Gangs (45 page)

According to Barry, the new gangs have brought a higher level of sophistication to the smuggling industry: ‘What a lot of the bigger gangs are doing now is bringing people in with loads that naturally emit carbon dioxide to fool the machines that they use to detect human breath. Cut flowers and potted plants are two that I’ve heard of. It’s not perfect, though, and they’ve had to reduce the number of people on each trip. If you have sixty people in the back of a lorry there’s no way you can get away with it. Now they’re lucky if they put more than ten people through at a time. They make them sit in boxes with carbon paper stuck to the inside so they can’t be seen by X-ray machines.’

Barry is far from being the only Briton involved. Drawn by the large and seemingly easy profits, small gangs of British Snakeheads are setting up in business and often going out of their way to find clients. In August 2003 two Britons were arrested in Romania after trying to find clients who wanted to pay thousands of pounds to be smuggled all the way to Britain.

Little wonder, then, that by the end of 2003 ferry operators were warning that the number of asylum-seekers trying to reach the UK was once again on the rise, doubling during the course of the year.

Barry heads off towards the EastEnders cash and carry and I decide to make my way to Brussels.

I am on the trail of a man called Mhill Sokoli, a fearsome Albanian gangster now behind bars for smuggling more than twelve thousand of his countrymen into the UK in the space of just two years. I meet up with his Belgian prosecutor.

‘Every night we watched, they tried to bring at least twenty people across the Channel hidden on lorries aboard ferries,’ says Anne-Marie De Hondt. ‘It was brilliantly run, with a sliding scale of tariffs. The top rate – two thousand one hundred and fifty pounds – was for a guaranteed successful passage on a lorry with a bribed driver. There were lower fees for clients who took their chance by scrambling aboard parked lorries on motorway laybys near Zee-brugge while the driver snatched some sleep.

‘Clients were enticed with the promise that Britain was the “promised land” and that it was easy to find well-paid work in London. Sokoli ran his gang with military precision. Each member had a specific task – some were drivers, others ran safe-houses while others were in charge of meeting and greeting the new arrivals. Then, every morning, the gang’s “bookkeeper” made a call to a mobile-phone number in Britain belonging to yet another member of the gang in order to check how many had made it through Dover.’

Belgian police spent months on the trail of Sokoli and his twenty-four-strong gang, following their trail from tiny Albanian villages to Italy, then to Zeebrugge and across the Channel. The gang not only provided transport for those seeking it but actively recruited people by infiltrating the refugee centres to drum up more business. Sokoli was estimated to have made £6 million, which he invested in blocks of flats and businesses in his home area of northern Albania. But he never flaunted his wealth in Belgium, living in a small flat and planning his operations from back-street cafés.

‘Sokoli’s case was the biggest of its kind so far,’ says De Hondt. ‘But we know there are other big fish still active.’

I find this out for myself when I head off to the district where Sokoli used to live. In the modest apartment block on the rue Emile Feron I find few people willing to talk openly. One neighbour tells me: ‘He kept himself to himself. He was quiet. It was like he had a regular job. He would leave in the morning and come back in the early evening. There was nothing about him that suggested he had money. We were shocked when we found out the truth.’

It’s the same story in the Wittamer tea room where Sokoli would often while away the time. Staff remember him as a quiet customer but not one who drew any attention to himself. ‘He was a nice man,’ says a young girl, behind the bar. ‘He was always reading, always going through the paper. I simply thought he was a businessman who didn’t like to spend too much time in the office.’

But while catching Sokoli was a real coup for the police, those who work to try to combat the gangs remain sceptical about the impact this will have on the trade. ‘Every time someone is caught, the others look at the mistakes they made,’ a Belgian police officer confides to me. ‘The gangs are like a herd of animals and the police are like the big cats. They kill off the sick, weak ones and leave only the strongest.

‘The gangs are now more sophisticated. They have worked hard to establish contacts with the legal profession and law enforcement. Thanks to the vast amounts of money they make, they are able to offer huge bribes to border guards, police and Customs officers in order to let people through.’

Some gangs get homeless people or others to apply for passports, then pass them on. That way they get genuine documents that can be altered. A common method is to obtain a student visa by signing up for a course. In some cases, the courses are genuine, but the student does not attend, sometimes with the complicity of the college. Other gangs go further and set up entirely bogus colleges expressly to provide migrants with the documentation to obtain a visa.

A lot of the gangs are taking advantage of low-cost airlines and the fact that they operate from smaller airports with less sophisticated security, and staff who often have little time to check documents prior to boarding. They will use false documents to embark on the flights, then pass their papers to the facilitator for recycling.

Such sophistication is not the sole province of the Albanians, though it has almost certainly been copied from them. In September 2003 Sarwan Deo was jailed for seven years after being found guilty of running a gang responsible for bringing more than six thousand people into the UK. Deo doctored passports that had been stolen and replaced the photographs with those of the illegal immigrants. Each immigrant was charged around eight thousand pounds for the journey from the Punjab to the UK and Deo’s gang is believed to have earned more than £50 million from the scheme.

Deo, a forty-two-year-old father of four, bribed Indian diplomats and African immigration officials to provide his clients with a complete entry service. It included everything from documentation and rudimentary English lessons to advice on what clothing to wear and accommodation in a succession of safe-houses
en route.
For those who were caught there was free legal representation, and for those who were deported a second attempt to enter the UK was provided at no extra cost.

The numbers entering the UK illegally are now so large that traditional areas where they could mix in and vanish into the black market are fast becoming saturated. New destinations are being found, sometimes in the most unlikely locations.

When a small three-bedroom house on the Fairstead Estate in west Norfolk burst into flames in the early hours on a Tuesday morning in June 2003, firemen were shocked to discover eighteen Chinese workers sleeping there. All escaped alive. In the weeks before the fire the local council had received thirty-one complaints about overcrowded houses and flats, some containing as many as forty people.

It has since emerged that at least two thousand Chinese workers moved into the King’s Lynn area during 2003, most working in food-processing or farming, often for as little as two pounds per hour. They hang about King’s Lynn bus station in groups, smoking and talking among themselves. If not there or working twelve-hour shifts in the Fens, they can invariably be seen at any of the cut-price supermarkets in the town.

There are also growing numbers from Portugal, Eastern Europe and Albania. PC Tony Lombari, the police minority liaison officer for West Norfolk, said the plentiful supply of land-based or food-processing work makes the area all the more appealing. ‘Some arrive here with nothing more than a phone number on a piece of paper that they’ve carried from home. They will be met by whoever and set up in a home and that’s where it starts to get cloudy. Some come legitimately and some are illegal, but once they are here they can move around and it’s also very difficult to return them without the proper documentation.’

Landlords have been quick to cash in on the boom. They charge the migrants up to forty pounds per person per week. By packing in as many people as possible, properties that would normally rent for perhaps £500 a month can generate almost ten times as much income.

Work is provided by local ‘gangmasters’, who employ people on a day-to-day basis for cash in hand, regardless of their immigration status. In King’s Lynn, dozens of minibuses arrive at the Fairstead Estate each morning to collect hundreds of workers.

Some of the workers are legal, others are illegal and in the middle are those who are claiming asylum. While their claims are being processed they get accommodation but they are not allowed to work, and may have to spend up to six months without any income. It means they are virtually forced to go into the underworld.

Luckily for them the people-smuggling industry is directly linked to an increasingly lucrative black market in illegal workers. Some industries – most notably agriculture and food-processing – have a reputation for turning a blind eye in exchange for being able to pay lower salaries and flout health and safety regulations. In February 2004 gangmasters were blamed for the deaths of nineteen Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned after being caught in fast-moving tides at Morecambe Bay in Lancashire. Locals spoke of hundreds of illegal Chinese workers being moved into the area in the weeks before the tragedy to take advantage of rising cockle prices. The desire to maximise profits and collect the shellfish without the proper permits had led to the Chinese being told to work at dead of night when the incoming tides and stretches of quicksand could not be seen. It later emerged that some of the dead workers were being paid as little as a pound for a full nine-hour shift of backbreaking labour.

Although some of the new arrivals have work lined up or a good idea of the kind of employment they are likely to find, others find themselves forced into virtual slavery. And for increasing numbers of young women brought to this country in search of a better life, the work turns out to be anything but what they expected.

 

When Mei first arrived in Britain from Thailand on a six-month student visa, she could not speak a word of English. Now, just six weeks later and without attending a single lesson, she has picked up several key phrases – ‘massage’, ‘blow job’, ‘condom’ – and she can count up to fifty in five-pound increments.

Each morning she reports for work at a small sauna in Glasgow’s Charing Cross, where she ‘services’ up to twenty clients a day, charging them fifty pounds for full sexual intercourse. Of this, she hands over forty-five to the sauna’s boss to cover her rent, security and contraceptive pills. Any money left over goes towards repayment of the £17,000 debt she owes the Triad gang who arranged her passage. Mei is just one of hundreds of foreign women being trafficked into Britain by major criminal gangs – including the Triads and the Russian Mafia – to work in the UK sex trade.

I learn of her plight not from Mei herself – her English is not good enough and, following a series of exposes by television and print journalists, Mei has been warned by her bosses to report anyone who arrives at the sauna, declines anything more intimate than a massage and proceeds to interview her about her background.

Instead I speak to Sandra, a girl who works in the same sauna to whom I am assigned when I enter. Sandra is short and dyed-blonde. After I have handed over my fee she gives me a small towel and directs me to the shower, then asks if I prefer talc or baby oil for my massage. We walk up a single flight of stairs to a small booth on the top floor, containing a single bed and a small television screen showing pornographic movies on an endless loop.

Sandra pulls off her tight-fitting T-shirt to reveal her naked breasts. She leaves her short skirt in place as she kneels on the edge of the bed and nods towards it, inviting me to join her. Keeping my towel strategically placed, I lie down on my front and immediately feel her oiled hands working up and down my back. Being careful not to sound too much like I’m interviewing her I begin to ask about her life.

She tells me she has been working in brothels for the past five years, since she was nineteen, that she has a young daughter and that she lives with her boyfriend, who is fully aware of what she does but somehow doesn’t mind. ‘It’s weird. In many ways it’s great to have someone to help look after my little girl and to be there, but then at the same time you think if someone really cares for you they wouldn’t want you to be doing this,’ she says sadly.

We begin talking about the morality of the world’s oldest profession and before I know it, before I’ve even had a chance to turn over, my fifteen minutes are up. I tell Sandra how much I’ve enjoyed chatting to her and ask if it is possible to extend it – not so that we can have sex but simply to continue talking.

She reaches for an intercom by the door and buzzes down to Reception, informing them of what is going on. ‘I have to do that,’ she tells me, returning to the bed and slipping her T-shirt on as I scramble to put on my boxer shorts without dropping the towel. ‘Otherwise, if I don’t come out on time, they’d think you’d attacked me and come up here with the knives.’

We talk for another fifteen minutes and I tell her – honestly – that I find her really interesting. I wonder if it would be possible to meet her away from the brothel for a drink.

Sandra eyes me suspiciously. She explains that she gets this kind of offer at least a dozen times a day. ‘My theory is that the ultimate fantasy for any bloke is to sleep with a prostitute and not have to pay for it. I think they like the idea of being so good in bed that the girl just says, “Nah, mate, you keep the money, I really enjoyed that.”’ But then she gives me her mobile-phone number anyway.

The following morning I call and explain the truth – that I am a writer looking to expose the trade in sex slaves. There is a pause, then Sandra agrees to meet me. She says that it is about time someone knew the truth of what is going on and that many of the women are being treated in the most appalling way.