WARSAW (dpa) – Instead of a celebration, more work was the order of the day on the first “birthday” of Poland’s anti-mafia agency, the Central Office of Investigation (CBS).
Together with colleagues from the FBI in America, the German Federal Crime Office and policemen from nearly 40 other countries, CBS boss Adam Rapacki and other top officers spent a day discussing strategies in the battle against the mafia.
There has been no lack of success stories. Nearly 160 organised gangs were broken up during the first year of the CBS’ operations, including 23 internationally-operating mafia groups.
But there has been a bitter after-taste to some of this success. For over and again, the handcuffs were being snapped shut on other policemen in Poland.
The special organisation was founded with especially ambitious goals in combating organised crime. For the first time, the departments for fighting narcotics, the mafia, and economic crimes were also grouped together.
The latest technology and a secure internal computer and telephone network were put in place to protect some 1,500 policemen from themselves being spied on from criminal elements, as well as from corrupt colleagues in the police department.
Since the CBS’ founding a year ago, Polish television viewers were able to thrill to the action-packed film sequences shown on the evening news, pictures of masked police agents in fighting gear and bullet-proof vests storming up some stairs of a building or escorting crime suspects out of some warehouse or narcotic drugs laboratory.
At the end of last year the police arrested a number of leading gang members and then proudly announced busting up the Pruszkow gang, Poland’s most notorious mafia group.
But the claim turned out to be premature, because business in protection money racketeering, drug trafficking and stolen cars continues to flourish in Poland.
And the police gladly would have done without some successful operations. Recently the head of the Warsaw police department fighting automobile theft was himself arrested.
It turned out that along with four other officials, he had for years provided the Pruszkow gang with inside information about especially lucrative goods to be stolen and about police surveillance plans and operations.
The gangsters are believed to have stolen at least 500 luxury cars worth 50 million zlotys (11.9 million dollars) thanks to the help of society’s “friends and helpers”, the police.
This was not just an isolated case. Scarcely a month goes by without more revelations around Poland about how police, customs agents or border officials have helped smugglers, car thieves and other criminals.
As recent investigations by state prosecutors in the southern- central city of Kattowice have shown, the contacts made by organised crime are not just aimed at simple police officers, but also penetrate into the country’s political levels.
In early April, former sports minister Jacek Debski was gunned down in front of a restaurant, which aptly enough was named “Cosa Nostra”. There had been repeated speculation about the politician’s contacts with gangsters, and after his murder the rumours were fueled further.
A likewise murky character in Polish politics is Aleksander Gawrolik, a businessman who after the downfall of communism rose to become a multimillionaire with a network of money-changing offices. He eventually became a senator in the upper house of parliament.
But his success story came to an end early in May with his arrest after the Kattowice prosecutor’s office said it had found he had connections to the Pruszkow gang.
A further success story, from the state prosecutor’s office in Wroclaw, only confirmed once again the bitter realisation that not all police officials can resist the lure of illicit money. Of all people, it was an official in the department fighting organised crime who was caught cooperating with the mafia.
