Outlaws Inc.

by Matt Potter

  Still, the cheapest planes might not always be the newest or the best maintained. They probably wouldn’t pass the CAA’s airport runway inspection. No sweat—just use your triple-security, razor-wire, well-guarded, UN-populated air base. And if the CAA boys get uppity on takeoff, that colonel you bunged the hundred-dollar bill to will put them in their place. Hell, cut him in on the proceeds later, why not. With margins this big—and we’re talking hundreds in return for every dollar invested—there’s plenty to share around.

  Patrick continues: “That’s how simple it is. First, make contact with your rebel leader. Go armed—contract a local or use your own soldiers—then come with a plane. Your warlord will be armed, and let’s say you want timber, he’ll just find a road, and say, ‘Okay, from here, all this timber, take it.’ And your men just roll it and put it on the plane, because these planes are huge.”

  In fact, it’s quicker and easier to make a private mission for black cargo than it is to go by scheduled civilian airlines: no papers, no passport, no visa, no immigration, no customs, and—best of all—no limit on what you carry back, says Patrick. It’s all very civilized, too. “You can do it all in a day, or you can stay over—all the warlords have comfortable places where they put our guys up when they come over—and to their contacts they’re only ever a mobile phone call away.”

  Who’d have thought it? In this bright new world of the consumer as king, even the die-hard Congolese guerrillas resisting government forces in the hills and jungles of Central Africa put twenty-four-hour customer service at the very heart of their business plan.

  And that’s it. Except for customs—and let’s even assume you’ve got some independently wealthy and heroically incorruptible customs guys here for a moment, highly theoretical guys who are immune to bribes. Hmm, could be a problem. Then again, no. Remember, stupid, you’re in the army.

  “Customs can’t go into the military/UN cargo air base,” says Patrick. “It’s not civilian jurisdiction. It’s army and defense ministry property. Soldiers guard it, and if a customs officer goes there, they just arrest him for trespassing. Trespassing! And”—he laughs at the irony of it all—“jeopardizing national security!”

  The clock is ticking, Patrick’s on deadline, and his editor’s getting antsy for this week’s news pages to hit the press, so we say good-bye. I decide to walk home and take my chances with the snitches, to see if I’m followed. As I step out into the overcast, red-earth-and-tar patchwork of Kanjokya Street, hobbling between termite mounds and potholes and wondering which of the loiterers in the wet dirt road is the army spy, I’m splashed by a camouflage, open-topped UPDF jeep doing its best to circumvent the foot-deep holes and the Friday rush-hour traffic. In it are four men in tailored suits and jewel-tipped sunglasses carrying antiquated wooden rifles over silk-clad shoulders.

  There’s no pavement, so I step carefully between road and grass, jeans getting splattered with mud. I turn around at the corner and look back. The guy reading the paper has folded it up and is looking past my shoulder, and there’s a man regarding me steadily while he talks away on a mobile phone at the junction. Then again, I’m a wet, muddy mzungu on foot in a country where even the hardest-up local trader would rather flag down an illegal boda-boda moped ride, so of course everyone’s looking. Then the rain starts again and I stumble between torrents and traffic, wondering about that anonymous Ugandan voice on the phone who wished me a safe stay. But now there are too many people walking my way to be sure of anything at all.

  WHAT ALL THIS means for monitors of illicit activity is something most can’t even begin to fight, even though men like Peter Danssaert and Brian Johnson-Thomas have long known it and have seen it again and again, in Belgrade, in Uganda, in Afghanistan.

  The problem is this: Mafia activity is by its very nature against the interests of the state. We’re used to thinking in terms of “families” and “gangs”—tuxedoed Sicilians making offers we cannot refuse. So when the state itself gets in on the act, as it did in early-1990s Russia, late-1990s Serbia, and in our own time Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai’s inner circle, including his warlord brother Walid, stand accused of facilitating “Afghaniscam,” awarding contracts, and plundering coffers at will, nobody quite knows the difference anymore between organized crime and economic policy. This appears to be true in Uganda.

  A UN report entitled “Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” published back in 2002, sums up the reach of this private-enterprise shadow state and its devastating effect.

  The elite network operating out of Uganda is decentralized and loosely hierarchical, unlike the network operating out of Rwanda. The Uganda network consists of a core group of members including certain high-ranking Ugandan People’s Defence Force officers, private businessmen and selected rebel leaders/administrators … The network continues to conduct activities through front companies … Each of these companies may concentrate on one or two commercial niches, though these may change. The role of the companies is to manage their respective niche activities by assembling the personnel, logistics and occasionally the financing for the operations … The network generates revenue from the export of primary materials, from controlling the import of consumables, from theft and tax fraud. The success of the network’s activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo relies on three interconnected features, namely, military intimidation; maintenance of a public sector facade, in the form of a rebel movement administration; and manipulation of the money supply and the banking sector, using counterfeit currency and other related mechanisms.

  Everything disappears into the network’s ravenous jaws, and then into the holds of the giant cargo planes it charters. Wood from protected plantations; blood diamonds; coltan, a chemical highly prized by African exporters for its value to mobile-phone manufacturers; gold. Local butchers are forced at gunpoint to skin animals and hand over their hides to the network’s fatigue-clad soldiers, and even live cattle is rustled, by stealth or force, from herders. And for their complicity, the suppliers, the local warlords, and tribal leaders enjoy the protection of UPDF troops, as well as gasoline, cigarettes, and arms, all exempt from taxation.

  Sometimes the logic is so neat that even those most affected can’t see it. Later tonight, I’ll head to a hotel bar and watch some TV—BBC World, I think, but I can’t be sure—and see a documentary on a woman who runs an elephant sanctuary. She’s protected by soldiers because of the constant activity of armed poachers in the area and threats to her life, but complains that whenever she leaves her guarded headquarters on the reserve for a trip to town or abroad, “It’s as if I’m being followed and spied on by poachers somehow, because they only seem to strike the very moment I go away.” She regularly comes back, she will say, only to find that the soldiers she employs have been outfoxed by heavily armed ivory poachers who’ve raided the reserve, gunned down an elephant using military-grade Kalashnikovs, and disappeared with the ivory, apparently before the soldiers could locate and stop them. The soldiers keep a low profile in the doc, only to scratch their heads and wonder aloud to the woman how the mysterious poachers keep eluding their grasp. “They must be very clever,” says one.

  And I’ll stare, and think, surely it can’t just be me? Surely everyone here can see the big, bad question hanging in the air—a figurative elephant in the room? But the woman doesn’t see it.

  It seems to me like the perfect expression of the failure of agencies, NGOs, and law enforcement alike to stop traffickers. In the face of the pursuit of profit by any means necessary, anyone thinking in terms of moral right and wrong—anyone looking for criminals—is blind. Like government, like reserve stewards: the unthinkable is happening right under your nose, courtesy of regular Joes earning a buck, and you’re out looking high and low for the bogeyman. And the planes just keep coming and going, for the UN, the CAA, the military; for aid organizations and businesses. Wholly respectable and above-reproach operator
s are forced to compete with those who’ll do anything, take anything, work for anyone, and artificially lower their prices because they’re carrying secret cargo for cash.

  Weeks later, in a rare bust, an unaccompanied shipment of two tons of ivory—317 elephant tusks—and five rhino horns will be seized at Kenya’s Nairobi airport, having flown by cargo plane out of Entebbe in huge crates declared as containing fresh avocados. The prime suspect, an employee of the cargo operation, simply vanishes.

  THE FUNNY THING is, I’ve met a few of these pilots, on both sides of the divide, and some who’ve moved between them, and they aren’t bad guys—on the contrary. They’re also pretty anxious to do the right thing if they can. So they’re doing what everyone’s always telling them they need to do to stay out of trouble, just as they had to back in the air force, and just as we all have to. They’re keeping their heads down, working hard, and doing exactly what the authorities ask of them. If those authorities, if the state itself, is doing something wrong, they rightly ask, should somebody important not be doing something about that?

  A week on. I’m standing on the wet perimeter track of Entebbe airport, looking out along the runway from which all flights—including, it is said, countless “merc” flights—depart and on which they land. To my left, the civilian airport. To my right, the military air base, with its containers stacked and ready for loading by soldiers onto flights to eastern Congo and, cuddled up next to them, its rows and rows of stenciled UN tents. Welcome to the world of advanced globalization. Welcome to the world where a mafia is not a mafia but is reborn as the state itself. Welcome to a place where even what is illegal is not illegal, if the network is doing it. The UN-Ugandan military base is for their use only; but the going rate for bribing your way to use it for a commercial flight is a mere $300 from the pilot.

  Then again, if the network doesn’t want it done—poking around like Patrick over at the Independent, or me here—it’ll send someone to put a stop to it right away, legal or not. And right on cue, here’s the drab green jeep, purring round the perimeter to check my ID, make a call, escort me away.

  The neat rows of UN tents, huts, and offices are so close I could pick up a handful of gravel and break the windows, but uncannily, despite the howling noise of the engines, the unloading of loot in front of them, the soldiers and airmen scattering through the gates, the daily coverage of the smuggling ring in opposition newspapers, nobody in the UN camp seems to notice a thing. The network is, after all, the government. And these people are its guests. So like everyone in every mafia economy, they make nice. Play the game. Make their pacts and deal with their devils. Focus on the always-worthwhile bigger picture. And meanwhile here come the goons with guns and wraparound shades, and here, as we talk, comes another planeload of goodies from the DRC.

  There are no absolutes, and everything is allowed if the right person says it is allowed. Out here, away from the tiny, exclusive gated community that is the first world, out here in the sweltering dusk of the developing world, big rights and abstract wrongs are outweighed by cash on the barrelhead.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Getting Your Kicks on Route Il-76

  Central Asia and the Caucasus, 2009

  MICKEY DOES PLENTY of what he calls “pizza delivery” runs, too—a common feature of the routes over former Soviet territory from Afghanistan through the dusty wastes and old Red Army bases of the Central Asian ’stans and the Caucasus, as well as Africa—in which some cargo planes still take hitchhikers and drop off casual packages in lieu of there being any serviceable roads or functioning infrastructure. These are impromptu or short-notice landings and diversions, sometimes for fuel, sometimes for pickups and dropoffs, sometimes just for social visits. We’ll remain on the ground just long enough for Mickey to run over to the terminal, hut, or patch of earth and point, and for the one, two, or three uniformed or squinting, shirt-sleeved men to shout and point and drive their flashing, bleeping truck up to the plane and rummage about and disappear again, waving.

  These runs don’t appear on anyone’s flight plans, so wherever we land, pizza-delivery stop-offs are often a surprise for the conning tower, air traffic control, and even the runway cleaners and sleeping technicians (whose first indication that they’re about to be landed on is when they see an Il-76 bearing down on them over the perimeter fence). They’d be just as big a surprise to Mickey’s clients, bosses, shippers, and business partners if they knew.

  Mickey’s not alone. One European security contractor who’s flown with these outfits on business for coalition support illustrates just how ad hoc many of the missions undertaken by pilots like Mickey are. “I was in an Il-76 en route to Afghanistan from an airport in Germany, or at least I thought we were en route to Afghanistan. But halfway there we just banked and landed with no warning on some godforsaken barren runway. The pilot himself leaped out and disappeared into the Nissen hut. He was back five minutes later, which was when I found out he’d just stopped as we entered this particular country’s airspace and paid for over-flight permission using his own credit card! It was just like buying some petrol for the car.”

  Reporter Doug McKinlay, meanwhile, recalls an incident from one aid flight to northern Afghanistan during the first freezing post-invasion winter of 2002. “I’d traveled out there in an Il-76, stretched out on top of a pallet of tomatoes someone was sending as aid,” he says. Once airborne, he found he wasn’t the only noncrewmember on board. As McKinlay stretched out, he found himself greeted by “this creepy American pastor” who was along for the ride. The pastor explained he was heading out there doing a tour of the refugee camps and an aid flight was the only way to get him and his camera crew there from Dubai. There were warning signs in the way the man seemed preoccupied with his appearance, and kept bawling out his long-suffering personal assistant. But nothing prepared McKinlay for the bizarre spectacle of the pastor’s attempt to engage with the locals he was there to help. “The whole thing was a circus,” recalls the Canadian. “He was standing on stages in front of these starving people freezing their asses off and holding up boxes of food, telling them through the mic that whoever said they wanted to know about Jesus could have some food. The Afghans were just bewildered and he kept on asking for shows of hands for Jesus, then shouting that wasn’t good enough, and the security goons kept beating on anyone who got too close to the food truck.”

  To add to the surreal scene, the pastor’s assistant was “all hair spray, too much makeup, and high heels right in the middle of the refugee camp,” recalls McKinlay. “Just in case the evangelical address to the camp was shown on local TV back home.”

  It was on the home leg, heading back toward Sharjah, that these unlikely Samaritans got their own first taste of just how flexible a crew used to pizza runs can be. “So over Uzbekistan you could see this assistant started looking a little weird,” laughs McKinlay. “She tottered up to the pilot and said she needed to use the bathroom. Now this is an old plane, they’ve ripped almost everything out, so the toilet was a bucket. Plus she’s gonna do it around a bunch of journalists, the reverend, and eight Byelorussian airmen. So she went back and pleaded with the pilot, and he just said, ‘Okay,’ and banked this gigantic Ilyushin, found an airfield he used to know from Soviet days right out on the plains, and landed it on a dime.” The grizzled airmen, the pastor and his entourage and one veteran Canadian reporter all found themselves looking everywhere but out the right-hand side of the plane as the assistant clattered down the steps in her heels, then hobbling to a concrete shelter in the distance that the loadmaster had pointed her toward. “Two minutes later she emerges,” laughs McKinlay, “stumbles across the dirt trying to be ladylike, climbs back up the ramp, and we’re gone. That plane was on the ground for ten minutes, max. But with the amount of fuel it takes to get that thing off the ground, it had to be the most expensive piss in history.”

  The speed and agility of our load-offs, stopovers, and informal supermarket sweeps encapsulates everything that makes crews
like Mickey’s so fundamentally perfect as business partners to organizations of all stripes. Often, deals are done and loading handled so quickly to maximize turnaround and minimize red tape that the first time Sergei will audit or adjust the cargo—if he goes to it at all—is at cruising altitude.

  Like any long-distance truck driver, Mickey’s come to know the best places to make convenient refueling stops, too. Indeed, he’ll often divert from his route specifically to refuel at what first appear to be little more than glorified filling stations; places like Baku, the oil-rich former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan’s capital.

  Fly with them and you’ll notice this booming, freewheeling oil town holds a special place in the hearts of many of these Afghantsy cargo dogs and their business partners. There’s something of the Here-Be-Monsters about it for Mickey; the last bit of Caucasus before you enter Central Asia. And with thousands of square kilometers of metronomic oil pumps pushing black stuff out of the ground so manically, the suburbs are often knee-deep in cheap fuel. On our final approach, I saw ragged men dipping buckets into shiny back puddles in the bare earth by the roadsides to light their lamps and fire their tractors.