FBI Director Sees Parallels Between Russia Now, Chicago Then : Crime: Louis J. Freeh doesn’t want a Slavic Al Capone to endanger U.S. investments or undermine the fragile democratic process. And he is working to help prevent it.

To FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, organized crime in Russia today bears disturbing similarities to Chicago’s in the 1920s and 1930s--violent but fractionalized, a danger to itself as much as to the rest of society, and with a potential for much more.

The likes of Al Capone, unchecked by the FBI or any other law enforcement body, welded the Chicago mob into a unified force that preyed on the community for decades.

Freeh does not want a Slavic equivalent of Capone to do the same today in Russia, for fear not only of endangering American business activity there but also of undermining that country’s fragile democratic process. And he is working to help Russian authorities prevent it.

Already, Freeh said, elements of Russian organized crime are responsible for everything from “bushwhacking” American businessmen to dealing in materials that could be used in nuclear weapons.

If authorities do not act soon, he said, organized crime will become so entrenched throughout the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites that, like the Mafia in Chicago, it will take decades to remove it.

“We have to look at it as something that’s clearly directed toward the United States, toward our economy,” Freeh said in an interview. “Even with decreasing resources, we can’t afford to do what the FBI did with respect to La Cosa Nostra for 30 years, and that was to completely ignore it.”

The situation in Russia today, Freeh acknowledged, is not as dire as in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s.

But German and Russian law enforcement authorities “are concerned about the very rapid inroads that these gangs are making into officialdom, into police and government officials,” the FBI director said.

To help the Russians cope, Freeh wants to station up to three FBI agents in Moscow by the end of spring to serve as liaisons with Russian authorities.

Contacts are now handled largely by two agents based in Bonn, who have responsibilities beyond the former Soviet Union.

Authorities in Russia’s Interior Ministry and the Moscow police “are desperately in need of our help,” Freeh said. “They want our training, our methodology.”

He also wants to bring Russian agents for 11 weeks of training at the FBI’s National Academy in Quantico, Va., where they would learn about laboratory and computer work and the other technologies that the FBI uses against organized crime.

For now, Freeh said, the victims of Russia’s organized crime are mostly Russian entrepreneurs and other business people. But he warned that American businesses seeking a foothold in Russia are just as vulnerable.

“Part of the (Clinton) Administration’s program is to give not only economic aid but to (assist) economic institution-building and to encourage American and other foreign investments” in the former Soviet Union, he said.

“If the scouts for leading American corporations are getting bushwhacked in their hotel rooms in Moscow or, perhaps worse, establishing a foothold and having to face extortion and economic criminal activity they are not prepared to do, our economy takes a serious hit,” Freeh said. “The end product is that the process for democracy and a free economy in Russia takes a very significant step backward.

“I guess it’s an irony, but it’s much harder to police in a democratic fashion than to police in a totalitarian fashion,” Freeh said. “Police work is very hard if you do it according to due process and democratically.”

Authorities in the former Soviet Union “don’t have that experience and haven’t had it for 70 years. So they’re having to learn all of the tools, skills and techniques and, at the same time, deal with a burgeoning crime crisis,” Freeh said.

U.S. authorities are particularly concerned that Russian gangs “are aggressively looking to buy and sell nuclear materials,” the FBI director said.

The materials so far are less than weapons grade, but they could be used for designing devices deadly to population centers, according to FBI intelligence.

“That’s a whole different threat than we’ve faced before,” Freeh said.

He declined to give any more specifics on the threat, but said the United States under the law now lacks authority to fully deal with it.

Under the 1950 Atomic Energy Act, the FBI has authority to investigate the transfer or shipment of nuclear materials only if their origin or destination is American or they have entered and left the United States.

Freeh said he has discussed with Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and other Justice Department officials the need for a law broadening the FBI’s authority over such matters.

The FBI is also interested in the criminal activities of Russian immigrants in the United States, according to Jim Moody, who directs the FBI’s efforts against organized crime.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, about 200,000 people entered the United States from the Soviet Union, and Moody estimated that about 1% of them--2,000--were “hard-core criminals.”

But he regards them as second-string players who are now being replaced by more highly skilled, educated lawbreakers.

In one of the more sophisticated conspiracies involving Russian emigres, a federal grand jury in Philadelphia last June charged 15 people and two corporations with evading federal and state excise taxes on the sale of more than 51 million gallons of diesel fuel in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.