Billions laundered in Canada,

Mafia fighter says

By Joanne Chianello / The Financial Post

Canada's lax currency laws allow billions of dollars to be
laundered here annually and interfere with international
investigations, one of the world's top Mafia fighters said
yesterday.

Canada has ''at least 10 organized-crime groups but . . . there is
no law that targets organized crime, as there is both in Italy and
the U.S.,'' Italian prosecutor Nicola Gratteri told a Toronto
symposium on the threat of the new global Mafia.

Gratteri said his own Mafia-fighting work in Italy has meant his
''life has been totally transformed.'' He travels by armored car,
lives in a highly secured house, does not go to local restaurants or
the cinema, and is never anywhere - including the conference -
without several bodyguards nearby.

Antonio Nicaso, an organized crime specialist and the writer of
several books, told the Toronto audience that Canada is the
''underworld laboratory for organized crime.''

While researching his latest book, Nicaso said he and his partner
found that every case they investigated in the U.S. - from Los
Angeles to Wilmington, Del. - led back to Canadian criminals.

Yet, Canada has no anti-organized crime laws.

Mario Possamai, a Canadian investigator with Washington, D.C.-based
forensic accounting firm Lindquist Avey Macdonald Baskerville Inc.,
said Canadian laws do not allow police to look beyond a single
criminal act as part of an association or a larger organization.

He said the Canadian system doesn't work because of such
limitations. ''It's crucial to go after the head office, the other
branches, the wholesalers,'' he said.

Canada also has no laws that require financial institutions to
report any suspicious transactions, although the major banks have
voluntarily adopted such a policy. And small currency exchanges,
which are not regulated as strictly as banks, easily wire money
around the world. Also causing money-laundering problems are

Canada's immigration laws. Critics like Possamai and Nicaso

say Canada's laws are too lax.

November 9, 1994