This is What a Refugee-Smuggling Ring Really Looks Like
An Eritrean smuggling ring, broken up in December 2014, had been trafficking in human beings from Sudan to Europe. It was this organization that had put 243 refugees on the Ghost Boat.
The following is an extract from the book Mare Monstrum, Mare Nostrum (published by Utet, 2015), by Cristina Giudici. Chapter 5 of this book focuses on Operation Tokhla, the investigation by the Catania public prosecutor’s office into a smuggling operation that was responsible for the Ghost Boat which, along with 243 refugees, disappeared in the Mediterranean in June 2014.
by cristina giudici
translation by Grey Drane
To Catania! To Catania!
Today, I’m bound for the Lady in Black — Catania, the lava city — to attend the international convention The Future of Immigration, and I’m feeling a bit like one of Chekhov’s Three Sisters as they cry, “To Moscow! To Moscow!”. Like them, I’m in need of new and broader horizons. I’ve been wandering through the catacombs of GICIC [the interagency task force established in Sicily to combat illegal immigration] for too long now, and Syracuse is starting to wear on me.
The sun’s rays have finally poked through a week of chaos, one packed with paradox, surreal happenings, and sad stories. On the road to Catania, the rap of Fiorella Mannoia is running through my head. It feels right for these days I’ve spent here in Sicily: “It’s not a film and those who went missing have not reappeared / dangling and different between us and the background / and the rest of the world crossing over the border / but the border is round”.
So here I am, amid the 15th century splendor of Palazzo Platamone, the site chosen for the conference, and surrounded by officers from the Italian Navy, as well as from the coastguard, although they had been pushed out of the spotlight by the dominating presence of the navy throughout the Mare Nostrum mission.
Numbers scroll across a screen, summing up an entire operation — statistics of migrants, broken down by nationality, percentages, numbers and charts, observations about Syrian refugees, Eritrean refugees. The mention of Eritreans piques my interest. Eritrean refugees are the real reason I’m here in Catania. I’ve been looking into an investigation that attracted my attention, not least because of its name: Tokhla, which means “jackal”. An Eritrean smuggling ring, broken up in December 2014, had been trafficking in human beings from Sudan to Europe. In Italy, they were organized by area — in Sicily, Lazio and Lombardy — in order to arrange travel for Eritreans and Somalis before getting them to Switzerland, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom. Actually, in one of life’s many ironies, this ring had even held a group of kids in an attic for days, not far from this very building in which we are now blithely talking about immigration.
That’s what happens in immigration, behind the scenes. We get mocked by the very same people we welcome in and save. I had thought that, with the Mare Nostrum mission, this sort of thing would stop, but I was wrong.
Police, judges, lawyers, and volunteers from humanitarian organizations file on stage one by one, each trying to show that they are better than the ones before them and complaining about being left alone to deal with this humanitarian crisis. Nonetheless, what they all share is their praise for the amazing capabilities of this land in dealing with a new boatload of migrants every other day.
They fall over themselves to applaud the volunteers from the humanitarian organizations, because without them it would have been impossible to take in the over 170,000 arrivals from October 2013 to the end of 2014, most of whom landed in Sicily.
The master of ceremonies for the event is Giovanni Salvi, who leads the Catania police force, considered to be the best in this sort of investigation. Having their own organized crime division here, they can more easily track traffickers all the way up the supply chain.
In fact, just a few days ago, I had spoken with Salvi on the phone about Operation Tokhla as he listed off his team’s accomplishments — the number of traffickers arrested for conspiracy, their most sensational operations, and the legal measures taken to define new crimes as the need arises — all of which has made his office famous throughout Europe. This was all really great, I thought to myself, but I hadn’t called to swap compliments and pleasantries. And I certainly hadn’t come to Sicily to award the Palme d’Or to a chief prosecutor.
As I listen distractedly to talks on the new international conventions on unaccompanied minors, some friends on Facebook are posting their own advice for me. Come back to Milan, they say, before ISIS assassins make it to Sicily. “Even if they did, I’m pretty well protected right now. Practically untouchable,” I reply, adding a smiley to put them at ease.
The announcement of a talk by an Egyptian magistrate, come to promote a stronger partnership with the Catania public prosecutor’s office, draws my attention back to the conference. I’m keen to hear what he has to say, this guy from a nation that has caused us the most trouble with their gaunt, sun-scorched fishermen-turned-traffickers.
Unfortunately, though, he’s giving a prepared speech in nearly incomprehensible Italian. All I catch is that it’s a list of good intentions, although he does make a point of adding that Egypt must not be left alone to combat terrorism by the ISIS militia. “It is your problem, too,” he underscores. And he couldn’t be more right, but right now I’ve got other things on my mind. As absurd as it may sound, my problem for the moment is not the ISIS offensive. What’s gnawing on me now are the Eritreans.
I’m up and heading to a café to meet with the deputy prosecutor, Carmelo Zuccaro. It was Salvi who pointed me to him. When I had attempted to get more information about Tokhla on the phone, Catania’s chief prosecutor politely ended the call by inviting me to the conference and suggesting that I talk to Zuccaro, who coordinates a task force set up in 2013 to combat human trafficking.
Over a cup of coffee, the plain-spoken Zuccaro describes standard operating procedure for the ring that has organized dozens of trips out of Libya.
Operation Tokhla began after the arrival in Catania of 200 migrants rescued by the Grecale, an Italian navy vessel, in May 2014. The investigation owes its origins to an Eritrean engineer and his wife, who testified against Jamal el-Saoudi (“the Saudi”), an Eritrean man who arranged for trafficking from Sudan to Libya and then from Libya to Sicily.
He also points out an important detail, that the association between the traffickers and their victims typically ends when a trip goes wrong — when the boat doesn’t make it — as this brings relatives of the victims out of hiding to help bring the traffickers to justice. There’s only one source of consolation over the death of a loved one, and that’s revenge. In fact, it was a boat that apparently sank in June 2014, with an estimated 244 people on board, that led to the identification of several ring members in Italy and to the arrest, in Germany, of the individual responsible for that boat’s disappearance.
When Zuccaro leaves me to hear the final conference speaker before the midday break, I decide not to return to the conference at all, better to keep all that pointless conference discussion from ruining my lunch.
I head out to meet with another Catania man, Parini, a cop who works in the shadows, underground, and has actually met these young Eritreans who have fled mandatory, permanent military service in their own country to become traffickers, kidnappers or people smugglers. I hope to hear his first-hand account of things, because I didn’t come down here just to watch that cavalcade of authorities and volunteers. I need to know more about the Eritrean captor who kept those kids in that attic so close to here. Just knowing his name, Yemane Andemariam, doesn’t tell me who he really is.
As I make my way to the headquarters of the Catania Squadra Mobile investigative unit, I am increasingly drawn in by all these stories that I haven’t been able to get out of my head.
I need to meet the officers who actually arrested several members of the Eritrean smuggling ring. Maybe here I can find someone who has gotten his hands dirty and can fill me in on the details of Operation Tokhla.
Jamal’s Gang
The Squadra Mobile headquarters are right in the center of Catania, not far from Palazzo Platamone and, ironically, just a stone’s throw from that attic where the migrants and refugees had been held captive since their arrival, right in the middle of that much-acclaimed Operation Mare Nostrum.
On his computer, unit chief Antonio Salvago shows me the photos of young Eritrean men who look like they’re just out of college. They’re all members of the smuggling ring led by Jamal el-Saoudi. Jamal knows all there is to know about Italian laws and how to take advantage of them, so he tells refugees to keep their identities secret and to refuse mug shots. That way, he can then arrange for their escape from the refugee centers and their transport to other European countries.
Jamal’s soldiers keep this extensive organization running by coming and going from Libya mixed in with the other refugees. The smuggling ring has cells throughout Italy. The authorities use the word “cell” intentionally because they equate the smugglers and their accomplices in Sicily, Rome and Milan with terrorists, the only difference being that they kill people with rough water, not explosives.
Salvago is polite, but not particularly forthcoming. All he does is show me the photos of Eritreans who have been arrested, but at least he has given me faces to put with the names I already knew from the Operation Tokhla files.
In these files, for example, I had read of the desperate Eritrean women who had called the trafficker said to be responsible for the boat lost in June 2014. She wanted to know what had happened to a family member who had left Libya on a boat along with 240 other people, but never arrived. Now I can put a face to that trafficker, Measho Tesfamariam (30). I can even see his Facebook profile, complete with a selfie of him in a plaid shirt. Under this selfie, he had posted a video of his favorite singer, Michael Jackson. After the shipwreck, he had fled to Germany, where he applied for refugee status in an attempt to escape the wrath of the victims’ families who had since gone to the police.
Tesfamariam was arrested in Germany last December [2014] following the arrests of his accomplices in Italy, a group led by a man who, judging by his photo, looks like a guy you’d gladly have as a neighbor, if only to prove to people you’re not racist. In actual fact, he was the one responsible for sorting out all the Eritreans and Somalis sent to Sicily by el-Saoudi. Abraha Filipos is his name, and he’s just twenty years old. Like Tesfamariam, Abraha even looks like a nice guy in his mug shots, and those can make anyone look like a criminal.
I lay out a series of questions to reconstruct his backstory. Did he flee to avoid mandatory military service, too? How did he become a smuggler? Who are these kids who look like students, but have been profiting on the hopes of refugees while mocking their rescuers? Was he once a migrant or refugee, too? Did he go through the same ordeal of crossing the sea, packed onto a boat with hundreds of other people, afraid of drowning with no chance of rescue? How did he manage to forget all that and make the switch from victim to captor?
As I look at his photo on Salvago’s screen, I try to reconcile that boy-next-door face with his cynicism from the wire taps, in which we hear Abraha complaining that the shipwreck made him lose “money and stuff.” That couldn’t have done his organization’s reputation in Libya any good.
But these question of mine go unanswered. Here in Catania, they arrest the smugglers and traffickers. The police aren’t paid to understand them. Their job is to stop human trafficking, not to study the exodus. For me, though, it’s not enough to know that these nice-looking, baby-faced young men are little more than modern-day slave masters. Looking at their photos, I imagine them strutting through the huge Mineo refugee center out in the Catania plains, a place where the coexistence of diverse cultures makes it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain order. Abraha Filipos would often slip into the center peddling his wares and looking for clients, baby faces like his, people from his home nation — maybe even his hometown.
I think back to the scenes in that video Commissioner Ciavola had shown me in Ragusa, the video in which a group of migrants were refusing identification and mug shots by police so that they could make a quick getaway to northern Europe with the people smugglers. From there, they may find themselves stowed away in a house or an attic somewhere, waiting for their families to pay ransom. I don’t know this now, but in a few months, after yet another shipwreck in the Strait of Sicily, I will hear that other Eritreans like them have been arrested on the same grounds — for the same crimes, committed in the same way — as they await their cargo on a railway platform in Milan. When it does happen, I’ll come to realize that it’s getting harder and harder, at current numbers and with yet another tidal wave of refugees attempting the trip, to separate good from bad and that it’s nearly impossible to piece together the puzzle of their lives they have left behind. There’s no time to verify their stories once they’ve landed on Italian soil.
After viewing his photo gallery, I ask the chief investigator if I can talk to the officer who arrested Measho in Germany — the same officer who had discovered all those kids kept under lock and key by that baby-faced Yemane Andemariam, the Eritrean jailor, just a few hundred yards from here. When I catch up with him, he listens to my questions, eyes open wide as if he can’t quite figure out what it is I’m asking. His description of the raid on the attic lacks detail. He remembers finding them, barefoot and looking lost and in bad shape. A woman was there, too — maybe the wife of the jailor — so focused on her cooking that she hardly notices when the police arrive.
I know there’s no point pressing for more. Knowledge of this human exodus isn’t in any criminology textbooks; it’s the result of years of experience, of living life on the razor’s edge between good and bad. His reservation is understandable, so I let it go. I say goodbye and turn to leave, accompanied, as always, by my obsession for these baby-faced traffickers, looking like college students in their wire-framed glasses.
I leave the office and decide to head out into the heart of Catania’s historic center. The lava-rock facades of the buildings and the gray skies of yet another rainy day — of this Sicilian winter that never ends — instill in me a sense of oppression.
Once in the car, I again drive past Palazzo Platamone, upon which Parini had bestowed yet another of his unsolicited addresses prior to my leaving for the convention. The corner of one of the event’s promotional banners had detached from the wall of the building, so now all that could be read of the name of the event was “Immigration that…”
The conference had been organized during a difficult time, one in which a momentary lull in arrivals had coincided with the threat of attacks by the Islamic State in Libya, but the event failed to add to my understanding of the assembly line managing this humanitarian crisis.
And I still won’t know what’s going on months later, as Operation Triton begins. Managed by the European Union directly, this operation is to be highly criticized after yet another disaster in the Sicilian Strait. Apparently, even the European Union is impotent in dealing with the problem of having to take in refugees that no nation wants.
There will be talk of establishing new rules for the distribution of refugees, who, in turn, will continue fleeing their assigned centers to head for Milan. The overcrowded humanitarian organizations will make a call for aid, if only to provide soap and diapers for their refugees — all Eritrean, of course — who have come on their own or with the help of smugglers like Measho. They’ll continue to move, like ghosts without names, from one city to the next, from one European country to the next, in search of their ultimate destination.
But all of this has yet to take place. For now, I leave Catania, the Lady in Black, and head to the white of the island of Ortygia. My destination is a tiny restaurant behind the Temple of Apollo, and I’m hoping to get some answers from a kebab-shop owner turned detective who can perhaps better explain what I am still unable to see. Which brings us back to where we started. “To Ortygia! To Ortygia!”
Mare Monstrum, Mare Nostrum
Migrants, smugglers, traffickers. Tales from the fight against illegal immigration
(in Italian, published by Utet Edizioni, pp. 160, €14.00)
Investigative journalist Cristina Giudici lives and works in Milan. She has been reporting on current events for Il Foglio since 2000. She is also a contributor to Grazia, Il Venerdì di Repubblica, and the online publication Linkiesta. She writes about society, politics, economic crises, the challenges in southern Italy, Islamic fundamentalism, and immigration. Books she has authored include Leghiste (Marsilio, 2010), Padania Perduta (Marsilio, 2012), and L’Italia di Allah (Bruno Mondadori, 2005), for which she was awarded the Maria Grazia Cutuli Prize.
