Monday, JUNE 23, 1997

U.N. Names Italian Expert on the Mafia to Its Top Anti crime Post

By CELESTINE BOHLEN

Rome, June 22 One of Italy's top experts on the Mafia has been appointed the United Nations' leading official on international crime.

Pino Arlacchi, who is also a member of the Italian Senate, will become Under Secretary General and director of the organization's Vienna offices where the United Nations antidrug program and others are based.

The appointment of Senator Arliacchi is an integral part of the Secretary General's effort to strengthen the capacity of the United Nations to address in a coherent and systematic way, threats to the stability of society arising from transnational crime in all its manifestations from drug trafficking and money laundering to international terrorism," Fred Eckhard, the spokesman for Secretary General Kofi Annan, said on Friday.

A sociologist and the author of several books on Italy's powerful criminal organizations, Mr. Arlacchi, 46, has been closely involved with Italian law enforcement in its all out war against organized crime, which has achieved remarkable success in recent years, particularly against the Sicilian Mafia.

Those credentials, and his proposal for enlarging the United Nations' role in the global fight against organized crime, won him the job against a crowed field of candidates. In an interview in his office at the Senate, where he has represented Florence since 1995 as a member of Party of the Democratic Left after serving one term in the lower house, Mr. Arlacchi said his duties would include investigating financial empires suspected of thriving on illegal profits.

"We don't have an international body to follow what is widely recognized as a weak point in the international system," he said. "There is no international office that deals, systematically or globally, with these subjects. We need to elaborate a system to deal with thebig problem of tax havens, for instance."

A striking example of the dangers of shady enterprises that go unregulated and unchecked is Albania, which descended into near anarchy this spring after the collapse of pyramid investment schemes.

"This is an example of how money laundering and corruption combined to destroy the savings of a whole country,' Mr. Arlacchi said. "Today there are a number of countries with wild capitalist markets operating without regulations. And yet if globalization is to be a positive phenomenon, it must have a strong basis. Otherwise, it could be negative, and dangerous."

He noted that the United Nations, with a 1988 antidrug agreement signed by more than 120 nations, already has one instrument available to pursue global investigations of "dirty" money. That convention requires signers to abolish bank secrecy laws that can help hide drugtrafficking profits, and to contribute a percentage of assets seized from drugtrading organizations to the United Nations office of Drug Control Prevention, which Mr. Arlacchi will now head.

"The idea is to take up all the levers available to us," he said.