FT944-8297 _AN-EKUDAACFFT 941121 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. Countries:- XAZ World. Industries:- P9721 International Affairs. Types:- CMMT Comment & Analysis. The Financial Times London Page 16