The United Nations has reported an extensive “phenomena of the sale of children” for purposes of commercial adoption, child labour, organ transplantation, prostitution, and pornography (Vitit Muntarbhorn, “Sale of children,” United Nations Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights). In the arena of child trafficking, the U.N. Report also warns of “the risk of abuse” of foetal tissue sales and submits that “there is a need to safeguard the foetus from commercialization and sale “(21).
The tragedy of trafficking which exists in female prostitution has also been widely and publicly deplored. While the World Health Organization definitions do not define “human organ[s]” in relation to human reproduction, “namely ova, sperm, testicles or embryos,” the U.N. Report warns that “one should take heed of the call for safeguards against commercialization, as abuses may arise in the process” (Ibid). The U.N. also notes that at its worst, trafficking “involves organized crime and a web of syndicates” as well as “corruption and collusion” between law enforcement agencies and “the undesirable elements” (3).
The article presented here, which goes beyond the parameters of the U.N. Report in its consideration of drug trafficking, gun-running, etc., was first published in the “News Focus” section of THE EUROPEAN (18-24 November 1994, 4) This information, reprinted with the hind permission of Mr. Jeff Jeski, North American sales editor of THE EUROPEAN, raises cautionary questions for our readers regarding these issues.
Even in a global recession one business is thriving. A community of vast international concerns is forging into new markets, striking alliances and ploughing the sort of funding that most corporations can only dream of into research and technology.
Unhindered by tariffs, quotas or the long arm of the law, organized crime is booming.
Anticipation is the name of the game, and the sorry fact is that the gathering of international crime-fighters, which began in Naples on 21 November, has very likely been pre-empted by the organizations it is trying to stamp out.
“Organized crime syndicates have already held this kind of meeting,” said Liliana Ferraro, a senior civil servant at the Italian Ministry of Justice. “It is certainly a lot easier for them. They just make an appointment in a hotel in Eastern Europe and sit round a table to divide up their profits.”
Intelligence shows that such meetings have already taken place, with destinations formerly sheltered by the Iron Curtain, such as Prague and Warsaw, a favorite rendezvous.
By contrast, it has taken the Italian government more than five years to persuade the United Nations to organize the first-ever World Ministerial Conference on Organized Transnational Crime. The choice of Naples raised a few eyebrows among security experts, wary that the presence of politicians and senior officials from 187 countries would offer a prime target to the local version of the Mafia, the Camorra.
But Ferraro, who is coordinating the event, points to the success of the G7 summit held there last July. “By bringing the conference to Naples, we are demonstrating the South’s determination to free itself from an evil curse,” she said, but 17,000 security men have been called in just in case.
While criminal groups are still one step ahead of the game, the fact is that the conference has already achieved its primary objective; breaching the wall of silence which has sheltered international criminal cartels for so many years. Owning up to an illicit presence is the first step for any government in dealing with it.
“By getting all these countries together, we hope to raise the level of awareness that organized crime can no longer be fought with national laws alone,” said Ferraro.
National legislation is inadequate protection against an even expanding criminal network. The range of “products” and “services” offered by the Russian and Italian Mafia and the late Colombian cartels is astonishing: drugs, arms and prostitution; stolen vehicles, nuclear material and body parts; trafficking in children and money-laundering. According to U.N. estimates, criminal organizations are now attempting to smuggle as many as one million people a year from poor to wealthy countries, earning a profit of $3.5 billion a year.
Taking advice from highly paid “white-collar” Mafiosi, the cartels are working examples — and impressively successful ones at that — of the fashionable theories espoused by management gurus. They are diversifying, investing in research and development, seeking strategic alliances and expanding counter- intelligence activities. As our illustration shows (p. 10), activities are being targeted at specific markets: trafficking cars in Albania, body parts in the former Soviet Union, nuclear materials across Russia and Germany. Localized “cells” run the networks.
International cooperation has already proved fruitful. Operation Green Ice, the two-year project linking ten countries in three continents which revealed links between the Cali Nostra, culminated in 1992 in 200 arrests.
Investigators found that the Mafia had been helping the Colombians to break into the New York heroin market in return for franchise arrangements for cocaine in Europe.
Ferraro’s fellow coordinator Francesco Di Maggio, a former anti-Mafia magistrate who now serves as Italy’s permanent representative to the United Nation’s crime commission in Vienna, believes other law enforcers still tend to think that organized crime is a national affliction, common to Italy and, more recently, the former Soviet Union.
“Some European countries deny they have a problem,” he said. “It was the same in Italy in the 1970s when the Mafia was still the stuff of folklore. Our great leap forward came when we recognized the Mafia as a criminal institution.”
Di Maggio believes that the U.N, conference must identify a global action plan. “If it was just a case of raising awareness, then we might as well limit ourselves to sending out a few faxes,” he said dismissively.
According to a recent U.N. report, “the pattern now emerging suggests that organized criminal groups often recruit personnel in one country, obtain the necessary goods in another, operate in several others and direct their proceeds to still other countries.” Faced with the degree of horizontal and vertical integration, police forces appear ill-equipped, their investigative and prosecuting powers still limited by mutual mistrust. There is a universal failure to communicate and compare notes, to link one crime in, for example, Turkey to another in Poland.
Di Maggio suggests that the least experts can expect from the summit is an agreement on the “establishment of an international school to raise the professionalism of the world’s police force”
At a pre-summit meeting in Palermo, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, who together with U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali will preside, demanded tighter international policing and coordination.
Di Maggio agreed: “There are cultural differences to overcome but we must escape the old logic of searching for consensus down to the last comma.”
Ferraro emphasizes the need for countries, including Italy and the U.S., both of which have tough anti-Mafia legislation, to help developing nations. “It’s a bit like the Roman Empire,” she said. “We don’t want to treat these countries like colonies, but we can’t afford to leave them behind. If their legislation leaves loopholes, the cartels will exploit them.”
Also adding to the pressure for an all-encompassing strategy is the impact on the poorer societies these groups are set on exploiting.
“A developing country in need of investment rarely stops to think about the origins of capital,” said Di Maggio. “Only when organized crime threatens their authority do they start to think about ‘dirty money’.”
The risk of entering into this “devil’s pact” is that the black market may supplant the state as the chief guarantor of employment. It also invites robbery and other more mundane crimes.
“We don’t have a lot of time.” said Ferraro. “If Eastern Europe’s fledgling democracies start to grow without legal points of reference, we may not have a second chance.”
What it costs the state
[Using Italy as a model]
Organized crime is increasingly infiltrating the Italian economy, despite recent successes in capturing top Mafia bosses.
Experts say the bosses are simply replaced, while the financial muscle and internationalization of Cosa Nostra makes it more dangerous than ever. They estimate that the Mafia has an annual turnover in Italy of around 120,000 billion lire ($77bn).
Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni warned; “The Mafia’s accountants are becoming more dangerous than its killers because they are devouring our economy.”
The extent of Mafia infiltration was outlined in a report last week by the small businessman’s association, Confcommercio. It said the Mafia had increased its profits from loan- sharking by 37 percent, and expanded its interest in commerce by 20 percent and the industrial sector by 15 to 18 percent. The hotel, restaurants and bars under Mafia control were up 15 percent, with 5,000 to 6,000 businesses taken over by organized crime in the past two years.
Confcommercio said the Mafia had invested in pharmaceutical companies and the private health care industry, and textile companies. It said the Cosa Nostra controlled at least half the public works projects and building sites of southern Italy and was increasing its influence in the North.
The report said organized crime controlled 20 to 22 percent of Italy’s building firms, 24 percent of its large agricultural markets, and 20 percent of restaurants, as well as vast tracts of property in southern Italy, for an estimated total wealth of L400,000bn.
Italy’s anti-Mafia magistrates agree that the war against the Mafia must be fought on the financial front. Investigators are irritated that Mafia drug smugglers are able to launder profits on the doorstep of Europe in the Channel Islands and in the offshore banking centres in the Caribbean.
Bruno Siciari, head of the national anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office, described the war on money-laundering as “the justice frontier for 1995.” He said: “We won’t have Mafia informers to help us, but we have the legislative and technical instruments and the professional capacity to tackle it.” His optimism was not shared, however, by Milan anti-corruption magistrate Gherardo Colombo. “When money goes abroad, it is difficult to follow it,” he said.
As Italy prepared to host a conference on organized crime in Naples from 21 to 28 November, laundering laws were being widely seen as ineffectual, despite costing the banking community L200bn a year to apply. Italian law requires banks to report operations involving more than L20m to the finance police, but reports are not always effectively followed up. Confcommercio said 100 Italian banks are under investigation for alleged complicity in money laundering. It hopes that a new computer system being developed by the European Union will help monitor suspect financial transactions.
Criminal links with Eastern Europe have boosted Mafia profits, with counterfeiting operations in Naples and Palermo providing false American dollars for use in the former Soviet Union, where controls on bank notes are rare. Investigators say that law enforcement agencies are lagging behind as the Mafia octopus spreads its tentacles around the globe. Confcommercio director Sergio Bille said: “It’s a landmine waiting to go off under our feet.”
Leaders in the world crime business
Italian Mafia
Headquarters: Sicily.
Number of employees : Not known
Turnover : 40-45 billion lire (426m—29rn).
Product diversification : drugs, property, toxic waste, arms, gold and diamonds, antiques and art, import-export, construction and financial holding companies.
Strategic alliances : Links with Thai heroin producers, ties with Golden Triangle in southeast Asia. In 1992 Palermo clans met the Medellin cartel in Florida to acquire the franchise for import of cocaine to Italy and its sale throughout Europe.
Research and development : Incorporation of cocaine base or cocaine into cardboard, glass, plastic and fibreglass for smuggling.
Relocation policy : Like most transnational companies the Mafia regularly moves its operations to more favorablelocations. Mafiosi on the run are often sent to Sicilian communities in Germany; illicit funds to Austria.
Russian mob
Headquarters : The farmer Soviet republics. Number of employees: 5,700 crime groups, of which more than 200 operate overseas.
Turnover : Not known.
Product diversification : Drugs, prostitution, metals, weapons, nuclear materials and body parts, money laundering, art theft, car theft, mercenaries in the U.S.
Division of labour : Former Yugoslavs control arms trade; Armenians small—arms trafficking; ex-Soviet Jewish gangs market stolen cars via Polish Mob in Germany; Russians operate prostitute and Ukrainians smuggle radioactive material.
Strategic alliances : 1992 secret agreement with Cosa Nostra seeking to establish a global network for drugs and nuclear components. Also in 1992 an agreement with Italian Mafia to protect new illicit trade in central Europe by creating death squads drawn from former KGB members.
Conferences/summits: Warsaw and Prague used as meeting places for organizational sessions.
Yazuka
Headquarters : Japan
Number of employees : Several major groups, of which the most important is 26,000-strong Yamaquchi-guma.
Turnover : Not known.
Product and geographical diversification : Trafficking methamphetamine into Hawaii and California; smuggling guns from the U.S. into Japan; major force in the trade of women; Philippines used as a base for smuggling handguns; gambling, fraud and money laundering; sex and drug industries in Hawaii.
Colombian cartels
Headquarters : Medellin.
Number of employees : Not known.
Management techniques: Deals solely in drugs but has developed industry based on sound management, specialization and division of labour.
Market diversification : Entering drugs markets in Western and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Operation Green Ice uncovered role of Grajeles family in Rome as intermediary responsible for Colombian cocaine in Europe.
Organization : Cell structure with special departments for marketing accounting and air transport.
