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By Leroy Cook
As I walked down the stairs from the plane in Sofia, Bulgaria, April 17, 1996, I couldn’t miss the striking blond woman in a KGB style black leather skirt and jacket coolly observing each person disembark. Visions of James Bond movies flashed before my eyes. Monica, an English speaking W.E.S.T. employee, and Stephan, the driver, whisked me past the waiting line at customs and into a small car for the three hour drive to W.E.S.T. headquarters in Veliko Turnova.
Maybe I should back up a ways and lay some foundation to make it clear that this is not an attempt at spy fiction. I cannot claim to be an expert on Russia or on the involvement of foreign nationals in insurance fraud rings. This article is the result of a very interesting trip that humbled me mightily. My goal is to share what I “unlearned.”
In claims circles, it is not unusual to hear stories and rumors about the “Russian Mafia” being involved with fraudulent claims activity. The danger of jumping to conclusions based on someone’s accent are known to any who follow bad faith litigation. With this in mind, I would like to share some experiences and impressions. If this article helps one company avoid a foolish multimillion dollar bad faith judgment, it will have been worth the effort.
Investigators in the US and other Western countries received a mailing from Bulgaria last year. An organization called the World Elite Security Trust seemed to be claiming the ability to solve all security problems and fraud investigation needs everywhere. The seeming absurdity of the claims made most people throw the invitation to join W.E.S.T. in the trash without further thought.
ION sees hundreds of brochures from investigators who claim to be able to do anything anywhere. Some of the exaggerated brochures we have are from competent investigators of high integrity. Combining this knowledge with an awareness of how easy it is to say the wrong thing when translating to a different language, I chose to take a closer look at W.E.S.T. The Bulgarian diversion was timely, coming at the same time as an expansion of ION’s referral services to worldwide from nationwide.
I wrote and asked for more information. I have corresponded with W.E.S.T. by mail, FAX and the Internet for the past year. At no time has W.E.S.T. asked for money. In mid 1995, after several communications, they asked if I could be named “Honorary Regional Director” for the US It was still unclear what W.E.S.T. was all about, but I had detected a thread of idealism in their communications. The price was right (they still didn’t ask for money) so I said “Sure, why not?” After all, opportunities for ongoing contact with Eastern European organizations are rare. After I agreed to be named as a regional director, I was invited to attend a meeting in Bulgaria. I declined and continued to ask questions in our weekly Internet exchanges. The November meeting dates passed and I was invited to attend (for only the cost of getting to Bulgaria) a meeting in April 1996. The timing was good for catching the London Board meeting of the World Association of Detectives on the same trip. I was tempted, but I still had serious reservations about W.E.S.T., what it is, does and can do. When I mentioned my dilemma to Jack Townshend, a longtime friend and mentor who has spoken at international scientific symposiums in Russia, Jack said, “Leroy, maybe you can help.”
Before going to Bulgaria, I had little reason to consider the accuracy of stories about the “Russian Mafia” or the meaning of the words bandied about so freely. I had heard enough ominous references to make me a little apprehensive about what I would be flying into. I returned from my trip asking “What do most people mean when they say Russian?” Do they actually mean people from Russia or are they referring to anyone from a former communist country that constituted part of the USSR? If there are in fact “Russian Mafia” members perpetrating frauds on US insurance companies, what about those people from all those other countries who speak with similar accents? Are they doing it too, or do they march to a different drummer? Many countries of the former USSR have names so unfamiliar to us and our tongues that it is possible they are referred to as “Russians” out of the inability to pronounce their country’s names.
How abut the word “mafia?” What does it mean? Since returning
to US soil, I have looked the word up in several dictionaries,
and I will share with you the definition from Webster’s New
World Dictionary, Third College Edition: “Mafia n. 1. In Sicily
a) an attitude of popular hostility to law and government. b) a secret society characterized by this attitude. 2. In the US and elsewhere, a secret society of Italian origin, engaged in such illegal activities as gambling, prostitution and illicit trade in narcotics. 3. Any exclusive or dominating group.” The World Book Dictionary included a description of mafia as “a close family oriented group having power outside of government.”
The loaded nature of both words, “Russian” (following years of cold war propaganda) and “Mafia” as described in definition #2 above, should warn us of a bad faith mistake waiting to happen. Anyone labeled with the term “Russian Mafia” because of an accent or origin might not receive the same level of trust afforded other policy holders and claimants. Enough talk about semantics. What happened in Bulgaria?
After leaving the Sofia airport, we drove up and over Bulgaria’s central mountain range. To get to Veliko Turnova took 2 hours, sometimes at speeds over a hundred miles an hour, all on a two-lane road. The roads are very rough and the country did not look very pretty. The snow flurries and the patches of snow on the ground as well as the fact that I had spent most of the past thirty-six hours in an airplane seat, didn’t help. From the car windows I saw two extremes. There were medieval-looking buildings, in small villages, with no pavement except for the main highway going through the middle. In the larger towns there was high-rise after high-rise, with laundry hanging on clotheslines on every veranda.
I didn’t sleep much the next four days; I experienced sensory overload. Nearly everyone at the meeting spoke or understood Russian except me. Having an attractive young English-speaking “companion” assigned to me from morning to night helped but also added to the incredulousness of the situation. The visions of James Bond merged with a John LeCarre novel. The interpreters were all young women. The attendees were men with names like Imre, Sergei, Alexander, Hristo and Miklos. They were from Russia, The Ukraine, Rumania, Hungary, Israel, Uganda, Moldovia, etc. The word “minority” now has a new meaning for me. I was asked some interesting questions, such as, “How can I contact insurance companies interested in doing business in Eastern Europe?” Can private investigators in the US physically capture criminals from other countries and deliver them beyond the protection of the US borders?” “What international organization exists to coordinate the efforts of nations around the world to combat international stolen car importing and exporting?” I received the impression large rewards are being offered by some of the former Eastern block countries for finding the millions or billions of dollars worth of funds that came to the US and other Western countries with some of their former government leaders. I advised them that legitimate private investigators in the US don’t typically work on contingency, and those who want to stay out of jail are not interested in kidnapping anyone for any price. I sensed my answer was a disappointment to them. I would like to hear from anyone with helpful responses to the questions about insurance companies interested in Eastern Europe and in combating international car theft. I will pass the information along to my new acquaintances.
I didn’t get all my questions answered. I left Bulgaria a week later with new questions about things I had never considered before. I am still communicating with W.E.S.T. with the goal of determining what they can do to help investigators in the real West and what we can do to help them with whatever part of their goals are compatible with our laws and goals.
We in the West are abysmally ignorant of almost everything of importance about the people, customs, governments and business practices in the former communist countries. I suspect the people in the former communist countries are equally as ignorant about our world. The CIA country description describes Bulgaria as “an emerging democracy.” My hired driver in Sofia (after I left the W.E.S.T. meeting) described the prevailing government system more accurately as “anarchy.” I walked through the customs checkpoint, past the waiting line without a hitch because the official knew the person I was with. I occasionally observed traffic policemen in serious conversation with drivers they had pulled over. Everyone I asked told me the same thing: ie, the police take in more money in a day of traffic shakedowns than the government pays them for a month. They only work two or three days a month and derive their income by taking the “fines” (usually about half what the court would levy) on the spot.
The consensus of most Bulgarians I talked with was that the “security companies,” frequently said to be “Mafia run,” are more honest than the police. These conversations involved extensive use of my English-Bulgarian/Bulgarian-English dictionary. Here is an excerpt from my journal dictated at the end of one such conversation.
“Alexander (my hired driver in Sofia) just explained that private police or security (I think he thinks of private detectives and security as being the same) are probably controlled by Mafia, but he went on to say it is not a question of honesty. The private police are effective and the police aren’t. If somebody kidnaps his son, for example, he would be better off paying a security company to get the boy back than he would complaining to the police, who would probably not make much of an effort to accomplish anything. Honesty does not appear to be a relevant issue as much as effectiveness.”
A study of the word “mafia” and what it means beyond our first impression is critical to any understanding of what Alexander meant. Riding the city buses in Sofia, I noticed something I have noticed before in third-world countries. The fare collection system on the government-operated buses is so poor that most of the people who ride them don’t pay their fares. I asked several people about this; their evasive answers led me to believe they know there is something wrong with cheating the government out of the fare, but they rationalize it as okay because everyone does it. One young lady who spoke English well, at first claimed all the people had monthly passes but when I pressed her with a few more questions she said, “Well, for most people it is too expensive to buy a whole ticket for just one or two stops.” That is every bit as good as the rationalization we use in the West when we can get away with something. A quote in the July 1, 1996, issue of Forbes Magazine is timely. Samuel Butler said, “Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers.” Where the government is ineffective or corrupt, or both, is someone who exercises power outside the government necessarily “immoral,” or even dishonest?
Free enterprise is easy for us to comprehend because we are part of it. I suspect it is as incomprehensible to Eastern Europeans as the political and economic chaos they are living in is to us. My feelings about W.E.S.T. are still neutral. W.E.S.T. is not an investigative association as we know them. It isn’t a typical private investigation agency. It might be closer to a fledgling Eastern European Dun & Bradstreet type service. I will continue to ask questions, learn and try to help as long as I am able. As a part of ION’s expansion into the international market, I am willing to make more trips to Eastern Europe. If I do, I will take the names and addresses of many good contacts I met through the hospitality of Vladimir and Gabriella at W.E.S.T. Now that I am aware of my ignorance, I will be able to ask much better questions.
I have learned to take nearly all written propaganda with a grain of salt. Fancy words and brochures can be purchased by anyone for a price. My travels in over fifty countries have convinced me that generalizations can apply to nationalities but not to individuals. What counts is, can a person be counted on as an individual? It takes a lot longer to get the answer to that question, but the time and investment is worth it. If every adjuster and insurance investigator could exclude generalizations and prejudices from their work in claims, the bad faith attorneys would have slim pickings.
Leroy E. Cook, the founder of ION Incorporated, lives in Tempe, Arizona, with his wife, Margaret, and two daughters. ION and the Investigators Anywhere Resource Line can be reached at 800 338-3463 or online at ionjcfr@ioninc.com.
© Copyright 1996 Alikim Media