Rinsed is an essential guide to modern finance and crime. If you are bombarded by messages about online crime, this book explains why. Here Geoff White has written an exemplary account of criminal networks that extends beyond violent crime into worldwide financial markets.
It is constructed around a series of crimes and criminals that take up a chapter each. The structure is simple and direct, the events in each section are not. It starts with Pablo Escobar and the movement of money into vanishing accounts that are hidden in obscure off shore islands that make Panama or other money havens seem transparent.
What the book focuses on is the ingenuity of the criminals and the assiduous nature of their pursuers. But sometimes when the perpetrators are caught the money has moved on to Russian or African organisations amongst others through elements of the dark web. Although the book is highly serious (the sections on the dark web carry reader warnings), it has its comic moments. Nicolas Escobar finds one of Pablo Escobar’s legendary money stashes. Nicolas assumes it will be a life transforming windfall but something has gone wrong. It has decomposed, only the packaging remains and some telecommunication equipment.
The story is one not simply of crime but the development of global markets and sophisticated fintech instruments. If the earliest criminals depended on the brute force of gang pyramids, later criminals were as likely to have been educated to Masters level and be anonymously corporate in their business suits. The book is a history of how crime became globalised with finance. It even includes some future gazing into the world according to bitcoin and its successors. it gives a convincing account of the difficulty of policing because of the increasing complexity of the networks.
To me, the pace of the narration and the depth of knowledge, condensed into two hundred and fifty pages, reminds me of Michael Lewis’s series of books that could be turned into a series of novels, films, and documentaries.
Any Cop?: Geoff White has the gifts of a novelist and an historian too. I read the book in one day. Read it.
Richard Clegg
Bookmunch 