Sea Control - Sea Control 369 - Conceptualizing Ports & Organized Crime with Dr. Anna Sergi

Episode Date: August 7, 2022

Links1. “Italy Seizes 4 Tons of Cocaine Linked to Colombian Gulf Clan,” by Colleen Barry, The Washington Post, June 7, 2022.2. Chasing the Mafia: 'Ndrangheta, Memories and Journeys, by Anna Sergi, Bristol University Press, 2022.

Hey, folks, it's Jared. Walker Mills returns as host today. He's joined by Dr. Anna Sergi to discuss criminality in ports. This episode was edited and produced by David Sahida. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our chapters and contact information on the website at

SimSec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Night. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. Today we're talking with Dr. Anna Sergi, a professor of criminology at the University of Essex.

Anna, welcome aboard. Yes, hi, hello, thanks for having me. Yes, I'm a professor of criminology at Essex. I am originally from Italy, from Calabria, from the south. I studied law and then I went on to do a master in law and criminology and then a sociology PhD. I've been in England for way too long and I work on organized crime mostly mafia, mafia mobility

that's my thing the Calabrian mafia specifically and its movement around the world and while chasing them around the world especially in Australia and Canada and the United States I grew particularly interested in what everyone kept telling me about which is their dominion over the cocaine trade and specifically over certain key ports in europe

so i decided okay you know what let me try and find out how anyone could ever control or dominate anything like the cocaine trade i knew very little about the cocaine trade overall and even less about ports so i built this project and i started it at the end of 2018 it went on throughout the whole pandemic it was funded by the british academy and it was essentially me going around in ports key ports that i chose for a number of reasons we can discuss and eventually leaving aside the mafia connotation just looking overall at organized crime and ports so by putting the accent on the space of the ports rather than just the cocaine trade or the illicit trafficking or any other any specific groups this is the combination this is how they went in my head

and then eventually I learned that ports are you know one of those topics you get into and never leave again because they are so complicated and once you get really you really start getting something it becomes really difficult to stop learning about them because they are very they are fascinating places but more importantly they are very complex so there's always this need of knowing more so that's what i am now trying to figure out next steps in this research and we're really excited to have you on the podcast again before we start i got to give the disclaimer that i'd like to remind the listeners that the opinions presented here are solely our own and should not be taken as representative of any of the institutions we're associated with so anna um you

You know, you know, obviously, but the listeners don't that we met when you were giving a talk on on maritime security and crime and ports at the Columbia Naval Academy here and in Cartagena, Colombia. What are the kind of connections between organized crime and maritime security and ports that you've uncovered in your in your research and been working on? OK, so this is a million dollar question because obviously I'll try and be sort of brief and then you'll tell me where do you want to go deeper? obviously if you start from the obvious part the obvious part ports are gates for illicit trade for a very simple reason they are gates for licit trades and we know that illicit trade moves along the lines of licit trade so of course ports are entry doors but also exit doors and therefore it's not strange to find that most of the organized crime, let's say literature around ports, is indeed about illicit trafficking. In illicit trafficking, usually of narcotics,

so we find, of course, cocaine top of the line because of its cross-country, cross-continent nature. But also we find, you know, other types of illicit trade, anything from wildlife trafficking to arms trafficking so anything that moves on the water so that's the obvious one in order to do that in order to be able to carry out carry on and in legal shipment of anything then organized crime groups need to have a know-how a specific know-how and this specific know-how is where things get interested there are different ways in which as a crime group you can get you can use and exploit uh the port and this could be anything from what we saw in new york city and especially in the on the docks of new york and new jersey harbor we still see that by

the way which is about investing very much on people and investing on people means uh at the and this is all judiciary history infiltrating and controlling the union the international longshoremen association the ila at the it's very local sections because if you control who works in the port in a way that is kind of conducive to your own interest then obviously you exercise what we call governance over the port let's say space and obviously that brings you back a number of advantages so that's quite extreme and i must say that is not that even if it's the most interesting case is not the you know the most likely thing to happen in a port so we saw this in New York we saw this in another I saw this in another port which is Gioia Tauro this used to

happen in Montreal and now less so this used to happen in certain ports including Cartagena in the 90s so we're essentially controlling the port workers even just by offering jobs to those who need it and therefore creating some sort of bond with the gratitude in a way is one of the ways in which you can manage to smuggle things in and out of the port there are usually middle grounds which is uh corruption uh occasional corruption of uh either a port worker or a border agent or fiscal police depending in which port you are who is doing the function that you need i'll explain myself a little bit better in each port you have pretty much the same function everywhere so there is the security people that really look at the ground safety then there are

there is the police whichever police depending on where you are in some cases you have national police that runs let's say checks on the port or you might have a specific type of police which is like the cbp where you are essentially a border force but you also have customs let's say functions and within your custom function you also have some executive policing law enforcement mandate So there are various ways in which customs, borders and police are active in each port. But there will always be one institution that is the one that will open the containers, will search the containers and will essentially do the frontline work. In the US, this is CBP. In Australia, for example, this is ABF, Border Force, together with state police. in certain other countries this might be just customs like i was thinking about the port of

piraeus you don't have police presence in the port you only have customs doing just customs work so depending who you need essentially and whether or not you have access to those institutions then obviously you will address as an organized crime group you will address your corruption efforts in that direction and this is a very very difficult thing to admit for many institutions that they have an issue obviously no one wants to say that they are vulnerable i had very difficult conversations obviously with customs agents around the world that they are very concerned about the bad apples or about whether or not this is a systemic issue but we know this happens there are everywhere this happens and then however another way which you can also eventually find

in very, very few cases is a top-down approach where you have organized crime infiltration in the economy around the port, which means logistics, which means freight forwarders, which means anyone that works legally around the port. Those legal firms, those legal companies might be either fronts for some organized crime group effort or they might be hijacked

for the purposes of organized crime. For example, again, I was in Piraeus last January in the port of Piraeus doing research and I was talking to some fruit importers. This is a very big company that imports fruit from Ecuador. And recently they have found cocaine in their shipments. They have no idea who is doing that. They are just opening up random containers

when they arrive in their warehouses and essentially that means that something went wrong at the organized crime level where they couldn't pick up the drugs and the drugs remains in the container and arrives to the warehouse where the importers open it thinking that they are finding, I don't know, fruit and instead they find cocaine. The worst part about this is that they are still, especially in Greece, charged for the importation as if they were complicit in it until they get cleared so there are many issues with that sometimes you do have con events obviously with these big firms receiving a kick-off fee to allow their containers to be used some other times instead most of the time you have what we call the rip-on rip-off system where

the container transporting certain goods is essentially exploited without the importer knowing so it really depends on which level so you see them all you really see all sorts of different typologies at very extreme level but i found this only in one and a half example you have an even more top-down approach which is the infiltration of the port administration and this means essentially a much much more problematic issue and this there was an attempt to do that in Montreal at some point it didn't go well thank god there was an attempt to do that in Italy in Gioia Tauro at another point so it there are many ways but obviously a lot depends on how good is the organized crime group how sophisticated they are how rich they are

because it takes money to run all the schemes to sustain this level of involvement so it might be just easier to go on a one-off payment and hope for the best in a way so it really depends where you are how the port is organized how the port is policed how penetrable and how porous is the institution that has the access the main access to the containers and the ship and obviously eventually how controllable is the know-how of the port not the people but know-how how much does the organized crime group know about how the port works and whether or not there is a situation where they might exploit those from the inside in different ways sorry a very long answer but told you it was a very difficult very difficult question i think that's just really fascinating

especially as a guy whose apartment overlooks a port you know so thinking about how the interaction between the police and the port administration and organized crime is really really fascinating I want to go back to one of the first things you said, actually, about how illicit and illicit trade follow the same routes and kind of travel in parallel. Because I think some people and maybe some of the listeners have this concept that cocaine arrives, at least in the United States, in little airplanes and is dropped out of the airplane somewhere or it's coming over in some criminal group-created semi-submersible vessel. Is most of that illicit trade really coming through legitimate ports of entry? Yes, you are totally correct. There are indeed very creative ways to ship cocaine. But we are talking, let's put it this way, you can ship up to two tons of cocaine in a yacht.

So in a very private, very nice, very cheerful yacht. But the trip you have to make from, let's say, Colombia or Peru or Bolivia or wherever in a yacht, is not exactly the less risky way of doing your cocaine trip so in theory yes you can do it to ship in private situation but we know that the bulk of cocaine moves through legitimate container ships and when i say the bulk i mean obviously we can't be sure of numbers here but we are talking about if you think about how much of our stuff in the world moves by a sea which is about 80 90 percent in certain regions of the world so we are talking about the same kind of percentage of cocaine so it's the same type of percentage so yes there will be a 10 20 percent

of cocaine that moves in other ways but the bulk of our of cocaine arrives via legitimate means via legitimate port of entry by a container and by a container ships and one needs only to look at the reasons and ways in and times in which cocaine emerged eventually as a global trade which is exactly at the time when containerization became well took off essentially so in the 70s so we didn't have this kind of amounts we couldn't have this kind of amounts of this these narcotics before that so because we are talking about something that needs to travel cross-continent sometimes cross-states obviously and also something that is heavily criminalized so if you are found importing cocaine or trafficking cocaine there is very little you

can do in terms of fighting your legal battle so there is also an element of risk in getting engaged in this involved in this kind of business that organized crime groups don't want to take meaning I want to try as an organized criminal to stay as detached as I can from my merchandise, from my commodity. So the commodity travel one way and I'll travel another way. Many times we find, for example, I remember a case in Australia that was fairly interesting. So the shipment started in actually in Colombia, went to Canada and from Canada was headed off Pacific route to Australia the guy sent off literally saw the container door shut in the warehouse where he was putting the drugs in and then went on on a plane a normal plane and essentially was flying directly

to Australia waiting for the drugs there the same person so in this actually is because if something happens to the container and the drugs in the meanwhile which can happen a random search something happens to the ship whatever can happen then there is no way of connecting that person who's flying uh by plane and his container ship because there is distance between the two so there are there are all these elements so of course there will be an element of choice that organized crime group that they do have a degree of choice whether i prefer this route or i prefer the other route but eventually they all have to obey the same rules you cannot invent a route that is not already there yesterday i don't know if you saw that they there has been one of the most one of

the biggest cocaine seizures of europe forever four tons of cocaine seized in the port of trieste in italy they it was coming so they made 38 arrests and these arrests were between colombia italy bulgaria croatia slovenia and those uh area east area there so what does this tell us is that in theory and very counterintuitively cocaine arrived from colombia into the balkans which is the other way, completely bypass Europe, all of Europe, arriving into probably Greece or any of the Balkan, former Balkan countries, probably Croatia or Albania, and through the Western Balkan routes went up to Trieste for distribution into North Europe. This is a whole kind of range of counterintuitiveness. It would be much easier to go to Spain or to Portugal and

then ship from there why would you bother going all the way through east europe and then to italy and then in the north of of europe and the reason why these things happen is because there is always one route even if it takes longer and even if it takes more stops they might be at any given time safer from scrutiny the only reason why they caught these guys is because they were at their 14 job through this route 14 they had already completed 14 shipments with cocaine or at least that's the belief of the prosecutor so it was already kind of a burned route now that this is closed there will be another route which could be via pireos it could be via any other port of entry in the south anything that looks like less with less attention from police forces and from

customs so it's it's a merry-go-round essentially but eventually they all obey the rules of the market the moment in which maersk created a direct route between guayaquil in ecuador and pireus with no stops direct all of a sudden we have a lot of cocaine from guayaquil to pireus surprise that obviously is how things work you create a new route you streamline legal trade you make it quicker safer easier cheaper that's where you have at some point illicit routes as well to follow up on that last point it's it sounds like you're saying that it's not so much that these criminal groups are creating their own routes or kind of adapting on their own but They're waiting for opportunities presented in the market and then rushing to take advantage of those as quickly as possible.

Is that true? Yes. That's why you have brokers, essentially. So you can take it in two directions. Either you take it from the side of the importer who sits, let's say, in Europe or in Dubai. They have the money. They are investing in cocaine. is not like they will pick up the phone and find and call someone in Colombia and say hey I need this in the port of Dubai here tomorrow that's not what happens what happens is that there will be someone who knows someone who knows a broker who might be in Rotterdam or Milan or London or

wherever who will have his own contacts in let's say Cartagena or Buenaventura or Ecuador or whichever way and those people who are local will tell you because that's where the knowledge of the port will come in handy saying you know what do you have any way of sending someone to pick up your drugs in let's say pireus if i send it to pireus and if you have the way to go and pick it up in pireus i can use this route that in three days will bring your cocaine if the person on the other side of the line says yes sure I have my network I'll activate my distribution network to go and pick it up in Piraeus the deal is done if instead I said no actually Piraeus doesn't work because I have zero clue how do I get to Piraeus then we'll find another way which way maybe

Trieste maybe Marseille maybe whichever so it really is a combination of the broker at the origin basically those who are essentially uh knowing how what is leaving the port of cartagena today or the port of buenaventura in a week or whether or not you know there is some new stuff going on and the ones at the at the end saying ah know what i have a very good uh contact at the port of gioia tauro is there a way you can have it arrive in gioia tauro and if the person say yes it takes longer but we can try great if not we'll find a way so there is always a matter of understanding the capacities of the organized crime group and how well connected they are at both ends so with the connections from the port and the availability of new opportunities

as you said with legal trade and at this at the other side realizing that essentially it works a little bit like a package if you live in cartagena and you might decide that it's easier to have a package to you sent to your family in the u.s because maybe it's cheaper maybe it's quicker and then they'll bring it to you somehow or you'll go there at some point and pick it up or they'll send it through u.s mail because it's cheaper so all these calculations which we normally do in our own little life will be done in the bigger cocaine or other type of trade. So there's always a sort of a negotiation with what's available. So yes, there is room for agency, but the room for agency still obeys the rule of the

market, illegal market. I just think that's a particularly fascinating point because working here in Colombia, we spent a lot of time thinking about how the cocaine and illicit goods are leaving the country, but not. I think it's quite as much time thinking about how they arrive in another country. We do the opposite. We never bother about how they leave. We only bother about stopping them when they arrive.

So that's why it's so interesting to combine both. I want to ask now kind of about the security piece. So obviously you've done research and field work in ports all over the world, and some are much more secure than others. Are there specific ways that ports improve their security? Are there things that are particularly effective or is it more the case that if you reinforce security over here, the market's just going to force illicit goods to go somewhere else? You know, are there things that can be done or not really? That's an interesting question because that's the question I struggle with all the time.

After 2002, maritime security, as you know, has gone particularly strong. So, obviously, after 9-11 and the need to protect infrastructure essentially from terrorism, we had this conflation between organized crime and terrorist threats in port space and in the sea. That essentially means that ports have to, must adhere to a certain norms, certain set of rules, which are shared by the maritime, the international maritime world. So each port will have some house that will look similar to a certain extent. I've never seen a port, including Cartagena, including Piraeus, which are the two most outspoken, Melbourne, Montreal, Genoa. It doesn't matter which port. So they all obey the international ruling. They all have certain basics in place. Basics means they will have a port facility security officer. They will have certain checks and balances in the way access is negotiated and organized, who can access the port premises, who handles the daily security stuff, and more importantly, the trainings to avoid, to be prepared, the preparedness about whatever can happen, which is usually mostly linked to counterterrorism, even if, in theory, they are also linked to organized crime.

there is this this element of confusion whereby poor security is supposed to on one side protect people's safety not security the personal safety of people at work and at the same time the security of the ship and the crew and and the third element to protect the business essentially so it's less about preventing crime than it is about making sure the business goes as usual we are talking about a heavily privatized sector port economy is heavily private business getting hold of public land but eventually managing a business these are corporations most of the time and you can count them on your hands i mean we're not we're talking about gigantic uh corporations in the world so the big giants of containers let's say of terminals so we don't want these people to be

bothered while they make money essentially in the port so port security is about order it's about governance of space when this happens essentially it means you design the space accordingly and when i say design the space i mean getting into the wonderful thing that is environmental criminology which is about making sure that you get rid of any incentive to commit crime create obstacles to commit crime, whether that is a CCTV or an electric fence, or whether it is a biometric card to enter. So creating all these little things and taking care of all the little things that make the security people feel like they have order, there is order in the port. This is very different from preventing crime, especially organized crime. You can prevent theft this way,

property crime because property crime are rational crimes in a way and they all they kind of begin and end in the same place where if you have the opportunity to steal a container you will steal a container if that's your intention to do so but if you have a CCTV looking at you you won't do it or you might not want to do it in the same way so crime prevention only works in a very localized way and we know this from research from all over the world in very specific property related crime when it comes to organized crime that happens elsewhere i mean the cocaine has already been put in a container by the time it arrives in the port there is no cctv that can look at the container and say hey that's cocaine in there so you need other types of a mechanism

but what essentially this has has created a situation where certain things that used to happen on the port premises do not happen in the port premises anymore. If you are a port worker and you are working for an organized crime group, or if you are a border agent and you're working for an organized crime group, and you know that your cocaine is arriving in container A, B, C, D, E, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you will never be able to open the container in the port terminal, take out the cocaine and walk away. Because now the security of the port means you cannot walk on the port premises you have to use cars there will be cctds at all spaces and times so you will be seen there will be a system that records whoever touches in and touches out in terms of access

what happens then that you will push out the crime from the port as long as it doesn't happen in the port space it can happen just outside wherever the security is not active anymore And this is why you see increasingly the use of firms to legally bring the container out of the port and then bringing it to a secure location, a warehouse somewhere where someone will open it up in peace. or you'll have a situation where the cocaine is dropped at sea. If someone in the crew is willing and is complicit with the organized crime group, the container might be open on the ship and dropped in the middle of the sea with a GPS on it with the organized crime group getting to it later at night. And this brings into question the role of small ports, small boats,

and everything around the other things you need to do. I was looking at a very interesting interception in Gioia Tauro where some of the mafia members, these were my Ndrangheta clans, the ones I look at, they were discussing how to bring cocaine from, I think it was Le Havre in France. Well, it was actually from Argentina to Le Havre and then to Gioia Tauro. And they were saying, well, we can't bring it to Gioia Tauro, there is no way. i mean there's just you know we have we have too many problems there the police and everything else it's kind of militarized now so there's no way we can get around joya tower even so they just say well i'm gone we don't have an issue with that we essentially make sure that someone of ours is on that ship as an employee and they will essentially make sure that the cocaine is dropped at sea and then we go with a very small boat very cute boat and pick it up three months later who

cares we have time because obviously there is a lot of cocaine coming in so it's not like you are waiting for the one kilo that is arriving so you have your reserves so this way you essentially create a system where cocaine arrives is dropped in the sea with a gps you'll go and get it when you want it and bring it how you want it where you want it with your wonderful little boat so these things keep happening they happen now for example with brexit in the sea between denmark and the norway and obviously nordic countries the baltic countries and britain with all this situation that is happening between scotland and northern ireland with all these small boats going in and out that obviously are about fisheries are about you know normal people ferries so there are

many ways in which you can eventually complete so it doesn't have to be that the journey is completed in the port because security has made that less and less likely for security because again everything out of order will be noticed so what essentially happens and you still exploit the port you still exploit the the maritime routes what you can't do you'll find a way to do essentially so that's the creativity that's the submarines that's the you know the reason why at some point you have this lorry coming out of nowhere with 60 kilos of cocaine and you don't know which port they are coming from because it looks like they are coming from you know a marina and yes they are coming from a marina because probably that's one of the ways in which they

are collecting the cocaine fascinating and it sounds like it's just a really daunting problem i'm kind of glad i don't don't work in port security yeah it is a daunting problem yeah you did ask me what can be done i'm not quite sure i mean honestly i think what can be done is the usual trying to get to the social roots of it or eventually go drastic with legalization of cocaine but again there are issues with all the solutions fortunately i think we're just about out of time for today um but sorry i speak too much no no it was great but before we go i'd like to ask you if there's anything you're currently working on and then where if anywhere the listeners can find you online on on twitter or linkedin yeah i am everywhere on social media probably too much

mostly i use twitter which is it's with my name and surname at anna sergi that should be an easy enough one i'm also linkedin and i'm also on well facebook i use it for personal reasons but anyway i'm everywhere so easy to find me i'm working on so now my book on the mafia is coming out on mafias abroad possibly mostly australia which is the kind of the preamble of it all And my next steps, I think, so there will be a report, which might be of interest, where I contributed as a consultant with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Their Observatory of Southeast Europe commissioned a very big project last year, which finished in April this year, on 10 different ports in Southeast Europe on the Balkan route, which is where I contributed with the Port of Piraeus. And the report is coming out at some point in mid-July, so that might be part of interest. I'll send it to you when it comes out, maybe it should be easy for you.

And now I want to do more research on cocaine via Irish ports after Brexit, because I think that's another kind of difficult one to grasp with all the geopolitical change and the fact that it becomes more interesting to get stuff through the UK because the cost of drugs in the UK is higher and there is a lot of consumption of cocaine in the UK. However, it's not as easy as it used to be. So organized crime groups are reorganizing through different routes, one of which is Ireland Republic and Northern Ireland.

So I'm interested in that kind of changes at the European level. Well, we will look forward to those and maybe we can even have you back on the podcast when those reports come out. Thank you so much. And I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Anna Sergi for coming today to talk to us about ports and maritime organized crime.

Take care. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 We'll be right back.