In
May 2000, one of my many informants emailed me
an article from the London Times announcing
that Tom Constantine, late of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, had
been appointed to serve as Oversight Commissioner
for the implementation of the Patten Commission
reform agenda for the Police Service of Northern
Ireland. About the same time, I read a number
of reports that actor Pierce Brosnan was negotiating
to star in yet another James Bond film in which
007 would foil a plot to derail the peace process
in Northern Ireland. I answered these stories
with a press release indicating that now that
Tom Constantine was on the job, Mr. Bond’s
services would not be required. Apparently my
point was taken as no such movie was ever made.
I have personal reason to appreciate the honor
the British government bestowed upon Mr. Constantine
in handing him this challenging and historic task.
Certainly as head of the DEA and earlier superintendent
of the New York State Police, he had earned a
distinguished reputation and a high public profile.
But now, he had emerged on the international stage
in a role considerably more complex and demanding
that his four decades of crime-fighting. He was
now heading up the most ambitious effort yet to
implement a re-imagined vision of policing, one
that would make its organizational transformation
an essential element in resolving decades of communal
conflict. Compared to this, fighting international
drug cartels was a walk in the park. Mr. Constantine
emerged, in short, an international public figure
of considerable value that has yet to be applied
to a public benefit purpose appropriate to his
character and accomplishments. That is about to
be remedied.
I met Tom Constantine a few days after Governor
Mario M. Cuomo nominated him to head the New York
State Police in December 1986. My first encounter
with him was memorable and emblematic of the man
he is. I attended a meeting of police executives
at which the new superintendent was being literally
swarmed by colleagues congratulating on his nomination.
In the midst of all this embarrassingly ardent
adulation, I remember him looking up at the ceiling
and saying: “I can’t believe this happened
to a kid from Buffalo.” I was touched by
his humility. Indeed, I have never met anyone
in public service who more genuinely regarded
the opportunity to serve as the greatest of all
privileges. As I had occasion to tell the Belfast
Telegraph years later, he’s the closest
thing I’ve ever encountered to a knight in
shining armor.
In 1999, I was in the service Assembly Assistant
Speaker Edward Griffith, a distinguished New York
state legislator from Brooklyn. Speaker Griffith
returned that year from a visit to his native
Panama appalled by the damage wrought by the American
military operation that extracted strongman Manuel
Antonio Noriega. In discussing with him what he
had seen in Panama City, I explained to Speaker
Griffith that Noriega had effectively turned the
financial institutions of his country into a personal
piggybank and money laundry for the Colombian
drug cartels and that he could be assured that
the same thing was being done in any number of
the small nations of the Caribbean Basin. The
cartels were that rich and powerful. Speaker Griffith
was a man of rare insight and imagination in using
the legislative process. He asked me to draft
legislation that would put New York at the forefront
of the international struggle to confront and
defeat these increasingly global criminal and
terrorist conspiracies. The idea we came up with
was transform the legacy of Tom Constantine into
a permanent institution promoting excellence in
the field of public safety and serving as a center
for generating new strategies for confronting
our criminal and terrorist adversaries. This legislation
will be introduced in the New York State Legislature
during its 2007 session. It will authorize the
creation of the Thomas A. Constantine Institute
for the Study of Transnational Organized Crime
and Terrorism.
Our initiative is particularly timely. With the
continuing disorder and carnage in Iraq and the
world’s concern over terrorism and the dangerous
nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran, it’s
difficult to discern a ray of progress or hope.
Nonetheless, there have been two recent developments,
long in the making, that will be inscribed on
the positive side of the ledger of history --
both in Tom Constantine’s distinctive handwriting.
In late September 2006, two Colombian nationals,
Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, pleaded
guilty to international drug trafficking, agreed
to forfeit more than $2 billion in criminal assets,
and received sentences of thirty years in federal
prison. As they are both in their sixties, it
is highly unlikely that the pair will ever taste
freedom again. Their plea delivered what the United
States government called "the final, fatal
blow" to what has been acknowledged to have
been the largest and most powerful criminal organization
in history, the infamous Cali cocaine cartel.
In Northern Ireland, the Independent Monitoring
Commission, a four-man panel that includes former
directors of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
and the anti-terrorist unit of Scotland Yard,
reported in early October that the Irish Republican
Army has stopped recruiting members and has shut
down units responsible for bomb-making and weapons
smuggling. Three decades of terrorist violence
appear to have ended. Historic negotiations are
underway to establish a representative government
in the long-troubled province. British Prime Minister
Tony Blair has said there now exists "the
basis for the final settlement of the conflict
in Northern Ireland."
These two historic developments are worthy of
celebration in themselves. They also have a special
meaning for the people of New York because our
own Tom Constantine played a major role in bringing
about both.
From 1984 he led the New York State Police and
then the Drug Enforcement Administration in long-term
investigations that led to the
dismantling of the Cali organization and the arrest
of its kingpins in 1995. This stood in stark
contrast to the Colombian government’s earlier
war against Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel
which was prosecuted using paramilitary proxies,
death squads and horrific extra-legal violence
that cost the lives of thousands of innocents.
The long struggle against the Cali organization
was quite different. It was a genuine, international
law enforcement effort. It set historic precedents
in international law enforcement collaboration.
It ultimately led to the extradition treaty that
has brought the Rodriguez brothers to face American
justice.
Mr. Constantine’s subsequent service as Oversight
Commissioner for the implementation of the Patten
Commission reform of the Police Service of Northern
Ireland lent his steady guidance and professionalism
to legitimizing that agency in the eyes of the
Catholic/Nationalist minority in the province.
Over the three decades of The Troubles, the former
Royal Ulster Constabulary had lost all credibility
and trust with that minority. The Patten Commission
recognized that only someone of international
stature and sterling integrity could certify the
reality of reform. Only a truly professional and
fully accountable police agency could vitiate
the need for the British military presence and
so guarantee civic order that any public sympathy
for the paramilitary groups that had held sway
for so long has largely evaporated. The PSNI is
truly emerging as a community police force in
every positive sense of that term.
With these two signature career accomplishments
-- for which, of course, he would be the first
assign credit to many thousands of dedicated law
enforcement officers -- Tom Constantine has showed
us as probably no one else conceivably could that
the key to successfully confronting the threats
of transnational organized crime and terrorism
is honest, dedicated, professional law enforcement
operating within the bounds of the strictest constitutional,
legal and ethical standards. There is a right
and civilized way to confront these threats that
does not require or justify preemptive wars, forced
regime change, chronic states of emergency, abridgement
of long-standing conventions of warfare or cherished
constitutional rights, no Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo
Bay, no barbaric interrogation methods. That is
a message that this troubled world badly needs
to hear. The legislation that I have prepared
to create the Constantine Institute for the Study
of Transnational Organized Crime and Terrorism
will broadcast that message far and wide.
Seventeen hundred years ago, history was made
and changed in the far western Roman garrison
town of Eboracum, today
known as York, when the legions proclaimed Flavius
Valerius Constantinus emperor. He set out
to reunify a disintegrating empire, end religious
persecution, stand off invasions, found one of
the world’s great cities and establish the
values of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as the
foundation of Western Civilization. He is, of
course, known to posterity as Constantine the
Great.
Fifty years ago, the noted American sociologist
C. Wright Mills wrote: "For the first time
in American history, men in authority are talking
about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end.
Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the
name of realism they have constructed a paranoid
reality all their own." Today, there are
many such “men in authority” who are
trying to say that that civilization is in grave
danger because of terrorists, criminal conspiracies
and rogue states. That is their paranoid reality.
I invite thoughtful men and women of good will
everywhere to contemplate the achievements of
Tom Constantine, the “kid from Buffalo”
-- something of a far western garrison town in
New York -- and not to worry.
AN
ACT in relation to establishing the Thomas A.
Constantine Institute for the Study of Transnational
Organized Crime and Terrorism within the State
University of New York and making an appropriation
therefor
The
People of the State of New York, represented in
Senate and Assembly, do enact as follows:
Section
1. Declaration of legislative findings and
intent. Transnational society today includes
multinational corporations, nongovernmental
organizations, criminals, and terrorists. In
this environment, organized crime, in particular,
has gone global. It has emerged as the mortal
enemy of democratic institutions worldwide and
it infects and distorts world commerce and financial
institutions. It has forged alliances with terrorist
organizations and links to outlaw states. It
is ruthless and inhuman and has raised a capital
of such gargantuan proportions that these organizations
can make themselves masters of governments through
intimidation, violence and corruption.
New
York has a unique and celebrated tradition of
leadership in confronting and eradicating organized
crime. With the 1957 Appalachin incident, the
New York State Police dramatically exposed the
existence of La Cosa Nostra to an unsuspecting
world sparking decades of intense effort to
combat criminal conspiracies that had grown
pervasive and entrenched. Today, as a result,
the traditional Mafia is in full retreat.
In
1991 the New York State Police, under the leadership
of Thomas A. Constantine, exposed the operations
of Colombia’s Cali cocaine cartel when
the culmination of a six-year investigation
disrupted a far-reaching and sophisticated organization
that had been established in the state by the
cartel. It was again the first time that a state
law enforcement agency had brought the secretive
hierarchy of a major criminal conspiracy out
into the light of day -- this time, one based
in a foreign country and with tentacles in many
nations.
Mr.
Constantine made further history when, as head
of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, he
oversaw an international effort that led to
the surrender of the Cali Cartel's leaders and
the effective break-up of its organization during
the mid-nineties. This investigation stood in
stark contrast to the previous effort to eradicate
Pablo Escobar’s Medellin-based cartel which
was prosecuted by the Colombian government through
paramilitary proxies and a campaign of horrific
extra-legal violence that cost the lives of
many innocent civilians.
Mr.
Constantine is a most accomplished and unique
figure in American law enforcement. Not only
had he a hand in bringing down the Cali Cartel
-- generally acknowledged to have been the largest
and most powerful criminal conspiracy in history
-- but soon after he retired from the DEA, the
British government recruited him to oversee
the reform of the Royal Ulster Constabulary
and its reestablishment as the Police Service
of Northern Ireland, a key component of the
Good Friday Agreement to end three decades of
terrorist violence in Northern Ireland.
In
both of these signature career accomplishments,
Mr. Constantine showed us that the key to successfully
confronting the threats of transnational organized
crime and terrorism is honest, dedicated, professional
law enforcement operating within the bounds
of the strictest constitutional, legal and ethical
standards. Mr. Constantine is, as the result,
recognized and respected worldwide among his
peers as the paradigm of that kind of professional
law enforcement.
The
problem of transnational criminal conspiracies
is growing and metamorphosing at a frightening
rate. We are already in mortal confrontation
with organizations that threaten peace, prosperity
and public confidence in law enforcement's ability
to protect our people, our democratic institutions
and our economic well-being. With the internationalization
of organized crime and the emergence of global
terrorism, the challenge to law enforcement
has grown exponentially. To meet that challenge,
we must develop the legal and diplomatic frameworks
within which the law enforcement authorities
of many nations may cooperate along with the
essential personal and professional relationships
that build trust and unity of purpose. There
is an urgent need for research, policy development,
law reform and education to confront the threat
of transnational organized crime and terrorism.
This
legislation establishes the Thomas A. Constantine
Institute for the Study of Transnational Organized
Crime and Terrorism within the state university
of New York. Inspired by Mr. Constantine’s
extraordinary career achievements and the international
respect he has earned in the field of public
security, this entity will provide a focus for
deliberations on the control of these phenomena
and for public education about their manifestations.
The institute will sponsor a diverse research
program that will reflect a balance among the
issues relating to legal, operational, social,
political, and economic aspects of international
organized crime and terrorism. It will organize
conferences and symposia that will bring together
the best minds among academics, law enforcement
professionals, the intelligence community, lawmakers,
the diplomatic corps and the business and financial
community to develop strategies, tactics, relationships
and legal and diplomatic frameworks for more
effective international cooperation in the control
of transnational organized crime and terrorism.
Its ultimate goal is to be a valuable and practical
resource for the world’s law enforcement
agencies, governments and the international
business community.
§
2. There is hereby established within the
State University of New York the Thomas A. Constantine
Institute for the Study of Transnational Organized
Crime and Terrorism. Such institute shall organize
conferences and seminars, develop training programs
for law enforcement officers, sponsor and promote
research, publish its proceedings and maintain
a library. The chancellor and trustees of the
state university shall appoint a person well
qualified by education and experience to administer
such institute. Such institute shall be authorized
to establish a development program to build
its own endowment.
§
3. The sum of two hundred fifty thousand
dollars ($250,000), or as much thereof as may
be necessary, is hereby appropriated to the
state university of New York from any monies
in the state treasury in the general fund for
the purposes of carrying out the provisions
of this act. Such sum shall be payable on the
audit and warrant of the state comptroller on
vouchers certified or approved by the commissioner
of taxation and finance, or his duly designated
representative in the manner provided by law.
No expenditure shall be made from this appropriation
until a certificate of approval of availability
shall have been issued by the director of the
budget and filed with the state comptroller
and a copy filed with the chairman of the state
senate finance committee and the chairman of
the assembly ways and means committee. Such
budget and a copy of each such amendment shall
be filed with the state comptroller, the chairman
of the state senate finance committee and the
chairman of the assembly ways and means committee.
§
4. This act shall take effect immediately.
