ABSTRACT: Ralph F. Salerno, from the USA, worked for over twenty years in the New York Police Department, becoming head of the investigative section and supervisor of the officers. He collaborated to several presidential commissions for the repression of crime, and is co-author of a series of studies on criminal organizations. With an intervention on TV at the beginning of '88 in favour of the legalization of drugs, he rekindled the debate in the USA on the failure of prohibition.

(Notizie Radicali n. 66 of the 25th of March 1989)

Taking part in an international conference of this kind, one should feel very proud, one comes here together with colleagues - in my case from the United States - one generally carries out important meditations, one builds important formulas which we should generally share with all of you. You will surely have noticed that the people coming from the U.S strongly feel that the best contribution we can give here is to tell the long story of three or four decades of complete failure of our prohibitionist policy. I entered the police over 40 years ago; 40 years ago in New York there were no serious drug problems. There was a consistent police personnel consisting of 23,000 persons, and it was sufficient to appoint 19 men and one woman to the narcotics squad, that is a very small part of our resources, and at the end of the forties - believe me - this was enough to control the drug problem of that city. Today there are over 2,000 people involved in anti-drug activities in the city of New York, and only 26,000 per

sons working in the police department. You can see for yourself to what degree the resources deployed in the battle against drugs have increased. On the other hand, there is not one person in New York who can state that the drug situation is better now simply because there are over 2,000 people dealing with it. We deal with it, we have Charles Siracusa here in Rome who is trying to obtain the cooperation of the Italian and French police, and there is this organization called Drug Enforcement Administration, which will bring the number of people dealing with drugs to over 2,000. In the United States we also have the FBI, we use all the resources of all the border polices, of the coastal guard, of the air force; we have a great deal of people dealing with these things. We have 40 years of failures to pursue this myth of prohibition.

I am truly overwhelmed by this sensation of déjà vu. I have already been here...in the fifties the most important drug problem in the U.S. was heroin, and heroin arrived from the famous poppy fields of Turkey to refineries here in Italy, whence they reached the South of France, and from there arrived on the New York market. At the time we were told, and I and the others believed it, that it was sufficient to convince the Turkish government to reduce the extension of the fields in which poppies were grown, and that if we could get our hands on the laboratories in the South of France all problems would have been solved; then we discovered that the same poppies were to be found in Mexico, in Afghanistan, in the golden triangle, etc. Well then, when it comes to the cultivations in Peru and Bolivia and what to be done with them, I always ask: "Have you asked if, for example, these coca leaves can be grown in Africa, or in Asia, or are you once again deceiving me into believing the stories you already told me abou

t the poppy fields?". We had already been told that we could check some of the chemical laboratories that are necessary for this. If we had had the possibility to check these laboratories, we could have really solved these problems, but nobody was aware of it; a laboratory for the refinement of heroin costs 50,000 dollars, and can be organized anywhere. We were told that if we had been able to put the most important bosses of crime in jail, everything would have been solved, and I worked for this purpose, I prosecuted Genovese, for example, who died in prison, and Carmine Valenti, who spent 15 years in prison, then came out and was shot, and other people...and now I get really mad when they tell me that if we could only eliminate 12 people, everything would be solved.

I remember visiting a very clever professor who was dealing with the application of the law and the strategy against the great criminal organizations. We have analyzed what we thought and concentrated on a collection of specific evidences, that is, on a collection of specific testimonials concerning specific people who committed a specific crime. He told me: "If you gather these evidences, what will happen?". I said: "These people will be tried and will then go to prison". I explained certain cases in detail, especially as regards drugs. And he told me: "Will drugs then be absent from the market?". I said: "No, because there will always be someone replacing him". Can you imagine that people who run the drug trade do not have a lieutenant, brothers or sisters, who will take care of the thing for them? The approach in the application of the law is precisely the same: imagine you go bowling, you have 12 pins, and you have your investigation, that is, a ball in your hand: you strike 6 pins and you feel as if you

obtained a great success. Then you take another ball - another important investigation - and you hit another 3. What you see is that three seconds after the machine resets all the pins, in other words, all the brothers, the sisters, the lieutenants, all the pins anew, exactly where they were before.