Frank Viviano, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, January 7, 2001

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By any standard, the journey of Mohammed Hodrat from Tajikistan to Western Europe is an astonishing testament to international financing, state-of-the-art communications and pinpoint logistics. It is also, European law enforcement authorities say, the signature of an unprecedented organized crime network -- a worldwide archipelago of "mafias," loosely modeled on the Sicilian original, equipped with the latest tools of high technology and linked in powerful underworld alliances that stretch across the Earth.

The chief business interests of the Mafia Archipelago are drugs, arms and, increasingly, a multibillion-dollar traffic in human beings that carried Hodrat and three members of his family to Italy.

On a two-month trip by land and sea that ended with a midnight voyage across the Adriatic Sea in an open boat, the Hodrats passed through Afghanistan, Iran, eastern Turkey and Yugoslavia, crossing several of the world's most dangerous and heavily militarized borders without passports or visas.

Even for a family fleeing a bloody civil war in the ruins of the Soviet empire, the experience was terrifying. "We expected to be killed at any moment, " said Hodrat, who under an assumed name spoke with a Chronicle reporter at a crowded refugee camp in southern Italy.

But at every border, he said, someone was waiting in a minivan, a boat or a truck with a concealed passenger compartment to transport the family to a hiding place until the time came for them to move on to the next border. At no point were they asked for any more money than the $24,000 fee that was paid by a relative in Norway to a Serbian "businessman" before their departure.

Interpol, the international police agency, estimates that 4 million human beings per year are being smuggled across international borders by transnational criminal syndicates: Chinese triads and Italian Mafia clans, and their counterparts from the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Israel, Lebanon, Vietnam, Nigeria, Colombia and elsewhere.

Never in history, say leading law enforcement figures, have such far-flung criminal organizations combined their financial and logistical operations in a single enterprise. The traffic in human beings by this network "is among the most serious and fastest-growing problems in the world," warns Raymond E. Kendall, Interpol's secretary general.

According to the Turin-based United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, human trafficking now earns multinational criminal syndicates up to $7 billion annually. Britain's Immigration and Nationality Directorate believes that the number of immigrants involved exceeds 25 million per year, and that the mafias' take is as high as $30 billion.

On Dec. 15, the Clinton administration released a 120-page report characterizing global organized crime as a full-fledged "national security crisis" for the United States, equivalent to international terrorism.

Yet at present, no one in the world's beleaguered police and legal establishments knows how the Mafia Archipelago's labyrinthine partnerships are formed.

No one knows who monitors its costs, keeps the accounts, supervises itineraries, transport and warehousing -- whether the "goods" are heroin, weapons or desperate human beings -- and sees to it that profits are satisfactorily shared.

No one knows how the network is directed, or from where. "What we do know, because such sophisticated operations would otherwise be impossible, is that there must be a single umbrella organization that oversees illicit trafficking,

with representatives everywhere," says Umberto Santino, a leading expert on the criminal underworld.

Beyond that assumption, says a U.N. criminologist based in Europe, there are only questions.

"It is as though all of us, at international agencies and national police forces alike, are working separately on a 5,000-piece puzzle, but none of us has more than five pieces," the official said.

UNDERGROUND PASSAGE

At its most basic level, the traffic in human beings through the Mafia Archipelago is a gigantic transportation system, arranging passage from the world's poorest or most conflict-ridden corners to the rich nations of Western Europe and North America.

Most of its "clients" disappear into Europe's clandestine economy, spending years trying to pay off travel debts. Others, like the Hodrats, are quickly apprehended by police and languish for years in refugee camps, or are returned penniless to their homelands.

They are the lucky ones. The United Nations estimates that 1 million women and children per year -- some no older than 8 -- are drawn or forced into vast prostitution and sexual exploitation rings after setting out into the Mafia Archipelago.

In 1975, the worldwide flow of migrants was estimated at fewer than 85 million people. Today, it is thought to approach 145 million per year, reflecting an immense increase in the desperation that makes the Mafia Archipelago so lucrative.

"The income gap between the richest and poorest countries was 30-to-1 40 years ago. By 1997, it had increased to 74-to-1," notes Enzo Bianco, minister of the Interior in Italy, Western Europe's principal port of entry for trafficked immigrants. "There is a direct connection between those numbers and the globalization of organized crime."

There is also a direct connection between the massive flow of clandestine immigrants and blatant contradictions in Western immigration policy.

For a quarter of a century, the rich European nations have made legal immigration impossible. Yet these same nations have extremely low birthrates and a growing labor shortage that makes newcomers essential. To maintain its economic standards, according to a recent U.N. report, the European Union needs 1.6 million workers per year more than it produces through natural population growth.

The criminal organizations that govern the Mafia Archipelago, in that sense,

provide a service to the legitimate economies of the West.

"The European Union needs workers, and the criminal groups deliver them," points out Spartak Poci, Albania's minister of public order. "The absence of a clear policy addressing these population and economic trends is what makes the involvement of criminal actors possible."

As in America, undocumented workers in Europe are commonly employed in the food, textile and construction industries, with many local police departments turning a blind eye to their presence -- and to evidence of labor abuses by unscrupulous employers, according to the International Organization for Migration in Geneva.

In the implicit relationship between the Mafia Archipelago and the legitimate economies of Europe, "it is increasingly difficult to establish who services whom, who learns from whom, and ultimately who corrupts whom," says criminologist Vincenzo Ruggiero of Britain's Middlesex University.

Almost always, it is the immigrants who pay. A 1998 University of London study found that clandestine immigrants are charged from $3,000 to $30,000 each by organized crime groups for transport, depending on the difficulty of the journey and the wealth of the destination country.

Chinese undocumented immigrants in Europe -- an estimated 80,000 are in Paris alone, according to Interpol -- are reportedly forced to work in triad- run sweatshops for up to five years to pay off travel debts.

"For organized crime, the narcotics trade is like investing in high-risk stocks. It offers the prospect of fast money if things work out right," says a U.N. official. "But trafficking in human beings is like investing in bonds. The money can keep coming for years and years, and the risks are much lower."

International agencies believe each immigrant woman or child smuggled into prostitution generates from $120,000 to $150,000 annually for an underworld boss.

Altogether too typical is the story of "V," a 21-year-old Moldovan whose case profile was made available to The Chronicle by the Italian government.

In the summer of 1999, V paid a fee to an "employment agency" in her hometown that promised opportunities for domestic work in Italy. The agency, she now understands, was a front for a multinational network of underworld prostitution bosses.

Along with 20 other women, V was first bused to Romania, then delivered by train to Belgrade, where Serbian racketeers took over and put them on another bus to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro.

Montenegro has no extradition treaty with the West, which makes it a valuable "transshipment hub" in the Mafia Archipelago for contraband of every description.

From Podgorica, the women proceeded on foot over the mountains into Albania.

Exhausted and disoriented, they were divided into groups of two or three, under the supervision of armed gunmen who beat and raped each of them.

Two days later, V was literally sold for $2,000 to a man who traveled with her to Milan and forced her to work as a streetwalker until her detention by Italian police, who returned her to Moldova.

"People have become products" for the transnational crime network, says Interpol's Kendall.

GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

These "products" are shipped through the Mafia Archipelago on carefully designed, systematic routings that highlight the extraordinary level of collaboration among crime groups.

Lithuania is one of the few countries to have conducted a detailed study of the traffic in human beings, based on lengthy debriefings of arrested clandestine immigrants in 1996.

Although Lithuania itself is only a transit country, separated by Poland and Belarus from the nearest major immigrant destination, Germany, 80 percent of the immigrants had already crossed three or four borders before they were arrested. More than 75 percent confirmed that the routes were determined completely by the gangs that organized their passage. Indeed, very few had ever heard of Lithuania before they were detained in it.

They were housed and fed in a series of constantly changing "safe houses," which they were not allowed to leave until it was time to move on, according to the study.

Each of the detainees had on the average used four different means of transportation, a bewildering combination of airplane flights, boat and train voyages, cars and buses, journeys on foot and periods enclosed in truck containers similar to the one in which 58 Chinese immigrants died after crossing the English Channel last year.

On Oct. 20, in a similar tragedy, six Kurds from Iran suffocated near the Italian city of Foggia in a sealed truck with Greek plates, driven by a Bulgarian.

The journeys often begin and end with brokers from the same ethnically defined clans. "We find, for instance, that Chinese immigrants are usually handed over to Chinese criminal groups resident in Italy when they arrive here, " says Piero Luigi Vigna, director the Italian National Anti-Mafia Prosecutors Office in Rome.

Constant intimidation in Western Europe by ethnic gangs from their own native lands tends to reinforce "a wall of silence" surrounding the immigrants themselves, says Interior Minister Bianco. Fearful that their families back home will be targeted if they alert authorities, the vast majority of clandestine immigrants are trapped helplessly in the shadows of illegality.

"We know, and certainly the Italian bosses know, that the Albanians, the Chinese triads and Turkish and Nigerian crime groups operate in Milan, Florence, Turin, Rome and along Italy's eastern coasts and borders," says a top international law enforcement official.

In 1999 alone, more than 17,000 ethnic Albanians, either from Kosovo or Albania itself, were arrested in Italy on criminal charges or placed under investigation for illegal activities. Altogether, 14,000 of the 52,000 inmates of Italy's maximum-security prisons today are foreigners, a third of them convicted of narcotics trafficking.

"But to use American terminology," the official continues, "the various syndicates aren't bumping each other off. On the contrary, they are working very efficiently together, inside and outside of their own respective territories. That is unprecedented and profoundly troubling."

Michael Koutouzis, a former Greek official regarded as a leading expert on the narcotics trade, says, "The borders between criminal clans were even more important than the borders between states in the past."

Today by contrast, Vigna says, "Albanian criminal groups fulfill the functions of a kind of service agency, establishing, for the management of clandestine immigration toward Italy, ties with the Chinese mafia, and with its Turkish and Russian counterparts."

In a rare interview with a trafficker, conducted by a voluntary organization that assists refugees, "it emerged that joint ventures between southern Italian organized crime and groups operating in Albania are frequent, and that such partnerships are imposed by local criminal entrepreneurs who expect to be given a percentage of the profits earned by their Albanian counterparts," says criminologist Ruggiero.

Some criminal syndicates have gone so far as to seal their distant clans in marriage alliances. Josip Loncarcic, 45, the Croatian-born mastermind of human trafficking along the western border of Slovenia, was apprehended Nov. 28 by Slovenian police with his wife, Xue Mei Wang -- granddaughter of a Chinese triad boss deeply involved in the smuggling of Asians to Europe.

DANGEROUS CROSSINGS

The cross-border collaboration is most striking on the long leg, sometimes lasting four months, between the departure of clandestine immigrants from their Asian, African or Eastern European homelands, and their arrival in a destination country. En route, they may pass through a gamut of powerful underworld clans, most notably those of Russia, Albania and Turkey.

At any given moment, according to Interpol, from 200,000 to 300,000 clandestine immigrants are hidden in Moscow, awaiting onward transportation under the auspices of the Russian mafia.

The Moscow hub is just one on a dizzying array of routes through the Mafia Archipelago. Thanks to high-technology communications, its directors are able to shift enormous numbers of clandestine immigrants from one route to another within hours, depending on unexpected political developments or changing conditions at borders.

The next stops, after Moscow, are usually the westernmost nations of the former Soviet Union, most of which require no inbound visas from Russia, en route to the Turkish Black Sea coast.

"In Turkey, illegal traffickers buy old, cheap trucks and ships to transport illegal immigrants so that they can easily abandon their vehicles (and vessels) when they come close to the destination countries," says Hikmet Sami-Turk, Turkey's minister of Justice.

On Nov. 6, 1,200 clandestine travelers, including hundreds of small children, came perilously close to drowning when the leaking Ukrainian ship transporting them from Turkey was abandoned by its crew off the southern Italian coast. Another ship full of undocumented immigrants, this time under the flag of Georgia, broke apart in a storm off the Turkish coast on New Year's Day, killing dozens.

In the past three years, Sami-Turk says, the number of people arrested while attempting to transit his country illegally has more than doubled, and is now running at close to 6,000 per month. But that is a fraction of the numbers who reach the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro or Albania, the primary final jumping off points for the European Union.

The capture last year of Princ Dobroshi, one of the Albanian transit corridor's most infamous "godfathers," dramatizes the global character of the new crime links.

Dobroshi was tracked down by police in Prague, in the Czech Republic, en route to a destination unknown in a BMW with German plates. In his bags, the police found a Croatian machine gun, a shotgun with a Chinese silencer and a Czech dagger. He had been imprisoned six years earl

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