The drug billions that got me into a John le Carré spy thriller

I am feeling a little too pleased with myself. Smiley, you might say. John le Carré, the spymaster novelist famed for his cold war characters, has generously reprinted an article I wrote for this newspaper on the inside cover of his latest novel as a way of illustrating a point about money laundering. Our Kind of Traitor tells of a foul-mouthed Russian gangster who has "cleaned" billions of dirty dollars for his thuggish mates and wishes to tell MI5 about the world he inhabits. The master thriller writer, famed for his character George Smiley, tells how the proceeds of international crimes – mainly drug related – are washed through offshore bank accounts, enormous property deals and the purchase of international institutions. My news story, which appeared in the Observer nine months ago, reported how leading banks around the world, desperate for cash in the current financial crisis, turned to the proceeds of organised crime as the only liquid investment capital available. The head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in an interview that colossal piles of drugs money had kept the world financial system afloat when it looked dangerously close to collapse. The market eventually absorbed the greater part of a mind-boggling $352bn (£229bn) of drugs profits into the global economic system, laundering that vast sum in the process. The newspaper story was not, alas, le Carré's inspiration. It broke long after he had finished writing his book, but he has told interviewers that it confirmed the novel's main point: a huge slice of the global economy, as much as a fifth on some estimates, is made up by the profits of organised crime. Recognition does not come to news reporters very often, which is why it's a thrill to see your work in a soon-to-be bestselling novel. But given the subject matter, it might be inappropriate to ask for any of its royalties to be filtered away for me into an offshore account.