Rising Wave of Mafia-Style Violence Terrorizes Eastern European Nations

The businessman walked the few steps from home to his Jeep Cherokee before he was cut down by a bullet through the temple, fired from a silencer-equipped, large-caliber pistol about three yards away.

No one saw the murder of Jozsef Prisztas, who was allegedly linked to gangsters, on a residential Budapest street shortly before noon on Nov. 1. At least, no one was talking.

The slaying was emblematic of the Mafia-style crime wave that has taken hold across much of post-Communist Eastern Europe--where citizens were ready for just about everything democracy could bring except the terror of organized crime.

No week goes by without a message from the underworld: a bus or car bomb here, a grenade there. Robbery, murder, the smuggling of drugs, arms and people, and money laundering are on the rise.

Huge caches of smuggled weapons have shown up in Slovenia, the former Yugoslav republic between the Alps and the Adriatic Sea. Bombs have ripped through currency-exchange booths in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic. A former Bulgarian premier, Andrei Lukanov, was gunned down in a Sofia street in broad daylight and the country’s underworld was blamed.

Across half a continent, gangland violence has spread fear--and left courts, police and politicians flailing.

“We say that Europe has to unite,” said France Bucar, a veteran anti-Communist dissident who recently stepped down as head of Slovenia’s parliamentary security commission. “But organized crime discovered this already before. And the victim of all this is the security of our society.”

Eastern Europe’s gangs have grown rich on the divide between their countries and the West, supplying what legitimate businessmen couldn’t: first pantyhose and jeans, then computer parts and drugs, finally “protection” for money, property and lives.

The current gangland wars among Eastern Europe’s underworld princes reflect just how big the stakes have grown.

In Hungary, bomb explosions, hand-grenade attacks and shootings killed three men and seriously wounded three in November and December.

The toll is not out of line with many Western nations--Budapest reported 60 murders among its 2 million residents in 1995, which compares with 72 in Berlin with nearly twice the population but 131 in Cleveland with one-fourth the people. But the bloodshed shocked this normally placid society because the police seem helpless.

“Maybe it’s a conflict of interest or a turf dispute, but we also think that someone made off with billions of forints, and that there’s real estate speculation involved,” said Laszlo Garamvoelgyi, spokesman for Hungary’s national police.

Organized crime spread rapidly in the legal limbo that accompanied Eastern Europe’s transition from communism to a market economy. From restaurants and entertainment spots, gangs moved into protection rackets, loan-sharking and the drug trade--especially after the wars in former Yugoslavia shut down a key east-west narcotics route.

In Hungary, illegal oil-importing schemes have reportedly netted huge amounts of money for the underworld.

Prisztas’ killing marked a new, deadly turn in Budapest’s gangland war.

Within three weeks, two of his associates were seriously wounded--jockey Csaba Lakatos, shot near the stables at Budapest’s racetrack, and Pal Totka, a fish wholesaler and former boxer shot in the courtyard of his apartment building.

As organized crime has flourished, officialdom has all but admitted defeat.

In Maribor, a bucolic Slovenian town at the foot of the Alps, the mayor, Alojz Krizman, says the “mafia” rules in his nation.

Take local anti-hero Maksmilijan Vollmajer.

Before his death in a car crash this autumn, Vollmajer was as well known across the cozy Alpine country of just under 2 million people as its president or premier.

“His name had become a symbol for the nonfunctioning of the rule of law,” said Otmar Klepsteter, a Slovenian journalist.

Vollmajer spent time in prison in neighboring Austria before rising to notoriety in the post-Communist chaos of Yugoslavia’s breakup. Police and locals say he built a profitable line in illegal drugs, insurance scams and violent retribution on any foe.

In 1994, he was even convicted for some of the 65 crimes police charged him with. But a liberal justice system--devised by those who wanted to break the heavy hand wielded by the police under communism--led an appeals court to overturn the sentence.

Police allege Vollmajer took revenge by planting a bomb that missed the judge who had dared sentence him, but did maim the judge’s wife.

That was just one of 12 explosions that “poured fuel on the fire” in Maribor this past year, local police chief Milan Kus said. No one was killed.

“The aim of these explosions is not an attack on bodies or life, but to spread fear,” Kus said.