Books in Brief

Evil Money: Encounters along the Money Trail, by Rachel Ehrenfeld (HarperBusiness, 298 pp., $22)

TWO YEARS AGO in Narco-Terrorism Rachel Ehrenfeld exposed the political dimension of drug trafficking. Now she turns specifically to the money laundering that allows traffickers and terrorists to cleanse their profits of the taint of drugs. The world of laundering corrupts not only the banks, but sometimes the politics of entire countries. In Peru the money-laundering BCCI helped wed drug traffickers and the Maoist Shining Path. Even so, Peru’s former President Alan García embraced the outlaw bank, and between 1985 and 1987 about 25 per cent of Peru’s hard-currency reserves were at BCCI. Unfortunately, most of Miss Ehrenfeld’s reporting consists of anecdotes recounted in minute detail, often to little purpose. What analysis she offers comes mostly in a final chapter warning of the “Colombianization of the United States”: Miss Ehrenfeld claims, in a metaphor that is hard to visualize, that “Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ … is now stabbing itself in the back” as traffickers take advantage of capitalism to transform America into a “symbol of crime and degeneracy.” Coming at the end of a book that is stuffed with accounts of money-laundering cases assiduously broken by U.S. law-enforcement agencies, the charge rings hollow.

Evil Money: Encounters along the Money Trail, by Rachel Ehrenfeld (HarperBusiness, 298 pp., $22)

TWO YEARS AGO in Narco-Terrorism Rachel Ehrenfeld exposed the political dimension of drug trafficking. Now she turns specifically to the money laundering that allows traffickers and terrorists to cleanse their profits of the taint of drugs. The world of laundering corrupts not only the banks, but sometimes the politics of entire countries. In Peru the money-laundering BCCI helped wed drug traffickers and the Maoist Shining Path. Even so, Peru’s former President Alan García embraced the outlaw bank, and between 1985 and 1987 about 25 per cent of Peru’s hard-currency reserves were at BCCI. Unfortunately, most of Miss Ehrenfeld’s reporting consists of anecdotes recounted in minute detail, often to little purpose. What analysis she offers comes mostly in a final chapter warning of the “Colombianization of the United States”: Miss Ehrenfeld claims, in a metaphor that is hard to visualize, that “Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ … is now stabbing itself in the back” as traffickers take advantage of capitalism to transform America into a “symbol of crime and degeneracy.” Coming at the end of a book that is stuffed with accounts of money-laundering cases assiduously broken by U.S. law-enforcement agencies, the charge rings hollow.