EUROPE Criminal activity big business in Bulgaria

Crime makes up about 30 percent to 36 percent of the Bulgarian economy.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
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.
Within seconds, their target, underworld boss Milcho Bone -- a k a Brother Mile -- and five of his bodyguards lay dead on the restaurant patio.
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.
"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."
Can't crack down
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.
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."
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.
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.
New direction
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.
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.