In memory of all the nameless people who die with their dreams crossing the Mediterranean Sea every year.
For Nicholas and Matthew
Contents
Maps
Introduction: Setting the Compass
1 Rescued, Then Captured
2 Nuns in the Land of Fire
3 Madams and the Black Magic JuJu Curse
4 Italy’s DNA: God, Girls and the Mafia
5 Massacres and Alliances
6 Kalashnikovs and Bodies Under the Mattresses
7 The Way Forward
Cast of Characters
To Help
Acknowledgments
Notes
Introduction: Setting the Compass
When I moved to Italy with my husband in February 1996, I admittedly knew nothing about this country. We were newly married and had left South Dakota in the American Midwest on a blustering snowy day with wind-chill temperatures hovering around forty degrees Celsius below zero. The sight of the green rolling hills and deep blue sea below our TWA 747 as we landed at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport was nothing short of magical. The taxi driver even whistled “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” as he drove us through the cobbled streets of the ancient eternal city with which I would soon fall in love. Twenty years, two sons and one less husband later, this country still captivates my soul. It delights me and infuriates me, but mostly it still challenges me to reconsider everything I assume to know. Nothing can be taken for granted in a place with such a complex past, and the rules I was used to in America have never applied here.
Not long after we arrived, I landed a dream job with Newsweek magazine, which gave me a front-row seat to the events that were unfolding around me. The European Union was just launching its single currency and Italy was modernizing in ways both good and bad to try to keep up. When I first arrived, everything was closed on Sundays and you could scarcely buy milk and flour in the same store thanks to protectionist laws that kept small businesses alive. Now the quaint, family-run businesses have largely disappeared, giving way to Chinese discount shops and twenty-four-hour grocers. Italy was a true monoculture back then; most of the foreigners were tourists or white expats like me. That has changed, too, with the influx of migrants and refugees coming into the country by sea; more than 181,000 mostly Africans arrived in 2016 alone, creating what is referred to simply as “the migrant crisis,” even though many of the people coming over are also refugees in the truest sense of the word, fleeing war and persecution.1 Few will ever be allowed truly to integrate into this society; they are rarely allowed to work behind the counters in the shops; instead, they seem destined to stand in front of them begging for loose change.
I have covered all sorts of stories during my time here, from lavish papal coronations to mass-casualty earthquakes. I’ve lost count of how many governments have fallen and how many leaders have been forced out of office in shame. There have been murder trials and cruise-ship wrecks and gala parties inside ancient monuments, but the most common storyline that I have covered is one that seems to be the subtle thread running through every major event in this country: Italy’s endemic corruption.
It would be easy to blame this malady entirely on the country’s major organized crime syndicates – such as the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Neapolitan Camorra or the ‘Ndrangheta of Calabria – but it extends far beyond the mob. I have seen corruption in local and national government institutions and public schools, in the Catholic Church through the widespread cover-ups of clerical sex abuse crimes, and on my street when a traffic officer takes a bribe and tears up a ticket. But lately it is most apparent in the mishandling of the migrant crisis through the blatant exploitation and blind eye turned to what’s happening to some of the most vulnerable people on earth.
When I think back to the first time I saw Italy from above, that wonderful day I moved here more than two decades ago, I wish I had understood how complicated the country below me really was. Understanding Italy’s geographical location on the map is the key to deciphering its many challenges. The country, though one of the founding cornerstones of Europe, is as close to North Africa and the Middle East as it is to countries like Germany. South across the Mediterranean Sea from Rome is Sicily, whose western islands of Lampedusa and Linosa could have easily been a territory of North Africa, just seventy miles from Tunisia and a few hundred from Libya. It’s little wonder the United States and NATO keep their strategic drone command center and Middle East and Africa surveillance hubs at the Sigonella base on the island. To the east, on the other side of Italy’s boot, are the Balkans, Greece and Turkey, all just a ferry ride away.
When I first moved to Italy, several people told me that “Africa begins in Rome,” which was something I didn’t understand at the time, but certainly do now. The type of poverty that permeates much of Africa exists in parts of the Italian south as well. Almost two million Italian children live below the poverty line in the regions that start just a few kilometers south of the capital. UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, says Italy has the highest overall percentage of people living in extreme poverty anywhere in Europe, primarily due to the mismanagement of resources and funds intended for its own people.2 With that in mind, it’s little surprise that leaders pay even less attention to vulnerable strangers.
Italy’s major problems lie in its southern regions, known as the Mezzogiorno (literally “midday”), which holds a third of the country’s population and all its organized crime hubs. Unemployment is highest here, hovering around forty percent in some areas, and so is the murder rate, which regularly tops ten murders a month in Naples, a city of just three million people. Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot, was the central entrance point for counterfeit cigarette and arms trafficking in the 1990s, during the height of the Balkan conflicts just a few miles across the Adriatic Sea. Basilicata and Calabria, which make up the boot’s insole, still have villages without internet or schools. Moving north towards Rome through Campania, from the toe of the boot, the Amalfi Coast is the sparkling diamond among a region that is easily the most lawless and dangerous in the country, made famous by Roberto Saviano’s tales of death and despair in his bestselling book Gomorrah, all just a few hours’ drive from Rome.
This southern Italy is not the stuff of guidebooks and postcards. Its ports, as beautiful as they may be over a cocktail at sunset, hide unparalleled criminal activity as everything from deadly arms to stolen antiquities find their way past the often-corrupted customs officials.3
Lately, however, Italy’s southern ports have become the gateway for a very different type of cargo, with hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees arriving each year. I started covering the migrant crisis in 2009, when the blue wooden fishing boats bought from scrap yards by enterprising smugglers started washing up on the shores of Lampedusa, filled with economic migrants and those fleeing famine and dirty wars in Africa.4 In the beginning, the smugglers would even navigate the old fishing boats themselves and then either escape on smaller speed boats that trailed them or wait until they got caught and were deported back to Tunisia or Morocco and do it all over again. Some of those old blue boats can still be seen, washed up on Lampedusa’s coastline, but most have been hauled to the center of the island where they are piled high in what amounts to a gigantic boat cemetery.
It must be noted that the migrant crisis that impacts Italy is a very different one from that involving Syrian refugees in the rest of Europe. Italy’s crisis started as a trickle of people coming from across the sea in North Africa to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa more than three decades ago. Arrival numbers rarely topped a few thousand a year. It picked up speed in the years before the Arab Spring, when mostly young men started arriving, but the uprisings that began in late 2010
marked a great change in number of arrivals, which suddenly started topping fifty thousand or more. This also led to a rise in human smugglers, who soon understood that the more desperate people were, the more they would pay for passage across the sea. When the Arab Spring exodus calmed down, the smugglers weren’t ready to give up their profits and soon started actively searching out sub-Saharan African economic migrants and refugees fleeing war and persecution who wanted to take a chance on a better life in Europe, which seemed like a magical land of hopes and dreams until they realized that the opportunities weren’t meant for them. It didn’t take long for sex traffickers to realize they could use the established smuggling routes to ferry exploited women to Italy.
Of the women making the journey, I met so many who had both emotional and physical scars, with personal stories of war and torture, of mind-numbing poverty and death. Those stories that filled my notebooks have haunted me for all these years as I searched for a way to do them justice and find an audience who might be interested to know more.
Then, around 2012, something changed. The boats were increasingly filled with Nigerian women and, a short time later, so were the streets and back roads of Italy. Prostitution is legal in Italy, so sex workers from all over, including Nigerians and other sub-Saharan Africans, have always been part of the local landscape. But I noticed that the women who started showing up on the streets after 2012 were young and clearly scared. They were different – not the experienced sex workers who knew if a client was safe or not just by looking, but children the same age as my own, reluctantly getting into cars with men.
What bothered me most was not just that they had crossed the dangerous sea on a dream of a better life only to become sex slaves, but that everyone knew about it. Yet, for all the transparency in this tragedy, I soon discovered that only a few elderly Catholic nuns seemed to be trying to do anything to stop it.
Instead of helping these women, the focus on the migration crisis rests squarely on who should rescue the people on the smugglers’ boats and where they should be taken. Millions have been spent by the EU on a program called “Sophia” to destroy smugglers’ ships by lighting them on fire at sea once the people have been rescued, which has only resulted in smugglers using cheaper and far more dangerous rubber dinghies instead. The priority is never about who is on those ships and why, apart from the persistent fear that they might be Islamic State terrorists.
But consider this: in 2016, eleven thousand Nigerian women and girls arrived in Italy on those boats. More than eighty percent, that’s around nine thousand, were trafficked specifically for sexual slavery in Italy and beyond, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), who say many of the rest are also lured into the sex racket upon arrival. When the figures are tallied for 2017, the number is likely to be the same or higher. It seems unthinkable to me that this phenomenon has been allowed to grow steadily for the last five years. I cannot help but wonder: since we know about it, why can’t we as a society do anything to save these women?
Some argue that enough is being done just by saving them from drowning in the sea. Indeed, hundreds if not thousands of women who were destined for sexual slavery have drowned over the years when their boats sank. But saving women from death isn’t enough if their destiny is a fate some would consider worse: sexual slavery.
When the smugglers’ boats first started coming to Italy, the authorities did not allow rescues at sea as they eventually did with the advent of NGO search-and-rescue missions. Instead, the smugglers’ ships had to crash quite literally onto the sharp rocks of Lampedusa, which is the closest chunk of land off the North African coast, before they could be rescued. The Coast Guard would use planes to monitor when the boats were coming in, but no one went out to rescue them, no matter how urgent their plight or how rickety the boats might have been. Aid agencies, such as UNHCR and Save the Children, that were set up in Lampedusa would then relay the information to journalists covering the crisis in an attempt to bring exposure to what was happening. Those of us who could convince our editors that the stories were worthy would fly to Lampedusa, an island so small you can see water on both sides of the landing strip as the plane touches down.
More than once I sat on the shores of Lampedusa after nightfall with other journalists waiting for a smuggler ship to crash, listening to the staccato blasts of the waves until the voices wafted ashore. They came in at night because of the lighthouse on the island, which led the way. The eerie noise preceded the outline of the boats, which looked like ghost ships caught between the moonlight and the passing lighthouse beams.
During one particularly horrific crash that happened right under Lampedusa’s door-shaped memorial monument called the “Gateway to Europe,” which had been erected in 2008 for all the mariners and migrants who had died at sea, there were splashing sounds tied to screams as people jumped off the boat. It was different from other wrecks because the boat was an enormous fishing trawler with a high mast and an actual navigational deck, rather than the smaller boats with telephone-box wheel rooms more common on fishing boats used for people smuggling. The wrenching sound of wood breaking seemed endless, as if the ship wouldn’t stop crashing into the rocks.
Lights from the Coast Guard lit up the wreckage, its hull ripped open and a sea of humanity pouring out. I will never forget all those faces of the survivors as they scrambled towards us. It was not the time to conduct interviews. We put down our pens and cameras and helped them, carrying the small children and holding on to the pregnant women as they tore their bare feet open on the sharp rocks.
On that particular shipwreck assignment, which ended on the cover of the 20 June 2011 issue of Newsweek magazine, I met Dolly, a tall Nigerian woman with long braids of hair she had tied together with leather strings. We kept in touch for the next two years as she made her way to Sicily and eventually to the Italian mainland. I lost track of her after she left a refugee center near Florence, when her final asylum request was denied. A volunteer there confided that she was denied asylum because she had “run away to be a prostitute” somewhere in northern Italy. When I met her, she knew she might have to sell her body to survive “at first” but she had a real dream. She said she intended to open her own little shop in Venice one day, selling African handicrafts she would import from Nigeria.
In early 2017, I managed to contact Dolly after pleading with workers at the refugee center, explaining that I wanted to find out what had happened to her. After we got back in touch, she sent me a message and told me she had found work as a “window girl” in Amsterdam. She was paid fair wages and lived in a nice apartment by herself.
“It is not so bad,” she wrote. “The men are clean and we get free doctor checks all the time.”
She later updated me with news that she was planning to marry a Dutch man and quit sex work. The next time I tried to contact her, the email bounced.
Dolly is just one tiny piece of the long, sordid history of sex trafficking to Italy, one story out of thousands of women who came to Italy under different circumstances and who ended up selling their bodies by choice or by force. Whether Dolly chose to be a prostitute or was coerced into it is hard to know. She came at a time of transition, when most Nigerian women came to Italy with dreams that often worked out. That is no longer the case. Now that the sex traffickers piggyback on the migrant crisis, many of the exploited women end up in Italy whether they ever dreamt of coming or not.
It is a deadly and dangerous journey, and many of the trafficked women perish along with the thousands of migrants and refugees who die each year. But it seems that no one pays much attention to the deaths of those who aren’t registered on passenger lists or whose families aren’t waiting on shore. There is a hierarchy when it comes to tragedies, and the desperate have always been at the bottom. Reports of wooden boats or rubber dinghies going down with a hundred or even two hundred people barely make the news cycle.
In 2012, the Costa Concordia cruise ship, a giant ocean liner with more than 4,20
0 people on board, crashed onto the shores of the Tuscan island of Giglio. It was a spectacle made for TV. I spent weeks on Giglio, returning time and again over the next several years, even though ‘just’ thirty-two people had died. I have never been dispatched so often or for so long on a migrant story, where the death tolls were sometimes thought to be three times higher or more. Migrant shipwrecks are so common and the circumstances so vague that they all blend together, made worse by the fact that there are rarely any details about the people who have lost their lives. Unlike the Costa Concordia, where we had names, ages and nationalities, the migrants are nameless and faceless and often die without their family members even knowing. Whole smugglers’ ships just disappear off the horizon. Sometimes rescuers find empty dinghies floating at sea or old blue fishing boats with a few dead people onboard. We will never know how many people were on those boats. They’re just gone.
Several months after the Costa Concordia went down, a pair of migrant boats sank close to the shore of Lampedusa that did make the news. More than 360 migrants and refugees died, including a woman with her newborn baby still attached by the umbilical cord. The dead were retrieved from one of the sunken ships and eulogized at a mass funeral inside a hangar at Lampedusa’s airport. Those incidents changed Italy’s approach to migration. In 2013, it launched the Mare Nostrum program, spending €9 million a month on rescue missions to ensure there would be no more sinkings of that magnitude. However, only a year into the mission, under pressure from the rest of Europe to stop what was largely perceived as a program that encouraged illegal migration by creating a pull factor, and along with tight budget demands following a recession, the program was scrapped. The decision proved lethal and the death toll rose tenfold. The gravity of the danger became clear again when another ship went down in April 2015, with as many as nine hundred people on board.
Roadmap to Hell Page 1
