I found Hitha Prabhakar’s “Black Market Billions: How Organized Retail Crime Funds Global Terrorists” to be a fascinating and engaging read on a subject that, although I knew, I didn’t realize was so big and far reaching. The book was quite engaging with descriptions of the various links in the long chain of organized retail crime (ORC). And I did not realize how much of the money obtained from these criminal networks is sent abroad and what part goes to terrorist groups.
This book is divided into three main sections. The first section, The Economics of Piracy, looks at crime from a broader point of view and has chapters on organized retail crime going global, when a deal isn’t a deal, and the cost to stores. It’s a good introduction to how ORC cheats retailers and costs them more money than they thought, and how governments lose taxes due to huge ORC rings.
In the second part, Follow the Money, the others outline various links in the ORC chain. Chapters include The Money Trail and the Business of Cross-Border Trade, Profile of a Booster and a Fence, Family Ties, Money Laundering 2.0, The Political Agenda, and Strange Bedfellows. These chapters touch on those who are walking into stores and pushing goods to terrorists and organized criminals on a global scale.
Part Three, Putting a Band-Aid on a Broken Leg, is the shortest section of the book and contains chapters on The Failure of Preventive Measures and Letting the Bad Guy Get Away. This section has brief possible solutions to this global problem. I would have liked more solutions, but maybe no one really knows what to do yet. (However, the California mall story gives hope that simple solutions can curb the problem.) I also hope that this book, by raising awareness of the problem, can prevent some people from buying illegal but cheaper products. being sold through these retail organized crime rings.
There were parts of the book where I wish the author had gone into more detail, but I understand that it is always a task to determine how much to include in terms of depth of a topic. There were over 400 endnotes, so the author definitely did some research, but I didn’t check all the sources, and some may not be as reliable as others. Some of the dots that were in this book may not have been connected precisely, but to be fair, there are a LOT of dots to connect.
Overall, I think this is an important book for people to read and understand how big the ORC problem really is, and with this awareness start looking for ways to do something about it.
