Ex-communist thugs find home in Slovakia's mob

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — When communist rule collapsed in Central Europe in 1989, taking with it the fat salaries the Soviets once paid to their elite athletes, the thick-necked wrestlers and karate stars of Slovakia began looking for a new line of work.

They settled on a growth industry where a steroid-fueled physique was an advantage: the emerging Slovakian mafia.

Nearly 20 years later, Slovakia's mob has become an important player in nearly every aspect of Slovakian life. Mob figures who once walked around town with baseball bats extorting money from bar owners now own the bars themselves.

Mobsters have taken over security firms, invested in Bratislava's booming real-estate market and bought up restaurants and nightclubs, security experts say. When traffic gets bad in the capital, black Mercedes SUVs or fat-wheeled motorcycles — the transport of choice of the Slovakian mafia — accelerate onto the sidewalk and speed away, unmolested by the city's traffic police.

Slovakia's mob mafia may not be as big or brutal as the mobs that have taken hold in other Central European nations such as Albania or Bulgaria, but it is just as entrenched and unavoidable.

"The mafia are becoming more self-confident during these times," said Jan Marusinec, an economic-policy analyst with Mesa 10, a social and economic policy group. A series of firings, retirements and layoffs among government mafia hunters since the country's last change of government in 2006 has reduced pressure on mobsters, he and others said.

Mobsters, once surprised and arrested during raids, now are found "sitting on a couch with their feet up and their (desk) drawers open" when police arrive, charged Tom Nicholson, a longtime mob reporter with SME, one of Slovakia's leading newspapers. "Information is getting out."

Just how comfortable have mafia figures gotten? Mob dons now list themselves as bosses of companies in Web site listings.

Pito, a hulking mobster who sports a machete scar across his face and goes by only one name, has become a cultural icon in recent years since starring in a televised music video. Across the capital, young men have adopted the mob dress code — shaved head, black clothes, lots of gold chains — and kids have posted videos of themselves posing as mobsters on YouTube.

"Mob Story," a satirical sitcom about the mafia, is a favorite in Slovakia, and a major telephone company recently ran an ad featuring mobsters plastering one of their victims into a statue.

Slovakia's mafia — like the mafias in other Central European nations — feeds on a generalized culture of corruption that has emerged since the end of communism and that has proved hard to combat, despite substantial efforts under the former government of Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda, who left office in 2006.

Slovakia ranks only relatively low on Transparency International's perceptions of corruption index for 2008, near South Africa, Malaysia and, perhaps appropriately, Italy, which has its own mob problems.

But corruption in Bratislava "is absolutely universal," charged Nicholson, with low-paid police and prosecutors often tempted by mafia handouts and politicians subject to mafia pressure. Over the summer, he said, 11 senior managers of the organized-crime unit of Bratislava's police were fired. An energetic former mob prosecutor, after four murder attempts against him, is now retired and reluctant to speak out.

Corruption "is generally accepted as the reality," said Lubica Trubiniova, an environmentalist and civil-society leader in Bratislava. "Ordinary people are upset. But nobody knows what to do. Everybody can be, and is, corrupted by the mafia."

Slovakia's current leaders deny any links with the mob, or have simply not spoken out on the issue. But Slovakians like to tell tales of how, at a wedding attended by the country's political elite, diamonds disappeared from the host's bedroom and a group of mob toughs quickly showed up to shake down the guests.

Not much can make Slovakians yearn for the bad old days of communist rule. But "that's probably the only area where communism was an advantage," noted Trubiniova. During the days of ironhanded rule from Moscow, she said, "the mafia did not have enough free space for their activities."