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FT 21 NOV 94 / People: The faceless crime boss who is all too real - This
well-educated, well-spoken, cosmopolitan businessman is laughing all the way
to the bank
By JIMMY BURNS
While officials and ministers from more than 120 countries meet today in
Naples at the start of a UN conference on organised international crime,
many a big-time crook will be laughing all the way to the bank.
As Liliano Ferraro, a senior official with Italy's ministry of justice,
commented last week: 'The organised crime syndicates have already held this
kind of meeting . . . they just meet in a hotel in eastern Europe and divide
the profits.'
It has taken the Italians more than five years to generate sufficient
interest among UN member states even to talk about the subject. And that,
according to the organisers, is probably all they'll do in the Palazzo Real.
Attempts at improving international co-operation on law enforcement remain
hampered by a combination of political rivalries, jealously guarded national
legal systems, official corruption - and rank inefficiency.
In contrast, the organised international criminal fraternity has become
increasingly sophisticated; it is adept at extending its operations across
frontiers, establishing areas of common interest, and manipulating the
world's economic system for hugely lucrative ends.
'International organised criminals have learnt to outwit law enforcement
agencies,' says James Wyburd, an investigator with MRC Business Information
Group.
In the words of John Kerry, a US senator, these global mobsters cause so
much trouble that they are 'the new communism, the new monolithic threat'.
Who are they?
The really big boys are pretty far removed from his-tory's, and Hollywood's,
gangster self-publicist: Alphonse Capone, better known as Al - the man whom
the American crime writer Jay Robert Nash describes as 'a near illiterate
who acquired millions and knew not where to spend a dime of it'. Capone died
of syphilis and paresis of the brain. In the words of one of his gang: 'Al's
brain just exploded.'
Times have changed. Eduardo Vetere, a former professor in law who heads the
UN's anti-crime branch, based in Vienna, says: 'Today's big-time criminals
are more serious and dangerous than Capone ever was. The world has become
smaller, while the criminals have become bigger. It's a global village, in
which crime in one country is easily transferred to others.'
There is no one better to ask about old- and new-time crooks than Mike
Cherkasky. An employee of Kroll Associates, one of the world's leading
private corporate spook agencies, Cherkasky is a former New York attorney's
investigator who helped convict John Gotti, boss of the American mafia, in
1992, and was a prominent investigator in the BCCI case. Cherkasky now helps
supervise one of New York's garbage collection services, once the preserve
of the mob.
'The mob - blue-collar criminals like Gotti - may have worn Armani suits and
cashmere coats, but they used their fists to get to the top,' he says. 'They
had no choice. There's a different kind of corporate criminal around now. He
is a cosmopolitan businessman, well-educated, well-spoken, who knows how to
move among politicians and transfer his money from Wall Street to London to
Paris and onwards if he wants to. He has plenty of opportunities, but greed
makes him take the criminal route.'
The world's leading organised criminals do not give interviews bragging
about their activities, as Capone did, daily, to the Chicago press. The
meanest use journalists for target practice if they get anywhere near.
Behind today's organised criminal lies a veritable machine of hardware and
hard men which makes Capone's hoods look like chocolate soldiers.
Perhaps the most colourful prototype of the new international gangster was
Pablo Escobar, a collector of giraffes, camels, beautiful women and classic
cars, including Capone's Pontiac. Colombia's drug baron turned the smuggling
of cocaine into the world's biggest money-spinning bootleg operation. His
ability to bribe and corrupt officials went far beyond his home town of
Medellin, where he is believed to have authorised payments of Dollars 1m per
day to keep himself out of jail.
Escobar had a private army of 1,000 armed with state-of-the-art military
hardware, and an A-team of lawyers well-versed in the art of laundering his
ill-gotten gains through the world's (mainly off-shore) financial centres.
Escobar was shot dead almost a year ago by the Colombian army, supported by
the CIA, the US air force and the US drug enforcement agency. Yet he might
have escaped had it not been for rival drug barons turning against him.
Next to the Colombian boys, it is the emerging criminal fraternity in
eastern Europe which is likely to cause most worry at this week's
conference. In a background paper to the conference, the UN's anti-crime
division does not mince words when it comes to the new Russian mafia.
'Roubles as well as smuggled arms and valuable metals worth billions of
dollars leave the country in an unregulated fashion each month, while there
is a substantial inflow of black and grey money,' the anti-crime squad
states.
The criminal fraternity includes blue-collar villains not so different from
the one-time Chicago mobsters. But at his most sophisticated, the eastern
European criminal bribes officials, terrorises western businessman,
manipulates the banking system, launders money around the west with front
companies and exchange control fiddles, and engages in such transnational
activities as prostitution, drugs smuggling and arms trading.
Only last week a nuclear power plant was temporarily shut in Lithuania
because of 'terrorist' threats.
The Naples conference is a gesture fitting in a city of magic and death. But
that is all it is: a symbol.
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The Financial Times
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