Merchants of Men

How Kidnapping, Ransom and Trafficking Funds Terrorism and ISIS

Loretta Napoleoni

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781782399926
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Every day, a powerful and sophisticated underground business delivers thousands of refugees along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. A new breed of criminals, risen from the post-9/11 political chaos and the fi­asco of the Arab Spring, coupled with the destabilization of Syria and Iraq and the rise of ISIS, controls it. The ever-increasing political volatility has offered them new business opportunities, from trafficking millions of refugees to selling Western hostages to jihadist groups.

The kidnapping industry in the Middle East is now worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Loretta Napoleoni's exclusive and meticulous research into the business of kidnap and ransom, and its link to terrorist activity, is based on first-hand accounts - from interviews with hostage negotiators to the experiences of former hostages themselves. Merchants of Men is a fascinating and eye-opening exploration of this most shocking of financial interdependencies.

PART 1

chapter one

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb Protocol

In late January 2011 Maria Sandra Mariani set out from San Casciano in Val di Pesa, a small town in Tuscany, heading to the southeast corner of the Algerian Sahara. The fifty-three-year-old Italian woman was looking forward to her annual holiday in a breathtakingly beautiful region of the Maghreb. She had booked a group tour of the region’s natural features and archaeological ruins—some dating back as far as the Neolithic period—and was planning to spend a few days visiting local villages. Every winter since 2006, Mariani had vacationed in the Sahara desert, partly as a tourist and partly as a “humanitarian aid volunteer” to, in her words, “bring medicine and goods to the local population.”² As she had done many times before, she booked her tour with Ténéré Voyages, a well-known travel agency specializing in the Sahara. And as in the past, Aziz was going to be her guide. Aziz, a polite Algerian whom Mariani had befriended over the years, had even visited her and her family in Tuscany.

When Mariani landed at the Djanet Airport, approximately one hundred miles from the Algerian-Libyan border, the first person she saw was Aziz. He welcomed her, and seeing how pale she looked, he asked if she had had a rough journey. Mariani admitted that she was not feeling too well. “I must have eaten something bad on the plane and I felt awful,” she says, “but we left right away. We were heading for the desert of Tadrart,³ between Algeria and Libya. A few days later, I was still unwell. Aziz suggested we stop in a small tourist resort, with just a few bungalows, which was also owned by Ténéré Voyages.”

Mariani took a couple of days to recover. By February 2, she felt well enough to go on a small excursion. “We had a great day,” she recalls. “The light, the air, the scenery, everything was perfect. I was happy, happy to be well again, happy to be in my beloved Sahara.”

Mariani and Aziz drove back to the resort at sunset. “I got out of the car and suddenly, while we were walking towards the bungalows, Aziz saw two black SUVs fast approaching. Thinking that they were robbers or smugglers, he told me ‘go, go, they should not see you,’ and I rushed to the bungalow, but they had already seen me. As I learned later on, they had spotted me with binoculars; they were on the lookout for foreigners. I was not veiled because there was nobody around. We were in the middle of the desert and the hotel was empty, so I did not think to disguise myself. But they saw me and they knew I was a Western tourist,” remembers Mariani.

The men quickly surrounded the middle-aged woman, Aziz, and the hotel concierge. “For a long time they kept asking, ‘Where are the other tourists? Where is your husband?’ They could not believe that I was alone,” says Mariani. “They also spoke in English because they thought I was English. Twenty days earlier, in the same resort, there had been a large group of English tourists for the New Year’s holidays.”

Frustrated, the men, who clearly had expected to find a large number of Westerners, grabbed Mariani and pushed her into the back of one of the SUVs. A couple of them forced the concierge and the guide to follow in Aziz’s car. “When they locked me in the SUV, we all understood that they were not robbers or smugglers, but kidnappers. I felt hopeless, my heart sunk and I gasped for air,” says Mariani. “Later on, when I asked them ‘Who are you?’ they looked at me and proudly said, ‘We are al Qaeda.’”

As night fell, Mariani found herself alone in the back of a truck being driven across the desert by fourteen members of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. However, seeing the lights of Aziz’s car behind her was comforting. “Aziz was my friend. I was sure that he would protect me,” she admitted. But about five hours into the journey, her kidnappers decided to let the guide and the concierge go because their car was not as fast on the desert trails as their SUVs. “They broke the lights of Aziz’s car so that he would not be able to travel home until daybreak, and then we left,” remembers Mariani.

The kidnappers were professionals. They knew that they had to move away from the site of the abduction as quickly as possible. After all, they were not interested in kidnapping two Algerians. It was foreigners they wanted. As the kidnappers drove into the night leaving Aziz and the concierge stranded in the desert, Maria Sandra Mariani realized that she was totally alone.

Sinking into the back of the truck, listening to the sound of her heart racing, the middle-aged Italian woman did not know that, due to a surreal string of events, her terrifying ordeal was linked to a controversial piece of US legislation enacted by the Bush administration a decade earlier: the Patriot Act.

A JOINT VENTURE IN CRIME

The Patriot Act was introduced in the United States in October 2001, just a month after 9/11. The Act diminished the civil rights of Americans, increased government surveillance, and established a set of new financial and banking rules in order to disrupt the international flow of criminal proceeds and money laundering in US dollars, forcing the Colombian drug cartel to find alternative cocaine smuggling routes to Europe and alternative ways to launder their ill-gotten gains. The chosen route was through West Africa and across the Sahel. Mariani’s kidnappers, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), had tapped into this new business early on and branched off first into kidnapping foreigners and later into trafficking migrants. To understand this surreal chain of events that turned jihadists into drug smugglers, kidnappers, and human traffickers, a sort of freak-terronomics, one needs to retrace the money trail to its source: the Colombian cartel in the aftermath of 9/11.

Until the attack on the Twin Towers, the bulk of global drug profits was laundered in the United States in US dollars.⁴ Because 80 percent of these revenues were in cash—in the form of US dollars—money had to be transported physically to the US. The main entry point was through offshore facilities and shell banks located in the West Indies. The Patriot Act made this process much more difficult, if not impossible. For example, US banks and US-registered banks could no longer do business with offshore banks, such as those located in the Caribbean. In addition, the new legislation gave US monetary authorities the right to monitor dollar transactions across the world. Hence, it became a criminal offence for US banks and US-registered foreign banks to not alert the US monetary authorities of suspicious transactions in dollars anywhere in the world.

It is easy to understand why the Patriot Act was a major blow to the Colombian drug cartel. However, the key problem was not so much how to launder the dirty profits produced by the sale of cocaine inside the United States, but how to do it in US dollars anywhere else in the world and how to transfer the profits from one country to another without alerting the US monetary authorities.

The solution to this problem came from an Italian immigrant to Colombia, Salvatore Mancuso. As head of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the Colombian paramilitary terrorist organization, Mancuso brokered a deal between the cocaine cartel and the Calabrian organized crime the N’drangheta, which turned the newly born euro into the global monetary currency of drug profits. The N’drangheta offered a full-service operation: handling the sale of cocaine in Europe and laundering drug profits in the European and Asian markets.

The absence in Europe of legislation analogous to the Patriot Act made it easy for this unusual joint venture in crime to succeed. “Drug profits generated in Spain became real estate investment earnings in Belgium,” says a Europol source. “From there they could quickly be transferred in euros to Bogotá without any screening.”⁵

After 9/11, Maria Sandra Mariani’s Italy became a key European transshipment hub and money laundering hot spot for the cocaine trade. Data from the Italian law enforcement agency Guardia di Finanza, for example, shows that from 2001 to 2004, money laundering in Italy increased by 70 percent.⁶ Hence, with the new millennium came the advent of a veritable European Golden Age of money laundering thanks to the Patriot Act and to the N’drangheta’s clever strategies to circumvent it. However, shipping cocaine from Colombia directly to Europe proved much more problematic than washing dirty profits clean in the Old Continent, as shown by the success of “Operation Decollo.”

FROM THE GOLD COAST TO THE COKE COAST

In the fall of 2003, the Italian Guardia di Finanza made a major breakthrough with a three-year sting operation code-named Decollo (“Take-off”). Indeed, its success was due to a stroke of luck in the shape of an informer—a rare occurrence when dealing with the N’drangheta. The informer had revealed that a large shipment of cocaine was due to arrive in a cargo of Colombian marble at the Port of Gioia Tauro, Calabria, deep in the territory controlled by the N’drangheta.

Hidden inside the blocks of marble the finanzieri found 5,500 hermetically sealed bags of cocaine, each weighing one kilogram. From the captain’s documentation, it emerged that Miguel Diez, a fake import-export company set up by the Colombian drug cartel, had chartered the ship. The shipping company, the Danish Maersk Line, had no idea of the true nature of the cargo; neither did the crew nor the captain.

What happened that day was exceptional. For each illegal cargo discovered, hundreds, if not thousands, of shipments go unchecked.⁷ Without an informer it would have been impossible to locate the cocaine cargo. Nonetheless, the bust exposed the weakness of relying on direct shipment to Europe in a post-9/11 environment. Heightened security measures in Europe after 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London confirmed the need for alternative routes and new transshipment countries to get cocaine from Latin America to Europe. Venezuela and West Africa proved ideal.⁸

Since the mid-1990s, the Colombian drug cartel had worked to establish good relationships with politicians in neighboring Venezuela, showering them with money, an investment that proved very wise. Already after his election in 1998, Hugo Chávez had offered sanctuary to armed and criminal groups engaged in the Colombian cocaine trade. After 2001, he even encouraged them to move their coca plantations across the border.⁹ So, when at the end of 2001 the cartel thought to use Venezuela as a key transshipment point to smuggle cocaine to Europe via West Africa, it found strong support and an established infrastructure.

As its African transshipment hub, the cartel choose Guinea-Bissau, part of what used to be known as the Gold Coast, that infamous stretch of West Africa where slaves had been shipped to the New World. Daniel Ruiz, who in 2006, as the UN representative in Guinea-Bissau, denounced the nation’s rise in cocaine trafficking, noted that the country’s features made illegal shipments especially difficult to detect. “Guinea-Bissau was a good geographical choice for a transshipment point. It is flat, with an archipelago of eighty islands, all covered by a thick jungle and with easy access by sea. It was equipped with twenty-seven airstrips constructed by the Portuguese during their colonial wars, ideal for small planes flying from Venezuela across the Atlantic with their cocaine cargoes. Finally, Guinea-Bissau used to be an important fishing hub. Hence, its ports had huge empty warehouses where the cartel could store the cocaine.”¹⁰

The business model that the cartel put in place was both sophisticated and linear. “There were always two lines of shipment: one small using ‘mules’—Africans who swallow small quantities of cocaine and travel by plane—these shipments generated cash for the corrupt local politicians and police. Then there was the big one: shipments of tons of cocaine hidden in containers, in cargoes of commodities all sailing towards Europe,” says Ruiz.

However, when the cartel landed in Guinea-Bissau they found another, unexpected avenue to smuggle large quantities of cocaine, which proved very efficient and successful: overland, across the old trans-Sahara smuggling routes, hiding the cocaine inside trucks and SUVs. These were the same sandy trails that, years later, Maria Sandra Mariani’s kidnappers would use to reach and abduct her.

“I knew that in the Sahara desert there was a lot of smuggling. Sometimes Aziz would point out to me empty containers in the sand and tell me, ‘See this? It is from the smugglers, they must have stopped here.’ They smuggled everything: oil, cigarettes, hashish, everything that was in demand,” said Mariani. They also smuggled something else that people like Mariani did not know: cocaine.

According to security sources, “The full extent of the growing links between jihadists and Latin American cartels became evident when military officials located a burned Boeing 727 in the middle of the desert in Mali in 2009. The plane had been loaded with cocaine and other contraband in Venezuela, flown across the Atlantic, crash landed in the desert, and burned to eliminate the evidence.”¹¹ That same year, just two years before Mariani was kidnapped and brought to Mali, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that every year between fifty and sixty tons of cocaine reach Europe via West Africa, smuggled across the trans-Sahara routes, and account for about 13 percent of the total European trade. Drugs destined for Europe arrived in West Africa from Colombia, by far the most important among Latin American states in this sector, but also from Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela and Brazil.¹²

Right from the beginning, between 2002 and 2003, it was easy for the vast network of African smugglers—who already controlled the trans-Sahara contraband routes of the Sahel linking West Africa to the Mediterranean shores—to tap into the new business that the Colombian cartel had brought to West Africa. The smugglers were predominantly from Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, and Morocco, and among them there were several groups of jihadists. They headquartered in Gao, a town that sits on the Niger River in northeast Mali. Gao soon became one of the main transit points in the cocaine trade with Europe. From Gao, the caravan of drugs headed north, across the Sahara desert, primarily to the Mediterranean shores of Libya. In February 2011, Maria Sandra Mariani travelled with her kidnappers in exactly the opposite direction.

The cocaine business was very profitable and further revived the old smuggling routes, boosting the local economies of the Sahel at a time of great economic difficulty. Yet while these activities kept local businesses afloat, they further destabilized a region that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, had become politically unmoored. Guinea-Bissau was especially vulnerable. “The third poorest country in the world, with a 60 percent illiteracy rate and almost no supply of electricity, Guinea-Bissau had become one of the many casualties of the dismantling of the Soviet Bloc. In 1998, after its Marxist government had collapsed, the country was plunged into a civil war. Against this background it was easy for the Colombian cartel to buy the political elite, the police force, and to decide the outcome of the 2005 elections,” explained Dani...