Extortion Attempts Inundate Czech Republic

Vojtech Skrinsky was looking for a little excitement. What he got was seven years in prison for trying to extort cash with threats of bombings to “raze the country to the ground.”

Skrinsky, 19, a bored short-order cook, sent an e-mail to the Interior Ministry last spring demanding $31,000. Angry that his threat didn’t make the evening news, he upped the ante to $1.85 million with a direct demand to TV Nova, a local television station.

Within days, Skrinsky was arrested -- and Czech authorities logged another case in an unprecedented and inexplicable flood of extortion attempts.

In the first six months of 2003, the most recent period for which statistics are available, there were 724 cases of attempted extortion. Although most were quickly solved, others continue to vex authorities.

“What we have here is a wave of extortionism, something like a temporary fad,” said Ludmila Cirtkova, chief psychologist at Prague’s police academy.

In November, police arrested an unidentified 35-year-old man who threatened to blow up two court buildings in the capital unless he was paid $370,000 and a friend serving a life sentence for murder was freed.

The arrest came just days after authorities detained a 38-year-old man who threatened to blow up a hospital and an 18-year-old who tried to extort cash with threats of blowing up a shopping mall.

Cirtkova and others believe that the media are partly to blame, noting news coverage was deemed a factor in another Czech phenomenon earlier in the year: a string of self-immolations that began with one highly publicized case that apparently prompted other despondent people to set themselves afire.

“It is fine to warn people, but you don’t carry extortion cases live on television,” Cirtkova said.

Last year’s top extortion case, however, was too dramatic to keep off the air.

In March, Czech police used a helicopter to drop 25 plastic-wrapped parcels -- each containing $13,000 in cash -- to meet the demands of a blackmailer who had put a bomb beneath a railway bridge. Police found and disarmed the bomb.

Despite the fact that the money was not collected and the extortionist hasn’t been heard from since, the case may have inspired copycats looking to get rich quick.

But other cases involve mafia-style racketeering, the violent settling of business disputes and disgruntled employees trying to hurt their bosses, said police Col. Jiri Svoboda, an expert on organized crime.

Large foreign companies present tempting targets: In September, Anastas Stanev, a Bulgarian national living in the Czech Republic, was convicted of blackmailing the local operation of Coca-Cola Co. and sentenced to six years in prison. Stanev posted threats on the Internet saying he would poison the company’s products. He made repeated threats and sought payment of as much as $168,000.

The Czech government is the single biggest victim. It is responding with aggressive prosecutions and stiff jail terms.

In November, Patrik Jirsa and Petr Hirjak were sentenced to prison terms of seven and eight years, respectively, for threatening in May to poison food in Prague’s hospitals with cyanide unless they were paid $10.7 million.

Cirtkova believes that the wave of cases is beginning to recede now that the sentences are getting as much publicity as the original threats.

Cash isn’t the only motivation. Alcoholism and despair figured into one prominent case.

Frantisek Jira, 65, a retired mine worker, resorted to extortion in July after he lost his life savings and the family home in his son’s restaurant, which ended up going out of business.

Homeless and divorced, Jira told a jury in Prague that he was drunk when he wrote a letter to the capital’s mayor threatening to poison the water supply with cyanide and mercury unless he was paid.

“I wanted to put the family back together,” he testified.

Jira’s note told the mayor to put the money into two empty detergent cans and leave them in a park. He was arrested when he tried to pick up the cash.

He had faced up to 12 years in prison, but on Dec. 12, the court gave him a three-year suspended sentence.

Many people viewed him with pity, noting that he never had any cyanide or mercury. And his case had a touch of pathos: He had politely signed his letter to the mayor, “Yours respectfully, The Extortionist.”