Roadmap to Hell

by Barbie Latza Nadeau

  The next day Blessing would start work. Madam Faith stood with Blessing on the street because Blessing didn’t speak Italian and helped secure her “first client,” with whom Madam Faith arranged to take Blessing to a hotel. He said he was a doctor and spoke English to her. Blessing guessed that he was around fifty years old. He told her he used to work in Nigeria where he learned to like black girls. They went to the hotel and Blessing told him the whole story about Alice, the flight to Spain and arriving in Castel Volturno. They didn’t have sex, but the man paid her €50 just the same and left her back on the street. He asked for her phone number and implied that he would try to help her. He never called.

  In the days that followed, Blessing had no choice but to sell her body under threat of rape and other violence. She did it reluctantly, hoping to find men like her first client who would listen to her story instead of using her body. Instead, she soon realized she was just merchandise, a machine for sex, a piece of meat.

  When she finally earned money, her madam took it directly from her purse the minute she walked into the connection house so she couldn’t stash any for herself. Blessing knew she needed money to leave, so she tried to hide some the next day. After her second day on the street, she decided to find a police station. She searched and searched, but she dared not ask any of the other girls because it was hard to know which women were madams keeping an eye on their girls.

  Finally, she met a Nigerian man who, like her, was educated in Nigeria but had fallen into drug trafficking with the Nigerian gangs. She asked him to take her to the police station, but he was afraid of being arrested or, worse, that a fellow gang member would see him. Instead, he told her where it was. Not speaking a word of Italian, when she arrived the police officer told her to come back the next morning at 9 a.m., when someone could speak to her in English. She returned to the street.

  The next morning, she got to the station at 9 a.m. and there was an English-speaking officer there. She signed a complaint against Alice, Madam Faith and her husband and the police took her to Casa Ruth. She was off the street just four days after she arrived.

  Many women have successfully left the street, but Blessing has become a sort of spokesperson for the work that Sister Rita and the other nuns and volunteers do, and, in 2017, she published an autobiography with Italian journalist Anna Pozzi, who has dedicated her career to covering the Catholic Church’s role in helping sex trafficked women. Their book, called The Courage of Freedom, follows Blessing’s story from Nigeria, and underscores the frustrations she feels that she can’t do more.

  Because Blessing was not tied to the sex trade or to her madam by the JuJu curse, and because she did not integrate with the rest of the girls on the streets who often affirm each other’s fears of leaving, she is somewhat of an anomaly among sex-trafficked women. Her story is one of the few with a relatively happy ending in this horrific racket, but she still struggles with what she has been through. Twumasi, despite his testimony that has been corroborated by Blessing, is still in jail.

  Blessing now works as a cultural mediator with Nigerian migrants who arrive in Italy by boat, but it is far too dangerous for her to return to the Domitiana to try to convince young women that they can leave. While neither her madam nor Alice were ever arrested for what they put her through, the fact that she has denounced them has earned a price on her head, and she knows it. “Women die out there all the time,” she tells me. “They just get rid of the bodies and no one looks back. There is no one there to protect the women, and the longer they stay, the more fear sets into their bones.”

  Blessing is an integral part of Casa Ruth and the sisters often call her when traumatized young women arrive. But despite all the obvious good she does, she is often frustrated that all her efforts are just a drop in the ocean. Sister Rita says that in her more than twenty years working with women from the Domitiana, she has never met anyone like Blessing. “She is a unique gem,” she says. “She is very special and she will be the one to make a difference in this horrible trade if she is given the right opportunity.”

  Sitting in Sister Rita’s study one winter afternoon, Blessing grew angry that no one warns young women in Nigeria about what is happening. She says the Nigerian embassy in Rome, too, knows what is going on but are complicit in the racket. In fact, my own attempts to interview someone at the Nigerian embassy about the eleven thousand women who arrived in Italy in 2016 were met with ambivalence. That question, they said, had to be answered in Nigeria at the Italian consulate. But when I reached the Italian consulate, they referred me to the Nigerian interior ministry. When I reached them, they referred me again to the Italian consulate, which sent me back to the Nigerian embassy in Rome.

  Blessing and the journalist Pozzi traveled back to Nigeria with the Catholic Church’s anti-trafficking group Slaves No More, run by Sister Eugenia Bonetti in Rome. They met Blessing’s family in the village and set up engagements to speak about trafficking at churches in Benin City. But Blessing couldn’t speak about trafficking in her own village. She had told her younger sisters about what had happened so that the same thing wouldn’t happen to them, but she has not told her parents, who she says would surely feel as if it was their fault. She kept with her original story when she saw them, that her job as a computer technician that she left for was going well.

  When she returned to her muddy village, she saw more clearly the circumstances that made her so vulnerable in the first place. None of her old peers truly understood the reality of life in Europe; they all had grandiose ideas of what it was really like. She couldn’t blame them. Sitting in her parent’s hut, she remembered thinking the same thing.

  But what most infuriates Blessing and others who escape sexual slavery is how hard it is to convince women in Nigeria that they are all vulnerable. Even Blessing’s own sister, who, despite knowing all she had been through, called her one day after she returned to Italy to tell her what she thought was great news. She had met a woman whose brother wanted to hire her as a babysitter in London. Blessing’s younger sister even saw pictures of the family for whom she would be working. Blessing was incredulous. “There is no job as a babysitter,” she screamed over the phone to her sister. “There is only one kind of work in Europe for Nigerian women.”

  The Land of Fires, and more specifically the Domitiana, is the epicenter for the Nigerian gangs and the forced sex-slave market, but it is not the only area where these rackets are in place. In many ways, Sicily is an emerging market for the Nigerian gangs who have only recently made inroads with the Sicilian Cosa Nostra to collaborate with large-scale drug and sex-trafficking rings there. Their induction into the Sicilian organized-crime world was not as bloody as that of their partners in Castel Volturno, undoubtedly because of the lessons learned by the Nigerians at the hands of the Camorra. When the Nigerian gangs first set up in Sicily, they went straight to the Mafia to ask for permission and collaboration. The Sicilian Mafia granted it under several conditions: they stay away from established Cosa Nostra business, pay the protection money and don’t use guns. As a result, disputes among gang members in Sicily can only be resolved with knives and axes.

  Even before the Nigerian gangs set up an organized sex-trafficking ring in Sicily, random Nigerian madams kept girls on the streets across the island just as they do in almost every urban area in Italy. They are usually under the control of one or two madams who keep a handful of girls in cities like Catania, Agrigento, Syracuse and Palermo, which has the highest concentration on the island. Around five hundred Nigerian women are thought to be working on the streets and in illegal brothels there. Many can be found on the streets that traverse the Parco della Favorita, an overgrown park littered with garbage, condoms and syringes that offers secluded areas for blowjobs and discreet alcoves for sex in cars. Police turn a blind eye there, only patrolling the streets to answer specific calls.

  The upturn in the number of Nigerian women being trafficked for sex in Palermo started in 2012, around the same time but not at the sa
me level as Castel Volturno. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra had not allowed the presence of foreign criminal gangs – they just didn’t fit into the hierarchy – so the Nigerians were not able to set up the same trafficking racket as they did in Camorra territory.

  That year, a number of young Nigerian women were killed. One, named Favour Nike Adekunle, who had arrived by way of Lampedusa months earlier, was found dead in Parco della Favorita. She had been strangled and badly burned. Her corpse had started to decompose in the woods when she was eventually found; it had been a long time before anyone had noticed she was missing, despite the fact that she had told friends that she had a Sicilian boyfriend who, if she was telling the truth, would have surely raised the alarm. Favour’s body was left in a refrigerator at the Palermo city morgue for two years while an investigation into her death stalled. It was never a priority. By the time they released her body to members of the Nigerian community for burial, there were only a few bones left. Someone had stolen most of her corpse. Investigators later concluded that her assailant was likely a Sicilian Mafioso who killed her when her madam wouldn’t pay him a cut of her earnings.

  A few days after Favour’s body was found, Loveth Edward, a fifteen-year-old Nigerian girl, was found murdered in Palermo with a note on her body that said she had died for “the sins of her mother.” She had apparently been a sex slave who was hiding money from her madam.

  Since that time, the Palermo sex-trafficking rings have become more organized because the Cosa Nostra, like the Camorra, has allowed for collaboration with the Nigerians in the drug trade. And, like the Camorra, the Cosa Nostra requires protection money that can be made easily on the backs of the girls. Since most of the women rescued from the smugglers’ boats start in Sicily, it’s only natural that they would eventually be exploited there, too. The same Nigerian gangs that operate in Castel Volturno operate in Sicily, which makes them the only common denominator among the various Italian Mafias, which do not openly collaborate.

  Many of the girls have been moved from the Parco della Favorita to the dark streets of Palermo’s Ballarò market area, where they are forced to take men to small first-floor apartments that double as crack houses. The whole area is a vibrant vegetable and fish market by day but turns dangerous rather quickly by nighttime. During a visit with an undercover police officer in 2015, I saw a Nigerian woman dressed in a sequin tank top and matching thong with a leash around her neck tied to a streetlamp post. She was on her knees giving blowjobs to maybe a dozen or more men who had lined up around the corner. None appeared to be wearing a condom. The woman, who kept her eyes closed tight, gagged loudly as the men forced their penises into her mouth. She spat the ejaculate on the ground in front of her as the next client unzipped his pants. Another woman, presumably her madam, collected money from those in the line. The police officer said there was nothing necessarily illegal about what was going on, although sex in public is theoretically a crime. “They shouldn’t really be outside,” he said. “But who hasn’t had a blowjob in the open before?”

  In November 2016, sixteen members of the same Black Axe gang that operates in Castel Volturno, along with a Nigerian madam, were arrested in Palermo on charges of drug and sex trafficking, and for particularly gruesome sexual violence against men and women. A male victim, a refugee who had gained political asylum but who would not join the Black Axe gang, was “anally raped for a whole night with an iron pipe,” according to the complaint read in a court hearing I attended in Palermo. He had to have multiple surgeries to repair his rectum. The complaint also listed several incidents of gang rape and sexual torture involving objects against a number of underage Nigerian girls who refused to prostitute themselves. One victim was raped so violently she ended up in a coma; another nearly bled to death. A third is now in psychiatric care.

  A few months before the trial of the lead-pipe assailant, Yusapha Susso, a Ghanaian asylum seeker who was a customer at the Ballarò drug market, was shot in the back of the head. The fact that he was killed with a gun and not a knife told investigators that it was the work of the Sicilian Mafia, not the Nigerians. The man arrested was a local Sicilian Mafia thug, thought to have carried out the act in an attempt to instill a little bit of order in the Ballarò district and to show that the Italians were still in charge.

  In fact, Guido Longo, the police commissioner in Palermo, told me on the sidelines of a court hearing in early January 2017 that the Cosa Nostra risk losing power to the Nigerians, though they would never admit it. “As more migrants arrive and join the Nigerian gangs, the Cosa Nostra will have a hard time staying in control,” he said. “When that happens, we could see gangland warfare in Palermo like we’ve never seen before.”

  The police are prepared for just that, but it will be the Nigerians who face the biggest consequences, just as they did in Castel Volturno when the riots ensued after the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop massacre. The Cosa Nostra has reigned over Sicily for far too long to give up its turf so easily. For years, it was able to keep migrants and any foreign criminal groups at bay, but the sheer number of arrivals and the power of the Nigerian gangs are just too great now, which could forever change the dynamic of organized crime in Italy. In many ways, the recent influx already has.

  A worrying trend in the uneasy partnership between the emerging Nigerian gangs and the established organized-crime syndicates is the disappearance of thousands of unaccompanied African minors who arrive in Italy each year. Europol estimates that more than ten thousand unaccompanied minors who have arrived by sea to Italy since 2015 have disappeared without a trace. Many of them will have met family members, but many more are feared to have been sucked into criminal networks. Young women invariably end up in forced sex work; young men as petty criminals for the country’s various mobs, including the Nigerian gangs.

  No matter which crime syndicate’s territory they are shackled to, the Nigerian sex slaves and the profits they generate provide important revenue, comprising more than eighty percent of the country’s paid sex market.49 The Nigerian sex-trafficking racket turns over an estimated profit of around €2 billion a year in Italy (with the entire industry turning over around $99 billion globally).50 There is no way to know for sure just how many Nigerians are forced to sell sex in Italy at the hands of the criminal gangs because they are living in the shadows, but some estimate that there could easily be thirty or forty thousand women in Italy alone. How many more are spread across Europe is unimaginable.

  Eastern Europeans and women from the former Soviet Bloc have also become increasingly common in the sex industry in Italy and, in recent months, the Nigerian madams have allowed them, along with cross-dressing and transgender prostitutes, to rent space on the Via Domitiana and in other territories they control. However, as they bring in a mere fraction of the business the Nigerian sex workers do, they can only use the tightly controlled sidewalk space during irregular hours, like mornings and early afternoons.

  It’s hard to understand just why Nigerian women are so vulnerable to the sex trafficking trade. Carlotta Santarossa, a counter-trafficking project manager for the International Organization on Migration, says their group provides legal information and counseling for women when they arrive by sea. They give out brochures that point out tell-tale signs of sex trafficking and they offer legal counseling for women who want to denounce their traffickers. The problem is that when they first arrive, most women are so traumatized as a result of their torturous time in Libya, their rough sea voyage and the fact that they might have very nearly drowned, that they don’t understand the circumstances in which they now find themselves. “They might know what trafficking is, but they often don’t think it is happening to them,” she told me. “The system is well-known by all and well structured. It preys on poor families and uneducated women, and it is extremely hard to break.”

  Santarossa says many of the women are so embarrassed that they’ve been duped into trafficking, they can’t bring themselves to tell their families what is happening, which furth
er isolates them. “They feel it is their duty to send back money; [it’s] their opportunity to help their families,” she says. “Then when they realize what has happened, they don’t know how to come to terms [with the situation].”

  One of the ruined apartment blocks in the Coppola Village where arms are stashed and drugs are sold. Scores of squatters, including African migrants and sex-trafficked women, live in these condemned buildings.

  6

  Kalashnikovs and Bodies Under the Mattresses

  “I was afraid to perform certain sex acts for fear the weapons would explode under the bed.” – “Holly,” a trafficked woman

  Drugs

  VOLTURNO DESTRA – The Boomerang Hotel was once a boxy three-star property along the Domitiana just outside the Coppola Village. Hotel guests passed through tall iron gates to a parking lot that opened up to a wide, bleached cement sidewalk leading up to the hotel. The set-up was meant to give the air of an exclusive hideaway tucked among large umbrella pines and manicured hedges. The hotel’s large foyer opened up to an oval swimming pool with a smaller circular hot tub on one end that made it look somewhat like a snowman.

  A trail carved out of the pine forest still winds its way from the pool area to what was once a private beach, where guests could lounge in matching sun chairs. Now the trail is strewn with syringes and the former sunning area is awash with garbage and raw sewage that is pumped out to sea from the abandoned Coppola apartment blocks down the road and floats back in with the tide. Inside the hotel foyer, square columns jut from terracotta tile floors that were inlaid with tacky designs depicting Greek and Roman gods. Recreations of famous frescoes are cracked and peeling on the arched ceilings overhead.