By Malia Politzer and Emily Kassie
The biggest refugee crisis in recorded history has engulfed continents, swung elections and fueled the rise of nativism.
It has also made a lot of people very, very rich. These are the stories of the CEOs, criminal masterminds, pencil-pushers and low-flying vultures who have figured out how to profit from global instability, also known as human suffering.
PART THREE
The Mafia Meets the Black Axe
The Sicilian Mafia has parlayed human suffering into profits for over 150 years now. So the hundreds of thousands of refugees who risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean don’t pose a threat to Cosa Nostra. They present a brand-new business opportunity.
Because of a recent drug charge, Samora Santi wasn’t allowed to leave his apartment building after dark. So we sat on the broken stone steps of his musty, unlit stairwell to talk. He lives in Ballarò, an historic district in Sicily’s capital city of Palermo. During the day, the outdoor market—filled with stalls of Italian cheeses, freshly caught fish and artfully displayed fruit—is lovely enough to be a tourist trap. But at night, Ballarò loses its charm. It becomes a mafia town. There are brothels every few blocks, and the disembodied whistles of drug dealers announcing that they have product to sell echo through trash-strewn plazas.
A Ghanaian man in his late twenties with smooth dark skin and long eyelashes, Santi would be good-looking if it weren’t for the fact that part of his nose is missing: Someone had bitten a chunk of it off during a fight at the refugee shelter where Santi first stayed when he arrived in Italy in 2008. “There were no jobs in my village,” he said. “I had two sisters and three younger brothers, and there was no money to take care of any of us, so I decided to go.” It didn’t take him long to realize that the employment situation in Sicily wasn’t much better than the one he had left.
He managed to get a job arranging flowers at a shop, but lost it when he had to travel to Rome for a meeting about his immigration case. He tried earning money by parking cars and looked for work in construction, but the competition with the locals was too fierce. (Youth unemployment for native Italians hovers around 42 percent in Sicily.) “If you don’t have a friend or don’t have documents, it’s really difficult to get a job for us Africans,” he explained in his soft voice that occasionally drops to a whisper. “You really need to know someone.”
Desperate and poor, Santi eventually caved. He began selling drugs that he bought from a Nigerian gang. “I didn’t want to,” he said “But if you don’t have anyone or anything, you do what you have to do to survive.” Now that he has a rap sheet, finding a job is even harder, and the idea of making a life for himself within the law seems less and less attainable. He has to rely on his friends to give him money for food and for rent.
His story is a familiar one in Sicily. This year, a record 175,000 people, primarily from war-torn countries such as Nigeria, Eritrea, and Somalia, have landed on Italian shores. These migrants wait in refugee camps for the roughly six to 18 months it takes for their asylum applications to be processed. Those who are granted asylum are resettled in towns throughout the country. Those who aren’t usually end up staying anyway, since there aren’t bilateral agreements between Italy and many of the countries of origin. That means there’s been a population infusion at a time of widespread joblessness. It’s almost too much to bear. The drug trade has picked up. So has prostitution. And benefitting from all this instability, perhaps more than any other group in the country, is the Sicilian Mafia, otherwise known as Cosa Nostra.
The Mafia’s New Friends
At the height of its power, between the 1950s and 1990s, the Sicilian Mafia touched every level of the economy and government here. Local businesses had to pay up to one-third of their profits in pizzo, or protection money, just to keep the lights on. Bought-off cops and corrupt politicians were everywhere. It was a sprawling, humming, vicious monopoly.
The Mafia is not as all-powerful as it once was, however, kneecapped by the arrests of key figures and a breakdown in omertà, the infamous code of silence. So Cosa Nostra has had to diversify. Beyond its usual revenue streams (pizzo, local construction), it has branched out into areas like clean energy, securing lucrative projects funded by the European Union and the Italian government. But nothing has been better for Mafia business over the last 20 years than the hundreds of thousands of foreigners who have arrived in Sicily with too little to do.
Matteo Messina Denaro, the leader of Cosa Nostraand one of the most notorious criminals in the world, reportedly said of the police: “These demented Torquemadas will never stop me.”
“Do you have any idea how much we earn off migrants?” one mob leader was heard saying over a wiretap. “Drugs are less profitable.”
First, there’s the money the Mafia is extracting from the refugee camps themselves. Italian prosecutors are currently investigating three separate skimming operations, including one at CARA Mineo, largest camp in Europe. Mineo divvies out approximately 100 million euros in service contracts each year, and with all that money sloshing around, it’s no surprise that Carmelo Zucchero, the chief prosecutor of Catania, Sicily’s second biggest city, suspects that the Mafia intimidated other contractors to drop out of the bidding process. He also believes that the Mafia-affiliated cleaning and catering operations that won the bids are providing lower-quality services than the legitimate ones would have, thereby driving up their margins.
A recent visit to Mineo, a fenced-off cluster of buildings in the middle of miles of open fields, revealed evidence that the Mafia is up to even more tricks. Under Italian law, asylum-seekers are entitled to receive pocket money of 2.50 euros per day. But migrants staying at the camp say they never receive that.
“This is what they give us,” said a lanky Gambian man named Sirrif, waving a pack of cigarettes in the air. “Me, I don’t smoke cigarettes. What do I do with this?”
Several other migrants interviewed separately outside the entrance to Mineo also claimed to have received cigarettes instead of cash. A worker for a local nongovernmental organization, who wouldn’t give his name for fear of reprisal, provided the details of the scheme. “The cigarettes come from a company owned by a Mafia boss’s brother-in-law,” he said. “If the refugees want their pocket money, they have to sell the cigarettes.”
If an African was caught selling drugs to an Italian, he would be trussed up like a goat and strangled.
But these kinds of skimming operations are small potatoes for the Mafia—it’s been pulling similar schemes for more than a century now. What has ballooned the mob’s migrant-related profits into the billions, prosecutors say, is its increased emphasis on human trafficking. And this has required a level of collaboration with African criminal syndicates that was previously unheard of in Sicily.
A recent police investigation revealed that, for around five years now, the Mafia has been conspiring with North African smugglers to deliver tens of thousands of refugees from Egypt to Sicily. On a wiretapped phone call, a Mafia boss told an Egyptian trafficker involved in organizing boat trips about the best way to avoid trouble from the authorities. “If they find you,” the Sicilian said, “throw them all [the migrants] into the sea.”
Once the refugees reach Europe, the Mafia offers them lodging, food and transport to the northern part of the continent “in exchange for vast sums of money,” in the words of a police report. The Mafia’s role in human trafficking is actually similar to the passer’s role in Agadez—all the way down to how the Sicilians launch extortion campaigns and threaten to kidnap and torture migrants who fail to pay their full freight.
For all of its influence, Cosa Nostra doesn’t have much of a physical presence on the streets of Ballarò. Instead, the area is filled with different African criminal groups at war with each other over territory and power. And the one that appears to be winning is known as the Black Axe.
Members of the group don’t carry guns because Cosa Nostra doesn’t let them. They wield machetes and (yes) axes, and according to Gaspare Spedale, a prosecutor who is leading the government’s investigation into the group’s activities in Sicily, they rather enjoy using them. From his heavily guarded offices downtown, Spedale explained that the Black Axe’s recent slashing of a Nigerian boy “was part of a pattern. They use violence for stupid reasons, to show everybody that they can do everything they want their way, and to make everyone understand that they are in charge.” Last month, in an announcement publicizing the arrest of around 20 Black Axe members, Sicilian prosecutors made the revolutionary move of declaring the Nigerian group to be an official mafia. “For the first time in Palermo, we have another mafia other than the traditional one,” said Calogero Ferrara, one of the prosecutors. “It is very weird for us.”
The Black Axe was founded in the late 1970s, as a confraternity at the University of Benin, in Nigeria. The group was quickly outlawed across the country for being too violent, too cult-like. Members allegedly forced female students to pay them protection money, or risk being raped. One initiation ceremony involved drinking human blood.
While the group’s presence in Sicily can be traced back a couple decades, its power was, until recently, kept in check by Cosa Nostra. Black Axe members were allowed to push drugs only to other African immigrants. If one was caught selling to an Italian, he would be trussed up like a goat and strangled (the signature Cosa Nostra style of execution).
Authorities noticed the Mafia loosening its grip around 2013, the same year that large numbers of asylum seekers and immigrants started arriving in Italy. The timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous for the Sicilian Mafia. It had just suffered another wave of arrests, and it needed more people to do the kind of daily dirty work that carries a high risk of imprisonment. So it started leaning on the Black Axe and other African groups to deal drugs, even to Italian clients.
Prosecutors believe that the Sicilian Mafia has implemented a double-dip strategy with the Africans. First, the Sicilians force groups like the Black Axe to buy all of their drugs from them. Then, they collect money for rental of their territory. That way, the Italians can focus on large-scale drug trafficking while still profiting off street sales—and at no real risk to themselves.
“Cosa Nostra sees the Nigerians as expendable,” an undercover cop told us. “They don’t care if they get arrested. Their lives are cheap.”
Spedale and several other prosecutors made a point of saying that the growth of African criminal organizations isn’t the fault of all the new immigrants and asylum-seekers. It’s mainly that the government’s attempts to integrate Africans into society have been so clumsy and ineffectual that migrants are often left with no other ways to make money. Or as Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo, told the Telegraph last year: “[Similarly to how] prohibition in America produced Al Capone, [the lack of] permits for migrants is producing a new form of organized crime.”
In 2013, the government ramped up a program that placed 16,000 refugees in 500 towns and villages that had lost most of their youth population to the big cities. These towns, dreaming of economic revitalization, provided the refugees with housing, Italian language classes and job training. But even with that, they couldn’t hold their new residents’ attention. Most of the refugees also left for the big cities as soon as they could.
Alex Omoregbe still lives with his wife and three children in Sutera, a quaint hilltop village in southwest Sicily. “It’s a cool place, but it’s meant for old people, not people like us,” he said. “There is nothing to do here, only go to school, go inside the house and sleep.” He’s looking forward to a day, very soon, when he can move his family out of town and try to find more rewarding work. And if the experience of Samora Santi or any number of other refugees is any guide, the Black Axe is looking forward to that day, too.
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Malia Politzer – Freelance Journalist, Writer & Editor , Institute for Current World Affairs, Granada, Andalucía, España
Emily Kassie – Investigative Journalist, Filmmaker & Photographer. Founding Creative Director
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Huffington Post
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