THE OCTOPUS IN THE SHADOWS
Pundita is nothing if not persistent.
Not only has she been blogging about the implications of Transnational Organized Crime for some time now ( look here , here, here and here, here and here) but with increasing frequency in her emails, she has gently nudged me to look at that problem, in particular the International Crime Threat Assesssment that was released by the Clinton administration in December of 2000.
Admittedly, I initially viewed Pundita’s alarm over transnational crime with a degree of jaded cynicism. After all, I come from a State where the former Republican governor is under Federal indictment, the current Democratic governor and his powerful father-in-law are in hot water over a corruption scandal and the formerly omnipotent Mayor of Chicago is in the sights of the same Federal prosecutor who put Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman in the slammer. Looking no further than today’s Chicago Tribune, we see that a Colombian Heroin ring was running dope out of the City of Chicago’s Water Department – whose de facto boss must have been too busy defending himself from charges in the Mob-related Hired Truck scandal to notice the Cali cartel setting up shop. The same Federal prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, is also pursuing that matter as well as having rounded up most of the key members of the Chicago Outfit – minus Joey ” The Clown ” Lombardo who is now on the lam.
(For those out of the loop on on Chicago’s more colorful figures, if you have seen the movie Casino, Lombardo is wanted by the Feds for the death of Anthony ” The Ant” Spilotro who was murdered in 1986. Spilotro was the character played by Joe Pesci in the movie who gets mauled with baseball bats and buried alive in a cornfield)
With that in mind, to please Miss Pundita, I finally began reading the International Crime Threat Assessment, expecting nothing much to impress me. Well…it did. If you read nothing else, go to the assessment called ” Consequences for US Strategic Interests“. It’s an eye-opener and it got me to thinking that we Americans often laugh at the comical level of corruption that prevails in some South America countries or in Africa or various small nations where names seem incomprehensible and funny hats are worn. Then we assure ourselves that it can’t be like that here or in other advanced nations of the Core because we have the rule of law, a regulatory state of impressive size and power, transparency and democratic governance. Right ?
Well, in orderly Japan, the number two economic power in the world, the Yakuza have a respected place and a societal function going back to the days of the Tokugawa Shogunate. To keep the underworld and the legitimate world in complete harmony required powerful political fixers like the ex-fascist and war criminal Kodama Yoshio and the billionaire ultranationalist Sasakawa Ryoichi. These two men were the bridge between the gangsters, rightist thugs and LDP bosses in postwar Japan – they weren’t just bagmen either but advisers, organizers and string-pullers in both worlds.
Well..that’s the Japanese you say. They have a very different culture and legal rule-set for these matters. No one could get away with that in the United States. Right ?
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