Review – Black Market Billions: How Organized Retail Crime Funds Global Terrorists
This book is probably what happens when you write a book about something interesting – organized retail crime (ORC) – but your agent/publisher wants you to connect it to a bigger market – global terrorism. The whole thing suffers.
This would have been a stronger book had it just focused on ORC (those sections are well researched and communicated), but the terror components come off as an afterthought of “oh, and it fuels terrorism.”
The author is clearly out of her element, and it shows: Repeated assertions of links between ORC and terror that go un- or vaguely substantiated. Does the link exist? Of course. But she didn’t find it or explore it in a meaningful way.
You’re better off reading Gilman, Neuwirth, Naim, Glenny.
-Shlok
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