More on March’s OC arrests in Spain

By Beth Kampschror

There is perhaps a particular risk of such guilt by association in Spain, one of the focal points of last week's police operation. Some say biased media coverage of Eastern Europeans' role in Spain's criminal underworld is to blame for distorted stereotypes.

"In any society, there are some villains, some bad people, and here in this community [of Eastern European immigrants in Spain] -- I think in every community here -- there's a small mafia, some bad people," says Natalia Shapovalova, a Ukrainian resident in Madrid and a researcher at Spain's Foundation for International Relations and Foreign Dialogue. "The problem, of course, is the news coverage."

And others are annoyed that the press in Europe didn’t bother to get the story right about which country the alleged mobsters were from:

When news first broke of the arrests on March 15, Western European headlines touted yet another crackdown against the "Russian mafia."

RFE/RL's Russian Service correspondent in Madrid, Viktor Cheretsky, says Spanish media continued to refer to the criminals as "Russian mafia," even after it became clear that the ring was composed almost exclusively of ethnic Georgians.

Cheretsky says that the media took hours -- and in some cases even days -- to refer to the arrested men as Georgians rather than Russians. Cheretsky says Spanish journalists frequently use "Russian mafia" as a blanket term to describe criminal groups from across the entire former Soviet world.

"Any [criminal activity] that relates to Bulgaria or Romania or Poland or even Finland are attributed to 'Russia mafia' on many occasions [in the Spanish press]," Cheretsky says. "Imagine, they arrest a Finnish kingpin and they say he's a Russian mobster -- it's absurd. Above all, [criminals from] the former Soviet countries, from the Baltics, Ukraine, and Georgia -- all are called Russian mafia. This of course is not true."

It makes you wonder how the Spanish press has covered the recent stories about various crime figures from another notorious part of the world – the Balkans. According to Serbia’s television-radio B92, Spanish police worked with the Serbian Interior Ministry (MUP) to arrest a gang of burglars and robbers headed by a Bosnian Serb in Spain last week. The two police forces also worked together in March to arrest a wanted Montenegrin suspected of war crimes. But you know, those Russians – always up to their Russian mafia business, and those Serbs – always with the stealing and the war crimes.

Serbia’s Interior Minister touts OC fight

Speaking of the Serbian MUP, its leader last week said that his cops are the regional leaders in fighting organized crime. Interior Minister Ivica Dacic briefed Parliament about last year’s two big anti-drug operations – one that found two tons of cocaine on a yacht off Uruguay, and another that arrested 1,700 suspected drug dealers within Serbia.

The minister went on to say that in 2009 the quantity of narcotics seized was 64 percent greater than in 2008, with the police confiscating 1.2 tons of drugs in the January-November 2009 period. He also said the number of corruption cases that had been uncovered was 22 percent higher than the previous year, adding that the Interior Ministry was involved in battling high tech crime, which included several operations.

Dacic didn’t offer any comparisons to other countries in the region, so we don’t have any proof that Serbia is in fact the regional leader in fighting organized crime. And these big increases from 2008 may simply be showing just how little Serbia was doing earlier to crack down on narcotics trafficking. But still, these operations – particularly the South American one last year, done in partnership with the US Drug Enforcement Agency – are undoubtedly a positive development.

And they seem to be on track with following the money as well: Another official announced last week that the value of assets seized since Serbia passed its forfeiture laws in 2008 was approaching €100 million. Police director Milorad Veljovic also told Parliament last week that the police will now be trying to prevent criminals from laundering their money in legal businesses, particularly through buying companies, real estate and investing in tourism.

The heads of Serbia’s public companies and judiciary should also take note, as organized crime prosecutor Miljko Radosavljevic said last week that preliminary procedures are underway to launch investigations into several of those figures. Corruption will be the focus, he said.

Bulgaria: Corruption round-up

Public and state-run companies were in focus in the Balkan neighborhood last week. A right-wing political party in Bulgaria gave a dossier on state-run energy companies to the country’s top prosecutor, reports the Sofia News Agency. According to the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria, a local thermal power plant had bought coal from a local mine at prices that were 15 percent higher than the prices on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, and then passed on the extra costs to Bulgarian customers. The party also alleged that the plant failed to meet its supply contracts with Bulgaria’s national electricity utility, instead selling electricity to Greece and Turkey through middlemen; the party charged that “someone” had kept the money. It’s unclear what the top prosecutor will do about these allegations.

Bulgaria’s courts, however, may finally be stepping up on their end, after years failing to convict senior officials for corruption. The Christian Science Monitor interpreted two recent verdicts as proof that the European Union’s pressuring Bulgaria to clean up its act is bearing fruit:

On March 18, Asen Drumev, former head of the State Agricultural Fund, was sentenced to four years in prison for embezzling $34 million worth of EU assistance. Then on Monday, businessman Mario Nikolov received 10 years for defrauding Brussels of $8.3 million of agriculture and rural-development funds.

They were the first officials to be punished in an effort to placate an increasingly irate Brussels, which has for years criticized Bulgaria's widespread vote-buying, shady financing of political parties, money laundering, and failure to seize financial assets of alleged gangsters. As many as 150 mafia-related murders have netted no convictions.

Or, the paper writes, it could be that the voters who brought in a new center-right government in July of last year simply want the party in power to make good on its campaign promises.

Indeed, more than EU pressure, (PM Bojko) Borisov’s administration must answer to voters.

“They won because of their anti-corruption campaign,” says (analyst Ruslan) Stefanov. “So they can’t forget where all those votes came from.”

Europe, further east roundup

Bavarian police arrested 11 people last week on suspicion of involvement in an Italy-to-Germany cocaine trafficking ring run by Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta crime group.

Investigators believe that several kilograms of cocaine were regularly brought to Germany from Italy via courier trips and then distributed to bulk buyers, who they said were primarily pub owners in Munich and Upper Bavaria. From there, the drug was sold to consumers.

As part of the operation, some 340 officers raided 75 sites in the region to seek evidence and carry out the arrest warrants. These latest arrests come a month after police in Spain detained a string of Italian Mafia figures for drug running, including a key member of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra.