Concern for the peripatetic Crowe, who treats international air routes like the fast lanes on one giant interstate, seems justified given the explosion of kidnappings outside the U.S. over the last decade, particularly in Latin America. "We reckon there were something between 12,000 and 15,000 reported kidnappings worldwide last year, which might only be 10 percent of the total figure," says Gerald Moore, managing director of Inkerman, one of Britain's top kidnap-prevention organizations. "It's an industry." Ann Hagedorn Auerbach, author of the 1998 book Ransom: The Untold Story of International Kidnapping, says that over the last 15 years kidnapping for ransom "has become a big business, a well-known way to make money. The kidnappers' perception is that the higher the profile of the individual, the deeper the pockets."

It would be hard to find a man with a higher profile than Russell Ira Crowe, who stands a decent chance of walking away on March 25 with the Oscar for Best Actor, thanks to his stoic, smoldering performance in Gladiator. "He is in a league with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino -- definitely a heavyweight," says Michael Mann, director of The Insider, for which Crowe won his first Oscar nomination last year. Later this month Crowe will begin shooting Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, in which he plays Nobel-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. -- just the sort of professional stretch on which the actor seems to thrive.

Publicly he jokes about the kidnapping threat. At the Oscar nominees' luncheon in L.A. on March 12 he joked about what it might be like for kidnappers trapped in a small room with him. "They'd be on the phone going, 'Look! We've passed the hat around, and we've got a couple hundred bucks if you can take him off our hands!' " The blithe tone suits Crowe's reputation as an Aussie bloke who's as tough as the Outback is dry. Despite his A-list credentials in Hollywood, Crowe regards a stuntman as a wimpy accessory (that's the man himself hanging out of a helicopter in Proof), treats rugby as a religion (he had jerseys flown in for a match on the Maltese set of Gladiator) and has a history of bar fights in which biting is considered an option.

At the same luncheon Crowe told reporters that when the FBI first approached him in January, "I was probably taking the situation a lot less seriously than they did." Since then, friends say, Crowe has wised up. "It's pretty serious when anyone's personal life gets stepped on like that," says his Gladiator costar Djimon Hounsou. "He's being careful."