to be happening. If I can just loop this back to the themes of the book, one of the things that strikes me is we're so bad at what's called "red teaming"—in other words, trying to put ourselves in the heads of the bad guys. If there's one thing that I would hope policymakers get from the book if they read it—and I hope they will buy it, and read it too—it's precisely this idea: whenever you're going to bring in some new initiative, law, tax, or regulation, have some smart people sit down and think, "Well, okay, how could this be abused and manipulated? How does this create criminal opportunities?" Because I can guarantee you that it will. Now, it doesn't mean we don't do it—some things we're not going to just let people go into the supermarket and buy heroin for all kinds of good reasons—but at least then it gives us a chance of being ahead of the game. Because otherwise, what happens time and time again is some new law is brought in, often for the best possible intentions (like banning CFC gases which create greenhouse gases), and then only afterwards do we realize how, in the process, we created a criminal market in both disposing of fridges that use old CFCs and supplying people who want to keep their existing ones. Then you have to go through all the process of working out how you can respond and what you need to change in the laws, by which time the criminals have been at it for years. If only someone had thought, "Hang on a minute, if we're going to do X, then the gangsters are going to do Y, so maybe we should work Z into the principle as well just to try and head that off."
James Kennedy Right. Well, unfortunately sir, my time with you has come to an end, and as much as I would love to keep talking to you for hours and ask you another 500 questions, I'm going to have to ask one more and get the hell out of your way. So I want to finish with the biggie to calm everybody down a little bit: are we heading towards World War III?
Mark Galeotti I don't think we are. That's the short answer. The slightly longer answer is, when it comes down to it, everyone's playing brinkmanship games. They've been playing brinkmanship games for a long time, so there's a chance that they'll misunderstand and miscalculate, but to be perfectly honest, no one has an interest in letting things go that far.
James Kennedy Well, amen to that. Thank you for reassuring us all, Mark. We have now got to plug this incredible book of yours: Homo Criminalis: How Crime Organizes the World is out now. Please, please, please go and get it. Go and get five—buy one for your friends, buy one for your grandmother, and join the joyride through the murky underbelly of how the world really works. Fascinating stuff, and if ever we all needed a little bit of enlightenment and understanding of how the world really works right now and what is at play, then this is the book for you. Homo Criminalis by Mark Galeotti—go and get it, people! Also, you can follow Mark and stay up to date with everything he's doing at @markgaleotti on all of his socials. He's got tons of writing online; get involved, check it out, show him some love, and go buy the damn book! Mark, thank you so much for today, man. I really appreciate it. It's been a fascinating chat. I wish you all the best, and I'll see you next time. All the best with the book and everything going forward.
Mark Galeotti Yeah, absolutely. I've had a blast.
Key Points:
The podcast returns for January 2026 with guest Professor Mark Galeotti, a leading expert on Russia, security, and organized crime.
Galeotti's new book, "Homo Criminalis," argues that organized crime runs like capillary veins through global power structures.
Organized crime operates as an interconnected ecosystem linking drug cartels, money laundering, and legitimate financial institutions.
Money laundering relies on "smurfing," layered transactions, and offshore jurisdictions, with banks often enabling it through willful blindness.
During the 2008 financial crisis, drug barons' fast-moving cash helped prevent the global financial system from seizing up.
Russia wields a "perverse power of inconvenience" through disinformation, but its role in Brexit was real yet exaggerated.
Galeotti does not believe the world is heading toward World War Three, though miscalculation remains a risk.
Summary:
James Kennedy returns to podcasting after months spent completing his new album with the Underdogs, which he says is finished, sounds great, and will be released soon. He then introduces Professor Mark Galeotti, a historian and leading expert on Russia, security, and organized crime, whose new book "Homo Criminalis" explores how crime organizes the world.
Galeotti explains that organized crime runs like capillary veins through global power structures, connecting drug cartels, money launderers, accountants, lawyers, and major banks. He describes money laundering as a layered process involving smurfing, offshore jurisdictions, and eventual entry into gold-star financial centers like London and New York, with bankers often maintaining plausible deniability. He notes that an IMF contact once said removing all dirty money would crash the global economy, and that drug barons' fast-moving cash helped stabilize the financial system during the 2008 crisis. The conversation also covers Britain's role in global finance, how gangs evolve into governments by building social contracts, and Russia's use of disinformation. Galeotti argues that Russia exploits existing divisions rather than changing minds, and that AI-driven micro-targeting will make this worse. He reassures listeners that World War Three is unlikely, though miscalculation remains a danger. The episode ends with a plug for his book.
The James Kennedy Podcast is a Society and Culture podcast hosted by musician and author, James Kennedy. Exploring the big questions around health, social issues, the arts, politics, mental health, the human condition and how to navigate this thing called life through casual conversations with scientists, activists, rock stars, philosophers and academics. Please subscribe, leave a rating and support the show.
