Over the past few decades, organised crime has acquired such worrying proportions that a complete network of criminal organisations is now routinely operating even beyond national borders, using more and more sophisticated systems and procedures, pursuing extremely ambitious economic objectives and posing a very grave threat to the financial and political systems of the countries concerned.
The internationalisation of the Mafia and of most criminal organisations is following the illegal immigration routes.
Sicilian Mafia members went to America at the beginning of the century, and again in the Sixties in order to avoid law enforcement measures implemented in Italy at the time and they are still going there today to occupy new market niches left open after the decline of the American Cosa Nostra.
But they also return to Italy, as Lucky Luciano did after his deportation by the American Government.
Canada and Australia are also popular destinations for Sicilian communities which settle down and introduce forms of organised crime with pronounced Sicilian character.
The same has occurred in Germany where groups of Sicilian immigrants have recently been found to be working in close connection with their families of origin, making investments and recruiting members to be used in criminal activities in Sicily, as in the case of the murder of Judge Livatino.
Migration has certainly been one of the main factors behind the traditional internationalisation processes through which the Sicilian Mafia has developed.
But it was when Cosa Nostra became heavily involved in the drug trade in the Seventies that the old Mafia, initially llinked to the great landowners, followed by the urban Mafia and the contemporary Mafia made the great "leap forward".
As everyone knows, drugs are produced and refined in various places all over the world for consumption throughout the world.
Hence the need for Cosa Nostra to move on a worldwide scale.
The need to control the international crime markets and to supervise major financial activities and relations directly with other criminal organisations, are other reasons that have encouraged Cosa Nostra to establish itself abroad.
The International vocation of the Mafia dates back a long way, as we have said.
In the Sixties there was a "family" in Tunisia, reporting to the Caltanissetta "cupola"; another Cosa Nostra "family" had been set up in Venezuela where the organisation's investments had become far too important to be left in the hands of individuals with no obligation to obey or to respect hierarchical ties. According to the evidence acquired through cooperation with foreign police forces, the Mafia is now established in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Thailand, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Switzerland, Spain, the Federal Republic of Germany and Australia.
All of these bases do not only operate according to modern managerial rules to run the main unlawful traffics, particularly drugs and money-laundering, but they also provide valuable support to fugitives from justice or they kill those who thought to escape by seeking refuge abroad. Some murders, strictly linked to the "Mafia wars" which occurred in Palermo in the early Eighties, were carried out in the Federal Republic of Germany or in the United States.
One common mistake is to identify the criminal activities of the Mafia merely with drug trafficking. While these two phenomena are very closely linked, they are not the same.
On the international level there is a combination of other elements. The heroin and cocaine trade is not in the hands only of traditional Mafia groups, but also of emerging indigenous and foreign groups. Mafia crimes are always committed to further Mafia's own objectives, one of which is to demonstrate its organisational capacity and its ability to strike down anyone who tries to thwart its plans whenever and wherever.
This enormous intimidatory capacity was brought to the world's attention through the massacres at Capaci and Via d'Amelio in 1992 in which two of the symbols of the war against Cosa Nostra, Falcone and Borsellino, lost their lives. This is a great asset to the Mafia, which coupled with its traditional reputation for efficiency and effectiveness of its structures, gives it full title to conclude agreements and strategies with criminal groups involved in the international drug trade, but also to take advantage of other criminal opportunities offered on the international market to large underworld organisations.
These include, for example, the traffic in arms, nuclear materials, works of art and archaeological remains, hazardous wastes (radioactive waste), stolen motor-cars and heavy vehicles, as well as their cargoes and children for adoption, human organs for transplants, immigrants, and so on.
The internationalisation of this phenomenon is now a fact and has been documented by the most recent police operations carried out in Italy and abroad.
It was on the island of Aruba, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean, 20 kms off the Venezuelan coast, that the Sicilian Mafia and the Colombian Medellín cartel decided to join forces in October 1987.
Giovanni Falcone saw this as a terrifying new development.
These two giants in the field of organised crime established a partnership to instil terror, each one with its own international army, unlimited financial resources, and the power of a state within a state.
What was particularly frightening was not so much the fact in itself as the growing realisation that from 1990 onwards all the major crime syndicates would be joining forces: the Sicilian and the American Mafias, the Turkish Mafia trafficking in arms and drugs, the Russian Mafia, the Chinese Triads and the Japanese Yakuza.
Although separated by thousands of kilometres and centuries of history, tradition and culture, these powerful underworld organisations were now beginning to coordinate their money, men and illegal markets in what Falcone called "operational welding", a kind of non aggression pact to avoid conflicts, establishing common strategies and zones of influence in which to cooperate peacefully worldwide.
Within the period of four to five years, following the 1987 Aruba Summit, that is exactly what happened, even though Falcone did not live long enough to see his predictions come true because he was assassinated in the cowardly bomb attack at Capaci (23 May 1992).
At Aruba, the Sicilian proposal was to barter European heroin for cocaine produced in Colombia.
It was designed to give Medellín the chance to gain a foothold on the profitable American heroin market, in exchange Cosa Nostra was given exclusive rights over the European wholesale cocaine market.
This was the answer given to those who believed that the Mafia had virtually disappeared after the successful 1984-1986 trials, the seizure of property and refineries, the maxi-trials and the sentencing of a thousand "men of honour' in Sicily, and the Pizza Connection trial in New York.
With the Cosa Nostra monopoly, Europe caught up with and overtook America.
From 40 tonnes of cocaine reaching Europe in 1987, imports increased five-fold to 200 tonnes in the following five years, with a street value of 10 billion dollars.
In short, the Sicilian "mafiosi" were also recycling their revenues from the cocaine trade in Europe but also the Colombian cartels'. With the "Green Ice" operation the DEA in conjunction with the police forces of 7 other countries, inflicted a serious blow on a number of money-laundering channels in Europe.
But in the meantime several other laundering channels had been set up in the countries of the former Communist bloc.
The Sicilian Mafia had managed to get there first, by establishing a special cooperation agreement with the Russian Mafia.
That happened in 1992, at that time the Western authorities were not able to imagine why a Sicilian or an American Mafia boss, or any other sane person would want to buy 10 billion dollars' worth of rubles.
In the former Soviet Republics were the world's largest oil reserves (80 billion barrels), one-fourth of the world's gold and timber reserves, one-fifth of the world's diamonds reserves, the world's second largest deposits of copper, iron-ore, coal, nickel and zinc and a whole string of precious metals.
And that is not all; the former Soviet Republics had also inherited what had formerly been the world's largest army, with its sophisticated weapons, tanks, missiles, aircrafts, and nuclear warheads and materials.
All of this was available for anyone who wanted to take it, in a country that had been crushed, penniless, chaotic and devastated by the high rate of corruption.
Everything was on sale at incredibly cheap prices, but payment had to be made in local currency purchased on the black market for a fraction of its value.
In 1990 it was possible to buy a tonne of crude oil for the rouble equivalent of 5 dollars, and re-sell it for 150 real dollars in Western Europe.
All that was needed was an agreement with a Russian Mafia colleague or a corrupt politician to open an account in a Russian bank, obtain an export licence, buy roubles in exchange for narco-dollars or forged dollars and then pay for the export of raw materials in roubles, and by so doing not only launder the money but come out of it with profits of 400/500 per cent, and even 1,000 per cent.
It was in Russia that the large criminal syndicates found out that they could help each other in a régime of "Pax Mafiosa", and they could plunder an enormous country and maximise their profits virtually risk free.
Towards the end of 1992, a former Mafia member turned State's witness from Caltanissetta, Leonardo Messina, told the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission that "Since the Eighties Cosa Nostra has acquired a world-wide status... There is the leadership at the top, a place where everyone meets... We sit down around the international table with all the other organisations. The World Commission is a consultation body, but it is also where important decisions are made ... Before November 1991 other people had been in charge, but then at a meeting held somewhere on the planet, we were given the job of representing all the organisations ... Totó Riina reached the position of Supreme Commander, and my boss, the provincial representative of Caltanissetta "Piddu" Madonia, sat by his side."

I must confess that it was particularly difficult to believe in this account which became increasingly harder to credit when we subsequently saw that the boss of bosses, the supreme commander of the world criminal order, arrested in January 1993, looked like a humble, obsequious, gawky peasant.
As a matter of fact, he was none of these things at all. His interrogators realised that he was acting out a part, and found him to be cunning, domineering and subtly arrogant. On the basis of the statements made by Messina alone, even though there was no corroboration for them at the time, there is no proof that he really was the head of a criminal government world-wide in scope. But there can be no doubt at all that the International underworld had concluded an agreement to divide the world up between them, which Judge Falcone had already realised before he died, as one can easily see not only from what has been said above but also by the following specific events and highly significant facts that have been recently ascertained:
- leaders of the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta have purchased hundreds of Kalashnikovs in the former Yugoslavia, bartering them for heroin shipments with the support of the Puglia criminal organisation, the Sacra Corona Unita;
- investigations in Germany and Sicily have revealed that members of Mafia clans operating in the provinces of Enna and Agrigento are involved in arms and explosives trafficking; an enormous foreign arms arsenal belonging to the powerful Catania family of Nitto Santapaola has been seized;
- various European police forces have ascertained that Western Mafia organisations are bartering roubles for narco-dollars or forged dollars. These transactions involve incredibly large amounts of money. In one of these operations 500 billion roubles were laundered, with which buildings and companies were purchased;
- a number of Mafia families of the former USSR and the American Cosa Nostra have concluded agreements to carry out economic frauds, also in the credit card industry where Asian criminal groups are also involved;
- links have also been discovered between the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta and a number of Turkish cartels involved in heroin trafficking;
- in the Czech Republic members of the Neapolitan Camorra belonging to the clan headed by Gennaro Licciardi are at work. There are also contacts between members of that clan and members of Russian criminal gangs;
- a trade in arms between Croatia and Italy with the involvement of members of the Puglia and Sicilian organised underworld, allowed to ascertain the existence of relations between these and criminals resident in the former Czechoslovakia;
- there are links between a number of Italian companies and organisations belonging to the Russian underworld suspected of laundering money from unlawful activities carried out in the Russian Republic,
- in the police operation called "Europa I", which was completed in 1993 by the Judicial authorities of Locri (Reggio Calabria) against a group of Calabrian 'Ndrangheta mafia members. It was yielded that a finance company belonging to one of the mafiosi was involved in purchasing and selling billions of roubles and hundreds of millions of dollars, even though the company had a minimal share capital;
- in "Operation Wall Street" which was completed by the Milan police in 1993, it was found that ‘Ndrangheta cells are now being constituted in the Eastern European countries, particularly in Poland and in Hungary;
- a number of smuggled cigarette sales outlets in Italy are now selling packets of cigarettes bearing the name of the place of manufacture in Cyrillic characters, indicating that there is a permanent relationship between Italian Mafia groups running smuggling rings and the Russian groups;
- on the outskirts of Palermo 5 tonnes of smuggled cigarettes produced in Eastern Europe were recently seized;
- according to Leonid Fituni, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, on the basis of information from the police department to combat organised crime, a secret agreement was concluded between the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and criminal groups in the former Soviet Union in the late autumn of 1992, to set up a network to traffic in nuclear components and drugs produced in the former Soviet Republics. The first contacts were established in March and June 1991 in Warsaw and then continued in Moscow;
- similar information has also been supplied by the Czechoslovak Federal Police, according to which one month before the two autonomous republics were established at the end of 1992, the Italian Mafia had secretly concluded a pact in Prague with various criminal gangs from the former Soviet Union;
- Senator Nunn has told a session of the relevant Committee of the United States Senate that the authorities had confirmed the existence of plans to bring together Russian and Italian criminal groups in Prague, Warsaw and Zurich, and in Berlin in 1993.
It should be added that details about relations between Italian and Russian organisations are coming in increasingly week after week.
It is evident what damage might be done to the Russian Federation, the Eastern European countries and all the other countries in the West by these anomalous joint venture agreements.
The Russian Mafias work in an environment which is ideal for the maximum development of criminal activities; they can guarantee impunity, launder money, provide hide-outs for hot goods such as narcotics and arms, with virtually no borderlines between legal and illegal markets.
Endogenous criminal organisations such as the Mafia are a safe model because of their centuries of experience. Wherever a Mafia group arrives, the local underworld is forced to go away or to become subject to it, or to change their organisational model and fall into line with the Mafia model.
This is why the Russian underworld is increasingly tending to acquire the "military", political and financial features that are typical of the Italian Mafia, which have shown to be the most suitable for moving out of the "criminal organisation" phase and into the "integrated criminal system" phase, which is typical of the criminal world of the near future.
Against the background of this planetary-wide criminal alliance, law-abiding societies go on waging their fratricidal little wars, splitting themselves up into thousands of ethnic fragments, haggling about jurisdiction and national sovereignty, and a multitude of police forces are eager to keep their secrets carefully to themselves.
A few years after the establishment of the single market, the 12 member states of the European Community have sacrificed very little of their sovereign prerogatives.
Each country has its own extradition laws, its own asylum law, and their own surveillance laws, and laws on exchanging information produced by the police forces and the secret services, the possibility of infiltrating their agents, carrying out sting operations with drug shipments, imprisonment terms, different types of crimes, governing recycling, telephone tapping and microphone eavesdropping, and protecting data banks.
For example, a man who has been found guilty of Mafia membership and is still at large cannot be extradited from other countries of the Community, because their legislations do not provide for this kind of crime.
The Belgian police cannot control anybody's telephone, and certainly cannot plant secret microphones.
Dutch law prohibits transmission of any information to any foreign police force that is likely to lead to the arrest of a Dutch citizen.
A German policeman cannot pursue a criminal within the Dutch borders without a rogatory letter, or beyond the borders of any other State for more than 10 kms; and even then in a police car which is clearly marked. On the other hand, a Dutch policeman can cross the whole of Germany in pursuit of a criminal on the basis of bilateral agreements.
A French intelligence agent can catch a drug trafficker by setting him up in a sting operation, while any German policeman that dares do such a thing in his own country might end up in prison.
It could take a lifetime to standardise all this legislation, but so far very little has been done by the dozens of international committees that have been set up for this purpose to keep pace with the fast-moving changes in the criminal world, which is constantly developing.
Criminals are moving much faster than the governments that are trying to combat them.
On the day the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, they were already rushing over the border in order to acquire as many resources as possible for themselves and to contact the Russian Mafia which was moving in the opposite, westward, direction.
The implications of this meeting of underworlds have been extremely worrying for every country in and outside Europe, starting with the United States.
Criminal gangs now meeting up with the Russians, have been plaguing America for years.
The Colombians used to supply most of the cocaine imported into the United States, while the Sicilian Mafia and the Chinese Triads have provided the heroin, while the Japanese Yakuza over the past decade has turned America into its primary headquarters for investing in the arms and drugs trade, and for money-laundering and large-scale blackmail.
The Sicilian Mafia has been importing thousands of new recruits into the United States in order to rejuvenate, perhaps even to replace, the older generation in certain "families" who were still in command of America's Cosa Nostra.
As if that were not enough, the Russian Mafia has sent thousands of recruits to America, to perpetrate ingenious fraudulent schemes worth billions of dollars, agreeing to pay a percentage to four of the five New York Mafia families.
Rushing towards the Pacific, the Russian gangs came into contact with the Triads and the Yakuza on the other side of the map, offering new outlets for the heroin of the Triads, who operated through China. Meanwhile, Georgian and Japanese gangs were stealing Japanese motorcars and sending them to the flourishing black market in Russia.
Thus the United States, China, Japan and Europe found themselves locked in a struggle against organised crime which itself had embroiled the whole planet in a lethal embrace.
Organised crime had managed to achieve a world without frontiers for itself.
And this was one of the least evident, and the most insidious of all the disastrous consequences of the collapse of Soviet Russia.
Who would ever have thought of bumping into a Sicilian who had just opened an "International Bank of Southern Russia" with the American Mafia, at Sverdlosk, in the middle of the Urals, 1,000 kms south of Moscow, in February l993?
Thinking carefully back over the projects of these two groups, one can only surmise what they were doing, because Sverdlosk lies at the heart of the famous military-industrial complex which once supplied the Russian army. It stands in the region with the largest oil reserves in the Middle East, and it is also the headquarters of a Russian Mafia gang which worked throughout the whole of the former Soviet territory, from the Baltic sea to the Pacific.
The income from organised crime can be put down to two main sources: the illegal production and distribution activities (drugs, illegal gambling, racketeering, European Community frauds, just to quote a few examples) and infiltrating lawful activities (trade, public contracts, etc. ).
Illegal and legal activities must be seen to be part and parcel of the same thing. Criminal organisations work simultaneously in both sectors, and the money they earn circulates between legal and illegal activities for a series of reasons which may be summarised as follows: to maximise the benefits from criminal activities (financing) while minimising the risks, as for instance that of identifying the organisation and that of its members being arrested on the one hand, and having the wealth thus generated, on the other, not to count the risk of seizure.
Criminal law enforcement is the main policy used in many countries, and this also applies to Italy. But its increasing costs and the flexibility shown by the underworld, and hence its ability to evade the law, are making it necessary to pay closer attention to prevention policies which must complement criminal law enforcement policies and be directed at:
- reducing the opportunities to commit crime, namely reducing the number of possibilities of gain offered by black market and illegal market operations;
- reducing the vulnerability of the legal markets which can easily be infiltrated by criminal organisations.
One of the most prominent collaborators turned State's witness, Gaspare Mutolo, has told the Italian Parliamentary Anti-Mafia commission, "The worst feeling is when our money is taken away from us. People prefer to be put behind bars and keep their money than to stay free without the money. Money is the main thing."
Profit, money, is the raison d'etre of organised crime: taking it away is the solution to the problem, but the problem is finding it in the first place.
Except Italy, no country has yet managed to get its hands on anything more substantial than what these organisation would consider pin money.
The tax havens that exist throughout the world are preventing substantial success being reached: Aruba, Saint-Martin, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Monte Carlo, the Channel Islands, and even Germany until 1992, the Cayman Islands, the Seychelles, Malta, Uruguay and Hong Kong are quite unabashed in this respect.
Even though money-laundering has become an international problem, these countries still openly tout for the custom of the most dubious clientele worldwide, despite advertising in the press.
Numerous governments are quite content to sit round a table to talk, and then issue sterile joint instructions and declarations of intent which are most unlikely to be implemented because of their legislative differences.
The fear of having prying eyes looking into their bank accounts and discovering vast areas of tax evasion or profits from other crimes against the public administration, which have to a certain extent been tolerated in the past are constraints that have virtually made any legislation basically useless.
Most of the reports regarding suspicious banking transactions (4,000 in the United Kingdom, and 122 in Italy between 1991 and 1993) have come to nought, very often because they have nothing to do with drugs or other crimes, but were merely transactions carried out to conceal wealth.
Whatever is being done anywhere in the world to take away the money from the criminal organisations is bound to be a total failure under these conditions, the exception being what the Italian courts have managed to achieve: in a short space of time, 3 billion dollars' worth of property has been seized from the Mafia bosses.
It is therefore dangerously deceptive to say that we have finally managed to make money-laundering an international crime, as someone recently claimed at the United Nations International Congress on Transnational Crime in Naples.
So what can be done then?
In view of what I have said, the following is required:
- a serious strategy to combat organised crime and defend other democratic principles through real international collaboration,
- policies in the international field designed to:
- narrow the differences between the legal systems;
- do away with types of competitiveness based on permissiveness, namely on the adoption of less stringent measures to combat crime;
- promote cooperation and overcome barriers by establishing common legal and judicial bases;
- provide venues for regular multilateral meetings, and set up liaison offices to act as clearing houses for important data and intelligence;
- provide assistance and cooperation to less well-equipped countries (developing, emerging countries, etc.) so that they can take precautions along the lines of those adopted by other countries.
Even though no government seems to realise it, it is not necessary to be prophets or fortune-tellers to predict that links between international organised crime syndicates will eventually destroy the economy, pollute politics and threaten public and private morality.