- SOFIA, Bulgaria -- Like a
scene from a Hollywood gangster film, six mobsters in police uniforms burst
into Sofia's Slavia restaurant screaming "Everybody down!" and
opened fire.
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- Within seconds, their target, underworld boss Milcho
Bone -- a.k.a. Brother Mile -- and five of his bodyguards lay dead on the
restaurant patio.
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- The gangland slaying on July 30 in this small Balkan
nation was the latest bloody salvo in an organized crime turf war that
has seen 50 mob hits in the past three years.
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- "It's at the point that if you go into a restaurant
or a bar, you can't be sure someone won't come in and start shooting,"
says Rumyana Buchvarova, director of Market Links Research firm, based
in Sofia. "That the perpetrators of this recent attack were dressed
as police officers is emblematic of the problem we're facing."
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- Authorities have arrested seven people and charged one
man with murder for the restaurant mob massacre, but police often have
a tough time getting such charges to stick. Witnesses often recant testimony
or fall victim to "accidents," lawyers back out of cases, and
evidence disappears at the hands of corrupt police officials.
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- Criminal gangs in Romania and Bulgaria are "extremely
dynamic" and involved in "a wide range of criminal activities
which impact upon many European Union countries,'' according to a report
by Europol, the organization that coordinates cross-border policing and
criminal investigation throughout Europe. It suggested that the gangs "pose
one of the main threats to the European Union."
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- Authorities estimate that international sex trade operatives
traffic 10, 000 women a year from Bulgaria to other countries. Bulgarian
mobsters are adept at counterfeiting currencies, forging credit cards and
identity documents and facilitating the transit of heroin from Asia to
Western Europe, according to Europol.
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- Their criminal enterprises account for between 30 percent
and 36 percent of the Bulgarian economy -- to the tune of $6.2 billion
to $7.4 billion annually, according to the Center for the Study of Democracy
in Sofia, the capital.
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- Bulgaria's mob blossomed after the fall of the Soviet
Union. Many out-of- work body builders turned themselves into bodyguards,
learned how to shoot and joined forces with shady young businessmen looking
to exploit Bulgaria's transition from a closed, Soviet-style system to
a more capitalist market economy.
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- Known as mutra -- which means "ugly face" in
Bulgarian -- the bodyguards made a name for themselves in the early 1990s
by providing "security" to small- and medium-size businesses
for monthly fees. Business owners who refused to pay fell victim to repeated
robberies, which ceased only when the protection money was paid.
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- Homegrown versions of Mafia dons exploited Bulgaria's
domestic instability and lax law enforcement as the Soviet bloc unraveled,
buying or shooting their way out of any potential legal trouble.
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- Bulgaria's geographical location at the crossroads between
Europe and Asia attracted mob interests from places as diverse as Russia,
China and Colombia -- newcomers who introduced the aspiring Bulgarian capos
to more profitable markets.
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- Over the past couple of years, authorities striving to
clean up Bulgaria's image before it joins the European Union in 2007 drafted
anti-crime legislation and closed legal loopholes that impeded a crackdown
on the country's mobsters. A recently passed law targets human trafficking
offenses, mandating 5- t0 25-year jail terms and stiff fines.
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- The result is stiffer competition for the multibillion-dollar
drug and flesh trade, disintegrating into a bloodbath between men whose
nicknames could have come out of a Dick Tracy comic strip.
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- Authorities believe the two main rivals are drug lord
Anton Miltenov, a.k. a. "The Beak," and Ilyan Versanov. The fight
between them intensified as other criminal groups, including those led
by "Zladko the Baretta" and Vassil "The Scalp" Boshkov,
vied for control of the lucrative business of Konstantin Dimitrov, killed
in Amsterdam by a 37-year-old Dutch drug dealer known as Erwin W., who
is suspected of being a hit man hired by someone in Bulgaria.
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- On June 4, two men dressed in the flowing black robes
of Orthodox priests walked up to a cafe in Sofia and opened fire, killing
three of Miltenov's rivals. In mid-June, the younger brother of "The
Beak" was gunned down outside a pizza parlor later identified by authorities
as a narcotics distribution point.
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- "They have learned all their lessons from Hollywood,
and so they play out their lives -- and deaths -- in that vein," says
Interior Ministry Chief Secretary Boyko Borisov, 45, who insists that Bulgaria's
mob problems are no worse than those of Italy and the United States.
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- "If this problem were enough to prohibit entry into
the European Union, then all the countries would have to leave it,"
Borisov said. "Organized crime is an international problem."
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- Borisov, interviewed between incessant calls on his cell
phones in an office cluttered with bulletproof vests, 9mm pistols and handcuffs,
doesn't mince words about the government's strategy.
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- "We've got a policy of no tolerance. And this is
a job that has to be done, and done completely," he said.
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- Among Bulgaria's successes, security forces dismantled
32 currency- forging operations in the past year, snagging millions of
counterfeit dollars and euros. In early June, a four-city sweep involving
360 Bulgarian security personnel and members of Interpol resulted in 10
arrests and the seizure of 55, 000 counterfeit euros (about $68,000), as
well as forged American and Canadian visas.
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- "No doubt, efforts are being made," says Buchvarova
of Market Links Research, "but when most of the cases brought against
mobsters won't stick, basically there is nothing we can do but wait for
them to kill each other."
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