17th December 2000

UN taking on Mafiosi

The 1972 Academy Award winning film "The Godfather," one of the finest gangster epics ever made, continued the saga into Parts I, II and III, prompting one cynical movie critic to observe that Hollywood could never have created movie sequels if there were no Roman numerals.

When the "The Godfather" was being shot in the streets of New York, the producers received an anonymous phone call threatening to blow up the multi-storeyed Paramount Pictures glass-structured building outside Central Park — if the movie script had any references to "mafia" by name. Fortunately for Paramount Pictures, the original script did not mention the crime family by name — maybe because the movie was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and the novel authored by Mario Puzo, both Italian Americans.

Virtually every single movie or novel on the mafia has had an underlying reference to the fact that most mafia leaders are obsessed with food — and are invariably gunned down while enjoying a calorie-rich meal in an Italian restaurant. As legend has it, in one particular Italian restaurnat in Brooklyn, the visitor is greeted by the maitre d' who asks him: "Sir, do you want the shooting section or the non-shooting section." Obviously, the shooting section in New York's Italian restaurants is more hazardous to your health than the smoking section.

Mafiosis very rarely died in bed. One mafia leader admitted that he lived with one foot on a grave and one foot on a banana skin.

In the United States, the mafia is known to have infiltrated every conceivable lucrative business, setting up "front" organisations for extortion, gambling and bootlegging, among others. In more recent times, even the Wall Street stock market was not immune, as the mafia's tentacles spread into the realm of white collar crimes. US crime prosecutors have, over the years, broken the backs of the mafia but never succeeded in eliminating New York's crime families.

Last week the fight went global as the United Nations unveiled the first international UN convention to fight organised crime. The signing of the new convention took place in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, Italy, the onetime home of the mafia.

"The convention is one of the major achievements of the United Nations," boasts Pino Arlacchi, Executive Director of the UN Drug Control Programme and Crime Prevention. "It will also be a welcome tool for investigators, prosecutors and judges throughout the world."

A renowned crime fighter in Italy, Arlacchi is best known for his relentless battle against mafia syndicates in his home country. The convention, he says, combines the most advanced tools available for fighting organised crimes. Titled "the UN Convention Against Transational Organised Crime," the new treaty will strengthen governments against all forms of serious crimes, including money laundering, trafficking in human beings, arms smuggling, international fraud, drug trafficking and corruption.

The convention will enter into force after 40 countries have ratified it. The need for a convention has also arisen due to a surge in transnational crimes prompted by globalisation. For the first time, the convention offers the international community universally recognised definitions of several fundamental concepts of criminal law linked to organised crime.

The 41 articles in the convention define concepts such as "organised criminal group," "serious offence" and "proceeds of crime." At the opening of the conference last week, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that criminal groups have wasted no time in embracing today's globalised economy and the sophisticated technology that goes with it.

"But our efforts to combat them have remained, up to now, very fragmented, and our weapons almost obsolete," he added.

Annan pointed out that the Palermo Convention, however, gives a new tool to address the sourge of crime as global problem. Addressing delegates, the Italian Minister of Justice Piero Fassino said: "We are no longer citizens of individual countries, but of the world. Crime is more organised at a transnational level while technology has increased mobility for all. Both licit and illicit interests have become transnational and new figures of illegality have arisen, as have new forms of crime."

The Italian government, he said, is supporting a proposal under which 25 percent of the confiscated proceeds of organised crime will be paid to the United Nations to help fight transnational crimes.

Arlacchi paid tributes to two judges, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who were killed by the Sicilian mafia back in 1992. "Their deaths remind us that the struggle against organised crime is never cost-free. This is the reason why this Convention is a milestone measure a living tribute to the thousands of men and women who have lost their lives in pursuit of a world free of mafias and criminal violence," he added.