Solea by Jean-Claude Izzo

Author:Jean-Claude Izzo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2016-06-20T04:00:00+00:00

The five disks contained pages and pages of documents. They had been compressed to contain as much information as possible.

“Will you be O.K.?” Cyril asked.

I was sitting in front of his computer, starting to scroll through the files on the blue disks. “I’ll only need an hour. I’m not going to read everything. Just find a few things I need.”

“Take your time. We have enough here to withstand a siege!”

They’d brought back several six-packs of beer, pizzas, and enough cigarettes to last all night. The way they’d started, they were going to remake the world four or five times over. And, given what I was seeing in front of my eyes right now, the world could certainly do with being remade.

Out of curiosity, I opened the first file. How organized crime is poisoning the world economy. This was clearly a draft of Babette’s report.

In an era of globalized markets, the role of organized crime in the market economy is still little known. Public opinion, nourished by Hollywood stereotypes and sensational journalism, associates criminal activity with the collapse of public order. The activities of petty criminals are constantly talked about, but the political and economic role, as well as the influence of international criminal organizations, is rarely brought out into the open.

I scrolled down.

Organized crime is inextricably interwoven with the economic system. The opening up of world markets, the decline of the Welfare State, privatization, the deregulation of international finance and trade: all these things have tended to favor the growth of illegal activities as well as the internationalization of a rival criminal economy.

According to the United Nations, the annual world income of trans-national criminal organizations is in the region of a thousand billion dollars, a figure equivalent to the combined gross national product of those countries categorized by the World Bank as low-income and their three billion inhabitants. This estimate takes into account both the revenue from drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, smuggling of nuclear materials, etc., and the revenue from activities controlled by the Mafia, such as prostitution, gambling, and the black market in currency.

What it does not take into account, however, is the extent to which criminal organizations have taken control of legitimate businesses, or the extent to which they dominate the means of production in many sectors of the legal economy.

I was starting to get an idea of what the other disks might contain. There were footnotes referring to official documents. Another set of notes, in bold lettering, contained cross-references to the other disks, classified by transaction, by place, by company, by political party, and finally by name. Fargette. Yann Piat. Noriega. Sun Investment. International Bankers, Luxembourg . . . It made my flesh creep. Because I was sure Babette had worked with that professional dedication that had driven her ever since she had started out as a journalist. That fierce determination to get at the truth.

I scrolled again.

Criminal organizations work unofficially with legal businesses, investing in a variety of legitimate activities that provide them not only

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