Roadmap to Hell

by Barbie Latza Nadeau

  That first year, the nuns returned every two weeks to hand out the notes, coffee and even copies of the Qur’an. They did anything they could think of to convince the women and young girls to betray their madams and defy the ritual JuJu curse that keeps them in slavery thanks to the manipulative work of traffickers in Nigeria.

  Things grew from there. After they had gone out to the street several times, the trafficked women started to trust them, and some even got into their car, emboldened by the sisters’ promises of safety. Others came to the shelter in the middle of the night, walking miles to make their escape. The nuns started making inroads with the police, too, who started bringing the girls directly to the shelter when they went to the local station for help. Before that, women who asked for help were sent to jail, deported or ignored and sent back to the streets.

  There is a tangible and constant underlying fear of death and bodily harm among the trafficked women, both on and off the streets. There is never a moment when they feel safe or relaxed. The anxiety eats away at many of them. Alcohol and drug dependency is a major problem among the African community in Castel Volturno, especially among the women who use these vices to cope. Sometimes when they are rescued from the streets, they require detox programs as well as psychological support. It is rarely a smooth transition from such dangerous work to safety.

  Sister Rita is, in many ways, the quintessential nun, which is what makes her seem so out of place among the Nigerian women. Her flat grey hair is cut short and matches both her skin and the buttoned-up blouse she wears under her wool sweater, windbreaker, or puffy jacket, depending on the season. Her matching gabardine skirt falls below her knees, exposing tights that are so opaque they make her legs look like shiny cylinders that fit perfectly into her classic, thick-soled, black lace-up “nun shoes.” In the summer, her legs are bare and she wears knock off Birkenstock-style sandals under her cotton skirt and short-sleeved blouse. She always wears a simple wooden cross around her neck. Sometimes she wears a nun’s veil at mass. Sister Rita and the other nuns who work at Casa Ruth are one of the only rays of hope for getting the girls off the streets.

  More than thirty thousand men and women from Nigeria and Ghana are thought to live in the town of Castel Volturno alone, according to the local city government, surpassing the size of the local population, which is estimated to hover around twenty-five thousand, according to the official census. That means undocumented migrants who don’t pay taxes or utilize social services outnumber registered residents. Many have falsified documents that pass basic police checks and might get them medical care, although many more live like ghosts with no documentation at all.

  It is well known that Nigerian sex slaves often disappear without a trace. No one knows if they’ve been sold to other madams or have been killed and disposed of. Sometimes their bodies are found in road ditches or ravines. Like the migrants at sea, they die nameless, buried without fanfare or often dumped in the local river. It is too dangerous for madams or even other women to report their deaths. Often, they are buried in the farmers’ fields by friends who don’t want to call attention to what happened. Some of the Nigerian women say that if a woman isn’t bringing in enough money, her madam will kill her to teach a lesson to the others. The threat of death is omnipotent, but the threat of living the way many of these women have to live isn’t necessarily a better option.

  The feeling of impending danger is ever present in Castel Volturno. There is an uneasy silence that blankets what’s left of the Coppola compound, broken only by an occasional distant cadence of popular American rap music streaming from open windows. It always feels as if someone is listening, watching. It’s hard even to walk along the abandoned beach without the eerie feeling of being observed. The overpowering smell of dead fish, raw sewage that drains from the Coppola apartments, buffalo manure and rotting garbage adds to the overall uneasiness of the place. The fence that separates the sea from the squalor is piled high with garbage washed up by the waves on one side and littered by passersby on the other. Syringes and used condoms are tossed like candy wrappers on the broken sidewalks.

  Children ride their bikes alongside rows of parked cars whose drivers are looking for illicit deals of one kind or another or just getting blow-jobs. The abandoned apartments are filled with Nigerians who run the sex, drugs and arms trade from the lower levels of the buildings. Most of the front entrances have been sealed by the police, but holes and openings in the fences make access easy enough. Some of the cordoned-off buildings even have Nigerian “doormen” to control who comes and goes. It is here in these buildings that the Camorra allows the Nigerian gangs to run one of the biggest cocaine trades in Europe, so long as they pay the syndicate a hefty monthly fee that is rumored to top sixty percent of their earnings.

  Many of the villas that were built as single homes by the Coppola brothers are now used as “connection houses” by the Nigerian madams, who rent the rooms to the girls they own to bring their clients. Many of the trafficked women live and work in the same small rooms, often turning tricks twenty-four hours a day. The girls are everywhere – on every corner, standing behind trees on the side roads, waiting at bus stops.

  Generally, Nigerian women are trafficked to Italy for sex in two ways – both of which are without consent and tragically similar to the old days of the slave trade. Either they are hand-picked, identified and “sold” directly from Nigeria through the use of recruiters and hidden Facebook pages with pictures to a madam who is already set up in Italy. In some cases, madams who are trying to establish their stable of women are known to travel across the sea with them to ensure they aren’t “stolen” by other madams along the way. The second way they are trafficked is more general and entails traffickers selling the women directly to Nigerian gang members, who then sell them on to madams once they arrive in Italy.

  Girls who are trafficked by men without a madam typically incur around €15,000 in travel expenses, including a cut to the recruiter or sponsor (like Joy’s maman) in Nigeria and a cut to the smugglers for the price of the journey both across the desert and across the sea. Once they are sold to a madam in Italy, their costs go up to include the price the madam paid for them, usually around €5,000.

  Girls who are trafficked directly to madams in Italy will owe far more, around €60,000. A cut goes to the recruiter in Nigeria, a cut to the traffickers and smugglers who expedited the women’s journey and a large portion goes to the Nigerian gang members, who must pay the syndicates like the Camorra in whose territories the women will be forced to work. There are other incidentals along the way, including room, board, clothing and rent for the space on the sidewalk from which they will eventually solicit sex.

  If we assume half of the girls who came to Italy in 2016 generated €60,000 each through debt bondage for the madams’ gangs, the profits off those girls alone would top €300 million, even after their travel costs are deducted.

  It can take up to five years or more of constant sexual slavery to pay off the massive debts. Then, women are free to go, but some end up becoming madams themselves, either brainwashed by what they perceive to be lucrative potential gains once their debts are paid or as an angry act of revenge: to bestow on others what they had to endure. This cycle has continued for more than a decade, but in 2016, the number of Nigerian women who arrived by smugglers’ boats grew by sixty percent over the previous year.

  Either way, all the women arrive with heavy debts before they even know they have been sold into sex slavery. Italy’s anti-trafficking authorities estimate that there are as many as ten thousand Nigerian madams in operation in Italy, each with at least three women in their charge. Some of the madams also turn tricks to supplement their income, suggesting that they, too, are exploited.

  Not everyone agrees on whether the women are aware of the fate that awaits them in Italy. I believe most don’t, but some think all of them know exactly what to expect. I had a heated debate with journalist Nazzaro, who is convinced the women come from Nigeria by
choice to work as prostitutes and that they aren’t sex slaves at all. In his opinion, they see it as an enterprise and play the victim once they get caught. “They know exactly what they are doing,” he says. Nazzaro is a parliamentary spokesman for the Five Star political movement, which shares staunch anti-immigration ideology with a lot of right-wing political parties in Europe, and doesn’t buy the trafficking stories. “You can’t tell me these women don’t choose this. Look at how they dress and act,” he says. “The only thing they don’t know is how much money they have to give to their madams.”

  He believes that the stories of trafficking are grossly exaggerated by left-wing political parties who advocate open migration. “They don’t owe you the truth, they will tell you whatever they think you want to hear,” he tells me when I explain how many women I’d met who I was sure were true victims. “You can’t know if they are lying. You don’t speak their dialect, you can’t take their word at face value.”

  When Sister Rita came to the Land of Fires, it was not like this. She and a group of nuns opened the Casa Ruth shelter in the city of Caserta, about an hour inland, in 1995 because it is the regional seat and one of the larger towns outside of Naples. Caserta has always had two faces. Tourists from all over the world come to Caserta to see its massive eighteenth-century Royal Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that looms over a long ribbon of manicured gardens and artificial lakes. But the city is mostly known as a center for organized crime. So notorious is its reputation that Sopranos writers made it psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi’s ancestral home.

  Caserta is not as lawless as Castel Volturno, but it is hardly tranquil. Many tourist hotels in the area have armed guards and locked parking. The city just doesn’t feel safe. There are always strange men lingering on the streets, always a sense that something bad is happening. It is too quiet. There is no sound of children laughing, no music coming from windows like in many other Italian towns of the same size.

  Casa Ruth is on the Corso Trieste, one of the main avenues that cuts through the center of the town. At one end of the street is the monument to the fallen soldiers of World War I. At the other is the rear entrance of the Royal Palace. The sisters who run Casa Ruth belong to the order of Ursulines of the Sacred Heart of Mary, nuns that are well known for their charity to women and the poor. The first Roman Catholic nuns in the United States were Ursulines, having settled in New Orleans as part of a group of French immigrants from Normandy who came over on a five-month ocean voyage in 1727.

  The shelter is named after the biblical figure Ruth, who was a convert to Judaism. Sister Rita says their community chose the name because it represents their aim at inclusiveness. She didn’t want to open a “pre-packaged shelter for women.” The situation in the Land of Fires was unique and needed a different kind of shelter.

  Before coming down south to Caserta, Sister Rita lived in Vicenza, in the sophisticated, wealthy northern region of Italy, which is as far as one can get from the squalor of the Land of Fires. She arrived in Caserta with Sister Assunta and two other nuns in a green minibus on 2 October 1995. In her journal, she recalls a “magnificent sunset that stole our sights, alleviating the weight of the separation from home we carried in our hearts.” Her journal was later published as the book Slaves No More, which continues to be sold to help raise funds for the shelter.

  During their first years in Caserta, the Ursuline nuns quickly ran into difficulty carrying out their missionary work without a car. The city bus service was sporadic at best, not at all what they were used to in northern Italy, and walking proved impossible and dangerous. They soon acquired bicycles to get around, earning them a blip of relative fame that Sister Rita fondly remembers. The local newspaper ran a picture of her and another sister, describing them as “the bicycling nuns” who had arrived from the north. They cycled over the cobblestone streets, their habits flying in the wind, making their way around Caserta to visit women in prisons and hospitals. Eventually they bought a second-hand Fiat, which was stolen from them almost immediately, as were the next two Fiats with which they replaced it. They had a Rover that lasted for many years and now they drive a minivan with the Casa Ruth logo painted on the doors, which has, so far, detracted the thieves.

  Casa Ruth’s first live-in resident in 1997 was Atika, a woman born in Morocco who came to Italy with her husband on a rickety boat by way of Lampedusa. Atika’s husband’s illegal arms trade landed them both in jail, which is where she met Sister Rita, who back then combed the prisons in search of women who hadn’t committed any crimes, of which there were many at the time, and who were imprisoned simply because authorities didn’t know what else to do with them. Atika’s husband was eventually deported back to Morocco, but Atika didn’t want to join him and live under his oppressive rule after she tasted freedom while he was behind bars. Sister Rita helped Atika secure asylum and she stayed on and lived at Casa Ruth for a full year. Despite the fact that she was a practicing Muslim, Atika fit in well with the sisters, who used the experience to carve the path for what Casa Ruth would become, which is first and foremost a place where victimized women can learn self-respect. They realized through Atika’s experience that women outside of Europe are often brainwashed and more inclined to defer to men as their protectors. Many truly believe women are not free to make their own choices.

  “She helped us build a connection,” recalls Sister Rita. “A Muslim woman among the nuns – we were united like true sisters.”

  The shelter has taken many forms over the years, sometimes occupying space in the back rooms of the rectory, other times in borrowed apartments. Now they are finally in a permanent space owned by the local diocese. The shelter comprises three first-floor apartments, the walls between them knocked down. The space feels informal and haphazard, not at all institutional. It is somewhat fitting for the chaos of these women’s lives, and they seem to feel at ease there. You reach the entrance through a private access from the courtyard, so no one has to meet anyone in the building’s hallways. It is discreet, private and perfect in many ways.

  A covered terrace offers some respite from the humid summers, but there is little natural light inside the building except from the windows in Sister Rita’s study and the chapel. The apartment complex houses mostly elderly people who weren’t so keen to have a shelter for rescued sex slaves as a neighbor, at least at first – Sister Rita has since won them over, even successfully recruiting some as volunteers.

  Most of the rooms are set up with single beds and baby cribs dressed with bright, colorful linens. Others feature bunk beds and African art.

  A massive wooden crucifix draped with a rosary hangs on the main wall in front of a small wooden altar in the airy chapel, which is in the living room of one of the former apartments. African paintings and colorful posters with prayers decorate the sidewalls. A sheer, white curtain hangs over the window, casting a pearly light on the white tile floor.

  Prayer rugs are rolled up in the corner for the many Muslim women who find themselves here. Several copies of the Qur’an line a small shelf by the door. It is no coincidence that the crucifix hangs on the wall facing Mecca. When the babies who live in the shelter take their afternoon naps, the nuns roll their buggies up next to the altar.

  “It is easily the quietest and most peaceful room in the entire shelter, and the babies sleep peacefully in here,” Sister Assunta explains.

  Sister Assunta is an older, softer version of Sister Rita, with a rounder face and smoother skin. She has a wonderful sense of humor and a contagious smile, and she defers to Sister Rita for all matters, though she is not without strong opinions of her own. Her biggest nemeses are the male clients, whom she says are the real problem. She hates the men who pay for sex, and she is quick to criticize anyone who dismisses their role in this racket, often saying that without them there would be no need for what she and Sister Rita do.

  The youngest woman I ever met at Casa Ruth was a teenager called Betsy, whose vacant eyes still haunt me. She didn’t look like the oth
er Nigerian girls, and Sister Rita suspected that she might have been from Somalia, though she didn’t talk enough for us to get much of a family history. Her double-take looks made her especially vulnerable on the Domitiana, where men tend to seek out women they could never have sex with through normal channels. But she was young and she didn’t know to insist that her clients wear condoms, and she soon ended up pregnant.

  Her baby was just two months old when I first met Betsy, when I was visiting Casa Ruth for lunch one day. She was sleeping quietly in a baby stroller at the end of the table, seemingly oblivious to the laughter of the other children playing on the floor nearby. When the baby, whom the sisters called Faith because Betsy didn’t want to name her, did finally cry, Sister Rita hopped up to comfort and rock her so Betsy could eat. Betsy was extremely thin despite having just given birth. She seemed in a state of shock, often drifting off into a trance-like state or just staring straight ahead.

  Betsy barely spoke Italian, though Sister Rita tried desperately to teach her, hoping she could reach her somehow. Every time Sister Rita tried to touch her arm to comfort her, Betsy flinched and pulled it away. Later, I learned that she was systematically beaten and raped by her madam’s henchmen when she refused to come on to men on the Domitiana. Eventually, she stopped eating and passed out on the street. The police picked her up and brought her straight to Casa Ruth. It was only there that she discovered she was nearly six months pregnant. Sister Rita was worried she might be suicidal, but the birth of Faith seemed to have brought her around, ever so slightly.