Follow the money, not the boats

‘Follow the money’ may be a trite old cliché straight out of old police detective movies; but if it became cliché at all, it is only because the technique has a proven track record of success when it comes to combating organised crime.

One example that stands out in my memory is the Mafia crackdown carried out in Sicily by two judges, Giovanni Falcone and Pietro Borsellino, in the late 1980s. It has since been the subject of several movies and television series: including an American big screen feature called ‘Excellent Cadavers’, starring Chazz Palmintieri as Falcone and F. Murray Abraham as Tommaso Buscetta (the first major Mafia ‘pentito’). 

But since the actual mafia “maxi-trials” were themselves shown live on TV throughout the early 1990s, the story is still fresh in most of our memories. Giovanni Falcone was instrumental in exposing the leadership hierarchy of ‘Cosa Nostra’, and succeeded in bringing to trial some 75 Mafiosi – including the ‘capo dei capo’, Toto Riina – where all previous efforts had come to naught. 

How? In his own words, he ‘followed the money’. Applying skills he had acquired as a lawyer involved in company liquidations, Falcone used his judicial powers to seize bank records and assemble a complex ‘money trail’ of Mafia-related heroin deals. Without the aid of computers, he had to pore over printouts of every transaction, requisitioned from every bank in the Palermo province, to join the dots. His efforts eventually led to the conviction of several key bosses and the weakening (albeit temporary) of the mafia’s European heroin trade. It also resulted in his own, and his colleague Borsellino’s, assassination in May 1992.

It is a story worth revisiting today, in part because Falcone also unwittingly illustrated precisely why organisations such as the Mafia are so difficult to eradicate. The more he delved, the wider the net of investigation grew… until it was no longer limited to Palermo banks and Sicilian Mafiosi, but suddenly included international (and supposedly legitimate) conglomerations, and even governments.

It also quickly became apparent that there were other forces at work against Falcone, apart from the Mafia. Many of the convictions secured through Buscetta’s testimony would later be overturned on appeal, on decidedly spurious grounds. Palermo’s new chief prosecutor (Falcone having been by-passed for the job) refused to accept the outcome of his investigations, and failed to act on the mountain of evidence that pointed towards a hierarchical structure with tentacles reaching deep into every stratum of Sicilian society. 

Those structures are still in place today, as evidenced by continued Mafia activity ever since. So Falcone might have demonstrated the means by which such organisations could conceivably be defeated. But he also demonstrated that that there are massive vested interests in NOT actually defeating them. 

This is in part how all criminal organisations function: the secret of their enduring success is that they also rope in legitimate institutions, which in turn prop up vast interests that will in time come to rely on the money generated by illegal activity for their own survival. 

Like corporate banks in times of financial crises, organisations such as the Mafia become “too big to fail”.

Meanwhile, there is mounting evidence that much the same applies to the network of human trafficking operations behind the ongoing wave of emergency migration out of Africa. This week I interviewed Ahmed Nuur Ibrahim – a 27-year-old journalist who escaped from Somalia in 2013, and came to Malta after a harrowing ordeal which involved repeated kidnapping by human trafficking cells, torture and mistreatment, extortion on a monumental scale, imprisonment and escape, and two attempted Mediterranean crossings. 

I won’t repeat all the details here – you can read them in the interview – but what emerges from Ahmed’s experience (among many other things) is also the sheer pervasiveness of human trafficking networks on both sides of the Sahara, which likewise extend tentacles deep into every fissure of the African continent.

In Ahmed’s account we get a glimpse of how these trafficking operations actually function. Individual groups of traffickers have ‘representatives’ in various countries in eastern and western Africa: Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, etc. These entice aspiring migrants with the promise of a quick and safe journey to Europe for only US$500. Once the money is paid, the victim will be driven to the middle of a desert, and effectively held to ransom there for an additional US$3,500, on pain of death. This information is communicated to the victim’s family, which (in Ahmed’s case, at any rate) would have to sell off property – or beg, borrow, steal – to cough up the money. 

Then the process repeats itself. The ones who haven’t already been killed in the desert will be driven to the next stop in this macabre relay-race of extortion. Again they will be held hostage; again a ransom will be demanded ($2,500 this time, in Ahmed’s case). Again, those who can’t raise the money will be killed. Those who can will be transported to Libya, where they will go through the procedure again to get to Tripoli. There, they will still have to pay the ferryman (as it were) for their final passage to Europe… with the high probability that this will only end in a horrific death at sea.

Ahmed himself attempted the crossing twice, first with 142 passengers, and later with 124. Assuming that all had roughly the same story to tell, the amount of money raised by this criminal racket becomes almost incalculable. Each would have paid an initial deposit of $500, followed by regular pay-offs of up to $3,500, before a final $1,000 payment for the boat ride. Ahmed’s trip alone cost him over $9,000. Multiply that by the thousands of people caught up in the same situation each year… and suddenly you’re looking at sums of money comparable to the GDPs of nations.

Where does all this money go? Is it possible that it doesn’t leave a money trail, like the Mafia’s drug operations in the 1980s?

This is where a latter-day Giovanni Falcone would come in handy. Going back to Ahmed’s story, and one can also discern the same pattern that had underpinned the fight against organised crime in Sicily. How do the migrants’ families manage to effect the payment of a ransom to a group of men holed up somewhere in the desert? Why, through the banks, of course. How else?

When held hostage by a human trafficking operation, one is first shown the skeletal remains of other, less fortunate predecessors… then given a satellite phone with which to call home, and also a bank account number to deposit the ransom money. If the money is not deposited in a certain bank account within a certain time-frame… you become the next skeleton to rot in the desert. 

Leaving aside the chilling implications for the victims and their families… this also means that this ghastly criminal operation is also propped up by financial institutions that are, in themselves, ‘legitimate’: and above all, subject to international banking legislation that in theory should make their transactions accountable. 

Ahmed also points towards a network of corrupt government officials in African countries, which in turn helps explain why these otherwise legitimate banks can get away with accepting enormous sums of money raised through one of the cruellest and most reprehensible criminal operations imaginable.

Incidentally, I don’t claim to have uncovered any of this myself. In fact, this is the interesting part. Ahmed has already been through the entire asylum application procedure in Malta, and has repeated all the above details on other occasions. And he is but one of thousands who have all been questioned minutely – by the police, by the Refugee Commission, by international agencies such as UNCHR, etc. – on the details of the human trafficking network that brought them to Malta. 

The entire procedure is therefore very clearly known to all who care to look. This also implies that all that money, all those untold millions pumped into African bank accounts held by human traffickers all over the continent, is entirely traceable. 

But is anybody looking for it?

Of course not! We all heard the press statement following the European Council of Ministers’ meeting last week. They’re not following the money. They’re following the boats. This, it seems, is the grand strategy adopted by the European Union to counter this vast, deadly and ultra-monetised criminal organisation, present practically all over Africa. Sink a few boats in the Mediterranean here and there. After a while, they’ll all get tired of buying new ones, and give up... 

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any Prime Minister of any European member state that a criminal network with access to untold millions of US dollars, stowed away in banks all over Africa, can probably afford to keep buying boats for a long, long time. But hey, sinking boats is a lot easier than cracking down on a monumental money-laundering operation involving several distant and possibly uncooperative African countries. In fact, you can do it without even venturing beyond your own doorstep. And it’s kind of fun, too. It’s like playing ‘Battleships’, but with real vessels instead of crosses drawn on paper…

Following the money trail, on the other hand, would involve a lot of work. And as we all saw in the Falcone case, it is work that might lead investigators to some very uncomfortable conclusions regarding who, exactly, is profiting from this harrowing cycle of extortion and murder on an inconceivable scale.

Perhaps, then, it is time to start asking ourselves why there is so much reluctance to pursue this matter at source. Could it be, perhaps, for the same reason that governments and international organisations have always been singularly reluctant to probe banks for illegalities? 

This is after all not exactly the first time that international organisations and governments have seemingly turned a blind eye to collaboration between respectable banks and criminal organisations. In 2012, it was revealed that HSBC had accepted deposits running into hundreds of millions of dollars raised by Mexican drug-dealing operations. The bank was eventually forced to pay a $1.9 billion settlement when a US court found it guilty of a “blatant failure” to implement anti-money laundering controls. 

HSBC’s profits for that year amounted to $13.9 billion: more than 12 times the price it paid for a crime that would land lesser mortals in jail for most of their remaining years.

Likewise, in both the US sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007, and the more recent European banking crisis of 2009, vast sums of taxpayers’ money were diverted to bail out banks that had also ‘failed to implement’ some of the most basic financial controls necessitated by all major international jurisdictions regarding the banking sector. The pattern seems to endlessly repeat itself: banks flout local and international regulations with impunity; and when caught, they are either let off with a gentle slap on the wrist, or actually rewarded for their transgressions.

In the case of untold millions deposited in African banks through kidnapping and extortion, we have merely taken the same pattern to the next logical level. Not only do we pretend not to notice it is even happening, but we deliberately settle on a hopelessly misplaced ‘alternative target’ – human trafficker’s boats – to reinforce the impression of a studious, concerted attempt to protect the real criminals.

All that remains to complete the cycle of historical repetition is for a latter-day Giovanni Falcone to actually follow the money trail – to accumulate the evidence, expose the leadership hierarchy of the criminal gangs, and lay bare all the ‘legitimate’ transactions that permitted their operations to run smoothly… and what would happen then, I wonder?

In all probability, the new Falcone would suffer the same fate as the old one… and all the accumulated evidence would likewise be deliberately ignored. And like the Sicilian mafia, the human traffickers will continue to ply their hideous trade, inconvenienced only by the loss of a few boats here and there.

But at least, European countries will still be able to say they are ‘doing something’ about a situation which inevitably becomes more lethal with each passing year. And that’s the really important thing, right?