As was set forth in the Commission’s public hearing and in the text of this final report, billions have been spent on efforts to disrupt and interdict the supply of illicit drugs. Our prisons are filled to beyond capacity with incarcerated drug offenders, and our criminal justice system is clogged with such cases. Despite such difficult and problematic circumstances, of course, no rational person would argue that law enforcement should drop its weaponry and walk away from the pursuit and prosecution of tough laws aimed at the worst offenders – the dealers and kingpins. But what of the demand side? How can we best control the actual use of narcotics and thus pull the  market out from under organized crime and organized criminal groups? In this regard, the state should undertake a systematic review of the full spectrum of current demand- reduction programs, primarily those related to early intervention, treatment and rehabilitation, and replicate those that have shown results. How are those results measured? Is there close monitoring of these programs? Taxpayers are entitled to know that money pumped into rehabilitation and other demand-reduction strategies is spent wisely and effectively and does not merely result in an elaborate revolving door established at exorbitant cost. It is critical for the state to determine whether those who successfully complete such programs are returning to the same conditions and circumstances that gave rise to their drug problems, thus risking entrance into the same cycle all over again. A full assessment also should be undertaken of proven demand- reduction strategies employed elsewhere in the nation and the world, and the best aspects of such strategies should be considered for application in New Jersey.

As a state, we should look upon this as a threshold opportunity to explore an entire universe of options, including those that go beyond the expenditure of scarce public dollars. For example, should the state’s economic development policy agenda focus more sharply upon the needs of those areas of New Jersey, the cities, where problems related to crime and drugs are most severe? Should the business community, with encouragement from government, provide after-care work opportunities for at-risk youth and adults, including those on probation or parole, through apprenticeships leading to eventual employment? Should the state’s experiment with drug courts be expanded to encompass all counties in New Jersey? Are all grant opportunities offered for this program being pursued? Are there more creative ways to ensure that local law  enforcement authorities interact regularly and effectively with their communities, in the best spirit of community-policing? Should random drug-testing and treatment be extended to parochial, public and independent secondary and middle schools, as well as home-study programs? Should testing be mandatory and employ the newest technologically superior indices beyond urinalysis? Should the state organize a system in which counselors, drug-court personnel, mentors and others prepare candidates for available jobs, refer them to prospective employers and monitor their progress? Should coverage for drug-abuse treatment, including chemical detox and counseling, be mandated in all health insurance plans? Taking the issue to its greatest extreme, should there be a dialogue on whether prohibitions ought to be removed for drugs deemed to possess legitimate medical utility?

The willingness to confront these and other difficult issues in an open and constructive debate will be a measure of New Jersey’s commitment to cutting off the lifeblood of organized crime.

As demonstrated in this report, groups linked to La Cosa Nostra and the Mafia no longer pose the exclusive or even the paramount threat in this realm, though they clearly remain criminal forces to be reckoned with. Rather, groups operating well beyond the  familiar confines of traditional organized crime have inherited that mantle. Violent, unpredictable and oddly structured, these groups are difficult, if not impossible, to penetrate and to neutralize using standard investigative tactics. The conventional “onesize- fits-all” response to organized crime is no longer viable. Many law enforcement agencies are cognizant of the need to adopt creative approaches and, indeed, have begun to deploy resources and personnel to infiltrate the new frontier of Russian, Dominican and South American mobsters, Asian drug gangs, Mexican Mafiosi and other emerging groups. But all too often, this necessary strategic shift is occurring too slowly and in piecemeal fashion. Too many organized crime control units, originally established to battle Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrant mobsters, remain wedded to monitoring the past, enamored of their successes in prosecuting the traditional syndicates, despite the general decline of these long-time targets and the rise of new players who appear alien in everything from their mode of criminality to their spoken language. In effect, law enforcement – individually and as a whole – needs to conduct a community-wide “gut check” to make sure that task forces, intelligence analysts, money-laundering countermeasures and community-policing resources are being employed most effectively and efficiently against the threat of the new organized crime where that threat is most pronounced.

General Harvey described the language and cultural barriers that will have to be overcome to combat non-traditional organized crime effectively:
We have to be sure that we are diverse in law enforcement, not simply in gender and ethnicity, but in languages. As some of these different organized criminal associations do their work, they are doing [it] sometimes in very insular communities … where English is really a second language. And so we have to be sure we recruit into law enforcement persons who have the capability to understand not only other cultures, but can speak multiple languages so that we have the ability to go in and break up, for example, a protection racket in a particular community where someone who is not from that community or not from that culture can’t get in to find out what the racket is. You know that legitimate store owners are being shaken down and are being required to pay money to keep their stores from being torched or destroyed in some ways, but it’s very tough to get in. You take the one case that we did in connection with the United States Attorney General’s Office and the FBI involving women, who were essentially enslaved in the United States in a number of dance clubs and in other areas. These are Eastern European women. And it took a long time to build their trust. It took a long time to be able to communicate with them. And we found out that ultimately the scheme was one involving fraudulent United States passport documents. And we then turned the case over to the United States Attorney’s Office because they had jurisdiction over the crime.

 Thus, in order to deal effectively with the changing face of organized crime, law enforcement must be equipped with the proper tools. Expanded efforts should be undertaken to recruit qualified personnel who possess particular familiarity with the language and culture underlying every non-traditional organized crime group known to be active in this region. Additionally, all existing personnel who are assigned to investigative units targeting non-traditional groups should receive a basic modicum of linguistic and cultural training, as well as follow-up instruction as warranted by circumstances.

Further, a review of training in our police academies should be undertaken. Police-training curricula may have to be revised to require universal inclusion of courses that foster awareness of society’s diversity, as well as a full understanding of the historical causes and effects of crime, of good police ethics and of what it takes to counteract official corruption. The training should include extensive examples of real- world situations that young officers may encounter and instruction as to what they need to do in order to perform honorable service. Representatives of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as New Jersey agencies, such as the Division of Criminal Justice, State Commission of Investigation and county Prosecutors’ offices, should engage in comprehensive workshops for new recruits. The state should cast a wide net in the effort to improve its training regimen, drawing upon the best programs here and abroad.

Law enforcement also needs to do a better job to eliminate circumstances that foster police corruption. Any actual or implied adherence to a policy that discourages officers from revealing misconduct by colleagues or superiors only permits the infection  to fester and law enforcement to become a tool of the criminal cartels. Young officers should be encouraged to blow the whistle on any activity that deviates from the ethics ideal taught at the academies, and police departments and other law enforcement agencies should be provided with hotline numbers for officers to call for advice and assistance. They should receive constant reminders that their oath is more important than adherence to any unwritten code of silence. The system should ensure that after alerting authorities about corruption and other problems, the whistleblowers come out of the process appreciated, possessed of good career opportunities, and financially and psychologically whole. We should make heroes out of our patriots and not promote the myth that New Jersey folk heroes can be found in the ranks of television’s “Sopranos” or from rogue cops as portrayed in the media.

Drug interdiction in particular demands a more directed approach. Let it be stated that the Commission has the greatest regard for the efforts of New Jersey’s law enforcement personnel. Over the past three decades, they have worked diligently in a daily effort to curb open-air market drug dealing and violent turf battles associated with gangs, guns and drugs. Without this constant effort, violent crime would have surged to become an even greater presence in our society with the thugs expanding their urban turf to encompass communities that so far have escaped the brunt of the drug trade. In accordance with the New Jersey Statewide Action Plan of the 1980s, as revised in the 1990s, the state’s 21 county Prosecutors have established Narcotics Task Forces, and many local police officers through these efforts have become skilled in conducting drug investigations. Further, they have used their training and experience to enhance the operational performance of their colleagues. Moreover, successive Attorneys General have created statewide task forces enlisting State Police cooperation. Many such efforts have sporadically disrupted drug trafficking in various jurisdictions, and many have involved cooperation with the federal authorities. As a result, over this period, law enforcement agencies have locked up significant numbers of drug offenders and have reaped the benefits of the forfeiture laws. In the process, however, elements of the law enforcement community may have fallen into a false sense of complacency and entitlement.

The Commission concludes that the system is not performing as well as it should, in part, because of an inadequate focus at the state level on the development of creative,  coordinated strategies to target the altered landscape of traffickers. Our investigation reveals that the flow of, and the demand for, illicit narcotics have not subsided, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Law enforcement cannot look solely to “chasing the package” (drugs) but must develop concerted attacks upon the kingpin organizations and large- scale independent operators. While the scourge and degradation of drug dealing persists, recent history reveals that the state’s collective response has abated. At one time, nearly 180 State Police detectives were assigned throughout the state to specialize in the drug- law enforcement. But because of budget constraints and shifting priorities, these ranks have thinned to the point where they currently possess less than one-quarter of their original strength. Alexander Gourley, the Acting Special Agent-in-Charge of the DEA’s Newark office, noted that 96 DEA Special Agents are assigned to the Newark, Camden and Atlantic City Offices, along with 53 Task Force personnel from various counties and local police in New Jersey. The Commission’s review showed that only two state-level representatives participate.

Attorney General Harvey, to his credit, has spoken out and acted positively to revitalize the Statewide Narcotics Task Force with a Gangs, Drugs and Guns initiative, a noble undertaking that has begun to reveal some successes. Nevertheless, this initiative ultimately will wane and wither unless it evolves into a broader undertaking equipped with sufficient resources and personnel, and undergirded by clearly focused directives that give the effort all of the force and backing required to get the job done. This requires will, hard choices and leadership. As General Harvey himself stated bluntly in his public hearing testimony, “We need more investigators.” The Commission applauds his candor, particularly in light of the fact that the Office of the Attorney General is the agency best  positioned and empowered to coalesce a viable, centralized approach to drug enforcement involving local, county, state and federal agencies. The Attorney General of the State of New Jersey has the singular authority to create a unique umbrella consortium composed of all levels of law enforcement. There is no room, under any circumstances, for segregating or fractionalizing efforts to enforce the law. Though law enforcement, due to the multi-dimensional nature of the challenge at hand, remains but one piece of the overall strategy to rid society of organized crime and the drug-ridden engine that drives it, the law enforcement community as a whole nonetheless is a crucial component that demands proper, coordinated and productive deployment.

Current laws provide that making false or misleading statements in hazardous waste disposal documentation amounts to no more than a third degree crime. Because of the enormous profit potential, organized criminals find improper disposal of solid and hazardous waste to be a lucrative racket. Depending on the ultimate consequences for individual victims and the environment, crimes impacting the environment are difficult to prove and should be met by severe fines and imprisonment. The deceit which makes them difficult to prove often lies in the documentation required to be kept by collection or disposal companies or filed with the Department of Environmental Protection. Therefore, crimes relating to tampering with or falsification of records pertaining to the collection, transport or disposal of hazardous or solid waste should be upgraded to crimes of the second degree with severe economic penalties.

Sports betting currently is legal in just four states – Nevada, Oregon, Delaware and Montana – under “grandfather” provisions of a federal law banning it in the mid90’ s. Only Nevada and Oregon have implemented such gambling officially. Given the federal ban, New Jersey’s task force should examine the best mechanism for achieving  legalization of such wagering, whether via court challenge, constitutional amendment or other means. The task force also would be charged with determining how legalized sports betting would impact the integrity and viability of other forms of state-regulated gambling, such as casino gaming in Atlantic City and the horse-racing industry.

One significant way New Jersey can help turn the tide on money laundering is to tighten its law governing money transmitters, N.J.S.A. 17:15C-1. Money transmitters are persons or entities engaged in the business of receiving money for transmission to locations within or outside the U.S. via payment instructions, wire transfer, facsimile, or electronic funds transfers for fee or commission. These are not sophisticated banks but are primarily storefront locations that operate money-transmittal business as adjuncts to the sale of calling cards, cell phones, beepers and the like. Despite this “mom-and-pop” aspect, the amount of cash moved by these businesses is enormous. Analysis of the latest available annual money-remittance reports filed with the state Department of Banking and Insurance show nearly 5.2 million transmissions from New Jersey during 2001 alone, totaling in excess of $2 billion – an increase of nearly $150 million over the previous year. The greatest volume occurred in Hudson, Passaic and Union counties. The top  destinations included Mexico, Colombia, Portugal, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Poland, Peru, Pakistan and the Philippines.

Although transmitters are required to be licensed and to file annual reports with the Department of Banking and Insurance – 148 such licenses were in effect in 2003 – significant numbers of those who engage in or assist this cottage financial industry fall through the cracks. These transmitters employ or otherwise rely upon the assistance of more than 8,700 agents, or “delegates,” who are required to undergo no background investigation, site audits or licensing.

In pursuit of tighter restrictions on the full universe of money transmitters, New Jersey should adopt a state version of Federal Law PL 107-56, section 1960, to make operating an unlicensed money transmission business a crime subject to both a fine and imprisonment. Further, N.J.S.A. 17:15C-1 should be amended to include a licensing requirement for each location owned or operated by an applicant. The Commission also strongly recommends that the statute be equipped with a provision requiring full disclosure by both licensees and delegates of all information associated with money transmissions to which they are parties. Further, licensees should be made liable for fraudulent and false statements made by affiliated delegates, as well as for the failure of affiliated delegates to comply with state regulations. In addition, key shareholders and managers of delegate locations should be fingerprinted and subject to the same criminal background checks currently required licensees.