Israel to launch witness protection

Published: 12 August 2008

By Beth

Israel is looking to have a witness-protection program operational by 2009, reported the Jerusalem Post last week.

Once the bill is prepared and goes through Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, the new law will affect about 20 witnesses who would be in danger of assassination if they testified without it. The idea is to bring in more people to testify against organized crime figures in the country, said Aryeh Livna, who heads the Witness Protection Authority.

"For every moment that there is no witness protection program in Israel, the fight against crime is not at its best," he said. "In 2007, the scope of organized crime was evaluated at NIS 13 billion. Even if we eliminate just one percent of that, we will remove access to a sum that can fund the activities of the Witness Protection Authority. The Authority will significantly increase the fight against organized crime."

Watch this space for an in-depth look into this later this month.  

Mob rule in Israel is also a function of weak laws and a lack of police pressure, a retired police officer told the Post in a separate article last week. Former Northern District police chief Commander Yaakov Borovsky said that the 80 to 100 crime families that operate in Israel have become more brazen, and incidents like last week’s botched mob hit on an Israeli beach that killed an innocent woman in front of her family are a sign of that.

As the law stands now, Borovsky said, there is a three-strikes rule that applies to holding membership in an organized-crime family. The third time a suspect is proven be connected to a crime family, through phone calls or surveillance photographs, for example, the information is put in that suspect's file.

"There needs to be a change in the law," he said. "It should go on their file the first time it happens, and after three, I suggest they receive jail time. The next time they're caught with a crime family, double the jail time, and so on. If this had been the case yesterday, those people might not have be walking around freely, and the shooting on the beach may have been prevented."
 
UNODOC: Corruption hinders fight against Afghan opium trade

Afghan leaders are too corrupt to fight the enormous opium trade in the country, leaders of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said last week.

"We talk about those who are not behind bars, but who should be," the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Afghanistan, Christina Oguz, told a news conference. "They are the people who have committed crimes of corruption or who are the brains and profiteers behind trafficking networks.

"They are people with power and people with powerful friends who can use their mobile phones to release a suspect from detention without a fair trial," she said.

The UNODC press conference came just days after the US’s former point man on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan published a damning article on Afghan government collusion in the $3 billion per year opium trade in the New York Times Magazine. Afghanistan’s opium production has increased every year since the US and allied forces ousted the Taliban’s leadership in 2001; it’s estimated that Afghanistan produced 93 percent of the world’s opium last year.

Anti-mafia prosecutor: “Historic moment” in Sicily

La Cosa Nostra’s extortion racket may be on the way out, said a regional anti-mafia prosecutor last week.

"Phone taps are showing that extortionists are becoming afraid to ask for 'protection money' because they fear they could be asking an entrepreneur who will report them to police," Palermo anti-Mafia prosecutor Nico Gozzo told the Giornale di Sicilia Daily on Monday in an interview.

He said that prosecutors are expected in the next few days to order no less than 80 suspected Mafia bosses, extortionists and collaborators to stand trial.

The suspects include 15 shopkeepers who failed to report their extortionists to the police, Gozzo stated.

Gozzo did warn, however, that though the Mafia may be in disarray, it could easily regroup if business owners don’t stand up for themselves and refuse to pay the protection money that for so many years was part of life on the Italian island. 

Meanwhile, two men thought to be “postmen” for an accused Sicilian Mafia boss have been arrested – one in Rome last month and one in Palermo last Friday night. Police said that boss Bernardo Provenzano was able to supervise a mob network throughout Sicily thanks to the two men, though he was captured in 2006 after decades on the run from murder charges.

Bulgarian PM: We have our work cut out for us

In the same month that a damning report on Bulgaria’s inability to fight organized crime and corruption resulted in the European Union freezing more than €800 million in aid to the country, Bulgaria’s prime minister admitted that the country is facing an uphill battle.

"The report was objective ... pointing out problems that we simply cannot close our eyes about," Stanishev said after a meeting of his three-party ruling coalition in the southern resort of Bansko.

""Without successful investigations that lead to charges and end up with sentences, our efforts will not look convincing enough to anyone,"" he added.

Stanishev also urged the interior ministry to curb the leaking of information to criminals from its own ranks after the issue sparked major scandals over recent months and led to the resignation of former interior minister Rumen Petkov.

Meanwhile, another murder has the local press chattering that it was mafia related. Totio Totev, 36, was found dead in the town of Kazanluk near a parked Mercedes, with one bullet in his chest and another in his head. Police said that Totev, known as “The Wrestler,” was in the cherry-packing business; the press said he was in the drug trafficking and prostitution business.

If Mr Totev’s murder were found to be mafia-related, it would hardly be the first contract-style killing in Bulgaria in recent years. This year alone has seen the murders of an author who wrote books on the Bulgarian mafia and of the head of an energy company in two separate incidents in the capital Sofia.

RICO law argued in Russia

Russia’s Federal Customs Service is trying to use the US’s RICO law to bring a $22.5 billion lawsuit against the Bank of New York, reported the Moscow Times Aug. 4. No other country has ever tried to argue that RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act), which has been used to attack mob groups in the US, could be used outside the US, but the Russians are trying. The case’s background, according to the paper, is as follows: 

From 1996 to 1999, Lucy Edwards, a former vice president at Bank of New York, and her husband, Peter Berlin, used the bank to help Russian clients illegally transfer around $7.5 billion out of Russia.

In 2000, the couple pled guilty to conspiracy in a U.S. court, in what many have called the largest money-laundering operation in history. Six years later, they were sentenced to fines and restitutions of $725,000, six months of house arrest, and five years of probation.

In 2005, the bank — one of the oldest in the United States — paid $14 million in penalties to end two criminal investigations after admitting that it did not report and supervise suspicious transactions.

Although the bank has received immunity in the United States, the Federal Customs Service revived the case in Russia last year, arguing that the bank never compensated the Russian government for its losses.

The bank refused an initial offer to settle the claims out of court, leading the customs service to sue.

A group of Miami lawyers working for the customs service on a 29 percent contingency fee have filed the case under the civil provisions of RICO, which allow a trebling of damages.

Notables like Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and former US attorney general Dick Thornburgh have testified in the case; the former arguing that RICO doesn’t have to be limited to use in the US, the latter arguing that the US Congress never meant for the law to be applied internationally.

Also in Russia, the organized crime group Vory v Zakone might be gearing up for a mob war, reports the International Herald Tribune. Or at least that was the news peg for a long story about the group’s history, its multinational operations and the Robin-Hoodesque place it holds in the imagination of many Russians.

Summer Olympics hit by ticketing scam

Sports fans and families of athletes competing in this month’s Summer Olympics in Beijing were bilked out of millions of dollars by a website touting fake tickets, reported the news wires on Aug. 4. Antipodean media reported that families in Australia and New Zealand spent tens of thousands of dollars on tickets that did not exist; fans in the US, Japan, Norway, China and Britain were also conned by the US-based website. Australian papers estimated that victims worldwide sent more than $46 million to scammers at beijingticketing.com, which has since been disabled.

Corruption round-up

Britain’s highest court ruled Wednesday that the Serious Fraud Office was right in calling off its investigation into arms dealer BAE Systems’s behavior in getting deals in Saudi Arabia. Corruption in the form of an alleged multi-billion-dollar slush fund for top Saudis was the focus of the original probe, which was cancelled by the government and the SFO in the interests of national security. Meanwhile, BAE’s outgoing chief executive warned that other fraud investigations into the company are undermining not only the company, but damaging the UK as a whole.

Siemens announced last week that it was suing 11 senior executives over their alleged supervisory failures, which caused a corruption scandal that has cost the company millions of dollars and ruined its reputation. 

In Burma, the UN has admitted that nearly $10 million intended to help the country’s hurricane victims has been skimmed off by banks run by Burma’s ruling military authorities.

Corruption in Iraq is still a problem, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction reported last week. The inspector, Stuart Bowen, told Cox News Service that Iraqi corruption is a “second insurgency” that could be harder to get rid of than the armed insurgency.