Human Trafficking: From Sole Proprietor to Big Industry

The human trafficking business in Albania has graduated into an industry.

What used to be a collection of independent operators with their boats, or a pimp with a couple of enslaved young girls, has now risen to the level of a sophisticated organized crime enterprise, which reaches deep into Albania society and the government.

When they were independent, traffickers and pimps were not above threatening police officers or beating up a terrified teenage girl to maintain business.

But in addition, now they are systematically intimidating the few organizations that are trying to give the young women returned from Italy a chance at a new life.

"I have been offered five million lire each if I hand over the two girls who live here," said the benefactor of a secret Vlora shelter.

She asked that she not be identified because the same traffickers who offered her money also threatened her life when she did not accept the deal.

The trafficking industry, which some government officials say has been diminishing since 1997, and local officials and NGOs working with returnees say is actually increasing, has spread into every part of daily life in coastal towns such as Vlora, Fier and Durres. Hotel owners, boat owners, fuel suppliers and even the relatives of traffickers are involved in a network that forms the basis of the local economies.

The result is that returnees, who faced a life of terror in Italy, come home to a stillborn second chance at a normal life, according to a two-week investigation by a team of eight Albanian journalists organized by the Media Diversity Institute in London, and the Albanian Media Institute in Tirana.

With few options, the returnees will likely land back in the hands of their pimps, who have a sophisticated system ready and able to immediately put them on yet another fast boat back to Italy, according to local police, NGOs and boat owners themselves.

In 2001, Albanian police intercepted or accepted the return of 372 allegedly trafficked women (including 52 from other countries), a Ministry of Public Order spokesperson in Tirana told the investigative team journalists. But a report on trafficking by the Save the Children non-governmental agency (NGO) last year warned that the ministry's information is often unreliable. Even the ministry has called their own data "incomplete."

The NGO said they were told in February 2001 that 348 Albanian females had been trafficked, presumably in the year 2000. But the ministry was unclear on what period of time the statistic covered or even if it represented completed or still to be investigated cases.

Save the Children concludes that the lack of data is further proof the Albanian government is still in denial of the scope of the trafficking problem. But it is clear from both NGOs and local police authorities, which deal directly with the issue, that the human tide crossing the Adriatic is substantially larger than any published data.

In the last four years the Italian Guardia di Financa, which operates patrol boats on the coast in cooperation with the Albanian Border Police, said it has turned back 40,000 clandestine immigrants, including drug and gun smugglers, families looking for new lives and young girls sold into the sex trade.

But a Guardia di Financa patrol boat crew in Durres told the investigative team that their success is only relative to the deluge of traffic along the southern Albanian coast.

"We are not stopping that many but we are doing our best," admitted Francesco Ricco, the boat's 42 year-old chief engineer, who is from Sicily.

The crew's 12-meter boat has a small cabin and is powered by twin diesel engines with 1500 horsepower each. The boat can reach a top speed of 54 knots in pursuit. But the traffickers' lighter open speedboats, powered by twin outboard engines, and a top speed of 60 knots are faster than the Guardia.

But they don't have radar, Ricco said with a smile.

The Guardia uses onboard radar and fixes from the Sazan Island radar installation to maneuver stealthily in front of the speedboats and block their progress. Most of the speedboats are simply turned back by this tactic. Others are boarded. If there is any resistance, the Italian boat has two rear deck guns with large caliber automatic weapons.

Even if the speedboats are successful in evading them the crew can have more patrol boats and four helicopters out of Bari to meet them as soon as the speedboat gets into Italian waters.

The combined effort means that 70 percent of the speedboats that set out for Italy are turned back or boarded, said 37 year-old Renato Orlandi, the Guardia boat captain.

But that still means that a substantial number of trafficked women make it to Italy, the crew admits.

The boat owners in Vlora have met the Italian threat to their business by organizing themselves into cartels.

"We no longer own just one speedboat like it was in the early '90s," a boat owner told one of the investigative team's reporters who posed as a tourist in a Vlora waterfront bar. "Then police would seize your boat and you were out of the game."

The cartels, formed by groups of "friends," according to the boat owner, share the costs of boat ownership and the profits on the cross-Adriatic trips. The escalation of organization is reminiscent of the historical development of organized crime in Italy or the U.S.

"Now, if the police manage to seize one boat, we can still continue our activity and replace the seized speedboat quickly," the young owner from Vlora said.

During the day the boats are hidden in coves along the mainland or caves accessible by water on Sazan Island, not far from the Guardia patrol boat base there, the boat owner said. They will come out at night for the trip to Italy only when the sea becomes rough. Both sides know that with a calm sea the traffickers' speedboats would be no match for the Italians' radar.

The boat cartels do not consider even the combined Italian and Albanian law enforcement effort a serious threat to their business.

When local Vlora police in a show of force confiscated dozens of boats in 1998, the boat owners simply abducted the Vlora police chief. The chief had to win his freedom by releasing the boats.

"Our speedboats are faster than the Italians and the pathetic boats owned by Albanian police are not any threat at all," the boat owner boasts.

In November last year the government rolled out it's latest threat to traffickers, and a sign to the international community that it means to get serious about the trafficking war. The government invited Greece, Italy and Germany to participate in an international trafficking center to be located at former communist dictator Enver Hoxha's villa hanging on a cliff overlooking the port of Vlora.

The center will create a central international database of information on traffickers of contraband and human beings, and maintain a central radar for the southern Adriatic, according to a Florian Serjani, spokesman for the Public Order Ministry.

But a visit to the villa last week by members of the investigative team found the concrete villa boarded up and the iron gates padlocked. A Public Order Ministry source, who asked not to be identified, told the journalists' team that so far the center had only received $400,000 in funding from the international partners, and was still waiting for radar from Germany and new boats from Italy.

While much of the government effort against trafficking seems to be on hold for one reason or another, for the boat owner cartels it is full speed ahead for their business.

They see trafficking as one of the only viable industries left in a devastated economy. And the traffickers, and the extended community that live off their industry, are not apologizing, no matter how many of Albania's daughters have to pay for it with lives of misery.

"In the end, this is a business that feeds and supports many people, and not only from Vlora," the boat owner said. "A lot of people base their income on what we do."

The drug dealers, illegal emigrants and even the young prostitutes are part of the business, the boat owner said. But the young girls are usually deceived into the business by promises of marriage, he added. Recently, the parents and other relatives of the cartel owners joined the business and are helping to find the young girls.

Then there are the people who transport the girls to Vlora, he said. Still others are hired to harbor the girls while they wait for the boats, never usually more than a couple of days.

When the boat trip is arranged there are usually two others to accompany the girls in Italy and they are paid too.

"You are asking too many questions," the boat owner finally told the team's undercover reporter. "Right now, I can't remember any of the others who also get fat from the sale of these girls."

The boat owner continued to get angrier as he was questioned about the morality of Vlora's only real industry.

"Why shouldn't we work in this business?" he said raising his voice. "This job feeds many people while the government is not doing anything. What has the government done for this town, tell me?"