Attorney-General announces increased war on organized crime

Weinstein states he will unite civilian and administrative governmental authorities, criminal law enforcement, against organized crime.

By YONAH JEREMY BOB
Handcuffs (illustrative photo) 370 (photo credit: Reuters)
Handcuffs (illustrative photo) 370
(photo credit: Reuters)
Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein at an Israel Bar Association Conference in Eilat on Monday announced an intensification of the war on organized crime.
Weinstein said that he would bring together all civilian and administrative governmental authorities, along with traditional criminal law enforcement, to undermine the organized crime’s infrastructure on a systematic basis.
It has been previously implied to The Jerusalem Post by the attorney-general that attacking organized crime using tax, money-laundering and securities authorities – and other bread-and-butter issues – could destroy their power far more than hot slogans like administrative detention (though other administrative measures may be used.) He said that all criminal syndicates are at their root, money- making operations, and that if you dry up their funds, they can be weakened – sometimes even more than by using criminal law enforcement that has structural limits.
Weinstein said that while in the past there had been some such successful multi-branch government efforts against criminal infrastructure, it had been mostly based on the goodwill of individual local officials.
In contrast, he will now be exercising special authorities granted to the attorney-general to demand local officials’ systematic cooperation and meeting concrete benchmarks in stamping out crime.
A specific advantage of this multifaceted approach is that tax and other local officials can, by their own initiative, create problems for organized crime, without having to track plans or wait for a crime to be in process, said Weinstein.
He said he would act to strengthen local municipal attorneys, whom he called the country’s “gatekeepers,” so they could not be rolled-over by corrupt local officials.
Other aspects of Weinstein’s speech featured his declaration of initial victories in having established the new oversight branch of the Justice Ministry under Hila Gristol and his joint efforts with Supreme Court President Asher D. Grunis in issuing mandatory efficiency guidelines for moving criminal proceedings forward at a faster pace.


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