Gangs (43 page)

‘There is a woman there. She is the one who is in charge of everything. She is the one who gave me the job. Everyone is scared of her. I was glad to get away. The Chinese community is very closed in the Netherlands so she could do a lot of things without a lot of people in Dutch society knowing about it.’

A month later, Lin was finally allowed to travel to Britain, loaded on board a lorry with around thirty others for the crossing to the UK. ‘We had no papers – they took them all from us – but they told us that if we were stopped we should tell them we wanted to claim asylum. We had to say either that we were Christians and that we were being persecuted for wanting to practise our religion or that we had parents who had broken the rule about having only one child and we were fleeing for our lives.’

But they were not discovered and Lin was let out of the lorry at a quiet layby on the outskirts of Ashford. Brought in by the same organisation that subsequently smuggled in the Dover sixty, he travelled to London soon after arriving and met none other than Jenny Guo at London’s Victoria station: ‘There were several other Chinese – four or five, all male,’ he explains. ‘I did not know if she was a solicitor. She asked us to wait, then there was a foreign woman who took us to apply for asylum. She took us to collect the forms they said we needed to fill in to be able to stay in Britain. I took the form but I did not understand it so I called Guo. She met me and filled in the form for me. All I did was sign it.’

Since then Lin has been working in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. The hours are long, he tells me, and the work is hard, but he is grateful to be in England and enjoys it much more than the time he spent in Holland.

As our conversation draws to a close, I ask if he will give me the name of the woman in Rotterdam who was in charge of everything.

Lin looks at his translator, perhaps wondering if he can trust her. Then he glances about the room to ensure no one is listening to our conversation. Then he leans towards me, his mouth close to my right ear and hisses a single word: ‘Ping.’

Barely five feet tall and slightly built, Jing Ping Chen has mastered the art of looking frail and demure. It is a talent that has served her well: few who have met her can believe that she is capable of harsh language, let alone acts of violence.

The thirty-seven-year-old, better known as Sister Ping, is one of the most ruthless gang leaders in Europe. Her origins are obscure, but it seems she was herself smuggled to Holland from Fukien in south-east China in the mid-1980s. In six short years, she made millions by trafficking human beings from her native China into the UK.

Using a combination of violence and intimidation, Sister Ping swept aside all her rivals and cornered the people-smuggling market between Holland and Britain soon after arriving in Rotterdam in 1997. Through her connections to the Triads – her boyfriend is the head of the Triad gang 14K in Rotterdam – she was able to hire muscle to do her dirty work whenever necessary. In one case a man was beaten so badly he was left with punctured intestines. In another Lam Chee Ming, with whom she had fallen out, was brutally assaulted. Five men attacked him while he was eating dinner, beating him with hammers, an axe and a pistol. Sister Ping directed the assault, listening in on her mobile phone. Her instruction was to place the barrel of the pistol in his mouth, right to the back of his throat and ‘rattle it around with vigour’. Eyewitnesses later told police they would never be able to forget the sound of Lam’s teeth breaking. He was unable to eat solid food for weeks.

When a rival mobster tried to muscle in on Sister Ping’s territory, she made a big show of inviting him to the Orient restaurant in Rotterdam’s Chinatown, the headquarters of her operation, ostensibly to discuss ways of dividing the territory between them. As soon as he was inside, he was dragged up to the first floor, beaten with a hammer, then shot in both legs.

According to police, Ping’s smuggling operation was a well-oiled machine. With more than a dozen people on the payroll, a fleet of eight cars, several other vehicles and at least eight safe-houses, the overheads alone were £35,000 per month.

Ping’s earnings are unknown, but in one recorded telephone conversation a key member of her organisation was heard boasting that he had earned £300,000 in two months. The best estimates suggest that she had accumulated at least £15 million from her criminal activities.

Long before Lin had given me her name, Dutch police had already picked up Sister Ping’s trail. Although Turkish gangster Gurbel Ozcan seemed to be the head of the smuggling operation, police had long suspected that he had been taking orders from above. He refused to name anyone when he was arrested following the Dover tragedy, but his ex-girlfriend later called the authorities and pointed them in Ping’s direction, telling them, ‘You must look for the woman. She is the Snakehead. She is the highest in Holland. She has contacts in China who fix things. She is very dangerous.’

Within hours of the deaths at Dover, Ping had gone into hiding but, convinced she was above the law, she soon went back to work. ‘The Dover transport was a financial setback that had to be recuperated,’ noted a report by the Dutch prosecutors’ office. ‘This organisation wasn’t put off by the police or the Chinese deaths. After the incident, the gang simply went back to business as usual.

‘Up to five hundred people per week went from France to England; the number depended on how many lorries were available. Following Dover there was a maximum of thirty people per vehicle.’

She was arrested following a massive police operation. In August 2003 a Dutch court sentenced Sister Ping to three years in jail and fined her £8000 for offences related to human-trafficking. Despite evidence that her gang was involved, Ping was cleared of any personal involvement in the Dover tragedy.

But despite Ping’s conviction, the trade in human cargo shows no sign of slowing down.

As big and as slick as her operation was, it pales alongside those who have stepped in to take the mantle. Whereas once the Chinese Snakeheads reigned supreme over the human-trafficking business, they now face stiff competition from a gang said to be the most ruthless and dangerous criminal organisation in the world.

And this time I will do more than simply hear about their operation: I plan to see it with my own eyes.

 

It is only minutes before I am offered a place.

I’m sitting in the corner of a tiny café just off the Place d’Armes in the centre of Calais, unwashed, unshaven and wearing a shabby jacket I should have thrown out years ago. There’s a mug of coffee cupped between my hands and I’m staring into it intently between sips, doing my best to look like someone desperate for a new life in the Promised Land.

A short, stocky man dressed all in black with wavy dark hair and a cigarette hanging from his lips suddenly appears and sits down beside me. I feel his eyes boring into the side of my head and I’m so intimidated it takes me a second or two to work up the courage to meet his gaze. He smiles with tobacco-stained teeth and points a gnarled knuckle northwards, the direction of the Channel.
‘Vous allez en Angleterre?’

I shake my head as if I don’t understand. I’ve never been much good at fake foreign accents and the one I’ve spent most of the morning practising is barely believable in pidgin English, let alone French.

The man cocks his head to one side and furrows his brow as he thinks about what language to try next. Eventually he speaks: ‘England, you want to go to England?’ The accent is strong and East European. I nod enthusiastically.

‘You can pay?’

‘How much?’ I ask.

He shrugs. ‘Depends. To ride on truck . . .’ He shrugs again, then holds up his right hand and extends all five fingers.

‘Dollars?’

He shakes his head. ‘Euros.’

I gesticulate and roll my eyes as if I’m searching for the right words. ‘Er . . . how?’

‘You give me the money. I take you to truck, ten, twenty others, and load you on. Then I put cardboard on top of you so you look like a box. In a cage. No move. You have a bottle of water and a plastic bag for your shit and maybe some chocolate. Three hours – England.’

I nod slowly. It sounds appalling and instantly makes me think of the fifty-eight dead Chinese at Dover.

The man soon picks up on my lack of enthusiasm. ‘But this way not good. Many police, many guards to check the trucks. They catch you, they beat you, lock you up, then back here and have to pay again to try again. You go to claim asylum?’ I nod once more. ‘Yes. Then better to have guarantee, be able to walk around on boat, not sit in back of dark truck covered in boxes.’

‘How much for guarantee?’

‘More, much more. Maybe one thousand, maybe two, we can fix a good price. Depends. But good price to you and better. With guarantee we give you passport. Your picture inside but different name. You buy ticket, you walk on to boat. Not difficult. No problems. You give passport to man on boat. In England, at Immigration you claim asylum. Is guaranteed, you see? And also we give you a number to call so you can find work. Is good, yes? I was there, London, two years before here.’

‘What kind of work?’

‘Whatever you want. In restaurant, in factory, in hotel. Inside, outside. Whatever you want. Good money. No tax.’

I tell the man I need time to think about it, that I may need to get relatives to send me more money in order to pay. I finish my coffee and make for the door, leaving him to sidle up alongside two Sudanese men sitting on the other side of the room. He barely misses a beat as he launches into his sales pitch once more.

Although I am left surprised by just how blatant the offer is, it was anything but unexpected. According to my source, a little-league bootlegger and white-van driver called Barry, the café is just one of a number of well-known haunts for the ‘agents’ who tout for business among the illegal immigrants on behalf of the smuggling gangs.

Although the agents are wary of being caught by the police and face stiff penalties if they are arrested, they have little choice but to work openly if they are to attract potential clients. Some of the more sophisticated gangs have Internet sites and place advertisements in local newspapers to promote their services under the guise of ‘employment agencies’ and ‘travel consultants’. Others base themselves in cheap hotels and pay scouts to bring customers to their door.

That said, I am only too aware that I am dealing with a group that cares little about human life. In the people-smuggling business there have been numerous cases of paying passengers being thrown overboard so that the boat-owners can escape prosecution.

These agents belong to an organisation that adheres to a culture where the belief persists that you are only a man if you own a gun, a society where blood feuds dating back hundreds of years are still fought out with astonishing brutality, sometimes in the UK. It is an organisation that took on the best that Italian organised crime had to offer. And won. It is an organisation that took on the Turks and the Triads and emerged victorious.

It is an organisation that, according to every police agency in Europe and beyond, represents the greatest threat to law and order to emerge in the last hundred years.

It is the Albanian Mafia.

It wasn’t always that way.

Like every country in the world Albania has always had a criminal element, but for years they were confined to within their own borders by the actions of a government that made it almost as hard for natives to leave the country as it was for outsiders to enter.

Occupied by Italy during the second World War, Albania emerged under the iron rule of Enver Hoxha who decided the nation should turn its back on a wide range of Communist influences. By the end of the 1960s Hoxha’s campaign had included a violent battle to extinguish all religious life in Albania. More than two thousand religious buildings were closed or converted to other uses while religious leaders were imprisoned and executed. When the work was completed, Albania was declared the world’s first atheist country. Foreign doctrine of any kind was banned. Journalists and Americans were forbidden to enter. There were no private cars, no inflation, no priests or mullahs. Albania didn’t even have private taxation.

Caught in a virtual time warp, Hoxha ensured that Albania remained one of the least economically developed and most isolated countries in Europe. In 1985, the year Hoxha died, just three thousand tourists were allowed into the country, all of them in small, strictly controlled groups. By contrast, neighbouring Yugoslavia played host to more than 1.5 million visitors, most of whom had the freedom to roam around at their leisure.

With its harsh mountain landscapes, unforgiving climate and lifestyle that relied far more on physical labour than modern machinery, the men who would go on to form the Albanian Mafia became hardier than most for the same reason that the Russian Mafia rose to the ascendancy in the early 1990s. Macho pride reigned supreme, within a family and within a village. Mass brawls and sometimes brutal murders over issues like loss of face or village pride became commonplace. Law enforcement was at best rudimentary.

Albanians currently form the majority not just in their own country but also in Kosovo, a region heavily disputed between Albania and Serbia (one of the six republics that made up the former Yugoslavia). While the Albanians claim that they are the area’s original inhabitants, the Serbs say that Kosovo lay at the heart of its medieval kingdoms and that during the Middle Ages few, if any, Albanians lived among them. Kosovo had been under the control of Italy and part of Greater Albania during the war years, and in 1974 a new Yugoslav constitution granted Kosovo autonomy (but not independence).

These were the glory years of the Albanian Mafia who, like the Sicilian Mafia, originated as a protection network for the poor. The Albanian networks inherited the same protective instincts. The family and its codes are everything. The Besa, or Oath of Trust, puts deep obligations on every family member. The fledgling Mafia swore to uphold the notion that Kosovo was part of Albania.