The evil domain of International crime

Media

Part of Panorama

Title: The evil domain of International crime
Creator: Brean, Herbert
Identifier: Low pay, high penalty
Language: English
Source: Volume XII (Issue No.4) April 1960
Year: 1960
Subject: International crimes; Criminal liability (International law); Crimes against humanity (International law)
Rights
Fulltext: L&v pay, high penalty The Evil Domain of INTERNATIONAL CRIME by Herbert Brean International crime is the world’s biggest invisible business. In prosperous times like the present, when mo ney is generally plentiful, it flour ishes and feeds off the prosperity of others. Every year it costs the citizens of the world billions of dollars and an unmeasurable amount of suffering, and yet very few people are even aware of how it works and how it affects them. A small carton leaving Ge noa tonight may cause a stickup murder in Chicago next month. A car stolen tomorrow from a driveway in Dallas may almost literally vanish from the face of the earth—until it reap pears in South America, to which it has been smuggled piece by piece and reassembled for profit able sale. The pound note which a London shopper may receive in change at one of the Bond April 1960 57 Street shops this weekend may have been printed last month by a counterfeiter across the Chan nel in Paris. The practitioners of interna tional crime are hardheaded busi nessmen with only one guiding principle: money. Their vast net works are spread throughout the world, and have more ramifica tions and branches than any three international corporations put to gether. The diversity is endless. The products of international crime travel across the oceans, through the skies and across na tional boundaries by ship, plane, truck, pack mule, junk, camel caravan and human messenger. The “product” may be almost anything: not only diamonds and dope and counterfeit money but also pinball machines, cars, con games, financial credits, coffee, 4slaves. Whatever the product and year-old children who are sold as whatever th? means of transport ation, the result is always the same: fast, illegal profits. This article reports on this lit tle-known world and the people who inhabit it. It defines this world, stripping it of the legends (familiar to mystery-story read ers and viewers of the movies and TV) that obscure its true char acter, and reveals the methods and accomplishments of the one group designed to combat inter national crime on an internation al basis—the self-effacing, brilliant organization known as Interpol. fl ne of the many legends sur” rounding international crime is that it is run by one or more super-criminals heading far-flung networks of malefactors with branches in all the principal ci ties. Such organized efficiency does not exist in the criminal world. There are perhaps 12,000 really first-class international cri minals and perhaps 500 times that many who play smaller roles. But when any of these six mil lion-odd culprits work together as a gang, they usually join forces in a temporary and haphazard way. For 30 to combine is un usual, and a gang of 120 work; ing together is a big ring. In any case, when trouble looms their alliances swiftly dissolve. The one exception is the famed Mafia, which is probably the clos est thing to what might be called an “international crime syndi cate.” But even the Mafia is a limited operation in the over-all picture of world crime, for its operations are concentrated al most entirely in the U.S. and Sicily. 58 Many international criminals are professional pickpockets, con men and counterfeiters whose names are familiar entries on the world’s police blotters. .Others are professional "carriers” who, armed with a small library of passports, concentrate on smuggling from country to country. But a sizable number are otherwise respectable businessmen or legitimate airline or shipping company employees —amateurs unable to resist the temptation of an easy profit. To the professionals the world is a strangely restricted place, for there are only certain areas where they care to operate. The Euro pean continent mightily attracts them, but the British Isles do not. The Mediterranean basin is pleasant for them but most of Africa is not. South America’s mountains and broken eastern coastline, the major ports of both U.S. seaboards and certain Asia tic cities are highly attractive, but Australia virtually does not exist for them. Neither do coun tries like the Scandinavian ones and those behind the Iron Cur tain. The Pacific Ocean is re garded mainly as an obstacle cre ated to hinder police pursuit. Within this curiously limited world international criminals are quick to respond to changing conditions. Automobile theft, for example, is now verv profitable and is therefore on t£ie increase, but white slavery has fallen off severely. Improved police proce dures have not only forced inter national criminals to shift con stantly but have also required them to specialize. A good ex ample is the theft of travelers checks, a crime that frequently affects world travelers. Until re cently a continental hotel prowl er (a Hungarian specialty) gained entry to the foreigner’s room and stole his checks while he was out, or a pickpocket (a Spanish specialty) lifted the traveler’s book of checks from his pocket while he gaped at the Eiffel Tower. In either case the thief tried to cash the checks by forgery, a risky procedure in any alert bank or store. April 1960 59 Today this operation has its ■ own production line manned by a succession of specialists. The first specialist is the thief himself for, while he may use the same old methods to get the checks, his assignment ends at that point. He simply sells the checks for 15% of their face value to a sec ond specialist, the middle man of the operation. The middle man turns over the checks for 40% of their face value to a third set of specialists, the “selling gang” which must perform the most difficult part of the opera tion: passing the checks. A trav elers check is, of course, signed once by the owner when he pur chases it and once again when he cashes it. The selling gang has its choice of two methods: 1) it can remove the original sig nature by a delicate chemical op eration and replace it with tne signature of tne criminal who will actually cash the check, or 2) it can employ a skilled forger who will be able to reproduce the original signature under the wary eyes of a bank clerk. The specialization does not end with the cashing of the check. If the check is used as payment for a purchase, the item bought is likely to be something easily disposed of at close to actual cost, such as a camera or a pair of binoculars. Such items are promptly sent out of the country to still another gang which spe cializes in disposing of goods. International crime is not al ways as clearly criminal as this because what is illegal in one country may not necessarily be illegal in another. Anyone en gaged in the narcotics trade in the U.S. is a criminal. But many other countries remain undis turbed about it because they have no narcotics problem of their own. Decent, respectable Turk ish farmers grow acres of poppies under government license to pro duce opium, as legally as Ne braska farmers grow wheat to produce flour. Opium smoking is still legal in parts of India. Ma cedonian women use the drug to flavor pastry. I n some countries international ■ crime is actually encouraged by antiquated or inconsistent laws. Spain, for example, is a “car-poor” country: it produces few automobiles. But because Spain imposes a tariff of 150% on legitimate car imports, smug glers of new or stolen cars have strong financial incentive to op erate there. Spain also imposes a heavy duty on foreign machine parts, even when Spain herself does not manufacture them. As a result an entire turbo-generator once had to be smuggled into the country to complete a vital dam because the legal duty would have been exorbitant. Because Brazil’s tariffs contain many sim ilar inconsistencies, its long coast line plays host to a livley inva 60 Panorama sion of illicit U.S. cigarets, whis ky, nylons and cars. (The smug glers often depart with tons of Brazilian coffee purchased for less than the artificially pegged price, thereby compounding the crime and the profits.) Population shifts sometimes fa vor the international criminal. London, traditionally free of nar cotics problems, is now worried about marijuana, which has shown up among English teen agers since the recent immigra tion of Jamaicans and other Bri tish West Indians who use the drug. The British Isles, however, are a good example of how geo graphy and innate respect for the law can inhibit the international criminal. British traffic in illegal goods is confined to relatively few ports and airfields that are easy to supervise. The British customs service exercises tight supervision over incoming aliens (an average of 2,500 are excluded annually), and its meticulously polite cus toms inspectors are well trained to detect guilt from a traveler’s nervousness, his eye movements and what he does with his hands. While one inspector makes a ca sual examination of luggage, a second may stand by simply to study its owner—and a third who is stationed at the exit may gent ly ask to glance through a coat just as the traveler is leaving. Other countries have been made vulnerable to crime because of their geography. Lebanon, at the eastern end of the Mediterra nean, has been an international trading center since the time of the Phoenicians. Uruguay, tucked in between Brazil and Argen tina, is not only a convenient haven for criminals fleing from its neighbors but is also a handy clearinghouse for cocaine leaving South America and for opium coming in from the Middle East. Whatever the local conditions of geography, 1 a w and police work, one condition for a flour ishing international crime over rides all others: the opportunity for profit. Criminals will go to any lengths and take any risks when this opportunity exists. The French Surete recently broke up a far-flung ring which was ac tually using the military mail service as its means of transporta tion for illegal gold ingots. The gold was shipped, ostensibly as presents from loving wives, to French army officers stationed in Saigon, Indochina. The packages were keyed alphabetically by the initials of the addressees and were purposely mailed with insufficient postage so that they would come to the attention of postal clerks who could recognize them by the initials. The scheme was discov ered only because some packages accidentally fell into the hands of a clerk who was not in on the plot. When he sent them back for additional postage, the return addresses proved to be nonexist ent. But before this happened, April 1960 61 an estimated two tons of gold was smuggled out of France at a profit of more than one bil lion francs. I international traffic in wo■ men is still profitable, but the infamous white slaver of sev eral decades ago is now a victim of technological unemployment caused by increasing feminine sophistication. It is no longer very easy to entice unknowing women into a life of prostitu tion from which there is no es cape, and so the white slaver has been replace by the "theatrical agent” or “tai it scout,” certificate. Then she gets a ticket and traveling expenses. In Bei rut or Aleppo, she goes to work in a nightclub where she may dance, if ^he can stand on her feet, or sing, if she can open her mouth. But her main job soon becomes that of B-girl. She must mingle with the customers, encourage them to drink and, if they request, agree to spend the nignt with them after tne night club has closed. Even more vicious is the en slavement of children in Nigeria. This lucrative trade is carried on near the eastern and western borders where Negro children 4 To get women for the night clubs of Beirut and Aleppo, for example, where oil-rich Arabs come to spend their money, the "agent” advertises in European newspapers for models, dancers or nightclub singers. If a girl answering the aa has a union certificate, she will be free to travel abroad and can be signed up at once; if not, she is quickly taught the rudiments of kicking in the second line of the chorus so that she can qualify for a to 12 years old are kidnaped and sold into Dahomey or the Cameroons to become house or farm servants. Sometimes the child never crosses a border but instead is sold to a local believer in juju who thinks that if he sacrfiices a human being to the god he will grow rich, or that by eating some parts of the slaughtered ana tomy he can rejuvenate himself or prolong his life. The cunent price is £300 ($846) per child. The international criminal 62 Panorama need not be a big operator to make handsome profits. A sailor who wants to taxe a little flier in Indian hemp, from which ma rijuana is made, can buy a 12ounce package in Rangoon for about $4.20. When he gets to an English port he can sell the package for $22 to someone who will come aboard and take the risk of carrying it ashore. If the sailor wants to take that risk himself, he can get $44 for it ashore, a better than 500% profit on his original purchase. Automobiles offer incredible op portunities for profit in some parts of the world. Smuggling cars out of Germany, for example, is a big business, and some 2,000 per sons are listed by police as smug glers. Volkswagens, Opels and Mercedes bring two to three times as much in Greece and Turkey as they do in Germany. In the Middle East the ratio is three to four times as much, in South America it is six to eight times as much. If the car was stolen to begin with, the profit is en ormous. One ingenious thief re cently cabled five car rental agen cies in Zurich and asked each one to deliver a Mercedes to five exclusive hotels on a certain day. The unsuspecting agencies deli vered the hve cars—and by the time the rental period had ex pired the automobiles were long gone. If their ultimate destina tion was South America, each car, worth $2,400 in Germany, could have sold for $19,200. To make his fast dollar the international criminal must ex pose himself not only to the risk of capture but also to the vaga ries of chance, to treachery with in his organization and to sud den sociopolitical changes. Ha vana, for instance, with its big tourist trade, wide-open gambling, flagrant prostitution ana general ly relaxed morality, was for years a convenient home - away - from - home for international criminals. Then Castro took over and fright ened the tourists away, so soon the crime business was bad. Ha vana today is relatively “clean,” not so much through police ef fort as through political upheaval. There are other kinds of risk. A Lebanese flew into Athens from Zurich a few weeks ago, collapsed in the airport and was taken to a hospital where he died. An autopsy revealed the cause of death: coronary throm bosis induced in part by a heavy corset containing 1,500 contra band Swiss watch movements. Another kind of risk was taken by a naturalized Frenchman named Zellingold; who was hired to travel to India with an Olds mobile containing 550 pounds of gold concealed in various com partments. Zellingold and the Olds got to India safely, but then he could not get in touch with the people to whom he was to make delivery. He found him self in a strange country, with an Oldsmobile and a fortune in illicit gold, and nowhere to go. He decided to return home and did — accompanying the car through customs inspections, al ways undetected. Then he con cluded that there was little point in returning the gold to his em ployers. When they learned what had happened they fingered Zel lingold to the police as a gold smuggler and ne was arrested. He confessed everything, naming his employers as gold smuggler^ too, and they in turn were ar rested. P ven the most ingenious technique can go wrong. A French “antique dealer” entered English ports regularly every few weeks for some 30 months, al ways accompanied by a bottle of Scotch whisky (which he osten tatiously declared) and a little girl who carried a big doll. Ac tually both bottle and doll con tained raw French perfume on which Britain sets a heavy duty. The antique dealer developed quite a friendship with the cus toms and immigration men. Then one day he accidentally dropped the whisky bottle on the customs house floor. If the only way to catch inter national criminals were through such accidents, the world would plainly be overrun with vice. Nor will strict and meticulous customs inspections, carefully worded laws or energetic national police work suffice. All such local efforts are vulnerable to the international criminal simply because he never stops moving. If things look bad in one place, he merely folds his tent and slips away, popping up elsewhere with a new variation on his racket. Years ago the ma jor countries of the world decided the only answer was cooperation among themselves. And so a re markable organization called In terpol came into existence. Even though its name stands for International Criminal Police Organization, Interpol is not an international police force, as some Panorama moviemakers have portrayed. Cen tered in a dignified old town house on the rue Paul Valery in the heart of Paris, it is a su percommunications center for the police around the world. While it employs some brilliant police men, not one of them has made an arrest on behalf of Interpol since its founding in 1923. Interpol serves 63 nations in Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America by maintain ing a thorough filing system, op erating a radio transmitter and us ing its members’ collective brains. Each country has at least one veteran police officer as its Inter pol representative. These men meet periodically at Interpol con ventions like one held recently, but normally work in their own countries until an international case comes along. Then they go to work for Interpol. When tne police in Copenhagen, for exam ple, want to check a report that a man they want is in Rio de Janeiro, the Danish Interpol re presentative asks Interpol to check the Interpol man in Brazil and the latter immediately issues the necessary orders. This sounds obvious, but until Intrepol was set up the routine was very dif ferent: the Danish officer asked his foreign ministry to ask the Brazilian embassy in Copenhagen to communicate with its home office in Rio and ask it to ask the police there to check on the presence of the suspect. The lat ter by that time could have reached San Francisco by slow freighter. Interpol’s entire administrative staff, whose job is to locate and cause the arrest of the world’s smartest international crooks wherever they may be, consists of only 59 people. All but 14, who are assigned to operate the Paris radio station or run a spe cial counterfeiting branch at Tne Hague, work at the Paris head quarters. Many of them are vet eran career French policemen lent to Interpol by the French government, which pays their salaries. Interpol gets along on a minuscule annual budget of 600,000 Swiss francs ($138,000). Interpol flashes crime bulletins and “men wanted” information around the world through a net work of 21 radio stations that handle 55,000 police bulletins a year. It also keeps a routine file of international criminals consist ing of 400,000 names (120,000 real names, 280,000 aliases) and an elite file of about 6,000 top criminals. April 1960 65 As it does its job of keeping the various worldwide police departments informed and in touch with each other, Inter pol makes use of the best inves tigative agencies and resources in the world. It calls on the scien tific index systems of the Ger man police, the U.S. Treasury Department’s T-men and Britain’s astonishing crime detection labo ratories wnich specialize in such particulars as poisons, spilled blood and dusts from grasses and weeds. But Interpol also has some unusual resources of its own. One is a quiet, thoughtful po lice officer named Louis Beaulieu, “borrowed” 12 years ago from the Paris police to set up Interpol’s record bureau. Beaulieu worked out his own fingerprint filing system and made other innova tions for the bureau but his great est triumph is his method of pro file analysis. He adapted it from a system of basic terminology for describing people that he had ori ginally learned in police academy. Beaulieu’s problem was to find a way of malting positive identi fication from photographs sent in from perhaps a dozen different countries, in which varying ca mera techniques were used and the subjects were people who changed their appearance as much and as often as possible. Beau lieu divided the numan profile into six zones and subdivided each into two to eight types ac cording to characteristics: jutting or receding chin, sloping fore head, tilt of nose ana the like. His reasoning was simple. While a criminal can change his hair style or may suffer a broken nose or start wearing glasses, he cannot change the entire outline of his face. Beaulieu knew he had to prove his method to his superiors, and he said nothing about it for four years until the right case came along. Algerian police had picked up a young dark-skinned man with a shaved head and had sent photographs of him to In terpol for possible identification. Beaulieu analyzed the profile, set down the proper numerical for mula and went to his files. He found a corresponding set of num bers—together with a photograph of a bushy-haired, mustacnioed man who had a long record as a thief and swindler. There was no apparent resemblance. Neverthe less, Beaulieu showed the picture to his superiors. He was laughed at. Undaunted, he sent back to Algiers for the man’s fingerprints ana compared them with those of the thief. The two sets were identical. “Since then,” Beaulieu says now, “when I say that two photographs show the same per son no one disputes the fact?’ An important part of Inter pol’s job is preventive police work. When a known swindler or jewel thief drops from sight in nis native city tne local police 66 Panorama tell Interpol that he may be on the prowl, and Interpol sends cir culars on him to other areas where he might turn up. When a large international gathering, like a coronation or a religious pilgrimage, is about to take place, Interpol checks on the where abouts of known pickpockets. If they do not appear to be at their home stations, it circularizes them to the police guarding the event. How effective this system can be was strikingly illustrated at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Early raids on suspicious hang outs before the fair opened, a close watch on ports of entry, Interpol’s invaluable circulars and checks with police of other coun tries enabled the Belgian police to scare off or turn back a large number of potential marauders. When the fair opened, a special pickpocket squad was assigned to it with instructions to make a big early roundup for deterrent pur poses. This they did, hauling in an entire gang during the first month. As a result pocket pick ings averaged less than two a day during the entire run of the fair, despite 200,000 to 700,000 daily visitors. | nterpol’s most dramatic func tion is the pursuit of a spe cific criminal across national bor ders. A famous recent case was that of Hans Flecken, a German who was suspected of having killed a 16-year-old girl for the 14,500 marks he allegedly in duced her to steal from her em ployer. The girl’s body was found on a Cologne highway and police began searching for Flecken as “the autobahn murderer.” An inn keeper near the Swiss border re ported seeing a man resembling the fugitive on a bus. German police, through Interpol, imme diately asked the help of police in Switzerland, Austria and Italy, supplying pictures of the wanted man. Flecken soon showed up in Tosens in the Tyrol where he took a pension room under the name of Landmesser. The land lady had seen pictures of “the autobahn murderer” and had her suspicions, but by the time she got around to reporting them to the police, Flecken had fled, tak ing with him a passport stolen from a fellow lodger, Werner Parth. Next day he was glimpsed on another bus near the Italian border, again not in time. Soon he turned up in Florence, still calling himself Landmesser, and there he convinced the represen tative of a German company that he was from the company’s home office in Bonn, had been robbed and needed 5,000 lire. He got it. But the company representa tive grew worried, called th<’ home office that night and learned that Landmesser was not an employee. He called the Ita lian police. A new alert went out all over Italy. April 1960 67 Flecken showed up in Paler mo, Sicily, and used nis Werner Parth passport to register in ano ther pension. The Italian police promptly swooped down—only to find he had moved. But they knew he was in the neighbor hood and, armed with Interpol photos, they began checking all pensions. He was finally found and is now being held in Pa lermo for extradition. Interpol has matched wits with some remarkably ingenious peo ple. One was a forger who tra veled to various cities with what appeared to be a very handsome and expensive valise, impressive ly heavy. No hotel man would suspect its owner of being any thing but well-heeled. Actually the valise was made of plastic and filled with water. When he had papered a town with spur ious checks, the forger emptied the water from the valise in the hotel washbowl, folded it up, tucked it under his coat and walked out without paying his bill. But the uniqueness of his modus operandi proved his un doing, for it made him easy to identify. An Interpol circular caught up with him in Nice. An even greater talent belongs to 77-year-old Attilio Pollastri, a Genoese who is currently in jail. A onetime jewelry faker, Pollas tri branched into counterfeiting, starting first with Spanish coins. At the outbreak of World War I, Pollastri converted to the man ufacture of French and Swiss francs, Italian lire and U.S. dol lars. A fine technician (he once made such perfect 50-lira notes that Italy had to withdraw the entire legitimate issue from cir culation), he did well until he changed to 100-lira notes and was caught. From jail he wrote the Bank of Italy polite sugges tions about how to make their notes more nearly counterfeit proof. He never got a reply, but the Bank of Italy’s 500- and 1,000-lira notes in due time dis played the improvements Pollastri suggested. Of all varieties of internation al crime confronting Interpol, by far the most prevalent is smug gling. It attracts the widest va riety of people, it involves the widest and most incongruous va riety of substances and it has given rise, to some of the gaudiest and most profitable escapades in recent criminal history. — from Life. 68 Panorama
pages: 57-68