Roadmap to Hell

by Barbie Latza Nadeau

  He’s right. There is nothing that prohibits anyone with a license to import goods for metallic carpentry used in factories and other legitimate businesses from legally importing the components that are necessary to build weapons. The Camorra has scores of shell companies with valid licenses in almost every sector, including those that allow for the importation of metallic carpentry. All they have to do is put the pieces together and they have undocumented weapons to sell to terrorists and others who can’t buy weapons legitimately.

  Police discovered a weapons cache they believe was earmarked for foreign fighters during an armed robbery arrest of a Nigerian man who was hiding out at a connection house in Castel Volturno in early 2016. It included live grenades and rocket launchers that had been hidden under the bed in the same house where women were forced to return with their tricks. “I was afraid to perform certain sex acts for fear the weapons would explode under the bed,” one of the women who lived in the house told police.

  Another woman reported that the guns were left there by Italian men who owned the house, presumably Camorra thugs. The woman, whom I will call Holly to protect her identity, said they were to be picked up by Nigerian gang members who police believe would take them north into Europe. Often police have to rely on the testimony of victims of sex trafficking, who are invariably afraid to tell the whole truth out of fear of retaliation. The secretive nature of most of what happens in the area makes it hard to come by reliable information. Pentiti, the Italian word for a turncoat or defector who is still alive after leaving a life of crime, are few and far between.

  One witness who has been particularly reliable is a former child soldier from Liberia who was working for a Nigerian gang before he started trading police protection for his first-hand testimony, making him a crucial attester to how the emerging weapons trade is tied to the migrant crisis. According to his testimony in a March 2017 arrest warrant for a group of twenty-three Nigerian men, which led to one of the biggest arms cache discoveries near Castel Volturno to date, the Nigerian gangs are well equipped in reassembling weaponry, which allows them to help the Camorra turn bit parts into an extremely lucrative business.

  The former child soldier, who is often referred to as “Jo” in investigative reports, warned Italian police about incoming terrorists more than a decade ago when he first started working with the police as an informant. “There are people who have been part of Boko Haram and who now live here even though it is not easy to locate them. They have the ability to provide support to terrorists in attacks and also take advantage of others,” he told anti-Mafia investigators, according to official documents. “Everyone knows how to move the weapons here and everyone knows how to assemble them. Often they bury them in the grounds of the Castel Volturno area to be picked up later.”

  In 2015, Neapolitan police arrested a Nigerian man as he approached a buried arms cache they had under surveillance. Police nabbed him before he retrieved any weapons out of an abundance of caution, fearful that the cache might explode or that they might get caught up in a gun battle with others who might be waiting for him if they hesitated too long. Had they let him pick up the arms instead, he might have led them to the foreign fighters waiting for the arms delivery, but as it played out, they just didn’t want to risk a firefight or ambush.

  They were sure the arms were intended for foreign trade, however. Because Camorra hits tend to be personal and directed at only one person, they can generally be carried out with pistols, often fitted with silencers. An exception is when they intend to carry out massacres meant to draw attention, like the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop killings when they used a Kalashnikov. Terrorists, as was demonstrated in both the Paris and Brussels attacks of 2015 and 2016 respectively, tend toward semi-automatic weapons like Kalashnikov rifles that can kill a large number of people at once. The weapons cache outside of Naples included more than a dozen Russian-made Kalashnikovs that are thought to have come into Italy from the Balkans during the late nineties.

  In February 2017, an Italian couple in their sixties who had been radicalized was arrested south of Naples for trafficking arms and helicopters to terrorists in Iran and Libya.58 Mario di Leva, sixty-nine, and his wife Anna Maria Fontana, sixty-three, had converted to Islam back in the 1980s. Authorities say Di Leva, who adopted the name Jaafar, had turned to radical Islam a decade later. His wife followed suit, earning her the nicknames “Veiled Lady” and “Dark Lady.” Di Leva was an outspoken Freemason before converting to Islam; his wife a councilwoman who had at one time worked to expose businesses with ties to the Camorra, although the cops suspected even at the time that she was a double agent. Their alleged accomplices were Andrea Pardi, who owned a local Italian helicopter dealership, and their son Luca di Leva, along with Ali Mohamud Shaswish, a Libyan middleman whose whereabouts are as yet unknown.

  The arms trafficking couple allegedly had also helped to create an elaborate scheme to import weapon parts to the Camorra, according to ongoing investigation. They specialized in components for Kalashnikovs, pistols and automatic weapon magazines from Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Iran, which the Camorra could then have their Nigerian counterparts assemble so they could sell to foreign fighters throughout Europe. It was a way of getting the weapons into Italy easily through the ports without technically breaking any customs laws should the authorities check.

  The couple first appeared on the anti-terrorism radar after Di Leva posted incriminating comments on his Facebook page, essentially mourning the loss of Colonel Gaddafi, whom they described as a “dear friend,” after he was killed in Libya. To be fair, it wasn’t altogether odd for an Italian to lament Gaddafi’s passing. After all, the two countries had enjoyed mutually beneficial trade agreements thanks to Berlusconi. There was something a little too intimate about Di Leva’s posts, however, that caused police to suspect that something was amiss. Nonetheless, they had no reason to suspect the couple of any crimes until 2015, when four Italian oil workers were kidnapped by ISIS militants in Libya, many of whom would be eventual recipients of the couple’s illicit arms and helicopters.

  Investigators immediately suspected that the kidnappings were an inside job, organized by criminals in Italy, either as a way to extort money for ransom from the Italian government or to gain control of lucrative oil fields in Libya that had been developed by both private and public Italian companies over the years. Before confirming the kidnappings, Italian investigators started watching anyone and everyone who might be tied to Libyan interests, the Camorra or radical Islam. Di Leva and his wife topped all the lists.

  Once the news of the kidnapping broke, Di Leva sent a nonchalant WhatsApp message to his wife to see if she had heard. She was apparently well aware, writing back: “Already done, old news, I’m already in touch. They have those from where we went . . . I’m already working with calm and caution.” Police were intrigued, to say the least. Through covert surveillance and undercover officers working both in Libya and in Camorra circles, they tightened the noose around the couple, arresting them in a giant sting operation near Naples. They lived on the upper floors of a building they owned and rented out the lower level to a Moroccan man who runs the Sheìk Narghile Arabian Bar and Restaurant, which advertises nightly belly dancing and Moroccan food, neither of which are particularly popular with Nigerians or Neapolitans, but which were apparently quite popular among those with whom the couple associated. In their living room, they displayed a photo of themselves together with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

  After their arrest, their email accounts offered a window into an established enterprise with lucrative business deals across the Middle East and North Africa, including countries where ISIS fighters are present, for weapons put together in Italy and shipped back out of the port of Naples illegally. The money was allegedly laundered through their son’s accounts both in Italy and abroad, and they conducted business with the sort of blatant confidence of a crime family, knowing that they might be under surveillance, but never too worrie
d about actually getting caught.

  Messages from middlemen and buyers were friendly, implying close relationships. Some were one-line notes asking for urgent delivery of Sam-7 surface-to-air missiles and Soviet-made weaponry. Other messages contained veritable grocery lists for munitions and even souped-up helicopters.

  Catello Maresca, head of the Naples anti-Mafia and anti-terrorism unit, says his team was able to connect the couple to weapons and helicopters intended for ISIS fighters in Libya, including nearly fourteen thousand M14 semi-automatic rifles, a military air ambulance that was converted for assault use, MI-17 Soviet assault helicopters, and at least three Italian A129 Mongoose attack helicopters. Some of the weapons intended for Iran never left the port of Naples because of a logistics mix-up; investigators say the defendants are still charged with trafficking the entire inventory because of their intent and the overall malaffare in which they were involved.

  The investigation into their arms trade uncovered strong ties to Francesco Chianese, a fruit vendor and Camorra associate who was arrested in 2015 for arms trafficking to known jihadi fighters under police surveillance. The cops weren’t concerned that the group was planning attacks here, but they were sure they were using Italy as a crucial corridor to move weapons to those who might have such intentions in other European countries. Chianese, who was referred to as “O Santulillo,” had spent time training militias in Libya and Nigeria and was well known to the Nigerian gangs in Castel Volturno as a trusted intermediary. Anti-terrorism investigators in the northern Veneto region had first heard of Chianese while investigating an emerging extremist cell with ties to a jihadi cell in France. Much of the information from the ongoing investigation remains sealed, no doubt to avoid tipping off others involved in the racket, but what is known is that Chianese’s business was dependent on arms parts that were smuggled into the port of Naples inside extra-large Nigerian potatoes – a curious import to Italy to say the least.

  Di Leva’s wife is thought to have been the mastermind of the arms trafficking operation, acting as a goodwill ambassador between the weapons buyers in other countries and the sellers in Italy. She and her husband had set up shell companies in Ukraine and kept bank accounts in Panama, according to the investigators working on unraveling their extensive network.

  The middle-aged arms traders are not unique in the Land of Fires. In November 2015, not long after the Paris attacks, Italian police carried out several raids against suspected Camorra weapons traffickers they believed were supplying arms to terrorist cells in Europe. They also found evidence that the Camorra was helping terrorist groups recruit mercenaries, both by offering them protection once they were in the country and by providing safe passage into Europe.59 They reportedly offered terrorist recruits short-term black-market employment in illicit drugs and arms sales to help them raise money to carry out their plans. Italy’s anti-Mafia unit fears that some southern Italians are even taken by the ISIS ideology, noting that many young men in the hinterland around Naples have started wearing beards and are, as far as they can tell, supporters of Islamic State ideology.

  Terrorism

  Time and again, investigations into the collaboration between the Camorra and international terrorism lead directly to the Nigerian criminal gangs, who provide a crucial link as middlemen between the two sides. Anis Amri, the ISIS-inspired perpetrator of the 2016 Berlin Christmas Market massacre, who came to Italy by way of Lampedusa in 2011, was overheard by German counter-terrorism authorities promising associates that he could easily procure Kalashnikovs from his “black friends” in Naples for reasonable prices “to fight for our faith at any cost.” The German authorities had heard the same claims about getting weapons in Naples so many times before that it didn’t even raise a red flag.

  “Naples has been, for many years, a central logistics base for the Middle East,” Franco Roberti, the prominent anti-Mafia prosecutor, told me in an interview in 2016. “The Camorra is also active in the world of jihadist terrorism that passes through Naples. [The city] lends itself to this type of activity. In the past there have been contacts between jihadi militants and the Camorra clans.”

  Whether the local authorities can’t or won’t stop the illicit arms activity is debatable. But it is especially worrying that the criminality has been linked to Islamic State sympathizers who are trying to enter Europe by posing as refugees.60 Concerns that potential terrorists are hiding among the legitimate refugees and economic migrants has been a battle cry for far-right and other anti-immigration groups for years, and it’s an argument that bears hearing out.

  In May 2016, CNN interviewed a human smuggler named Abu Walid in Tripoli, Libya, who said he had been asked by an Islamic State operative to transport twenty-five fighters on his next boat to Italy.61 The pay wasn’t exceptional, just $40,000 for all twenty-five men, which boils down to $1,600 a head – about a quarter of what Walid and others who run migrant ships usually charge. Walid said no, not out of integrity or concern for the safety of Europeans, but so that he could fill his boat with higher-paying migrants and desperate refugees and trafficked women. He had no idea whether the ISIS fighter found another smuggler to transport his sinister human cargo.

  Many of the male migrants and refugees who come over by sea and who find themselves caught up in criminal activities like drug dealing end up in Italian prisons, which are known incubators for radical extremism. Italian authorities have their eye on more than four hundred men who, like Berlin killer Amri, have been radicalized by incarcerated Islamic State sympathizers. Italy’s Justice Minister Andrea Orlando says Italy’s overcrowded prisons, like the one in Palermo in which Amri spent four years, are “hotbeds for radicalization.”

  More than 160 people with suspected ties to Islamic extremism were expelled from Italy between 2015 and 2017. They include a number of people kept under surveillance in prison and a handful of Amri’s associates, including several who lived in a house in the town of Latina, north of Castel Volturno. When he was shot and killed in Milan, Amri had a cellphone with the numbers of some of his old inmate friends who were added to various watch lists, though few have undergone any formal investigations. It is not illegal to be in possession of ISIS propaganda in Italy, so even if they did have it on their phones, as Amri did, it wouldn’t be enough necessarily to kick them out. Only in the cases where those being expelled are taken back by their countries of origin, usually at those countries’ expense, can Italians be sure the suspected terrorists are gone. But often, as was the case when Amri was freed, no one checks if they actually leave. And if they do leave, there’s nothing to stop them simply turning around and coming right back.

  Amri’s obvious ties to radical extremism did prompt Italian officials to pay more attention to what’s going on in prisons, and in early 2017, they started tapping calls between a Tunisian inmate named Saber Hmidi and his wife after suspecting that he was recruiting potential Islamic State fighters whom he planned to join in Syria on his release. He had also spent time in the same prison as Amri and the two knew each other. On the phone, his Italian wife warned him that he was changing. She became so concerned that she told friends she felt he might do something terrible. He was apparently radicalized after a brief incarceration on drug charges tied to work he had picked up with the Camorra. He was only out for a few months when he pulled a gun on two police officers, which landed him a second, longer sentence and led some to question whether he wanted to go back to prison to continue his recruitment. Because of Italy’s dire overcrowding situation in its prisons, he was moved around between facilities for administrative reasons. Each time he was in a new prison, he allegedly was able to gather a group of aspiring terrorists to preach to. Authorities put Saber in maximum security while they attempted to unravel his extensive web.

  False Documents and Money

  An integral component of the illegal sex, drugs and arms trades is the need for falsified documents, whether they are fake pro forma customs forms or biometric passports. The Camorra’s machinery
licenses are easily fudged and so are the permits that allow import and export through the Neapolitan ports. The use of false documents is especially important in the trafficking of humans, notably for those who end up in sex slavery.

  Blessing’s visa, for instance, was legitimately affiliated with her passport, even though it was given for work at a false company. The Nigerian authorities initially caught the problem until her sponsor Alice either paid them off or worked out a deal with them, but it easily passed a basic inspection by border guards in Spain because it was not machine readable.

  Between 2013 and 2015, thousands of blank Italian identity cards with official seals that were ready to be completed with photos and personal details were stolen from municipal offices in and around Caserta. The thefts worried law enforcement officials across Europe because the cards would allow whoever had them to travel unchecked throughout the twenty-six border-free Schengen states in Europe. Some of the cards were randomly traceable, which is a practice utilized in all European countries in case thefts of this nature occur. They found that many cards had been sold for between €150 and €500 to Syrians and Palestinians who wanted to live in Europe, and to Italians and other Europeans who wanted to go to the Middle East under a false name.

  False documents are, in many ways, the glue that holds all these criminal rackets together. Many of the Nigerians who live in Castel Volturno have documents that appear legitimate when traced, despite the fact that the national statistics show less than five percent of migrants from Nigeria have ever been granted any level of asylum or protection. Sub-Saharan Africans generally do not qualify for work visas in Italy outside the diplomatic sector, such as the United Nations, in part due to Italy’s high level of unemployment. The numbers don’t add up, but when police in Castel Volturno run someone’s residency permit through the national system, it usually checks out, despite the assumption that it has been falsified.