Combat Mafia by Cooperation, Says FBI Chief

Warning of the threat to world security and to Russian democracy posed by organized crime, FBI director Louis Freeh called on Monday for closer ties between U.S. and Russian authorities in fighting the mafia. Speaking to cadets of the Interior Ministry Academy in Moscow, Freeh repeated his warning that organized-crime groups might acquire weapons-grade nuclear material with the intent of selling the bomb to the highest bidder, and called for increased joint efforts to head off this threat.Freeh also warned that the mafia threatened Russia's efforts to establish a democratic rule-of-law state. The importance of his statement was underscored by a poll published days earlier that suggested a large portion of the population believe that crime gangs are running the country.Interior Ministry spokesman Vladimir Vorozhtsov said Freeh and Interior Minister Viktor Yerin would sign an agreement Tuesday that envisaged the exchange of information between U.S. and Russian law-enforcement agencies about the activity of crime gangs in the two countries.The agreement, which Freeh called a "police-to-police bridge," also envisaged the opening of an FBI office in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and an Interior Ministry office in the Russian Embassy in Washington. While the agreements were a sign of the newfound cooperation between law-enforcement agencies of former Cold War adversaries, they were also indicative of the crisis in worldwide crime-fighting efforts brought on by the fall of Soviet communism."One criminal threat looms larger than the others: the theft or diversion of radioactive materials in Russia and Eastern Europe," Freeh said, adding that it was likely that "organized-crime groups will view these materials as a desirable form of contraband, to be offered for sale to the highest bidder."Freeh's Russian counterpart, Sergei Stepashin, the head of Russia's Federal Counterintelligence Service, welcomed the agreements and the idea of greater cooperation with the FBI, but said at an earlier press conference Monday that he had no evidence of impending sales of nuclear weapons by the mafia. Freeh countered: "We cannot afford to wait until there is a successful diversion of a significant amount of nuclear material before we develop and implement an international law-enforcement plan of action to address this grave threat."Freeh said that the illicit nuclear trade was far from being the only potential threat emanating from Russia. He said that Russian organized-crime groups had rapidly formed contacts with other organized-crime groups worldwide, including the Italian mafia and Colombian drug cartels. But perhaps more ominous to Russia's future were "the dangers that organized-crime groups pose to civil order in Russia.""I am afraid that, if unchecked, these organized-crime groups and the terror that they generate will ultimately retard Russia's economic development and precipitate the flight of legitimate capital from your midst," Freeh said.Reacting to the growing atmosphere of terrorist acts, mainly aimed at wealthy business people, President Boris Yeltsin recently issued a decree giving Russian authorities such sweeping powers to combat crime that it has been criticized by Yeltsin's erstwhile liberal supporters on the grounds that it limits civil liberties.But if the decree has taken effect, it has yet to deter criminals, as illustrated by a report that appeared just hours before Freeh's speech. Itar-Tass reported that police had captured kidnappers who held an 8-month-old girl for 32 days and threatened to cut off the baby's head and send it to her parents if they did not receive a ransom of $500,000.The agency said that the baby, whom police identified as the daughter of a businessman, was kidnapped June 2 and freed unharmed Saturday after police paid a ransom of $270,000. Although the gang's members were captured, the act seemed to underline the growing audacity of criminals. Many residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg apparently believe that the crime wave is evidence that real power in Russia is in the hands of criminals, according to a poll published in Izvestia over the weekend. The survey found that 21 percent of Muscovites believed the mafia runs the country, while only 5 percent thought the president was in charge. Another 46 percent said they did not know who was in charge.