In the summer of 1992, a group of killers sat on a hillside in Capaci, Sicily, smoking and watching the motorway below. When two cars in tight formation appeared, one of the men threw a switch: the road under the cars exploded. The bomb blast killed the magistrate Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police officers who were guarding him.
The police who came to the crime scene were drawn from the Italian police forces – and from the FBI. They found the cigarette butts that the assassins had dropped. The butts were taken to a FBI laboratory, examined by Italian officers – and the DNA scraped off the butts finally identified the killers who came to trial and were sentenced, five years later. It is an encouraging story; something of a recompense for the murder of a man who, more than any other, epitomised the struggle of the Italian state with organised crime in its very heartland. The co-operation had its origin in meetings a decade before Falcone’s death, when Italian and US police agencies decided to attack their common – and increasingly linked – Mafia problem together.
International co-operation on combating organised crime has greatly increased: the FBI, once almost exclusively a domestic agency, now has around three hundred “legates” or officers posted abroad in US embassies and it co-operates directly with police forces in over 30 countries. Yet the links formed between the law are nothing compared to the growth of organised crime over the past decade. It is the greatest success story of the end of the 20th century.
“Organised crime,” says Professor Louise Shelley of Washington’s American University, “will be a defining issue of the 21st century as the cold war was for the 20th century and colonialism was for the 19th century. Transnational crime will proliferate because crime groups are the major beneficiaries of globalisation.”
The freedoms of the post-cold-war era have come too quickly for law and order. The collapse of authoritarian regimes in the east has not been followed by a building of democratic order: on the contrary, in many of the societies of the former Soviet Union – including the two largest, Russia and Ukraine – the state has little effective power to enforce the law and has very substantially merged with criminal and corrupt interests. Russia has between five and six thousand organised crime gangs with 100,000 members, the most active and ruthless of these operating increasingly abroad.
“It is clear,” says Phil Williams, an American expert on organised crime, “that the Chinese Triad, Russian criminal organisations, Colombian cartels, Japanese yakuza, Sicilian Mafia as well as other Italian groups such as the Neapolitan Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta and the Sacra Corona Unita, Nigerian criminal organisations and Turkish drug-trafficking groups engage in extensive criminal activities on a regional, and often global, basis. These organisations violate national sovereignty, undermine democratic institutions even in states where these institutions are well established, threaten the process of democratisation and privatisation in states in transition and add a new dimension to problems such as nuclear proliferation and terrorism.”
Their global reach was illustrated early in December, when Edmond Safra, one of the world’s 200 richest men and owner of the private Republic National Bank of New York, was murdered in his flat in Monaco. The immediate speculation was that his assassins were Russian contract killers: his bank was answering questions on money laundering and, according to one anonymous friend, his family believes “someone decided to send a message to the bank not to co-operate”. Safra was well guarded, in a flat built for protection; he numbered heads of state among his friends: that he should be so contemptuously taken out shows the sense of power now enjoyed by the crime bosses – as well as the height of the stakes for which they play.
The global drug industry alone now accounts for 2 per cent of the world economy – and rising. It is both very powerful and very flexible. When the FBI succeeded in closing down the conduit for drugs from Colombia through the Caribbean to the US, the Colombians rapidly opened up a new corridor – through Mexico, where the organised crime problem is rising exponentially.
But drugs may not be the largest part of the global mafia’s business. Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer and Senate investigator of organised crime, said in testimony to a Congressional committee last year that “fraud of various kinds is, in terms of its social implications, the most dangerous of all. Mafia-related stock fraud uses offshore corporations, using various hideouts in the international system to manipulate stock-market prices and take advantage of investors in the US. The problem is, who has the authority to investigate? Whose job is it to police the international financial system? And, in the end, how will you ever bring any of the perpetrators to justice or recover any of the money?”
Blum’s point is given extra force by the loopholes in the world economy, which leave plenty of room for organised crime to flourish. There are now around 50 “states” in the world that exist largely by selling their national sovereignty to those who wish to buy it in order to make their business deals inconspicuous. The “state” of Dominica advertises itself on the World Wide Web – its passport can be bought in a package with a name change, under the slogan “Perfect for someone who would like to leave his past behind”. There is no mystery as to what these states do: but since they have the formal attributes of independent states, they cannot simply be closed down.
Globalisation has another, seamier downside. As developing world cities proliferate and local customs and inhibitions break down, slavery – especially sex slavery – is growing rapidly, a trade also commanded by organised crime. At the more “sophisticated” end of the market, this can be an international trade, with brothels set up or supplied all over the world: more frequently, it is the induction of girls, often no more than children, into a world where they are brutalised both by their clients and pimps. It is also a world that lives cheek by jowl with the advanced economy: Edward Luttwak, the US analyst who has a dystopian vision of what he calls “turbo capitalism”, writes that in Pakistan, “within walking distance of law courts, police stations, universities and computer software outfits satellite linked with Silicon Valley, young girls are brought each day from villages far and near to live in slavery, after being inducted into the trade by rape and beatings”.
Modernisation proceeds unevenly, and for ill as well as for good. The sheer profusion of people in many parts of the world means that life is, literally, regarded as cheap: and the more ambitious seek work as the foot soldiers of organised crime, just as the Sicilian peasants of the 19th and early 20th centuries sought the protection and rewards of the gang – whether in Palermo or New York. But now there are many more foot soldiers and the gangs are huge – and globally organised. In November this year, Tony Blair called in the heads of the three main security agencies – Stephen Lander of MI5, Richard Dearlove of MI6 and Francis Richards of the GCHQ signal intelligence agency – for a meeting in Downing Street. The three directors told the Prime Minister that organised crime was now the largest threat to national security.
Blair is since reported to have told colleagues that he believed that, by boosting crimes of all kinds, the global mafia could threaten Labour’s election chances.
The directors told Blair that there were five “fever spots”. First and most serious were the former Soviet mafias – more ruthless, hungrier and greedier than any other, whose work includes contract killing and sophisticated computer fraud. Albania’s collapse as a state released gangs that traffic in prostitution and arms – with links to the growing Albanian communities all over Europe. Turkey’s drug gangs are now among the most active in the world: they told the Prime Minister that four-fifths of the heroin in Britain came from Turkish sources. West African gangs are becoming increasingly expert in credit-card and welfare fraud. Cigarette smuggling by Asian gangs is estimated to be worth £1.7 billion a year. These gangs are largely new, or rapidly growing, and are in addition to the more established Sicilian, Triad and other networks, with which they compete or co-operate. In response, the government is to pump more money into these agencies’ surveillance of the criminal networks. Yet the kind of stateless space in which these criminals operate will prove very hard to police.
The sheer range of the criminal links is breathtaking. In 1993, US border police arrested around five hundred Chinese coming over the border between Mexico and the US through what the Los Angeles Times called “a clandestine corridor linking the villages of Fujuian, the shores of Mexico and Central America and suburban safe houses in the heavily Chinese enclaves of the San Gabriel Valley”. The example showed that Chinese, Central American and Mexican gangs could co-operate successfully in a human smuggling operation across thousands of miles. It also showed that a globalised world is one where the poor of the Earth are no longer resigned to their fate. The end of the century has seen the death of stoicism and fatalism. Like westerners, people of the developing world want to improve their lot: balked at home, they travel to richer places. “People no longer sit at home in poverty,” says Marjorie Newman-Williams, a senior official of Unicef. “They get up and go. That’s an attribute people in the west have been taught to admire.”
This is a dark ending to a millennium whose brightness seemed so obvious a decade ago. It need not be for ever. Lawlessness has ruled large tracts of the earth for many periods of history: indeed, the relatively law-abiding developed states of the 20th century have been more exceptions than rules. They can deploy a battery of weapons. In the end, though, they must rely on freedom producing an antidote to licence: for the moment, it is fuelling it.
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