BY BILL BRADLEY
Organized crime is everywhere and ripping you off, says former RCMP officer Chris Mathers.
Mathers is the author of Crime School: Money Laundering, True Crime Meets the World of Business and Finance.
Mathers will be at the Elm Tree Bookstore on Elm Street this Wednesday at 7 pm for a presentation and book signing.
Organized crime isnÂ?t just into drugs and gambling.
You purchase an expensive $150 shirt from Italy and the buttons pop off. There is a good chance the shirt was made in Southeast Asia from a factory controlled by a crime gang.
Traffic jam on the way to that meeting in Toronto because a car stalled? According to Mathers that stalled car engine may have dirt in the gas line. The dirty gas may have been purchased at a small independent station controlled by organized crime.
Mathers writes about diverse ways organized criminals jerk you around from crashing computer systems to having your mobile phone account cloned. The latter could result in astronomically high long distance bills. Someone is calling friends in China.
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While these incidents are bothersome and costly, there are other criminal activities more deadly.
Mathers spent years following how terrorist fund their activities by laundering money through banks and other financial institutions. He worked for the FBI and RCMP on these cases.
Terrorists need money to fund their deeds. Strip them of cash and you stop them in their tracks, he says.
And Osama Bin Laden? Mathers thinks he has been dead for a while.
Â?If they had captured Bin Laden alive he would have been a huge security problem, but if they had killed him and let the world know it would be almost as bad, then he becomes a martyr, and the same crazies would be blowing stuff up forever.Â?
Crime School is published by Key Porter and includes a foreword by Norman Inkster, former commissioner of the RCMP and former president of
Interpol.
