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Uncooperative Police

Germany Gives Up on Mafia Extradition

By Andreas Ulrich

The arduous process of solving the 2007 Mafia bloodbath in Germany has revealed serious deficiencies in European police cooperation. With the German police failing to secure the cooperation of their Dutch and Italian counterparts, it looks like the presumed killers will not be tried in Germany.

When it comes to fighting crime in the European Union, the relevant politicians have learned to overcome borders and national jealousies. "We must put new forms of police cooperation to the test," German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble recently said, calling for a security network that "is designed to be as transnational as the threats it seeks to contain."

It's a shame that the reality of bureaucratic execution are making such a mockery of good intentions and proclamations, something made depressingly evident by the investigation into a sensational Mafia murder in the western German city of Duisburg.

The presumed killers, who are accused of massacring six Italians with at least 70 bullets in front of a restaurant in August 2007, have been captured. But important pieces of evidence are still missing today, something that can be blamed primarily on problems in the multinational investigation of the Duisburg bloodbath, which was the climax of a feud between rival clans. In the dismal assessment of one investigator, the case represents a "low point in combating organized crime in Europe."

At first, authorities seemed to have achieved an important success when, on March 12 of this year, a Dutch police task force arrested the presumed mastermind, Giovanni Strangio, at his apartment in Amsterdam's Diemen neighborhood. Soon afterwards, the police arrested Strangio's brother-in-law and suspected accomplice, Francesco Romeo. This week, a Dutch court will decide whether to extradite Strangio to Germany or Italy.

But, as it turns out, this is about all that has been achieved. Frank Berlanda, an attorney in the southwestern German city of Lörrach who is defending Strangio, was puzzled by the thin excerpt of the investigation files he was given by the Duisburg public prosecutor's office. Instead of names, the numbers 8, 13 and 31 are assigned to the key DNA evidence in the case. Berlanda, an experienced attorney, has no idea who the numbers are meant to represent. Absurdly enough, neither do German authorities. To this day, Italian authorities have failed to provide the reference DNA samples that were requested more than a year ago, nor have they responded to German requests for legal assistance.

Ironically, the investigation into the Duisburg Mafia murders was supposed to usher in a new era in European crime fighting. After the Duisburg bloodbath, representatives of both countries were practically tripping over each other in their efforts to declare war on organized crime. "We want to help the German police obtain new information," said Pietro Grasso, the chief prosecutor of the Italian anti-Mafia bureau, and Jörg Ziercke, who heads up Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), promised new "strategic approaches to fighting the Mafia." A German-Italian task force was established and staffed with high-level investigators from both countries. Its goal was to coordinate the fight against the Mafia on both sides of the Alps and help law enforcement achieve a breakthrough.

Requests Ignored

But it soon became clear that bureaucracy has a life of its own. For instance, the Germans are still waiting for DNA data on Giuseppe Nirta, the presumed second shooter, which they requested from their Italian counterparts back in September 2007. Without the DNA evidence, German authorities have been unable to issue a warrant for Nirta's arrest.

It took Italian police two months to deliver information about DNA traces from a car that had been linked to the suspect. The Italians insisted that they had found nothing, but the Germans questioned that claim, because they later found perfectly usable gunshot residues and DNA on other pieces of evidence that the Italians had said were unusable. Besides, the simple process of matching data, which became standard procedure with other European countries long ago, is an impossibility with the Italians, because the country has not yet ratified the relevant EU treaty.

German investigators had a glimmer of hope when suspected killer Nirta, who had already been sentenced to 15 years in prison in Italy for drug trafficking, was arrested in Amsterdam last November, just as Strangio's sisters were bringing him a meal of Calabrian sausage and noodles. But Dutch judges ignored a German request to obtain a saliva sample and extradited the man to Italy.

They didn't change their position after Strangio was arrested. A few hours before the operation began, the Germans asked Dutch authorities to allow them to be involved in the search for traces in the apartment "and other places where the suspected criminals had spent time" once the arrest had been made.

But when the time came, German and Italian investigators were only permitted to observe from a distance. The Dutch authorities instructed police to confiscate only a few items, such as a mobile phone, a laptop computer and one of the presumed murder weapons, a Beretta 93R with a large magazine. Then they turned over the apartment to Strangio's wife.

On April 2, the disenchanted Duisburg public prosecutor's office sent a new request for legal assistance, asking for a saliva sample, to their Dutch counterparts. It is still waiting for a response. Then, in a fax sent to Dutch officials last week, the German prosecutors withdrew their request for the extradition of Strangio.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan