A richer route in migrant smuggling
Smugglers capitalize on those with financial means to offer passage to Europe on yachts, sailboats from Turkey
AVOLA, SICILY — It was a far cry from the rotting fishing boats and overstuffed dinghies that carry so many thousands of migrants precariously to Italian shores.
The family of six had paid about $96,000 (all figures US) to travel from Afghanistan to Turkey. The last leg of their journey, a cramped week’s sail through the Aegean and Mediterranean seas aboard a cerulean 50-foot yacht, the Polina, piloted by three Ukrainian skippers, cost $7,000 a head. It dropped them in Sicily in relative style.
As migrants go, this was luxury class.
It was not the first time that Carlo Parini, the police chief inspector against illegal immigration in the southwestern port city of Syracuse, who met the family in April and recounted their story, had seen such a thing.
Since the beginning of the year, the Sicilian authorities have registered 125 migrants who have arrived on yachts and sailboats, mostly piloted by Ukrainian skippers, a lucrative and growing trend.
“It is likely that the organization is made up of Turks who use professional Ukrainian skippers, traditionally skilled, for the crossing,” said Francesco Paolo Giordano, the chief prosecutor in Syracuse, who is in charge of the investigations. “But it is still too early to say.”
Since the European Union cut a deal with Ankara in 2016, the numbers of refugees and migrants leaving Turkey in flimsy inflatable boats for the short passage to Greece have dropped sharply. But the crackdown by the Turkish authorities has apparently not discouraged a widening network of hardpressed but accomplished Ukrainian yachtsmen who ply the narrow Bosporus and are willing to smuggle Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians and others with the means and money. Captured boats have even included trophies and sailing medals.
The number of migrants in this elite category is a drop in the bucket compared with the 181,000 mostly sub-Saharan Africans who risked the treacherous crossing from Libya and Egypt to Sicily last year, dying by the hundreds nearly every week.
Nonetheless, the richer route from Turkish shores to southern Italy — occasionally on elegant wooden and fibreglass sailing vessels — is booming, Italian authorities say.
Parini has watched the numbers of yachts engaged in the migrant trade grow steadily in his 10 years as head of an interforce group fighting illegal immigration.
“Last November, we arrested a Ukrainian skipper for the second time and I recognized him,” Parini said. “Can you imagine what kind of business this is becoming if skippers do it routinely?”
One of the first luxury smuggling vessels Parini could recall arrived in September 2010, a graceful 36-foot German-designed sailboat that landed on a beach near Syracuse, carrying Afghans and with three Turkish skippers at the helm.
In 2015, 111 migrants cruised to Sicilian shores aboard sailboats, and in 2016, 710 did.
But last year the route started gaining steam. Much international police work remains to be done to catch up with the smugglers, Italian officials said.
Investigators have so far found that smugglers mostly rent their boats from charter agencies in Turkey and leave from the ports of Cesme or Izmir at dawn.
The Ukrainian skippers the smugglers rely on are renowned for their skills, yet they have become increasingly desperate in their home country, which has itself been torn by war since 2014. To avoid routine checks, the sailors skilfully navigate what is known as the “contiguous zone,” the continuous maritime area extending beyond any country’s territorial waters. Often the sailors have on hand several national flags — some fake, some not — that they can hoist according to the country they are approaching.
Typically, they at least have a Turkish, a Greek and an American flag, as many vessels are registered in Delaware, where “20 clicks and a credit card allow you to register a boat from anywhere,” said Mario Carnazza, a coast guard official on Parini’s team.
Carnazza recently showed a stylish, beige, 36-foot yacht sitting in the dock in Augusta, a large Sicilian port town where many of the migrants rescued by Italian authorities and non-profits end up.
In mid-March, the boat — called Maco — with its carbon fibre mast, nylon sails and pristine tender worth at least 3,000 euros (about $3,400) — was intercepted 110 kilometres off the Italian coast after smuggling 21 people across the Mediterranean Sea.
Aboard, the police found four medals and first-place trophies from Turkish sailing competitions, as well as Turkish pilot books, nautical maps and various stickers to change the name of the vessel.
For now, the skippers are the weak link in the chain. When caught, they have been charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration, a crime that in Italy carries at least four years in prison. The court in Syracuse is currently trying 21 skippers.
Many have defended themselves by arguing that they were forced to pilot the boats out of economic necessity or by Turkish criminals who threatened their families back in Ukraine.
Some are able to bargain their sentences down to a few months, while others are allowed to leave prison early for good conduct. For some, it is a price worth paying in an extremely lucrative trade.
Parini’s three-man team in Syracuse finds itself increasingly overwhelmed, working out of a narrow office crammed with files that chronicle the central Mediterranean’s recent history of crime and despair. The cases pile up.
Three floors below their office, a trial ended on a recent day with judges affirming the prosecutor’s case that two Ukrainian engineers in their 30s ranked high in the criminal ring, even if they had denied being professional skippers.
“Those two got four years and six months,” Carnazza said.
Marilena Barone, a local lawyer who defended the men as well as five others over the past year and a half, said that her clients were trying to escape Ukraine. After looking for work in Turkey, they were taught how to sail and forced to undertake the voyage, she said.
“Through the entire trial, they have been very attentive and very serious,” Barone said. “They said that their nautical licence is fake, so we will surely appeal.”
Yet in July 2015, they were caught after sailing across the Mediterranean with 74 migrants, mostly from Iraq, and running aground on a sandbar near Caponegro, a quiet beach north of here.
It was the same place that the Afghan family of six had landed.