Joint Force in Hungary Targets East Bloc Gangs

The criminals whose car bomb killed gangster-turned-police-informant Jozsef Tamas “Big Tom” Boros here in July are still on the run.

But they may be regretting that slaying, which claimed three other lives: The bombing has led to the creation of a unique U.S.-Hungarian joint strike force against Budapest-based international crime.

Hungarian investigators, assisted by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, are hot on the trail of the bombing suspects, officials here say. More broadly, the joint strike force ups the pressure on criminal gangs from the former Soviet Bloc that are headquartered here and operate internationally.

The strike force targets “financial frauds, drug smuggling, involuntary prostitution, weapons smuggling, trade in the materials used in weapons of mass destruction, contract assassinations and contract bombings,” said U.S. Ambassador Peter Tufo, who played a key role in launching the effort. One gang is a special focus of attention, Tufo implied, though he declined to give details.

“Some of the more notorious are Russian-speaking groups. . . . They may be Slovakian or Hungarian, but their common language is Russian,” Tufo said.

“We have investigations underway in the U.S. that are targeting these same people, and there’s information about their activities that is available here,” he added. “This is a ‘90s version of the Al Capone gang: highly sophisticated, well-trained, former military intelligence officials with international communication and commercial links, who combine highly sophisticated criminal enterprises with ruthless use of violence.”

The strike force was announced here in September and formalized in October when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited FBI headquarters in Washington. The joint effort builds on work done since 1995 at the International Law Enforcement Academy in Budapest, an FBI-run school for mid-career police officers from former Soviet Bloc countries.

The academy is backing the strike force with training in such areas as undercover operations and internal anti-corruption controls in police departments, said Leslie Kaciban Jr., the director. The school also builds personal networks among police officers of this region that help fight international crime, Kaciban said.

Hungarian police will get beefed-up U.S. assistance in the form of FBI experts on organized crime, laboratory and forensic help, direct computer connections to some U.S. crime databases and help with prosecutions.

“Hungary is going to be able to get on line with us to access our motor vehicle and theft database,” Kaciban said. “They’ll also have access to our fingerprint database.”

Kaciban noted that when countries of this region broke free from communism they tried to eliminate unsavory practices of the former secret police. Now police must learn how to conduct undercover activities within the context of a new political system.

“We’re also in a sense nation-building,” Kaciban explained. “We’re helping these new democracies adapt to a society where policing is done in a democratic way, preserving the rule of law and human dignity.”

Gocha Tsirekidze, deputy chief of the narcotics bureau in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, is taking an eight-week training course at the school and praises the emphasis on human dignity.

“This topic forces everybody to think about respect for others,” Tsirekidze, 30, said. “Even if you are a cop and the other party is a criminal, the human dignity of both sides is equally important.”

The FBI also has anti-gang programs in Italy and Russia. However, this is the first major bilateral effort aimed primarily at criminals based outside their country of citizenship, Tufo said. As such, it reflects the globalization both of organized crime and the fight against it, he said.

The strike force has made progress toward solving the Boros slaying. Jozsef Boda, the top Hungarian official at the FBI school, said police have identified a former Slovakian intelligence officer as a key suspect. Other former intelligence officers from Slovakia are believed to be involved, and Slovakian police are now cooperating with the U.S.-Hungarian effort, he added.

“They have a name, they have witnesses,” Boda said. “He was not alone. . . . There are some guys in Hungary who are behind it.”