Roadmap to Hell

by Barbie Latza Nadeau

  In 2017, Italy’s agency for information and external security, known as AISE, stumbled on a fairly banal advertisement in the deep web (the unindexed section of the World Wide Web that can only be accessed through specialized browsers). It traced the advert to a Neapolitan firm promising biometric British passports for around €2,000 or 4.113 Bitcoin.62 The website looked very professional and included a photo of the British passport seal, yet the advertisement made no secret of its criminal intent: “We are selling original UK Passports made with your info/picture. Also, your info will get entered into the official passport database. So it’s possible to travel with our passports. How do we do it? Trade secret! Information on how to send us your info and picture will be given after purchase! You can even enter the UK/EU with our passports; we can just add a stamp for the country you are in. Ideal for people who want to work in the EU/UK.”

  Police believe the deep web advertisements might be connected to a man who operates under the name “Amponsah,” who they believe runs a little laboratory somewhere around Caserta about half-way between Naples and Castel Volturno where he makes passports, identity cards and visas. He’s also able to hack into the national register so that when police check the documents, they appear valid. His work is well known, but his whereabouts have been elusive so far.

  Many times, as in Blessing’s case, these false documents are sent first to the Italian embassy in Nigeria either so that people can fly to Italy rather than take the rickety boats, or so that they won’t have problems once they get to the country. The fact that a false document like a visa could end up in a legitimate passport implies widespread complicity between people working in the embassies, but there has been little effort to explore that route of investigation. Nigeria’s government is notoriously corrupt, consistently ranking among the top forty of the most corrupt countries in the world, with a score of twenty-eight out of a hundred. (For comparison, the UK scores eighty-one, and is the tenth ‘cleanest’ country in the world according to this index.)63

  Italians have been proven to be easily corruptible, too, scoring forty-seven out of a hundred on the Transparency International corruption index, so it is hard to know where to begin to break the cycle.

  Blessing believes that people in both countries worked to secure her fake visa, which was tied to a business that clearly did not exist. Such cooperation would likely negate the effect of any safeguards to protect women from trafficking. It’s hard to find a red flag in a complicit system.

  The Camorra also needs non-traceable money to operate its varied enterprises. Sometimes they just make it themselves. The town of Giugliano, between Caserta and Castel Volturno, is considered the counterfeit capital of Europe. The European Central Bank says more than half of the euro notes taken out of circulation as counterfeit each year come from Giugliano, but in terms of annual income, counterfeiting falls far short of the document, drugs and sex trades. More often, the Camorra’s liquid operating funds come from protection money, including the hefty fee Nigerian gangs have to pay to operate their drug trade. The Nigerian gangs, of course, make that money quite literally off the backs of the sex slaves.

  Terrorism Ties in Europe

  Italian anti-Mafia and counter-terrorism police are on a constant hunt for points at which organized crime and terrorist activities intersect. Since the 9/11 attacks in the United States, Italy’s anti-Mafia police have been warning the authorities in America and other countries that it will only be a matter of time before international terrorists join forces with the Mafia.

  United States security cables exposed through WikiLeaks paint a picture of great concern. According to a cable dated 6 June 2008, “the Italian crime syndicates help support terrorist groups in Colombia and Central Asia through drug trafficking; violate the intellectual property rights of American businesses and artists; buttress organized crime in the United States; pose potential public health risks to US military and dependents stationed in southern Italy; and weaken an important ally.”64

  European terror attacks in France, Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom in the past five years have all involved at least one person tied in some way to Italy, whether they entered the country illegally as a refugee or took advantage of the Mafia’s network of fake documents, drugs and arms.

  At least two of the November 2015 Paris suicide attackers were in possession of false documents originating from Italy, according to the Italian investigation that led to the arrest of a Moroccan man named Mohamed Lahlaoui.65 The 28-year-old was arrested on terrorism charges in Germany in March 2016. He had been given a deportation notice to leave the northern Italian city of Brescia in May 2014 after he failed to check in with his probation officer after being convicted of attempted murder and weapons and drugs trafficking charges.

  No one kept track of him after he was told to leave Italy and he wasn’t given a second thought until he was stopped in Germany. His name wasn’t on any terror list, but the police asked to see his cellphone after he started acting suspiciously. Their hunch was right. What they found was a message from Khalid El Bakraoui, one of the suicide-bomber brothers who blew up twenty passengers in a Brussels subway a few days earlier. The message was sent at 9:08 a.m., just three minutes before the bomb went off. It said, simply, “fin” – French for “the end.”

  Authorities were sure that Lahlaoui may have also been friends with other attackers, including Salah Abdeslam, the terrorist driver tied to both the Brussels airport and subway attacks and the Paris attacks in 2015, who had evaded authorities for four months. What was of particular note to police was that Bakraoui traveled through Italy on a budget Ryanair flight the day before Abdeslam arrived by ferry into the southern port of Bari. Abdeslam ended up driving north and his trail was lost after he used a credit card at a highway tollbooth. Lahlaoui was back in Brussels a month later where he was treated for knife wounds in a Belgian emergency room the same day Abdeslam was arrested in a hail of bullets in a raid in Brussels.

  Authorities in Italy eventually also tied Lahlaoui to Djamal Eddine Ouali, a forty-year-old Algerian picked up in Salerno in March 2016 on charges that he supplied fake documents to the Brussels subway bombers and many others.

  Lahlaoui might have also been linked to Anas El Abboubi, a jihadi rapper featured on an ISIS recruitment video who admits to being radicalized as a youth and whose name features on a list of 22,000 Islamic State fighter recruits.66 The two attended the same Islamic culture center and lived just a few miles apart, near Brescia. Abboubi is the mastermind behind the Sharia4Italia recruitment website, which authorities say is responsible for the recruitment of hundreds of foreign fighters in Italy, many of whom eventually go to Syria to fight.

  One of the men who paid special attention to Abboubi’s work was Youssef Zaghba, a twenty-two-year-old Italian-Moroccan terrorist who was part of a trio of men who drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge before being killed in June 2017. I interviewed Zaghba’s mother in her modest apartment near Bologna shortly after her son’s identity was released.67 She told me he was radicalized on the internet and was a fan of Abboubi’s music. She had even seen him on the Sharia4Italia website.

  Authorities started trailing Abboubi in 2012, after he gave an interview to MTV about music and Islam, in which he expressed his radical views. They finally arrested him a year later after discovering a plan to blow up a busy shopping area in Brescia.

  For unknown reasons, no doubt related to Italy’s dysfunctional court system, Abboubi was released while awaiting trial. He escaped to Syria, where he changed his name to Anas al-Italy and continued to post on Sharia4Italia and Facebook until 2015. The same year, Zaghba was stopped at the airport in Bologna as he tried to board a one-way flight to Turkey with the intent to join the fight in Syria. He told investigators at the time that he was going to be a terrorist, mistaking the Italian word for tourist, which is similar. “It was his conscience talking,” his mother told me. “It’s what he really meant.” Stopped from going to Syria to fight, Zaghba t
raveled to London on his Italian passport where his mother says he worked in a fast-food chicken restaurant with other young men she didn’t like. “He was stopped [from] going to Syria,” his mother said, “so he found another way.”

  Despite having so many ties to recent terror attacks, Italy has not been targeted like other European cities, though ISIS operatives consistently threaten Rome and the Vatican in their propaganda. Historically, organized crime in Italy always wins, if not in the eyes of the law, then at least in practice on the streets. How much longer that keeps Italy safe from a terrorist attack is a big question. Italian authorities will argue that the reason Italy has stayed safe is because of their police work, which was perfected through years of national terrorism by the Red Brigades during the seventies and eighties and has remained strong due to the country’s constant battle with organized crime. Legal wiretapping, surveillance and general eavesdropping require little more than a judge’s signature, and often not even that, and are carried out with great frequency, used to thwart plans or expel potential terrorists. That heavy surveillance may keep Italy relatively safe, but it also underscores how much the Italian authorities know and choose to ignore in other criminal sectors. If they are able to gather enough intelligence to thwart terror attacks, why can’t they do more about drugs, arms and sex trafficking?

  Migrants and refugees march in Rome to demand better treatment and protection.

  7

  The Way Forward

  “It’s not like I’m having an affair. That would be cheating.” – “Giovanni,” client along the Via Domitiana

  ALONG THE VIA DOMITIANA – Giovanni drives his white Fiat Uno up and down the Domitiana, window-shopping for sex almost every Sunday morning while his wife thinks that he’s at church. Giovanni’s ruse is an excuse for him to take a shower and put on aftershave without making her suspicious. By his own admission, his goal is to experience a blowjob by as many different Nigerian women as he can because, in his words, the “dirtiness of having a black woman’s mouth on him” is a turn on. Plus, if he never goes to the same woman twice, he can never be accused of having a relationship outside of his marriage. If he errs and accidentally stops his Fiat beside the same woman two Sundays in a row, he says he apologizes and moves on.

  Giovanni is a short, balding man with a thick neck full of gray stubble and a potbelly that flops over the top of his trousers, which could easily describe half the Italians who live in and around Castel Volturno. He is around fifty-five years old and runs one of the little shops along the Domitiana. He dotes on his wife, calling her amore (love) and tesoro (treasure) as she minds the till, and seems like the last person in the world who would frequent the girls on the street.

  I discovered that Giovanni was a client by accident when I was looking for someone to explain to me just who the patrons of the many women standing on the Domitiana really are. Because he was a local, I thought he would know about them; I really didn’t suspect he was one.

  I often stopped at their business whenever I was on a reporting trip as they had an exceptionally clean bathroom, which is a rare treat anywhere around Castel Volturno. I had been there several times before I finally asked his wife about the clients who go to the girls lined up on either side of their shop. She gave a sideways look at her husband standing behind the deli counter and shrugged.

  “No lo so,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”

  I then asked Giovanni, who pondered my question. After a few minutes, he told me to come back later that afternoon when he reopened at four o’clock after his siesta break. He would try to have someone come to the shop who could help me with my questions.

  When I returned, he was there alone. He said his wife was at home with their children. He was not at all embarrassed and extremely candid about paying for sex. It seemed almost natural to him and, as is often the case when it comes to discussing sex with Italian men, he was not reluctant at all to talk in what turned out to be quite explicit detail about it. While in no way do I wish to protect the clients who keep this lurid business of sex slavery alive, I promised Giovanni, which is not his real name, relative anonymity if he was honest with me about being a long-time client. I keep that promise out of respect for his wife and their children.

  He said his first experience with a prostitute was when he was eighteen years old and stationed outside of Pisa, doing what used to be mandatory military service, which was discontinued in 2005. Many Italian men were first introduced to paying for sex during this time; apparently it was an open tradition that went back many generations. Both before and after World War II, it was a highly accepted rite of passage for Italian men to lose their virginity at brothels, which were regulated by the state until 1958, at which point Italy deregulated sex work but kept prostitution legal. It was frowned upon by the Catholic Church for young women to lose their virginity before marriage, so it was accepted that the boys had no other choice. Usually their fathers and uncles would take them, or, alternatively, they would wait for military service and go in groups.

  Giovanni described weekend furloughs from the military academy when he and the other cadets would go into Pisa to find mostly Eastern European prostitutes who would hand them a condom, lift up their skirts and bend over in the dark back alleys behind the Leaning Tower of Pisa for five to ten euro. He said dozens of service men, all around eighteen or nineteen years old, would simply line up, drinking beer between blowjobs and quickie sex. He saw nothing wrong with it. “How else do you learn?” he asked. “No one wants an Italian woman who is a whore, so what are the options?”

  That said, Giovanni did not lose his virginity to a prostitute. He had lost his confidence after the first time he had had sex with an Italian girlfriend and says that the prostitutes in Pisa “cured him.” By his account, he went dozens, maybe fifty or more times, during his year of military service. “Once a weekend,” he said.

  Then, when he returned to Castel Volturno, he met the woman who would eventually be his wife. They had a healthy sex life and two children, plus a late-term miscarriage. He says he refrained from frequenting the girls on the streets during most of his early marriage, but occasionally during each pregnancy he “gave in to temptation once or twice.”

  In 2006, his wife was in a car accident in Naples that left her with a fractured spine, which made sex terribly painful for her, so he eventually stopped asking. He said that he never had intercourse with the Nigerian women and that he felt that fellatio did not count as betrayal. “It’s not in the Bible,” he said.

  He suspects his wife knows about his encounters, but that she would surely forgive him because, as he says, “she can no longer please me.” In retrospect, I should have asked if his wife ever performed fellatio on him, or if he still tried to satisfy her orally or in any other way.

  “What does she expect me to do? It’s not like I’m having an affair. That would be cheating,” he says. “Paying the whores is not an affair.”

  I asked if the constant availability of so many women on the streets made it easy for him. “You mean like a fat man living in a candy store? Sure,” he said. “If someone tries to sell you something you are missing every time you pass by, eventually you are going to give in and buy it.”

  He didn’t seem at all bothered that many of the women were kept on the street against their will. “No one will hire them to do any other work,” he shrugged. “If they want to live in this country, they’ve got to do something for society.” He seemed even less bothered about Camorra involvement in the Nigerian racket, reminding me of the 2008 massacre at the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop and the fact that the Camorra and Nigerians were partners.

  “They all work together to make money,” he said. “There is no other way here.”

  Many women on the frontline of the sex trafficking crisis believe that prostitution should be made illegal in Italy to combat the exploitation of Nigerian women and others, but not everyone agrees that it would stop the problem. If prostitution were illegal, there would
easily still be sex trafficking. Criminalizing it would take vital work away from thousands of sex workers who, however coerced, choose prostitution to support themselves and their families. By some estimates, more than half of the Nigerian women who finally pay off their madams stay on the streets as legitimate prostitutes, free from debt bondage. Even some of those who are rescued from sex trafficking eventually return to the street out of financial desperation. When a girl has been conditioned to believe that her only option is to sell her body, she often starts believing it.

  Others argue that regulating sex work could be beneficial, even though allowing the existence of brothels might actually make identifying trafficked women even harder, precisely because they would no longer have to be out on the streets. The reality is, however, that most Nigerian trafficked women already work in brothel-like conditions, like the connection houses in Castel Volturno and the rat-infested street-level apartments in Palermo. Legalizing brothels likely wouldn’t have any impact on their madams’ business models and methods because the madams surely wouldn’t be able to open legitimate brothels without the risk of being found out as traffickers. One benefit such regulation might have would be to put more pressure on clients, because they, too, would potentially have to register to go to brothels, although it’s unlikely any of these rules would ever apply in a place like Castel Volturno. The priority, therefore, should be to adopt measures that would provide a means by which trafficked women can be identified before they get on the street, not after.

  IOM and other advocacy programs are instead aimed at educating clients like Giovanni, who may be oblivious to the true nature of “what they are purchasing.” The IOM’s Carlotta Santarossa, would like to see a system in place that tries to break through that barrier of ignorance in the sex market. “They should know that with the sex, they are buying a woman who has been raped and abused,” she says. “The men should know they are facilitating more misery.”