There is no end to the unsavory characters in Misha Glenny’s eye-opening tour of the world’s “shadow economy” of organized crime that has grown for two decades.

Take Victor Bout, a Russian soldier from Tajikistan on duty in Africa when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. Using old Soviet equipment, he built an air-cargo service that supplied weapons to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, until one of his planes was grounded in Taliban-controlled territory. “After negotiating the release of his pilots,” writes Glenny, “Bout then started supplying the Taliban with weapons,” too. Bout operates with impunity in Vladimir Putin’s Russia despite the efforts of Interpol to obtain his arrest.

Political unrest is often the catalyst for organized crime, writes Glenny, a former BBC Central Europe correspondent. He spent three years interviewing criminals, crime victims and police officials for “McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld” (Knopf, $27.95), an engrossing, if somewhat unsettling, examination of international crime trends.

When the Soviet Union fell in 1989, so did a rigid state-run order in Eastern Europe. “One group of people, however, saw real opportunity in the dazzling mixture of upheaval, hope and uncertainty. These men, and occasionally women, understood instinctively that rising living standards in the West, increased trade and migration flows, and the greatly reduced ability of many governments to police their countries combined to form a gold mine.”

The minions of Soviet bureaucracies, already corrupt, simply spread the corruption to their private entrepreneurial partners. They often began with car-theft rings and cigarette-smuggling, inevitably expanding into prostitution, gun-running and more. The wealthy ex-Soviet criminal “oligarchs” began laundering money into legitimate businesses. A favorite investment site is Dubai, the small desert town turned glitzy fun-and-sun capital of the United Arab Emirates, what Glenny provocatively calls the “largest washing machine in the world.”

Glenny cites other factors that foster organized crime – migration, economic shifts, looser banking regulations.

From the streets of Bombay (now Mombei) to Bogota to Tokyo, Glenny recounts criminal enterprises that, after a time, take on a sameness with their ruthless methods and motive (greed, always). He ends in China, where he foresees the “McMafia’s” future growth, citing its network of human trafficking in illegal labor and copyright theft. Glenny gloomily warns that only “some form of global governance” will truly combat internationally organized crime. Don’t hold your breath, for, as any cynic knows, it isn’t love that makes the world go around; it’s money. And making it the illicit way is still too easy.