As Nigerian sex trafficking rises, Italy tracks crime kingpins

Loveth, a Nigerian former sex slave, was forced into prostitution for three years in Libya before her trafficker arranged for her to be smuggled to Italy in 2014. She has since escaped slavery and is living in Italy. Photo by Quintina Valeria.
Loveth, a Nigerian former sex slave, was forced into prostitution for three years in Libya before her trafficker arranged for her to be smuggled to Italy in 2014. She has since escaped slavery and is living in Italy. Photo by Quintina Valeria.

In criminal network gripped by fear of black magic, Nigerian sex worker is murdered in Italy, then her body disappeared – “only a few bones remained”

By Tom Esslemont

CATANIA, Italy, Nov 9 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – When Italian prosecutor Lina Trovato first came across a sex trafficking suspect called “Mummy”, she sensed she was onto something especially sinister.

The code name had appeared several times in wiretapped conversations between Nigerian gang members in Italy and their apparently female boss back in the West African state.

“If one of the (trafficked sex worker) girls went astray, the agents in Italy always informed ‘Mummy’ – otherwise known as the Queen Bee of Nigerian trafficking – so she could keep them in line,” Trovato told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Several months of investigation led police to swoop in and arrest six people in the Italian cities of Rome, Genoa and Catania, she said. The six are awaiting trial.

Nigerian crime gangs have proliferated in Italy, controlling an extensive network of prostitutes and ordering them “on demand” from Nigeria, Italian police and prosecutors say.

But now the Nigerian gangs, who have been active in Italy for more than a decade, are taking on increasingly violent tactics, including knife crime and even forging close relations with notorious mafia groups, the Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, law enforcement agencies in Italy say.

The overlap with home-grown organised crime groups is troubling for police because the Italian mafia dominate the economies in their regions, often with the help of corrupt or complacent administrators, and they have spread their tentacles to northern Italy.

At least 16 Nigerians have been arrested on trafficking offences since the start of 2016 in the Catania jurisdiction in Sicily, up from around 10 the previous year.

“Mummy” is still on the run.

“Sometimes we are good at breaking the cycle (of trafficking). But it is very hard,” Trovato, a specialist in organised crime and mafia, said in Catania city.

Italy’s government has not disclosed the number of arrests in connection with Nigerian trafficking gangs despite requests from the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Around 12,000 Nigerian women arrived in Italy by sea in 2015 and 2016, data from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) shows – a six-fold increase on the previous two years.

Almost 80 percent of the young women are victims of trafficking, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), placing law enforcement agencies under pressure to uproot expanding Nigerian criminal networks, lawyers say.

MAFIA CRIMES

As the number of Nigerian trafficking victims rises, Italian prosecutors – lawyers who gather evidence before presenting it in court – are finding more and more of their time taken up with unpicking Nigeria’s criminal networks.

Nigerian prostitutes frequently end up working as recruiters or “madams” for new arrivals from Africa, prosecutors say.

These former sex workers also help with the logistics of slavery, driving trafficking victims to the cities where they become prostitutes, Trovato said.

But trends are changing. Armed robberies, murders and drug-related crime have spread south to the Sicilian city of Palermo from larger Nigerian communities in the northern cities of Turin and Castel Volturno, justice officials say.

“It is a compact community, in which there are lots of people who practice crime,” said Leonardo Agueci, prosecutor in Palermo’s justice department.

Earlier in 2016, the boss of notorious Nigerian criminal organisation Black Axe was sentenced to 12 years in jail after a number of Nigerian men were brutally attacked in Palermo.

The incident happened late one night in January 2014 in Palermo’s Ballaro street market, where police later found the victims with gashed foreheads.

“It was the first time a Palermo court has convicted a Nigerian on mafia-related crimes,” said Gaspare Spedale, another prosecutor in the Sicilian city.

Police fear the relatively small-time crimes committed by members of the Nigerian gangs in Palermo might become more serious in a city famous for Italy’s most storied mafia organisation, the Cosa Nostra, Agueci said.

For now, the prosecutors said there was no evidence mafia were running the Nigerian sex trafficking network from Palermo, but it could have connections with organised crime gangs on mainland Italy.

“The people who export (Nigerian victims) are in other countries,” Spedale said. “But there is a mastermind controlling it in Italy. It exists.”

Nigerian politicians, other public servants truly visit the U.S. to have sex

James Entwhistle's memo accused Mohammed Garba Gololo of
James Entwhistle’s memo accused Mohammed Garba Gololo of “allegedly grabbing a housekeeper in his hotel room and soliciting her for sex”, while Mark Terseer Gbillah and Samuel Ikon “allegedly requesting hotel parking attendants to assist them with prostitutes”.
By Anthony Obi Ogbo
By Dr. Anthony Obi Ogbo

The group of Nigerian politicians accused of both groping a hotel attendant, and trying to solicit prostitutes that might of been working at websites similar to www.tubev.sex at the time, while visiting the United States have threatened to sue the United States embassy for reporting the alleged incidents. However, these disgraceful conducts are not new, and are very familiar with most visiting Nigerian public officers.

U.S. Envoy James Entwhistle had written a letter, that three of the 10-man delegation to a good governance exchange program in Cleveland, Ohio, had allegedly been involved in behavior that “left a very negative impression of Nigeria”. His memo accused Mohammed Garba Gololo of “allegedly grabbing a housekeeper in his hotel room and soliciting her for sex”, while Mark Terseer Gbillah and Samuel Ikon “allegedly requesting hotel parking attendants to assist them with prostitutes”. But the three politicians blatantly denied the accusations, asking for both a retraction and apology.

But the truth be told, that most Nigeria public officers, especially their lawmakers actually visit the United States to have sex. They must have seen some of the videos on somewhere like www.hdmmovies.xxx and decided that they want a piece of that themselves. I am not going to beat around the bush on this issue, but would present myself as a witness that these folks, when they visit, pay the least attention to their official duties while they spend most times wandering with hired prostitutes having sex; shopping the malls, and hopping from restaurants to bars in the most disgraceful manner.

Responsible members of parliament who attend governance programs could at least come back, armed with the skills on translating their trainings into strategies to deliver public service excellence. They could be talking about relevant tools of effective governance and how to strategically apply them to their daily official tasks. Unfortunately and most disappointedly, this is not what the world is hearing. What we are here talking about is prostitution; some sex-hungry public officers holding their crotches and walking around the parking lots looking for where to buy sex. Here we are, debating irresponsible house members flirting with janitors and groping hotel room attendants – the same behaviors they get away with in Nigeria. Maybe what they should have done is stay in their hotel rooms gone online and visitied https://www.nu-bay.com/categories/557/masturbation and watch some adult movies instead, far better behaviour for a visiting dignitary

The whole story stinks, when in total disgrace of their office and constituents, some Nigerian lawmakers and other public officers retain pricey escorts (prostitutes) in different foreign cities through Nigerian cab and limousine drivers who coordinate the trade. In 2015, a Nigerian married woman who claimed she escaped a rape encounter from a Nigerian visiting dignitary, accused a Nigerian limousine driver of luring her to the hotel (Holiday Inn Express, Room 204, on Southwest Freeway) where the incident took place. She accused the limousine driver (name withheld at this time) of blackmailing women and luring them to sleep with visiting Nigeria dignitaries.

A local prostitute once walked into a local Houston store with some traveler’s check asking the clerk if they were real money. She was upset that one of her “honorable” visiting Nigerian customers paid her with travelers’ check because he ran out of dollar bills. These are just a few out of many horrible stories about Nigeria public officers who visit the United States to disgrace their country.

A local prostitute once walked into a local Houston store with some traveler’s check asking the clerk if they were real money. She was upset that one of her “honorable” visiting Nigerian customers paid her with travelers’ check because he ran out of dollar bills. These are just a few out of many horrible stories about Nigeria public officers who visit the United States to disgrace their country.

I am not finished. It may also interest the world to know that a former Nigerian president while in office has agents in Houston and Atlanta who supplied him with prostitutes whenever he visited. Same period, a member of the National Assembly who in fact, heads a committee connected to oil and gas once took an escort from Houston to Nigeria with a marriage proposal. The escort claimed the lawmaker “abandoned” her in Benin while he was in Abuja doing other women. She came back to Houston with a large monetary compensation, and told International Guardian, “I’m happy with the settlement, so I had to let that slide.”

In Houston, Texas where people from all over the world visit every May for the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC), the rate of delegates who indulge in sex with prostitutes got so disgraceful that the Harris County Sheriff’s Office issued a warning and threatened to prosecute any delegate caught buying or selling sex. Some Nigeria delegates to this conference are also notoriously known for using cab and limousine drivers to shop prostitutes. Some escorts even brag about contact lists of their customers from Nigerian, mostly top government officials and politicians.

Therefore, the incidents at the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel sounds very familiar. The accused officials are strongly denying the allegations. One of them, Mr Gbillah, dismissed the allegations as baseless attempt to tarnish the reputation of Nigeria’s House of Representatives. But the big question would be why anybody in a Hotel in Cleveland would want to tarnish the reputation of Nigeria’s House of Representatives? We are not talking ISIS or Boko Haram but supposedly honorable members of House of Representatives.

I am glad that our honorable parliamentary members involved in this scandal attended governance programs. If they paid adequate attention in their classes or conferences, they could have learnt that one of principles of good governance is taking responsibility. It simply means that rather than suffuse the social media with excuses about their irresponsible behaviors, they could own up, apologize to their country and their constituents, and resign from their offices. Furthermore, these cases would rightly serve as a good lesson to arrogant and irresponsible public officers unfamiliar with the system in foreign lands.

Dr. Ogbo is the publisher of Houston-based International Guardian.

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