Pino Arlacchi

Pino Arlacchi (Gioia Tauro, February 21, 1951) is an Italian sociologist who became famous in Italy and throughout the world for his books on the mafia, translated into different languages. Pino Arlacchi is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on human security. A professor of sociology at LUM University in Bari, Arlacchi is president of the International Forum on Crime and Criminal Law in the Global Era, an international association of distinguished scientists from 50 countries.

From 2009 to 2014, he was a member of the European Parliament, a member of the European Socialist Group, and lecturer on the European Union strategy in Afghanistan. Between 2006 and 2008, Arlacchi served on an international committee of three experts, created by the People’s Republic of China to develop a security plan for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In 2004, on behalf of the European Commission, Arlacchi developed the plan for the agency on combatting money laundering in Kosovo. Pino Arlacchi was president of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime.

A great friend of Judges Falcone and Borsellino, Arlacchi was honorary president of the Falcone Foundation and one of the architects of Italy’s anti-mafia strategy in the 1990s. As an adviser to the Minister of the Interior, Pino Arlacchi developed the executive project of the DIA – Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate. The DIA was created in 1991, along with its judicial body, the National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor’s Office, created by Giovanni Falcone.

Member of Parliament for the Democratic Left Party in two legislatures, first in the House and then in the Senate (1994-1997), Pino Arlacchi was vice-president of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission. In 1997, Arlacchi resigned from the Senate to take up the position of Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, Director of the UNDCCP (United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention), and Director General of the UN Office until 2002 in Vienna.

In 1993, the Ciampi government offered Arlacchi the position of head of the Italian security services, but Arlacchi refused due to the excessive exposure it would entail in addition to his commitment to fighting the mafia. This event was reported in the press and resurfaced in 1996, when Judge Davide Monti, who was in charge of an investigation into a group of international fraudsters called Fake Money, confiscated a fax sent in November 1993 by an Italian businessman to one of his American correspondents associated with US security services. The fax described Arlacchi’s appointment as inevitable and hypothesized a threat to the “free world,” given Arlacchi’s well-known leftist leanings.

Pino Arlacchi was an associate professor of applied sociology at the Universities of Calabria and Florence, a professor of general sociology at the University of Sassari, a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York; he also conducted courses, seminars, and conferences at various universities around the world.

As executive director of the UNDCCP, Arlacchi proposed and won approval by the United Nations General Assembly in 1998 of a ten-year strategy called “drug-free world” to reduce drug demand and eradicate opium and coca crops worldwide. The results of this strategy were assessed in March 2009 by member countries of the UN Commission on Drugs. The political declaration adopted unanimously as a result of the work recognized the progress achieved due to this approach and reaffirmed the same strategy for another ten years, until 2019.

During Arlacchi’s UN mandate, from 1997 to 2002, opium and heroin production in Afghanistan – the world’s largest producer – was largely stopped in 2001 and resumed later, after the US invasion in October of that year. Coca production in Bolivia fell by 56% over the same period. Pino Arlacchi created a satellite system for monitoring illicit crops, which helped eradicate opium plantations in 10 countries.

Another important result of Arlacchi’s work at the UN was the promotion of the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime that got approved in Palermo by 124 countries in December 2000 and came into full force in 2003. This was the first global treaty against the mafia, the dream of Giovanni Falcone, universalizing the experience of Italy and other countries in the fight against major crime. It is based on the seizure of assets of illegal origin, the abolition of bank secrecy for criminal investigations, and the introduction of the mafia community crime.

As director of the UN Crime Center, Pino Arlacchi repeated the experience of creating the DIA, helping to build a special anti-drug agency in Tajikistan, a country located along the northern drug route that starts from Afghanistan and reaches the Russian and European markets. This agency, consisting of 500 highly specialized employees, seized more than 4 tons of heroin in its first two years (1998-2000), which corresponds to the annual demand of two large Western European countries. Thanks to this agency and a cooperation agreement with the Russian Federation Space Agency, the Arlacchi-led Program has identified the largest hard drug storage system ever discovered: 40 warehouses located along the 1,300 km border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, containing more than 100 tons of heroin, enough to supply European and US markets for more than a year (satellite photos and report published in the Italian weekly Panorama in October 2000).

In the area of anti-money laundering, Pino Arlacchi helped signing in 2001 an agreement with 34 tax havens that obliged them to work with the UN to adapt their legislation to international standards of financial transparency and anti-money laundering. The agreement covered 70% of the offshore financial market, which was worth $4 trillion in 2000.

In 2011, Arlacchi, along with Russian counternarcotics minister Viktor Ivanov, developed a Euro-Russian plan to eradicate opium crops in Afghanistan, known as the Arlacchi-Ivanov Plan.

In 2012, he was appointed as special adviser to the Prime Minister of Romania on combating organized crime and corruption. After the end of his UN mandate, Pino Arlacchi has been consulting the leaders of Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, China, and other countries on the formulation of policies and measures to combat serious crimes. Arlacchi’s contributions have always been free.

Pino Arlacchi’s work has been praised publicly and privately by such figures as Pope John Paul II, Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, Vladimir Putin, Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, the King of Thailand, the Queen of Sweden, Nobel laureate San Suu Kyi, Soyinka, ElBaradei, and many others.