fellow TEDsters, grim economic times indeed.

And so, I would like to cheer you up

with one of the great, albeit largely unknown,

commercial success stories

of the past 20 years.

Comparable, in its own very peculiar way,

to the achievements of Microsoft or Google.

And it's an industry which has bucked the current recession

with equanimity.

I refer to organized crime.

Now organized crime has been around

for a very long time, I hear you say,

and these would be wise words, indeed.

But in the last two decades,

it has experienced an unprecedented expansion,

now accounting for roughly 15 percent

of the world's GDP.

I like to call it the Global Shadow Economy,

or McMafia, for short.

So what triggered this extraordinary growth

in cross-border crime?

Well, of course, there is globalization,

technology, communications, all that stuff,

which we'll talk about a little bit later.

But first, I would like to take you back

to this event:

the collapse of communism.

All across Eastern Europe, a most momentous episode

in our post-war history.

Now it's time for full disclosure.

This event meant a great deal to me personally.

I had started smuggling books across the Iron Curtain

to Democratic opposition groups in Eastern Europe,

like Solidarity in Poland,

when I was in my teens.

I then started writing about Eastern Europe,

and eventually I became the BBC's chief correspondent for the region,

which is what I was doing in 1989.

And so when 425 million people

finally won the right

to choose their own governments,

I was ecstatic,

but I was also a touch worried

about some of the nastier things

lurking behind the wall.

It wasn't long, for example,

before ethnic nationalism

reared its bloody head

in Yugoslavia.

And amongst the chaos,

amidst the euphoria,

it took me a little while to understand

that some of the people who had wielded power

before 1989, in Eastern Europe,

continued to do so after the revolutions there.

Obviously there were characters like this.

But there were also some more unexpected people

who played a critical role in what was going on in Eastern Europe.

Like this character. Remember these guys?

They used to win the gold medals in weightlifting

and wrestling, every four years in the Olympics,

and they were the great celebrities of communism,

with a fabulous lifestyle to go with it.

They used to get great apartments in the center of town,

casual sex on tap,

and they could travel to the West very freely,

which was a great luxury at the time.

It may come as a surprise, but they played a critical role

in the emergence of the market economy

in Eastern Europe.

Or as I like to call them, they are

the midwives of capitalism.

Here are some of those same weightlifters

after their 1989 makeover.

Now in Bulgaria --

this photograph was taken in Bulgaria --

when communism collapsed all over Eastern Europe,

it wasn't just communism;

it was the state that collapsed as well.

That means your police force wasn't working.

The court system wasn't functioning properly.

So what was a business man in the brave new world

of East European capitalism going to do

to make sure that his contracts would be honored?

Well, he would turn to people who were called, rather prosaically

by sociologists, privatized law enforcement agencies.

We prefer to know them as the mafia.

And in Bulgaria, the mafia was soon joined

with 14,000 people

who were sacked from their jobs in the security services

between 1989 and 1991.

Now, when your state is collapsing,

your economy is heading south at a rate of knots,

the last people you want coming on to the labor market

are 14,000 men and women whose chief skills

are surveillance,

are smuggling, building underground networks

and killing people.

But that's what happened all over Eastern Europe.

Now, when I was working in the 1990s,

I spent most of the time covering

the appalling conflict in Yugoslavia.

And I couldn't help notice

that the people who were perpetrating the appalling atrocities,

the paramilitary organizations,

were actually the same people running

the organized criminal syndicates.

And I came to think that behind the violence

lay a sinister criminal enterprise.

And so I resolved to travel around the world

examining this global criminal underworld

by talking to policemen,

by talking to victims, by talking to consumers

of illicit goods and services.

But above all else, by talking to the gangsters themselves.

And the Balkans was a fabulous place to start.

Why? Well of course

there was the issue of law and order collapsing,

but also, as they say in the retail trade,

it's location, location, location.

And what I noticed at the beginning of my research

that the Balkans had turned into a vast transit zone

for illicit goods and services coming from all over the world.

Heroin, cocaine,

women being trafficked into prostitution

and precious minerals.

And where were they heading?

The European Union, which by now

was beginning to reap the benefits of globalization,

transforming it into

the most affluent consumer market in history,

eventually comprising some 500 million people.

And a significant minority

of those 500 million people

like to spend some of their leisure time and spare cash

sleeping with prostitutes,

sticking 50 Euro notes up their nose

and employing illegal migrant laborers.

Now, organized crime in a globalizing world

operates in the same way as any other business.

It has zones of production,

like Afghanistan and Columbia.

It has zones of distribution,

like Mexico and the Balkans.

And then, of course, it has zones of consumption,

like the European Union, Japan

and of course, the United States.

The zones of production and distribution

tend to lie in the developing world,

and they are often threatened by appalling violence

and bloodshed.

Take Mexico, for example.

Six thousand people killed there in the last 18 months

as a direct consequence of the cocaine trade.

But what about the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Since 1998, five million people have died there.

It's not a conflict you read about much in the newspapers,

but it's the biggest conflict on this planet

since the Second World War.

And why is it? Because mafias from all around the world

cooperate with local paramilitaries

in order to seize the supplies

of the rich mineral resources

of the region.

In the year 2000, 80 percent of the world's coltan

was sourced to the killing fields

of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Now, coltan you will find in almost every mobile phone,

in almost every laptop

and games console.

The Congolese war lords were selling this stuff to the mafia

in exchange for weapons,

and the mafia would then sell it on to Western markets.

And it is this Western desire

to consume

that is the primary driver

of international organized crime.