Profile : No Fear of the Mob : Liliana Ferraro is Italy’s highest-ranking anti-Mafia judge. The job carries the risk : of assassination, but she is unswayed. In fact, she has been called a “woman of iron.”

Liliana Ferraro slides back with relief into the hottest seat in Italy after a flying visit to Paris to talk Mafia business with French prosecutors.

“One of those ‘full immersion’ work trips. Didn’t see a thing,” she says, lighting a pungent black cheroot. “I like oysters but we somehow picked the only restaurant in Paris that didn’t have oysters.” Or much of anything else. “Execrable. Lobster soup straight from a can. I wound up paying an arm and a leg for two crusts of bread.”

Ferraro is a judge; the highest-ranking anti-Mafia magistrate in Italy. She coordinates investigations nationwide as director general of the criminal division at the Ministry of Justice here. Bodyguards hover.

As Ferraro combats organized crime on its home turf, she also seeks to sensitize other European governments to the risks of contagion from mobs with illegal millions to invest. The Mafia is your problem too, she tells Italy’s continental partners.

“It is a great misunderstanding to imagine that the new single European market will make it easier for them. The situation is already disastrous. They don’t need the open market,” she said.

Ferraro does risky work. She sits in the chair her boss and friend Giovanni Falcone once filled. Mafia bombers blew up Falcone and his wife in June. In August, they killed his friend and close colleague, Judge Paolo Borsellino.

Ferraro is 48, divorced, no kids. She likes dangling gold jewelry as much as oysters. She knows about fear, and about determination. “A woman of iron replaces Falcone,” the conservative daily Il Giornale headlined an article on her appointment.

“Negligence is much more worrying than the risk of death,” she said over a morning glass of warm milk. “And I think when you do something in life you believe in, your only justification is to spend 24 hours a day working at it.”

Ferraro, who has been a magistrate since 1970, previously fought terrorism as liaison between the Justice Ministry and Carabiniere--national police--Gen. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who masterminded the defeat of the famed Red Brigade.

She worked in Palermo in the mid-’80s when judges headed by Falcone won convictions against hundreds of Mafiosi. She subsequently returned to the ministry here, and was Falcone’s deputy when he was killed by a bomb that blew up his car on the highway from the airport to the Sicilian capital. The Falcone killing, and the subsequent murder of Borsellino in Palermo, jolted the Italian government into relentless pursuit of organized crime, whose tentacles reach in all directions in all parts of Italy.

The Mafia is still way ahead, but the creation of anti-Mafia police units with broadened investigatory powers has led to some recent government victories. Just last week, in what was described as the biggest organized crime sweep in nearly a decade, police jailed dozens of Mafia suspects from Sicily to Milan.

“In the last 18 months we’ve had some unexpectedly good results,” Ferraro said. “I think the state can win the war if it continues on its current steady course.”

Although Mafia has spread as a generic term for organized crime from Italy to countries as diverse as Russia and Colombia, Italian investigators are in fact challenged by a complicated and interconnected web of criminal bands.

There is the original Mafia in Sicily, the Camorra in the Naples area, and the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria. They prey with clubs and pistols, with politicians and computers, from the highest levels of Italian society to the lowest.

In recent weeks, an informer has accused Salvatore Lima, the murdered close friend and Sicilian political ally of former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, of having had Mafia connections. Another informer has produced a list of former and present government and police officials and judges who he says also trafficked with the Mob.

At the other end of the scale, racketeers in Puglia in southeastern Italy and across the straits in Sicily murdered local businessmen this month who dared to publicly oppose extortion demands.

In her international persona, it is not the small-town Mob but the modern, outward-reaching, market-cornering multinational Mafia that most alarms Ferraro. The gangs need to launder their money, and they are eager to invest.

The current international economic crisis, she notes, is a time of grave peril for Europe and fertile ground for the Mafia, particularly in the former Communist Bloc, which anxiously seeks capital.

“Mafia-type organizations have a remarkable amount of liquid cash. Above all, they need to invest it because through investments they conquer markets,” Ferraro said. The strategy of the gangs with money to launder is often different from that of legitimate investors, she noted. They tend to be less concerned with immediate financial returns and more with ultimate market control.

“Through the money invested comes control of activities. In this way, criminal activities dominate territory. This is the worrying factor about capital investments in all of Europe--particularly in Eastern Europe,” she said.

The single market planned by the European Community cannot encourage further internationalization by organized crime, because the damage has already been done, Ferraro warns.

“Current free-market economies allow for the circulation of money and, rightly, of vital money-making energies,” she said. “The international dimension of the phenomena is already a fact; not a danger for the future.”

In September, justice and interior (police) ministers of the 12 European Community countries met for the first time to mull shared anti-Mafia strategy.

That same month, police in Italy, the United States and South America combined in a major operation called “Green Ice” that brought more than 200 arrests.

One of the major alleged money laundresses caught in the operation was Dutch. In England, police found a bunker containing 700 cubic feet of cash, Ferraro noted, underlining the ease with which the band crossed borders.

“We’re not trying to shrug off our responsibilities for the fight against organized crime, but our efforts alone are not enough. If the Mafia finds refuge and sustenance in other countries, actions of ours that stop at the frontier become one-armed,” said Ferraro.

“Preparation for the expansion of the Mafia means above all understanding what it is, and intervening before it becomes too serious for other (countries) as well.”

Biography

Name: Liliana Ferraro Title: Director General, Criminal Division, Italian Ministry of Justice Age: 48 Personal: Born in Lustra, near Naples, she is the daughter of a shopkeeper. She graduated from Salerno University with a degree in judicial studies; began working as magistrate in the city of Lodi in 1970. She was married for six years to a fellow magistrate, but later divorced. She has no children. She is said to be an accomplished cook and hostess, as well as a fan of classical music. Quote: “Negligence is much more worrying than the risk of death.”