Misha Glenny Quotes

Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.

Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.

In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.

The American people might have a criminal syndicate running their government.

Crime, money, power, drugs - are all linked.

Corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion are global problems, not just challenges for developing countries.

Americans accept that gangsters are running the government.

He [Donald Trump] is like - he's a magnet for crime and extortion and, you know, just really criminal investments which are extremely dangerous.

The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.

We don't know what proportion of public funds is regularly lost to collusion and corruption. Is it 25 per cent? 30 per cent? We do know that a portion of these public funds are feeding organized crime.

The two greatest priorities for my government are tackling tax evasion and corruption.

There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.

About 25 years ago, I started out as a reporter covering politics. And that sort of just evolved into organized crime, because organized crime and politics were the same thing in Boston.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

Most men think graft a sporadic evil, breaking out here and there, with no connection between outbreaks. I shared the same opinion, but very soon I discovered that the graft in the cities always leads to the graft in the State.

It's interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.

I don't know whether crime is dictating business or business is dictating crime.

They have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption. They have made speculation and public robbery a science. They have loaded the nation, the state, the county, and the city with debt.

Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.

Legitimate institutions historically have been defenseless in the face of outright fraud.

When you move off a point of power, pay all your obligations on the nail, empower all your friends completely and move off with your pockets full of artillery, potential blackmail on every erstwhile rival, unlimited funds in your private account and the addresses of experienced assassins and go live in Bulgravia and bribe the police.

Most major criminals operating in this country do so because of relationships they have with politicians who allow them to operate.

Cultural difference cannot be an excuse for the blatant levels of corruption that bedevil many parts of Africa. Corruption is one of Africa’s key problems. African societies are riddled with it – from kleptocratic leaders at the top, salting money away in Western bank accounts, to soldiers at roadblocks demanding bribes to let you through, to clerks in government bureaucracies charging to hand out official forms. But we in the rich world do not have clean hands here. Corruption is fed by big Western companies that routinely offer bribes to African leaders.

Once the state becomes the ultimate beneficiary of crime proceeds, how different is it, really, from being simply the most powerful gang in a battlefield of gangs?

We do have endemic corruption, but most of it is not political.