Is some of that oil winding up in pumps in Chevy Chase, Md., and Winnetka, Ill.?
Absolutely. Huge oil ports, such as the port of Houston, really don’t know how much of the oil showing up in their port is stolen, because a single tanker crossing the Atlantic, say, can change hands 300 times. So there’s no real way of saying this was legally obtained oil, or this oil was stolen from the pipelines, or this oil was smuggled out of the port of Basra. We have no idea. Some of the most arresting sections of the book are about the oil industry in Nigeria. We might assume the oil business is just rough and dirty and hard work for anybody working into it. It’s something else beyond that, even, in Nigera. It’s criminal. It’s rough, in a sense, it’s violent … It’s very violent. I think that our conception of the oil industry is that well-trained technicians pull up to a spot and suck the oil out and it comes over here on tankers and it never really touches ground. But what happens in Nigeria is that it’s part of a political system that involves gangs of young men who are mos
