Ever notice there is always some new something to fear?
Web Writer's comments:
Just when we thought it was safe to come out from under the bed covers! The story below does speak of open borders. So much for the nay-sayers! Any comments from the FBI, CIA, or others?
This is a story about Obama. It implies he helped drug dealers. It relates to story below.
http://www.thetotalcollapse.com/shock-report-says-obama-moved-85-billion-to-honduras/
This story talks about global crime. The New Boogeyman!
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1993/12/13/global-mafia.html
Global Mafia
Dec 12, 1993 7:00 PM EST
from NewsWeek Magazine
The New global mafia poses the most serious criminal threat in history. A team of NEWSWEEK correspondents spent a month on the trail. The report: ON THE VIA NOTARBARTOLO in Palermo, Sicily, stands a small rubber tree. Taped to its trunk, like prayers for the intercession of a saint, are messages from children--"You have to be a great man," Elisa and Flavio have written. And a great man indeed he was: Giovanni Falcone, to whose memory the tree is dedicated, was the most determined investigator the Sicilian Mafia has ever known. Falcone was killed by a car bomb in Palermo on May 23, 1992; his death enraged Italy. On Nov. 21, an anti-Mafia candidate won 75 percent of the vote in Palermo's local elections. Forty miles south of the city, in Corleone--the hilltop village of "godfathers," real and celluloid--Felice Bellerio, 11, strolls into the office of Dino Paternostro, whose magazine campaigns against the Mafia. "I am Falcone's friend," says the child. "He is our future," says Paternostro.
Perhaps, in the long term: but not any time soon. For just when police from Bologna to Brooklyn believe that they may have a grip on the Sicilian Mafia and its cousins, just when Pablo Escobar has been gunned down, new "mafias" have popped up as if the earth bad been sown with dragons' teeth. Traditional mafiosi, says one Italian cop, were "uneducated jerks"; Escobar was a byword for violence. But the new crime lords, as an international investigation by NEWSWEEK has revealed, are far more sophisticated, more international and just plain more dangerous than either the Sicilians or the Medellin cartel ever were. International organized crime is frightening some sensible policymakers witless. "We have a problem that is accelerating far beyond the ability of our current institutions," says Tim Wirth, the under secretary of state for global affairs. "Organized crime," says Sen. John Kerry, is "the new communism, the new monolithic threat."
Around the globe, intelligence agencies are refocusing their operations from spies to criminals. Some of this may reflect the desire of spooks to protect their budgets in the post-cold-war world. But the threat is real. Roy Godson of Washington's National Strategy Information Center estimates the annual worldwide profits of organized crime at $1 trillion, almost the same size as the U.S. federal budget. From Russia to Thailand, the export of precious raw materials is falling into the hands of organized crime. From Central America to the Pacific Ocean, the political control of small nations is falling into criminal hands.
At the limit, some observers tremble that the new criminals may also pose a threat to the developed world. NEWSWEEK has learned that the CIA is investigating whether organized-crime groups could acquire nuclear weapons. Juri Pihl, the head of Estonia's security police, speaks of a black market for Russian arms that is "totally out of control." Godson calls organized crime's threat to governments "an iceberg; nobody knows the size of it." A senior official at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says plaintively, "When did we put these guys in control?"
We didn't. Rather, a number of social, political and technological trends have met to form a new space for organized crime: a vast hunting ground with no fixed borders and with an entry permit available only to the cruel and deadly.
The first trend is the development of computer and communications technology. Electronic fund-transfer systems can whiz billions of dollars around the globe within seconds. Faxes and cellular telephones can be encrypted, making it all but impossible to trace calls from them. Drug-cartel planes flying north to the United States have signal interceptors to plot radar and avoid monitoring.
Second is communism's collapse. In the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, the rebirth of the profit motive has combined with weak governments to form a devastating mixture. In China, a Communist government has decreed that it is good to grow rich--but it has been unable to control the genies of crime and corruption that it has unleashed.
The third trend--itself the function of the first two--is the declining significance of national borders. As late as the 1960s, the Japanese were not allowed to travel abroad for pleasure. Just a few years ago exit visas for those living in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China were a prized rarity. Now Czech prostitutes work the Italian Riviera; Chinese immigrants to America are transshipped through Hungary; South American drug lords recruit traffickers in Nigeria. In Western Europe, people, goods, money and arms swirl around in an all-but-borderless space.
(Page 2 of 6)
The New global mafia poses the most serious criminal threat in history. A team of NEWSWEEK correspondents spent a month on the trail. The report: ON THE VIA NOTARBARTOLO in Palermo, Sicily, stands a small rubber tree. Taped to its trunk, like prayers for the intercession of a saint, are messages from children--"You have to be a great man," Elisa and Flavio have written. And a great man indeed he was: Giovanni Falcone, to whose memory the tree is dedicated, was the most determined investigator the Sicilian Mafia has ever known. Falcone was killed by a car bomb in Palermo on May 23, 1992; his death enraged Italy. On Nov. 21, an anti-Mafia candidate won 75 percent of the vote in Palermo's local elections. Forty miles south of the city, in Corleone--the hilltop village of "godfathers," real and celluloid--Felice Bellerio, 11, strolls into the office of Dino Paternostro, whose magazine campaigns against the Mafia. "I am Falcone's friend," says the child. "He is our future," says Paternostro.
Perhaps, in the long term: but not any time soon. For just when police from Bologna to Brooklyn believe that they may have a grip on the Sicilian Mafia and its cousins, just when Pablo Escobar has been gunned down, new "mafias" have popped up as if the earth bad been sown with dragons' teeth. Traditional mafiosi, says one Italian cop, were "uneducated jerks"; Escobar was a byword for violence. But the new crime lords, as an international investigation by NEWSWEEK has revealed, are far more sophisticated, more international and just plain more dangerous than either the Sicilians or the Medellin cartel ever were. International organized crime is frightening some sensible policymakers witless. "We have a problem that is accelerating far beyond the ability of our current institutions," says Tim Wirth, the under secretary of state for global affairs. "Organized crime," says Sen. John Kerry, is "the new communism, the new monolithic threat."
Around the globe, intelligence agencies are refocusing their operations from spies to criminals. Some of this may reflect the desire of spooks to protect their budgets in the post-cold-war world. But the threat is real. Roy Godson of Washington's National Strategy Information Center estimates the annual worldwide profits of organized crime at $1 trillion, almost the same size as the U.S. federal budget. From Russia to Thailand, the export of precious raw materials is falling into the hands of organized crime. From Central America to the Pacific Ocean, the political control of small nations is falling into criminal hands.
At the limit, some observers tremble that the new criminals may also pose a threat to the developed world. NEWSWEEK has learned that the CIA is investigating whether organized-crime groups could acquire nuclear weapons. Juri Pihl, the head of Estonia's security police, speaks of a black market for Russian arms that is "totally out of control." Godson calls organized crime's threat to governments "an iceberg; nobody knows the size of it." A senior official at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says plaintively, "When did we put these guys in control?"
We didn't. Rather, a number of social, political and technological trends have met to form a new space for organized crime: a vast hunting ground with no fixed borders and with an entry permit available only to the cruel and deadly.
The first trend is the development of computer and communications technology. Electronic fund-transfer systems can whiz billions of dollars around the globe within seconds. Faxes and cellular telephones can be encrypted, making it all but impossible to trace calls from them. Drug-cartel planes flying north to the United States have signal interceptors to plot radar and avoid monitoring.
Second is communism's collapse. In the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, the rebirth of the profit motive has combined with weak governments to form a devastating mixture. In China, a Communist government has decreed that it is good to grow rich--but it has been unable to control the genies of crime and corruption that it has unleashed.
The third trend--itself the function of the first two--is the declining significance of national borders. As late as the 1960s, the Japanese were not allowed to travel abroad for pleasure. Just a few years ago exit visas for those living in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China were a prized rarity. Now Czech prostitutes work the Italian Riviera; Chinese immigrants to America are transshipped through Hungary; South American drug lords recruit traffickers in Nigeria. In Western Europe, people, goods, money and arms swirl around in an all-but-borderless space.
These three trends have brought a period of unparalleled prosperity to the world, as goods find new markets and people sell their skills to the highest bidder. But when combined with the enormous profits to be made from crime, they have also created an unprecedented opportunity for evil.
There is no single worldwide criminal conspiracy, no board of directors of Crime International ready to take on a latter-day James Bond. "The chief hitch in transnational empire building," says a senior officer at Interpol, "is the issue of trust...In a deal between nationally distinct mobs...everybody is armed and expecting to get cheated or killed--usually with good reason."
Yet though still in its infancy, international criminal cooperation is growing. East European and Russian gangs sell arms to the Sicilian Mafia; last year Japanese and Italian gangsters held a conference in Paris. As criminals from once closed societies like Russia and China move into the rich world, so they provide murderous competition for established criminals; a competition that all too often engulfs the innocent.
Such struggles are bound to intensify, because of a fourth and final trend: the rich world's appetite for narcotics, especially cocaine. Cocaine generates enormous sums of money that slosh around, and corrupt, the world's financial system. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris estimates that at least $85 billion in drug profits is laundered through the financial markets each year.
Never before has one form of criminal activity generated such enormous sums of ready money for investment in businesses legal and not. The cocaine kings are always looking for new territories to conquer, new outlets for their funds. It is the drug cartels' new global reach that, when mated with the post-communist world economy, has bred the new organized crime.
To combat the new threat will take brains and time. When Louis Freeh was sworn in as the FBI's director this year, he praised his friend Giovanni Falcone for his "historic" contribution. Freeh was right to do so; but as NEWSWEEK'S investigations show, it will take a lot more than prayers to law enforcement's secular saint to emasculate the threat we all now face.
FRANKLIN JURADO WAS A sophisticated financier with homes in Paris and Luxembourg and a degree from Harvard. He was scoping out new opportunities in Moscow like any decent modern capitalist when an unfortunate fate befell him. The Luxembourg police charged him with laundering $36 million of drug money through 33 banks. (This was a case of putting theory into practice: Jurado's master's thesis was on money laundering.)
Jurado, now in a Luxembourg jail, allegedly worked for the cartel based in Cali, Colombia. Even before the death of Escobar, drug-enforcement officials thought that the Cali cartel controlled 85 percent of the world's cocaine trade. Cali's reputed kingpins, the brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, had been feuding with Escobar for years. "The Rodriguez brothers," says a senior DEA official, "had absolutely blown Escobar out in terms of the volume of drug trafficking." Cali had learned from Escobar and his cohorts that excessive violence only invites a government crackdown. Instead, the Cali cartel treats cocaine as a business like any other (give or take the odd murder). The cartel recently tried to lease its own satellite so the CIA and DEA couldn't listen in on conversations. Cali's recruits are intelligent and its systems are high tech. In one case, the DEA arrested a trafficker who had 20 computers to run his distribution network.
But for all their sophistication, the Cali cartel and other kings of cocaine face two problems. The first is a price of success. Drug gangs have generated such huge sums of money that their members need to find something to do with it: after you've bought your second or third soccer team, the thrill is gone. Second, though the drug cartels are always looking for new markets and smuggling routes, the use of cocaine is probably in decline in mature markets like the United States and Western Europe. "It's a terrible thought," says an experienced anti-drug specialist at Interpol headquarters in France, "but we may just put ourselves out of business by the end of the decade."
Now the bad news: the burden of law enforcement will only move elsewhere. In response to new challenges, drug cartels are changing tack. First. they seek new investments in businesses, whether clean or dirty; then they seek new markets.
The first element of this new strategy turns on money laundering--transforming the revenue from drug sales so it can be used in other businesses. Cartels wash their cash in myriad ways, from postal-order and credit-card frauds to old standbys like padded construction contracts.
More on this story at site link top of page.
