Goodfella

But Ron Goldstock, former director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, moves in both worlds easily enough, combining academic credentials with crime-fighting experience. Once every four to six weeks for the last two years he has been journeying to Northern Ireland, where his expertise, employed against the Lucchese and Gambino crime families, can be put to good use.
Last December, Goldstock, handed in a report to the Northern Ireland secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Paul Murphy, outlining his recommendations as to how the authorities there should tackle the growing menace of organized crime. The report remains secret as the government ponders its contents.
The Northern Ireland Organized Crime Task Force — an interagency body — was set up in 2000. In 2001 it issued its first report, identifying some 78 organized crime groups in Northern Ireland made up of about 400 members. Over half of them had links to republican and loyalist paramilitary organizations.
They are involved in drug dealing, smuggling, counterfeiting, robbery, money laundering, vehicle theft, benefit fraud, drug trafficking and other crimes. Goldstock’s involvement came unexpectedly. Two years go he received a telephone call out of the blue from John Reid, then the Northern Ireland secretary of state, asking him to act as an adviser on issues “involving local and international organized crimes and the means and methods of dealing with it and of developing cross-community support for those methods.”
Unknown to Goldstock, his name had been suggested to Reid by diplomats and organized crime experts. Until that time, he had no connection to Northern Ireland.
“It’s like learning a foreign language,” Goldstock recalled of his first days in Northern Ireland. “At the beginning it was enormously difficult just for me to carry on a conversation. I knew IRA, I knew Sinn Fein, but people are talking about UVF, UDA, UFF, PUP, UUP, DUP, SDLP — are they talking about a political party or an organized crime group? Then if it is a political party, is it on the nationalist side or the republican side. What’s the difference between nationalist, republican, unionist and loyalist? Who’s Durkan and where’s Paisley? The way you learn a foreign language is that you eventually learn what the words mean.”
Once Goldstock had acquired the vocabulary, it did not take him long, he said, to recognize that the organized crime problem in Northern Ireland was different from the one that he confronted in the U.S.
“There are a lot of things that are similar about organized crime in Northern Ireland and in the rest of the world,” he explained. “But one thing is unique: the issue of it growing out of the paramilitary tradition. No one else has that. That means a variety of things and one of them is that they come with a ready-made reputation for violence. Every dog in Belfast knows that they kill.”
Linked to the paramilitary tradition was another aspect of organized crime in Northern Ireland not usually found elsewhere and that was, he said, “the legitimization of the paramilitaries — they openly occupy public turf.” They stake out neighborhoods, painting political or sectarian murals, organizing public displays of force, and playing the role of vigilantes, dealing with petty criminals.
“We need to find ways to delegitimize the paramilitaries,” he said. However, history has complicated things for crime fighters in Northern Ireland. The political violence has given paramilitary groups a status and a level of acceptance that criminal gangs do not normally receive from the community. Goldstock is not the first to see some analogy with La Cosa Nostra in Sicily, where for generations the authority of the central government in Rome did not function. But it is not only the historical/political dimension to the Northern Ireland problem that facilitates crime. Goldstock has identified certain characteristics, products of governmental policies, that he says help criminals make money. One of them is the status of charities.
“Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom without charities legislation,” he said. “As a result, ‘charities’ are used to engage in criminal activities, whether it be tax fraud or extortionate payments made as charitable contributions. They are not held accountable as to how they spend their money.” Goldstock said there was no overview of how the charities spent their money, some of which came in the form of governmental funds. Among those suspected of criminal activity are prisoners’ aid charities. There is evidence that they have been used by organized criminals to launder funds. Goldstock thinks that the use of independent private sector inspectors — IPSIGs — would give the needed oversight and determine how all of the money is spent.
“Another huge problem in Northern Ireland,” said Goldstock, “is cash-in-transit robberies. Why it exists there and not in other places is that there are four different sets of banknotes circulating in the North. There are three Northern Ireland banks, each of which issue its own notes, and of course the Bank of England. And since each bank wants its own notes coming out of its own ATM, they constantly move them. So you have so much more money moving on the highways.”
Once the criminal potential is identified, policies that facilitate it can be changed, he said.
The production and smuggling of illegal fuel oil is yet another major source of income for organized crime run largely by republican paramilitaries. It is mainly centered in South Armagh. In 2000, 13 major fuel-laundering plants were discovered that had the capacity to produce 10 million gallons of illegal fuel. The theft and smuggling of cigarettes across the border is also a major problem. It is estimated that a third of all cigarettes smoked in Northern Ireland are illegal. The IRA is believed to have been behind two major cigarette robberies in recent years in Northern Ireland worth millions of dollars.
However, Goldstock said that he did not target any specific organization in preparing his report. The British government was anxious that his report would not become a political football, used by one side against the other. It was essential for his efforts to bear fruit that he received support from and won the trust of all sides.
“My job is to get both sides together to deal with organized crime,” he states.
It is thought that in order to do that more effectively, the British government is looking at possible legislation that would permit information obtained from telephone intercepts to be used in court as evidence. Currently, such information is not permitted as evidence. Indeed, as the law stands, it is illegal for a police officer to even disclose to another officer information obtained from a wiretap source. Laws allowing information obtained from telephone taps are thought to have been a major factor in breaking the power of the mob in the U.S. Goldstock is confident that similar victories are possible against the burgeoning menace of Northern Ireland’s paramilitary gangster culture.