WASHINGTON - International law enforcement officials, including deputy US Attorney General David Ogden, called yesterday for a far more coordinated global response to the growing threat of organized crime syndicates.
The officials said the syndicates increasingly are teaming up with terrorist networks and drug traffickers to pose an unprecedented national security threat to the United States and its allies.
Speaking at the 78th general assembly of the global police agency Interpol in Singapore, Ogden and some of his counterparts acknowledged that they need to do much more to work together on many fronts, including attacking the money-laundering pipelines that are enabling the crime syndicates to flourish in terror hot spots such as Pakistan and Afghanistan and other strategic locations such as Europe, Africa, and Latin America.
Ogden cited Mexican drug cartels, South Asian heroin-trafficking clans, and the more traditional crime families from Asia and the former Soviet-bloc countries as continued threats.
In unusually frank language, Ogden told the assembled delegates that they need to act far more aggressively to combat transnational organized crime groups whose proceeds, he said, comprise as much as 15 percent of the global gross domestic product.
In his speech and in a recent interview, Ogden said that newfound economic clout has enabled some crime groups to neutralize and co-opt for their own unlawful ends a wide array of political, judicial, and law enforcement institutions - especially in failed or fragile states that have been destabilized by conflict or economic depression.
“Criminal organizations can and do use their economic power to target individual public officials, public institutions, and even entire countries to look for new victims and new markets,’’ Ogden said. “We are now witnessing in many parts of the world, what US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy almost a half century ago presciently condemned in my own country as the ‘private government of organized crime.’ ’’
But, Ogden added, the lack of coordinated response by law enforcement agencies has allowed the crime syndicates to become even stronger, and forge close ties not only with one another but with terror groups Al Qaeda and corrupt government officials. Some are now exploiting advances in technology to the point where they are operating with virtual impunity.
Ogden and other delegates warned that law enforcement agencies must urgently boost the sharing of intelligence to fight hybrid criminal organizations, and pass strong anti-money laundering and asset-forfeiture laws that would make it easier to seize their criminal proceeds.
