Roadmap to Hell

by Barbie Latza Nadeau

  The lack of will to hold clients accountable or regulate sex work most certainly comes from the fact that many lawmakers are themselves clients. Even Silvio Berlusconi, the thrice-elected and longest serving prime minister the country has ever had, was convicted of abetting underage prostitution with a young Moroccan woman known as “Ruby the Heartstealer.”68 He was acquitted in an appellate trial when his lawyers successfully proved he didn’t know her age. Piero Marrazzo, the governor of Lazio, Rome’s home region, was caught with a trans-prostitute, which is not illegal, but because he was married and the trans-prostitute, known as Brenda, was later found dead in her apartment, he lost his job over the incident. He has since returned to the political arena.

  The only deterrent that has successfully curbed the appetite for the sex trafficked women, however marginally, is shaming the clients into not stopping on the roadside. Castel Volturno’s mayor Dimitri Russo is a criminal lawyer who has tried almost everything to stop the racket. In 2013, his city council finally came up with an ingenious plan to institute a loitering ordinance that makes it illegal to stop anywhere on the Domitiana that is not a licensed place of business. He coerced two of his councilwomen to dress as sex workers and try to solicit clients while he hid behind a fence. When the clients stopped, he ran out to the cars wearing the standard green, white and red mayoral sash all Italian officials wear when on official duty and handed out pamphlets that gave instructions about safe sex and human trafficking. A television crew filmed each encounter with a would-be John from behind a hidden fence.

  The cars all sped away, but not before a complicit police officer waiting down the road stopped them and fined them under the no loitering ordinance. They all paid the fine immediately, pleading with the police not to deliver the ticket to their homes. The campaign lasted only a few days and was highly publicized, but did little to stop the clients on a long-term basis, even though much of the footage was aired on local TV and remains on YouTube.

  A few months later, a different local police officer in Castel Volturno tried a similar strategy to shame the men who picked up the girls by taking a picture of their cars as the women got into the fronts seats. He then traced the license plates and summoned the drivers to the police station, where he slapped the no-loitering fine on them and showed them the pictures. Again, though, the campaign had little long-term impact.

  Around the same time the officer with the camera was out, police started monitoring a trio of hotels along the Domitiana. Hotel Tiuna, l’Hotel Millennium and Hotel Le Dune had become alternative service rooms when the connection houses run by the madams were full. Girls were given keys for designated rooms that had been paid for in advance where they could bring clients they picked up on the streets. Eventually, the hotel owners decided that they could also make money off the women, so they allegedly started allowing them to work directly out of the hotel without having to solicit men from the streets. According to court documents, full floors were designated to sex workers where men knew they could essentially shop door-to-door for a woman they liked, each charging between twenty to twenty-five euro a client. The price was higher than that charged on the street because the hotel also took a cut.

  Just thirteen people, including a handful of frequent clients as well as the owners of the hotels, were arrested in a sting operation in mid-2016. Many of the women and clients who would have normally been there were warned in advance about the arrest. Even though brothels are illegal, the clients were ultimately arrested for not legally registering at the hotels, which is required by law in Italy due to anti-Mafia legislation that is meant to be an obstacle for mob-owned hotels wanting to harbor fugitives. It also meant that none of the clients would be charged with anything to do with prostitution.

  Protecting the clients’ identity is clearly part of the problem in sex trafficking. The thinking is that if the clients could also be held accountable, they could actually help save trafficked women. When Blessing was forced to sell sex, she cried out to each and every man who stopped to be with her, pleading with them that she didn’t want to have sex and that instead she wanted to be saved. Only one client in her four days on the street agreed not to have sex with her. The rest forced themselves upon her despite her pleas that she did not want to have sex with them. Some forced her to perform oral sex. Others essentially raped her.

  So far, no legislation is even being drawn up that would address the issue of holding clients accountable, despite groups like IOM and other anti-trafficking entities insisting that laws must change in this regard.

  Placing the blame squarely on the clients’ shoulders obviously oversimplifies the problem. With so many women already in Italy it is hard to imagine that, even if the clients cooperated in identifying trafficked women, they wouldn’t be exploited in other ways. They would surely be made to work in underground brothels or as drug mules or even sold as laborers. Perhaps their organs would be harvested. In 2016, an Eritrean trafficker named Atta Wehabrebi gave testimony in exchange for protection against prosecution, telling Italian investigators that migrants who couldn’t afford to pay for their journeys were forced to sell their organs to an Egyptian criminal ring.69 Others who were kidnapped were killed for their organs, which were sold to Russians and wealthy Eastern Europeans who didn’t want to die on organ donor waiting lists. In 2015, several bodies washed up on the shores near Alexandria, Egypt, with cuts where their organs had been surgically removed.70 It is easy to envision that any number of rackets would develop to continue to exploit the girls until something changes within Italian society and its culture of looking the other way.

  Sometimes clients see themselves as the girls’ saviors. Giovanni, for one, insists that he is always clean and gentle with the women, which he says he is sure is not always the case. There are also legendary stories in Castel Volturno about clients falling in love with the women, including some who are able to persuade the girls to leave the streets, often paying off their debts to their madams to secure their freedom.

  But make no mistake, the clients are seldom the heroes in this tragedy.

  In 2016, Antonio Matarazzo, a seventy-five-year-old retired farmer from Calabria, was arrested for beating one of the Nigerian women on the Domitiana with his pistol after she refused to continue what he thought was a real relationship. He had been hiring her for sex for several years and had apparently fallen in love with her. When she refused to come with him out of fear her madam would find and kill her, however, he grew jealous and started stalking her and the various clients she picked up, sometimes butting their cars with his, according to the police report of his arrest. Her madam told her to get rid of the old man, so she refused to see him anymore. Her friends watched as he dragged her into his car one night and nearly beat her to death before leaving her bleeding on the street. Eventually she was taken to the emergency room in Castel Volturno, where she almost died in surgery. Police caught up with Matarazzo as he was driving back to Calabria, the bloody pistol still on the front seat of his car. He pleaded a crime of passion and, because of his age, was never sentenced to jail time for the assault.

  The truth is, clients who frequent the sex trafficked women generally make no distinction between them and legitimate prostitutes on the street, which makes them hard to profile. Even the women who have been forced into sex slavery tend not to be able to paint a general picture of the local clients beyond describing them as “hairy” compared to African men. There are few studies on the matter, but one about clients of prostitutes in Italy conducted by the Abele Group in Turin a few years ago found that seventy percent of the estimated 2.5 million Italian men who regularly frequent prostitutes are married.71 The number of overall clients is based on a dubious formula assuming that around thirty thousand legitimate prostitutes turn ten different tricks a day, seven days a week. The study showed that the most sought-after prostitute was black, preferably around sixteen years old, though it failed to address sex-trafficked women, which are thought to number more than thirty thousand in Ita
ly alone. The average turnover for those in Castel Volturno is up to fifteen or even twenty clients a day, because they are forced to work longer hours to pay off their fictitious debts.

  In observing cars stopping to chat or pick up girls along the Domitiana, a type definitely emerges. Whether they drive a BMW or a delivery truck, most of the men tend to look at least like they are past their fifties, often bald or with gray hair. Because they don’t get out of the cars themselves, it is difficult to estimate whether most are thin or fat. Some are clearly wealthy, based on their cars and sunglasses. Others are clearly not. Some men stop on motorcycles. The teenage boys who stop are invariably riding mopeds.

  Women are rarely clients, though there are exceptions and some do stop for a lesbian experience, according to many of the girls I have interviewed. Some of the Nigerian women agree to it if they can get by with charging more. More often, women are part of a couple looking for a threesome. Many of the girls on the street will concede, not least of all because they do charge extra for group sex. A common complaint is that “the Italian women are very mean.” Some want to watch their boyfriends or husbands having domineering or degrading sex with a black woman, sometimes even tying them up or filming the encounter. Sometimes the girls are paid to give hand jobs or perform fellatio on the men while the women take pictures or videos for the man’s later viewing.

  A few priests, too, are known to be regular clients, according to many of the girls I have interviewed, who say they are among the nicer men. So are American soldiers who are stationed at the nearby military installments and NATO bases, who the women say tend to be “cleaner” and are often circumcised, unlike European men, and less inclined to demand more degrading acts such as forced anal sex. Finally, there are the groups of “sex tourists” who travel to the area from all over Europe for “whore weekends.” These men also tend to be heavy drug users, which makes them either violent or docile. One of the Nigerian women I interviewed said she and another Nigerian woman were each regularly paid several hundred euros to spend the weekend in a hotel room and have two-on-one sex with Russian or German men who lined up at the door to wait their turns. While hardly enjoyable, she said it was much better than standing out on the street, not least of all because they asked the men to shower before touching them. Men who pick up the girls on the streets are rarely clean.

  Many of the young women at Casa Ruth and those who still work the streets point to a growing trend toward teenage boys as clients. Some have been introduced to sex through online pornography and, in the absence of a girl their age who might allow them to experiment, feel that they can do as they please with the women who work the streets.

  The biggest difference between the middle-aged men who make up the bulk of the clientele and the teenagers, they say, is that the younger clients are more likely to use condoms, whereas the older ones rarely do. Giovanni said that he had never once put on a condom for a blowjob, despite the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, implying that women on the streets only insist on them for intercourse.

  Sister Rita blames the clients entirely for the whole prostitution racket. If not for them, she believes, the Camorra and Nigerian gangs would have to find other means to make money for their illicit trades and sex trafficking would die out. She feels that the clients get a free pass from authorities and that everyone excuses their behavior because Italy accepts that men are both patriarchal and philanderers. “Even the wives know,” she says. “If we punished the men, these women would be free.”

  It is hard even to fathom what would happen in a place like Castel Volturno if sex trafficking or any of the criminality was suddenly stopped and the girls were free. They have no documents, no money and the outright denial and lack of public support about how to improve the lives of trafficked women would surely prove an insurmountable challenge. The success in helping the few women who are rescued depends, in large part, on making them independent. Regular Italian unemployment, however, remains at around twelve percent, with youth unemployment at thirty-five percent. If Italians can’t get jobs, surely undocumented Nigerians have no chance. The “work no one wants to do,” which tends to be babysitting and housecleaning, is largely taken up by Italy’s large Filipino community and the badante or elderly care market tends to go to Romanians.

  In an effort to keep women who have been rescued off the streets, most agencies and cooperatives that work to rescue trafficked women just start their own businesses and employ the people they are helping that way. But even then they rarely make ends meet and the women can almost never make enough to support themselves. The danger, of course, is that, when they can’t afford basic amenities, they will return to the one money-making scheme they know out of desperation.

  To try to combat this, Casa Ruth opened up its small cooperative factory a few years ago where the women can make African handicrafts that they then sell in a small boutique near the church in downtown Caserta.72 They buy bright, colorful material straight from a supplier in Senegal or through distributors in Holland, and have been able to collect half a dozen old Singer sewing machines, which are now lined up on makeshift plywood tables in a building that once housed a funeral parlor.

  The women work in the factory for a few hours a day and split the profits from the sale of the crafts, which include party favors, potholders, aprons and notebook covers. Still, few can survive without additional help. I had a heated conversation with Blessing one afternoon in which she said that the trafficked women aren’t looking for handouts. “If one more person offers me their old clothes, I’ll scream,” she said. “Give me a job, give me a chance, don’t give me the old things you don’t want.”

  Dozens of other entities exist solely because of the malaffare that permeates the area due to the drug and sex trafficking rackets. Emergency is an Italian non-governmental organization that operates primarily in warzones like Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, providing free medical aid to those in need.73 In 2013, they sent a mobile clinic to Castel Volturno, where they found that Nigerians living in squalor were consistently denied access to state-run health care, in part because they didn’t have transportation to take them to area hospitals or clinics.

  Two years later, unable to keep up with the demand with their mobile clinic, they opened a fixed emergency room on the Domitiana. They have since set up similar clinics in Sicily, where a huge number of asylum seekers and irregular migrants live in the periphery. “Day after day, we’ve been able to see for ourselves all the problems linked with access to treatment in a place where the issues of urban decay are compounded by the well-rooted presence of organized crime,” their Italian director Cecilia Strada says about opening a clinic in Castel Volturno, noting that their mission statement is still focused on serving people in conflict zones generally associated with war, which she says Castel Volturno is in many ways.

  What is perhaps most remarkable about the sheer desperation along the Domitiana is the presence of hope among the survivors of this horrific life. In November 2008, South African singer Miriam Makeba, better known as Mama Africa, took to the stage in Castel Volturno for a unity concert in honor of those who had lost their lives in the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop massacre. It wasn’t so much the scope of the tragedy in terms of the number of dead, but the message it sent that the Camorra had killed African migrants over turf they illegally control. It was billed as an anti-Mafia event that also paid homage to Roberto Saviano, who at the time was just emerging as a fearless hero for his investigative work against the Mafia. The stage was set on Baia Verde, not far from the abandoned edifices of the Coppola Village, and there was a sense of reluctant hope in the air for the first time in months.

  Makeba spent thirty-one years in exile in the United States after South African authorities revoked her passport in an effort to extinguish her voice of resistance against apartheid. It did little to silence her. She testified against the South African government at a special United Nations session in 1963 and she spoke and wrote and sang about the racial inj
ustices in her country throughout her celebrated career. In North America, she achieved enviable fame, known for introducing authentic African music to popular musicians of the time. She toured with Harry Belafonte and even sang at one of President John F. Kennedy’s lavish birthday parties. She was also the first African to win a Grammy.

  Makeba offered the perfect ray of hope and a voice of reason to the fractured community of Castel Volturno, still shaken by the murders and subsequent riots less than two months earlier. She was a trusted unifier who had lived through and seen the struggles between blacks and whites first hand. People trusted her. Plus, she brought a touch of celebrity to an area seemingly long written off as a hotbed for corruption. The event felt important, but politicians and dignitaries outnumbered the African community by two to one. The army was still patrolling the streets after the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop massacre and most who stayed home did so out of a justifiable fear that the event was just a trap to round them up and deport them.

  The Castel Volturno gig was one of a chosen few appearances for the ageing musician, who was on a farewell tour after announcing her retirement in 2005. Getting her on the playbill in Castel Volturno was a coup for the concert organizers and the evening was one of celebration, music and, for the first time in the complicated history of Castel Volturno, recognition that something needed to be done to help the divided community make peace.

  Then everything went wrong.

  In what was a poignantly symbolic last act of the night, Makeba finished her set with her famous song “Pata Pata,” a global radio hit that got the crowd singing and dancing. Then she took a bow, walked off stage and collapsed. Moments later, she had the first of what would be a series of fatal heart attacks.