Bitterness, Nostalgia for Top Cops : FBI director and Treasury Dept.’s No. 1 lawman find harmony with European counterparts. But crime, racism remain a challenge.

For FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and Assistant Treasury Secretary Ronald K. Noble, the law enforcement trip to Sicily and Bonn had the trappings of a homecoming--albeit a bittersweet one.

Freeh, whose maternal grandparents emigrated to America from Italy, issued a near call-to-arms against the Mafia last week in a historic Palermo chapel. The setting was an emotional memorial mass for Freeh’s “beloved friend” Giovanni Falcone, Italy’s leading Mafia prosecutor, who died last year in a massive bombing that left a 1,500-foot crater in the road to Palermo.

And Noble, the son of a black Army master sergeant and a German woman whom he met while stationed there after World War II, shelved plans to visit seven aunts and uncles and a multitude of cousins living the Munich-Bavaria area.

Noting incidents of racial attacks by German skinheads, Noble said: “I would have hated to mar the trip.”

On one level, the journey by Freeh and Noble, head of enforcement for Treasury, to meet with their European counterparts to plan strategy against organized crime, money laundering and racist violence was an example of how the son and grandson of immigrants of modest means can rise to high government posts in the world’s great melting pot.

But on another, it underscored the fact that racial hatred and Old World criminal organizations continue to drive wedges of fear that keep people apart.

Freeh, in speaking to the congregation in the 12th-Century Palatine Chapel in the Mafia stronghold of Palermo, recalled that his mother had told him as a child that she had seen in New York City the terror and intimidation of the Black Hand, a Mafia offspring. “My mother saw the fear spread by the Black Hand and the conspiracy of silence that allowed those criminals to kill and torment the innocent,” Freeh recalled.

“I know very well that injustice is not confined to one country,” Freeh said.

Freeh, 43, grew close to Falcone when they worked together on two of the most successful Mafia prosecutions ever brought to court--the 1987 Pizza Connection case in New York, where Freeh headed the government team, and the so-called Maxi-trial in Italy, in which Falcone played a leading role in convicting hundreds of Mafiosi en masse.

Freeh said he will never forget the Saturday mornings at the U.S. attorney’s office in New York “when Giovanni played with my sons.” He told of walking through Central Park with Falcone, who shrugged aside any concerns over personal security when compared with what he faced at home from the Mafia.

The sacrifices Falcone and his wife--a judge who also died in the bombing--were forced to make in their lives still draw head-shaking disbelief from Freeh: At one point, they replaced their home’s windows with sandbags, a precaution that helped protect them from Mafia attacks but also blocked out all natural light. “He lived like that for over 16 years--every place he went, everything he did,” Freeh said.

For Noble, the trip to Germany drew the first advice that his father, James, had given him since he was in high school. Now retired from the Army, the father told his son that “things are so bad” in Germany in terms of attacks on minorities that he should forgo turning the official visit into a personal trip.

From age 5 to 7, Noble lived in Germany, where his father was stationed, and he spent the next four summers there at his mother’s small hometown outside Munich.

“Black soldiers were regarded as saviors” then and there “were no public clashes” involving blacks, Noble said.

The relative good feeling extended to 1989 when Noble, as a Justice Department official, returned to Germany.

While visiting an uncle on that trip, Noble donned lederhosen and other Bavarian garb and walked the streets of Munich “looking quite unusual for a very well-tanned person. There were stares, but I didn’t find myself wondering if I’d be attacked.”

But on this trip, Noble said, “the part I found toughest to accept was that with my German mother, my dual heritage was no barrier to being attacked.”

He raised the subject during a conference at the Interior Ministry on links between skinhead violence in Germany and U.S. racist organizations, including the klan. Noble said he told an aide to the interior minister “that it was personally painful for me to see these groups resurfacing in view of the Nazi history.”