Frank Viviano Writes Organized crime said to launder billions
for terrorists
Money for groups has risen sharply in past decade- Paris — For the United States and its allies to wage a global
war on terrorism, and not merely on those responsible for the
attacks on New York and Arlington, Va., they must target an international
partnership whose financial means far exceed those of Osama bin
Laden.- The partnership, say law enforcement experts in Europe, involves
international organized crime groups working hand in hand with
major terrorist organizations, using banks, stock markets and
brokerage houses to launder more than $900 billion a year in
secret or illicitly acquired funds.- “The nerve center of war is money,” said Renaud
Van Ruymbeke, France’s chief financial crime prosecutor, who
leads a European Union team investigating the connections. “Without
money, terrorist networks do not exist.- They can’t finance their operations overseas or purchase
arms.”- The money has grown at a spectacular rate since the forging
of an alliance a decade ago between the criminal underworld and
fanatical religious and ethnic “liberation movements,”
say investigators.- In both the Middle East and Europe, says Hikmet Sami Turk,
Turkey’s minister of justice, a rising tide of illicit activities
are being “organized by criminal and terrorist gangs who
have international networks.”- Benefiting from this vast wealth are Islamic fundamentalist
groups such as bin Laden’s al Qaeda (the Base), along with their
counterparts in countries such as Lebanon, Chechnya and Tajikistan.
Other “liberation movements” tied into the underworld
financial nexus include the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey,
Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers and the Kosovo Liberation Army.- Terrorist groups also have been implicated in an international
narcotics trade, directed by organized crime, that the United
Nations now puts at $360 billion annually, says judge Thierry
Cretin of the European Anti-Fraud Office.- Investigators say the organized crime connection ranges from
wealthy, old- line “mafias” — Sicily’s Cosa Nostra,
Chinese Triads, cartels in Colombia and Israel — to newer crime
clans based in Albania, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Africa and the
Caucasus.- The crime families are seen as particularly important for
terrorist groups involved in the acquisition and transport of
arms.- “The expertise achieved by organized crime groups in
moving all kinds of goods through borders renders the contribution
of these groups invaluable for hidden transactions,” said
criminologist Vincenzo Ruggiero of Middlesex University in England.- In addition to their contraband activities, terrorist groups
earn significant amounts of money from graft and extortion rackets
directed against ethnic communities overseas. For example, French
police say small businesses in Paris serving Kurds, Tamils and
Lebanese are forced to pay “revolutionary taxes” to
terrorist groups.- Vast sums of this dirty money are being laundered each year
before re- entering circulation to pay for the travel, housing,
planning, weapons purchases and technical backup in terrorist
operations like the devastating assault on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon.- The laundered money is often funneled through the same high-profile
sector of financial institutions that were decimated on Sept.
11. It’s an area, say investigators, which the United States
and Europe have so far been powerless to tackle.- “Stock and bond purchases are essentially anonymous,”
said a German financial official. “If Osama bin Laden wanted
to invest money in the stock market, his name would certainly
not appear on the purchase ticket. A brokerage house is under
an obligation to protect the identity of its clients, not to
reveal it.”- As reported in The Chronicle on Tuesday, the U.S. Securities
and Exchange Commission is inquiring into disclosures that shares
in United Airlines and American Airlines, whose flights were
hijacked by the terrorists, were specifically targeted by a huge
stock sell-off, possibly by investors with advance knowledge
of the attack.- In Europe, reports that bin Laden’s financial advisers had
sold off huge stock holdings prior to the assault have prompted
investigations at banks and brokerages in Switzerland, Italy,
Germany, France and Japan.- However, laws requiring banks in Europe to disclose the sources
of questionable deposits are rare and weak. A panel of European
Union magistrates has been at work for several years on a new
set of trans-EU financial laws, geared to impede money laundering.- So far, they have been frustrated by the governments of EU
states unwilling to surrender national control over their own
fiscal infrastructures and criminal laws.- “The traditional system of judicial cooperation in penal
matters, based substantially on deposition and extradition, is
. . . inadequate to confront an organized criminality which .
. . exploits with great skill the differences that exist among
national penal law,” says Piero Luigi Vigna, Italy’s chief
anti-Mafia prosecutor.- Another area of cooperation between terrorist groups and
organized crime is the spiraling traffic in human beings. (The
Chronicle reported extensively on the human trafficking problem
last January.)- In Italy, for example, as many as 3,000 undocumented immigrants
have been arriving in a single week over the past two years.
A high proportion are Afghans, Kurds, Iraqis, Lebanese, Kosovar
Albanians and Sri Lankan Tamils.- Italian authorities say the voyages are a joint venture involving
as many as a dozen crime and insurgent groups, employing highly
complex planning tools and a carefully monitored division of
profits. Adding to the Italian government’s problem, say investigators,
is the lack of cooperation from other governments.- “The Italian police receive only the most minimal cooperation
from their European counterparts, much less from corrupt regimes
in the Third World,” said a senior official at an international
law enforcement agency who did not wish to be identified.- “The problem is that this is a phenomenon that respects
no borders. The organized crime groups and the terrorist organizations
are far more attuned to the realities of a globalist century
than Western governments are.”back
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