Global Beat

After scanning the British businessman's $100 bill, the Geneva bank teller politely excused himself--and called the cops. When the Swiss police later nabbed Thomas G. W. Roe near Lausanne, they happily collected something else: $376,000 in U.S. funny money that was traced to Los Angeles and a British wheeler-dealer named Dennis Loraine. What ensued was a model of transatlantic cooperation. The Swiss sent Roe to California to testify against Loraine, who got six years on counterfeiting charges; the U.S. then returned Roe, who is now serving his own six-year sentence in a Swiss cell.

Behind this recent tale of international crime and punishment was the simple fact that the Geneva teller had just read a counterfeiting advisory put out by the International Criminal Police Organization--Interpol. The glamorous acronym invokes images of SMERSH-smashing undercover men from U.N.C.L.E. but the glamour is a myth. Interpol never makes a pinch; it is merely the information broker that helps the world's police to help one another. The catch sounds small (some 2,000 arrests last year), but the effect is large. Interpol's prey is the big-time international crook--the jet-borne jewel thief or heroin smuggler who cannot be caught unless police spin a global web.

A to Z. Interpol started in 1923, when European police opened an information-swapping center in Vienna. After Hitler grabbed Austria in 1938, the Gestapo spirited the records to Berlin, where wartime bombing later destroyed them. In 1946, Interpol was reborn in Paris to combat postwar crime. It got a charter, a general assembly and a secretary-general--currently Jean Nepote, 52, a French Surete Nationale commissioner on leave. One-third of Nepote's 90-odd staffers are French detectives; most of his $500,000 annual budget is paid in dues by member countries--98 of them, from America to Yugoslavia (the only Communist country) to Zambia. The U.S. contribution: $20,000.

Interpol has just formally opened its new eight-story HQ in the fashionable Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud. Equipped with a 50-ft. rooftop antenna, the streamlined building contains a massive communications center linking member countries by radio, Telex and Teletype. Key to this network, which handled 118,000 messages last year, are Interpol's branch offices, called National Central Bureaus. The bureaus are manned by local police whose sole job is trading Interpol information with other bureaus and with Saint-Cloud. One payoff for Americans: interdiction of the narcotics pipeline that runs from Turkish farmers to French labs to New York pushers--pushing the price of an illicit kilo of opium from $500 to as much as $400,000 worth of heroin along the way. "Thanks to marvelous harmony between the world's police forces," says Rome-based U.S. Narcotics Agent Michael Picini, "a greater number of seizures is being made overseas today than on the American continent."

Mutual Education. On file in Saint-Cloud are 930,000 identity cards, 60,000 sets of fingerprints and 5,000 photos of "specialized criminals" classified according to year of birth, height and facial measurements under a telltale system that sometimes even plastic surgery cannot fool. Another ingenious file contains perforated cards that, superimposed, tell at a glance how many persons from different categories (men, women, Dominicans, Dahomeyans) have committed similar major crimes--especially useful when clues are nil. It works so well that Interpol does not even feel any need for computers. According to one official: "Once we get someone in our files, he can change his name 50 times and we've still got him identified. He can never get completely away."

Through Interpol, police the world over can trace a Bombay jewel thief with a dozen aliases and passports, study the latest research on police use of helicopters, learn how Lebanon is persuading farmers to grow sunflowers instead of hashish--or call on the FBI's monumental files of 184 million fingerprints. By holding annual conventions on a different continent each year, Interpol unites the world's fuzz--Tokyo detectives, Canadian mounties, U.S. narcotics agents--for mutual education in everything from electronics to odonto-grams (tooth identification). In addition, Interpol organizes regular seminars on scientific crime detection, sends forgery bulletins to 5,000 banks and credit houses and reprints learned articles from 300 police publications in 60 countries.

In a jet-shrunken world, Interpol is the first to concede that its work is barely holding the line against an upsurge in border-hopping crimes, from stealing credit cards and rented cars to fraudulent property sales and fakery of U.S. dollars. Fortunately, the sheer volume of such crime distracts Interpol from any interest in such divisive matter as spying--or so it proudly claims. "In an affair involving politics, religion or race," runs one of its prime rules, "Interpol is deaf and dumb."

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