MOBSTERS WON'T LOSE CRIME WAR, RCMP SAY

The long and expensive war on organized crime will never be won, two of
Canada's top law-enforcement officials say.

"Of course, we will never 'declare victory' over organized crime," deputy
Solicitor-General Nicole Jauvin told a group of Prime Minister Jean
Chretien's top aides late last year at a closed meeting in Ottawa to
discuss the impact of organized crime in Canada.

RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, who joined Ms. Jauvin at the
briefing for officials with the Privy Council Office, added that biker
gangs continue to flourish despite the much ballyhooed, multimillion-dollar
crime-fighting efforts of federal and provincial police forces.

"In spite of all this, outlaw motorcycle gangs are growing in Quebec, and
the rest of Canada," Mr. Zaccardelli said at the Nov. 6, 2000 meeting.

(A month after the Ottawa meeting, Quebec police said they had dealt a
"crippling blow" to biker gangs in the province after the arrest of 14
members of the Rock Machine motorcycle club.)

Mr. Zaccardelli and Ms. Jauvin's remarks from the meeting are contained in
a heavily edited document marked "secret" that was obtained for The Globe
and Mail by Ottawa researcher Ken Rubin under the Access to Information Act.

At the closed-door meeting, the pair said the federal government was facing
"significant" political pressure to deal with what was fast "becoming an
unacceptable situation."

Ms. Jauvin told the PCO officials that the pressure was particularly acute
in Quebec.

The pair also suggested that pressure was percolating south of the border
for Canada to deal more effectively with the threat posed by organized crime.

"Let's not forget our relationship with the United States," Ms. Jauvin
said. She and Mr. Zaccardelli painted a depressing picture of the deep
inroads that organized crime has made throughout Canadian business and
society despite the hundreds of millions of dollars Ottawa has devoted to
battling the Mob.

"While the harm caused by organized-crime groups can be highly visible,
many far-reaching impacts go relatively unnoticed," Ms. Jauvin said. For
example, the pair said that an international criminal syndicate operating
out of Toronto had recently forced more than 100 young girls into
prostitution. They noted that seniors are often easy prey for sophisticated
scam artists.

Ms. Jauvin suggested that organized crime may be contributing to outbreaks
of AIDS and other communicable diseases, such as hepatitis C, through the
mushrooming drug trade.

"Organized drug dealers target kids and young people in school, many of
whom fall victim to drug-related diseases like AIDS and hepatitis C," she said.

Ms. Jauvin and Mr. Zaccardelli were unavailable for comment yesterday.

Spokesmen for both, however, bristled at suggestions that their comments
were an admission of defeat.

"The struggle against organized crime is an ongoing one . . . [but] it is
absolutely no way a suggestion that the battle has been lost," James
Deacon, a spokesman with the Solicitor-General's office, said in an
interview yesterday. RCMP Staff Sergeant Mike Gaudet said that the force
has not waved the white flag just yet.

"The Commissioner's message is really that we need to be vigilant and
rededicate our efforts," he said. "To think that we can put enough
resources and money towards organized crime so that some day we can say:
'Oh look, we can declare victory,' I think we would be fooling ourselves."
But more money and resources are precisely what the pair were after. Mr.
Zaccardelli and Ms. Jauvin told the officials that the government needs to
make fighting organized crime a "national priority."