Organized Crime Shackles Balkans

Published: 04 November 2008

By Beth

The fallout from Croatia’s bloody October – which saw the daughter of a prominent lawyer, the owner and marketing manager of the weekly Nacional and a security company head killed – continued this week with a slew of articles on the crime wave and the leaking of a European Commission progress report on the region not due until Nov. 5.

Last week’s arrests of 11 people over the Nacional killings included two Serbian nationals, which spawned revelations in the press that though the former Yugoslavia is now fragmented into six (counting Kosovo, seven) countries, criminals have no problems reaching across the relatively new international borders. “Mobsters from Serbia, Croatia or Bosnia do each other favors for money or for another favor,” a retired policeman told Deutsche Press-Agentur in a short, one-source story last week. “Look at the biographies of leading underworld figures…many of them worked for secret police. The influence of secret services on their work is still enormous.” Former Croatian state prosecutor Radovan Ortynski said similar things in an interview with the local press. “We have reached a point when separating state officials from corrupted journalists and gangsters has almost become impossible,” Croatian journalist Sasa Lekovic told Time magazine. Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic wrote in the Guardian:

For the first time it became fearfully evident that the institutions of the state designated to protect citizens are not capable of doing their job. The explosion in the centre of Zagreb is a result of almost two decades of deliberate neglect of serious crimes. The problem – far from being unique to Croatia, of course – is the elaborate network of criminals, politicians, big business and the police. There is a picturesque word for it in Italy: octopus. Even the state public attorney recently lamented in the press the involvement of organised crime in the police and the judicial system. The president of the parliamentary national security council confirmed that criminals had infiltrated the very centre of power.

Pity that it took the murders of four people in as many weeks to prompt stories on the criminal-political nexus in the Balkans. This is a phenomenon that’s been part of the regional landscape since Arkan’s 1990s heyday and came to the world’s attention when Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was gunned down in Belgrade in 2003. These days, however, when the European Union is dangling membership before these countries, gangland murders and politicians’ relationships with mobsters may have consequences – stalling them or at least slowing their moves toward membership.

Enter the leaking of the European Commission’s latest progress report on the region, which habitually slaps all the countries on the wrist for their organized crime and corruption problems – called violating “the rule of law” in Euro-speak. The report, due out on Nov. 5, was leaked to the BBC and Balkan Insight, which printed the report’s salient points. Oddly, it is Croatia – the country whose recent wave of murders prompted the criminal-political reporting of late – that was deemed in the report to be “moving forward at a steady pace.”

In Serbia, a paper in the northern town of Novi Sad beat Balkan Insight to the punch early last week by publishing a sneak preview of the EU delegation to Serbia’s report:

The document criticizes "growing corruption" in the country, dubs the state of human rights and position of small religious communities as "worrying,” and accuses the ruling coalition of wishing to maintain "a political influence on judges.”

The former Serbian province of Kosovo – now an independent country, except in the eyes of Serbia or Russia – has also been slammed on organized crime. In what is becoming a meaningless drone from the EU, the report noted that the EU expects Kosovo’s institutions to “consolidate the rule of law” and the struggle against corruption and organized crime.

In next-door Montenegro, opposition leader Nebojsa Medojevic told the press that the EU sees Montenegro as a country that offers protection to international organized crime groups.

He said that a big problem was that the most important countries in the EU had sent many clear messages to Montenegro to “rid the country of mafia, organized crime, drug trafficking and consolidate adherence to the rule of law in Montenegro.”

Medojević said that the EU had already had enough problems with Bulgaria and some with Romania, and did not want to enter communications with “a small country that has a big problem with a lack of clear political will to deal with organized crime.”

Farther south, the EU may not be handing Macedonia any favors – the EU isn’t recommending a date for the start of accession talks – but the small Balkan country just north of Greece is on the road to wiping out corruption thanks to electronic government, or e-government, as the development wonks call it. Or at least according to the same wonks in the IHT article, which outlines how putting cross-border trucking licenses and state job applications online can cut down on corruption.

Moscow Times: Crisis could weaken corruption

In Russia, it’s the global economic crisis, not e-government, that could be putting the brakes on corruption. Business owners in Russia regularly pay bribes in the thousands of dollars to sanitation and other inspectors to avoid being shut down arbitrarily. They’re hoping that the crisis may mean some relief come bribe time, reports the Moscow Times.

Punctuality in making payments had always been Dmitry's pride, but in April he was forced to delay employee salaries by more than a month.

The sanitary inspector, who he usually bribed, had demanded an extra $15,000 to buy a new car for his wife. Dmitry had little choice but to hand over the money or see his shop closed for "sanitary reasons." But the bribe left no funds to pay the wages of his 15 employees.

"I had to ask the employees to wait, and I paid them back bit by bit," Dmitry said.
But Dmitry and other small business owners hope that times will change — and not because the Kremlin has promised to crack down on corruption. They said the financial crisis could actually help their companies by lowering the cost of bribes.

Italy: More on Villas, Schoolboys

Last week I wrote about NATO officers renting Naples-area villas that turned out to be owned by members of Italy’s Camorra mafia. Now, Australian paper The Age follows up with some numbers.

According to investigators, work by the anti-Mafia prefecture and local carabinieri during the past 12 months alone uncovered property assets worth more than 100 million euros that have been traced to yet another arm of the Camorra network, the Bianco Corvino clan.

When seized by the state, it was found that at least 40 of the properties had long-term leases with NATO. The lessees now pay their rent to the Italian Government.

Colonel Carmelo Burgio, a former commander of Carabinieri in Nassiriya, Iraq, and head of the 1300 officers who worked on the investigations, told Corriere Della Sera there are probably "hundreds more".

The Camorra, meanwhile, have not slowed activity, even though their cash flow from the villas has been diminished. Four masked men on motorbikes peppered five schoolboys with 30 bullets in a Naples suburb last week, wounding them in the arms and the legs. The shootings are believed to be a warning to the boys – two of whom are members of prominent crime families. None of them was in life-threatening condition.

Turkey: 40 arrested in highway corruption op

Ankara’s top anti-crime force arrested 40 people last week for conspiring to rig highway construction bids, and attempting to defraud the country of 250 million Turkish lira ($161 million). Officers from the Anti-Smuggling and Organized Crime Unit, raided 42 separate places at the same time after four months of surveillance. Among those netted in the raids were six engineers serving on the Highway Directorate’s bidding board, 17 construction company managers, and the son of the owner of a prominent Ankara football team.

Dirty cop news roundup

Senior Israeli police officials, including commissioner David Cohen, are being scrutinized by the state comptroller in connection with two police informants who were murdered while Cohen commanded Israel’s Central District in 2006, reported Haaretz. 

Documents obtained by Haaretz, and apparently also made available to the comptroller, reveal the unfolding of events that led to the murders. It turns out the police had warning signs that the informants were to be targeted, but one failure after another led to their being killed in any event, the first in October 2006 and the second three weeks later in November. The two informants were both involved in secret investigations into organized crime.
The first victim was Eyal Salhov, of Bnei Brak, who provided information to the police from inside Avi Ruhan's crime organization over an eight-year period. The second victim, who can be identified only as N., was an informant inside the Jerussi crime family. No one has ever been arrested for either of the two murders.

The documents show that a number of police officers gave repeated warnings before the murders, and afterwards demanded a thorough investigation of the failures that led up to the deaths, but that they were ignored. Even now, many Central District officers find it hard to believe how the two cases were covered up without being investigated properly, and how the affair was not previously reported in the media.

In Mexico, prosecutors announced a new, wretched twist in that country’s violent war on drug cartels that has left thousands dead: employees of the federal Attorney General’s office had been passing on information to drug traffickers. AP had the story:

Employees of the unit charged with fighting organized crime were paid by members of the Beltran-Leyva cartel to pass along information on federal investigations of their organization and other traffickers.

Two top employees of the organized crime unit and at least three federal police agents assigned to it may have been passing information on surveillance targets and potential raids for at least four years, the unit's head, Assistant Attorney General Marisela Morales, told a news conference.

One of the officials was an assistant intelligence director and the other served as a liaison in requesting searches and assigning officers to carry them out. All but one of the officials has been arrested. The agents and officials received payments of between $150,000 and $450,000 per month for the information, Morales said.