Model Treaty

A legal change enacted just days before the Palermo crackdown will enable U.S. and Italian law-enforcement officials to cooperate more fully in the ongoing war against the Mafia. Under a new extradition treaty between the two countries, many of the obstacles that had made it difficult for officials in one country to pursue suspects in the other have been eliminated.

Among its features: both countries will now let their own citizens be extradited. Previously, Italy and the U.S. generally refused to send their nationals to be tried abroad. The pact also allows both governments to freeze any assets held by suspected fugitives.

The agreement is a compromise between the continental Napoleonic and Anglo-American legal concepts. Italian authorities no longer have to meet the stringent "probable cause" requirement, under which they virtually had to prove in advance that a suspect was guilty. Now a "reasonable basis" for believing that the person sought has committed a crime is sufficient. In practice, this means that they provide a certified copy of the arrest warrant, "a summary of the facts of the case, of the relevant evidence and of the conclusions reached." Once extradited, a person can be jailed until his trial, which may be months later.

The new treaty also allows a person convicted in one country to be extradited to the other before having served a full jail sentence. The day the agreement went into effect, U.S. marshals hustled Michele Sindona, an Italian citizen serving a 25-year term in a U.S. federal prison for various offenses in connection with the collapse of the Franklin National Bank, aboard a flight to Milan. He faces trial there on charges stemming from the failure of his Italian financial empire. If Sindona is convicted in Italy, he will still have to be returned to the U.S. to serve out his sentence.

U.S. Ambassador to Italy Maxwell Rabb began to press for the treaty after a group of law-enforcement officials in Palermo complained to him that the U.S. was hampering their efforts by failing to take Italian extradition requests seriously. Rabb's previous impression had been exactly the reverse, that Italy had been stonewalling U.S. demands. "What we had here," he says, "was an opportunity to clear up differences where the blame for the past was about equal." U.S. and Italian authorities hope that the new extradition accord will serve as a model for agreements with other countries.