Customer Reviews

Wages Of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, And The Underworld Economy

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R.T. Naylor has a better understanding of illicit markets, than most regulators have. He has obviously done extensive research, on the mechanics of money laundering for example, and knows the legitimate banking system, as well as the underground financial system. I suspect his thesis that organized crime is a myth, may be quite controversial. Nonetheless, he backs up his statements with convincing arguments. The only reason, I did not rate this book 5 stars, is that he slips in his political viewpoints, that are decidedly left of center. As an example, when speaking of Republican congressman Henry Hyde's attempt to reform how banks report questionable transactions to the government, he states, "And for a time, Representative Hyde shifted his energies to more pressing matters, leading the abortive move to impeach Bill Clinton-not because Clinton had gutted the social welfare system, capitulated to the medical establishment on health care, or committed mass murder in Iraq but because of his idiosyncratic taste in custom flavored cigars". (pp.277)These types of gratuitous statements, while rare in this book, take away some of the force of the dilemma most Western countries face in dealing with an underground economy. Still, this is an excellent book, that reads like a college textbook, with priceless insights on offshore banking, money laundering, the underworld gold economy, crime control, and other topics. I strongly suggest this book, as a social commentary of the black market and undergorund economy.

Multi faceted and objective look at the underworld economy.
Many statitistics and and overwhelming amount of detailed historical
information. Some sources not sited in what could appear to be
biased editorializations, but these observations are few and far in
between. All in all a great overview.

This book was a bit disappointing. One issue was a deficit in theoretical foundation and analysis. Some sections did include a theoretical framework: for example, the chapter on insurgency finance divides insurgencies into several stages, with different funding methods available at different stages. But large sections of the book consist of interesting anecdotes, culled mostly from newspaper stories, and tied together by Naylor's opinions, assertions, and explanations. Where he does present any theoretical framework, he generally credits it to someone else.

As others here have mentioned, Naylor's political views are on full display, to the extent of inserting gratuitous jabs that have nothing to do with illicit finance, or in some cases even with economics. The breeziness with which he makes bold un-cited statements calls into question the overall quality of his scholarship. He takes others to task for putting too much confidence in facts and statistics about criminal markets, since the true extent of those markets and the secretive organizations that service them are inherently unknowable. This is a perfectly good point. Yet Naylor makes bald assertions about the role of intelligence agencies in the worldwide underworld, with no hint of how he gained such understanding of these equally secretive organizations.

Overall there must be better books on this subject, but while reading this one wasn't especially pleasant, it wasn't a waste of my time either. The anecdotes are interesting, there is a fair amount of general explanation, and I'm now confident that I'll never need to look up money laundering in a dictionary.

When I picked up Wages of Crime, I was hoping to find an objective presentation and debate on the the value of anti-money laundering policies and law enforcement trends. Instead, Naylor, without providing any evidence, reaches conclusions that suit only his own political agenda, which he pretty much makes clear throughout the book. His tone is wholly one sided and dismissive. It's perhaps a good thing that the author reverts to childlike plays on names and other amateurish techniques to support his arguments, for by doing so, he allows the reader to easily dismiss most of what he has to say. Examples of name calling include this sentence: "Hence, advised by neo-con artists crafting its foreign policy...". Neo-con artists. How clever. Or in this passage where he describes the many wonderful things he thinks Hizbullah has done, he includes: "rebuilding houses gratuitously destroyed by Israeli bombs and shells". This book is anything but a serious, unbiased study of the issues.

If you do a Google on Naylor, the first link brings you to an interview where Naylor gets right down to business in the very first question. His answer tells you all you need to know about what you might read from Wages of Crime: "Al Queda itself does not exist, except in the fevered imaginations of neo-cons and Likudniks, some of whom, I suspect, also know it is a myth, but find it extremely useful as a bogeyman to spook the public and the politicians to acquiesce in otherwise unacceptable policy initiatives at home and abroad."

This book on the black market makes a case for going back to views popular in the 1960s. In the 1960s, the black market was populated with cold-war spies and gun running free-booters. Since then, the popular press has painted the black market as a drug running paradise. Naylor tries to convince us this image is a lie. The real black market criminals are capitalist executives in the military-industrial complex. Defined in this manner, 'Wages of Crime' becomes a traditional left wing vehicle for brow beating those unwilling to genuflect before Marxist-Leninist dogma. This critique is not limited to attacks on the US political establishment. At one point Naylor laments that Gorbachev's generation 'forgot its ideological roots'. On another page, Naylor describes the proletarian interests in South East Asia.

The reader won't find the standard pulp crime stories here, which is a blessing. Unfortunately, the book relies on rhetorical flourish rather than statistics. Thus, it simply substitutes one stereotype with a second.

The text was pulled from independent articles, so the flow is sometimes uneven. For example, a chapter seeking to debunk the political might of heroin/cocaine dealers tries to convince the reader that drugs are of marginal economic importance. He complains that the published estimates of drug dealer wealth are too high by perhaps a factor of 100. In another chapter, rich drug dealers engage in crimes with military-industrial complex.

I really think this book gives a great inside in to the economics of ilegal activities.