MARBELLA CLUB

Nigeria’s army said on Monday itwould continue to fight criminal gangs in the oil-producing Niger Delta, underlining the fragility of a ceasefire declared by the region’s main militant group.The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND)declared a temporary ceasefire on Sunday after a week of attackson oil platforms, pipelines, flow stations and gas plants in theheartland of Africa’s biggest oil and gas industry.The six days of violence cut Nigeria’s oil output by at least 150,000 barrels per day and forced Royal Dutch Shell(RDSa.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) to warn it may not be able to meet contractual obligations on shipments of crude from the country.The army welcomed the ceasefire announcement but said thatits strategy of fighting a network of criminal gangs involved incrude oil theft and kidnappings for ransom in the Niger Deltaremained unchanged.“We are not at war, so the issue of a ceasefire does notarise,” said Brigadier-General Mohammed Yusuf, spokesman forNigeria’s defence headquarters.
“If the restive youths are actually ready to lay down theirarms, then we will change our tactics. If there is no crime,then we will change our tactics. All we want is peace for thedevelopment of the area,” he said.Security experts say a loose coalition of various armedgroups operate under the MEND franchise in the anarchic delta,where foreign oil firms including Shell, Chevron (CVX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Total(TOTF.PA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Agip (ENI.MI: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) have interests.

Pirates armed with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and AK-47s control the waters far out to sea; close to shore, the threat of Islamist suicide boats keeps captains watchful."It used to be a good place," says Mohamed Shoaib Siddiqui, the Pakistani master of the MV Golina, a rust bucket of a cargo ship loaded down with food desperately needed by Somalia's starving population."It was like Kenya with disco bars, nice hotels, a good life. Then the security situation changed. None of that is possible now."His 829km (510-mile) voyage from the Kenyan port of Mombasa was possible only by staying close to the guns and missiles of a naval escort.
As the master turns the vast hull of the Golina towards Mogadishu's harbour, a Canadian frigate armed with a 57mm cannon stands guard.Cdr Chris Dickinson scans the shoreline with high-powered binoculars from the bridge of Ville de Québec, watching for high-speed skiffs leaving the harbour. Anything that gets within 500 yards of the cargo ship or escort will be turned to driftwood within seconds."The threat here for us is small boats - a suicide boat or a boat armed with RPGs or small arms," he says.The ship's helicopter has been dispatched to make passes close to Mogadishu's pockmarked villas and bombed-out hotels looking for potential threats.
This is the only way humanitarian aid can be delivered to the world's most dangerous city.An estimated 8,000 people have died in the past year-and-a- half of conflict. Tens of thousands more have fled the capital.Last week, Islamist insurgents ordered the city's airport to close amid intelligence reports they had recently received a shipment of surface-to-air missiles.And it could be about to get much worse for Somalia's embattled population, which hovers close to famine. The Ville de Québec is due to return to Nato duties at the end of the week and aid officials are desperate to find another country to continue the escorts.Denise Brown, deputy Somalia director of the World Food Programme, says using land routes could only deliver about 10 per cent of the aid needed."We currently do not have a firm offer for any naval escort and we have 45,000 tonnes of food which needs to be distributed in October," she says. "We are expecting merchant captains to come back to us and say that they won't go in without an escort. It is crunch time."While almost half of Somalia's population needs emergency food aid, the country's armed entrepreneurs are busy exploiting the anarchy to earn hard currency. On land, they run protection rackets and roadblocks; at sea, they call themselves pirates, although they have little in common with the cutlass-wielding brigands of old.The power vacuum has allowed pirates to launch 55 attacks on vessels as they skirt the Horn of Africa this year. Shipowners are warning they may soon be forced to reroute their vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, increasing costs to consumers.
Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau based in London, says the frequency of attacks is unprecedented and could only be stemmed with international action."Somalia has no government able to deal with piracy. Neighbouring countries lack the resources to tackle this problem," he says. "The only forces that can do anything are coalition naval forces."A US-led naval taskforce, set up as part of "Operation Enduring Freedom" to tackle terrorism, has been given responsibility for trying to keep the sea lanes open.They have established a series of waypoints marking a safe corridor through the Gulf of Aden, which is patrolled by warships and coalition aircraft overhead.And last week European Union foreign ministers announced plans to set up a co-ordination centre to help tackle the threat.But so far the billions of dollars of warships, with their radar, missiles and helicopters, seem powerless to halt the ragtag bands of pirates in simple, fast-moving skiffs.
The result is boom time for the buccaneers, who can earn €1.5 million a time for their trouble.Today there are thought to be 10 gangs operating around Somalia with as many as 1,000 members. Two years ago there were only 100 or so pirates.
In all, 13 ships are under the control of pirates. Two more vessels - a Greek cargo ship and a Hong Kong-flagged vessel - were snatched last week and attacks are being reported almost daily.

throwback to 17th century days of Spanish galleons, Barbary pirates and avenging royal navies, pirates attacked a record 17 ships in the Gulf of Aden in the first two weeks of September compared to just 10 in the entire year of 2007, according to the Kuala Lumpur-based Piracy Reporting Center. "This is the highest number of piracy attacks we have seen in the past five years," said Cyrus Mody, manager of the London-based International Maritime Bureau (IMB) which runs the Piracy Reporting Center, the word's nodal anti-pirate organization. Mody estimates that around 1,000 active pirates in the region have increased attacks on shipping after shifting base from theeast coast of Africa to the Gulf of Aden, which yachties call "pirates' alley". The concern reached crisis level on September 18, with leading international shipping associations such as BIMCO, Intercargo and the International Transport Workers' Federation calling for urgent United Nations action, saying the situation is "in danger of spiralling completely and irretrievably out of control".
Shockingly for governments, pirates operating in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia and Yemen are currently holding 11 ships and nearly 250 crew members hostage. Pirates are demanding and often getting ransoms from US$2 million to $9 million.
Replacing the Malacca Strait as the world's deadliest waters, the Gulf of Aden is spinning its own 21st century pirate story: multi-billion-dollar oil tankers, pirates defying navy patrols to capture ships and crews for fabulous ransoms and even two flourishing pirate towns. An Indian sailor, Maria Vijayan, who was held captive by Somalian pirates for 174 days, told Asia Times Online of the existence of a pirate town called Harardheere, 400 kilometers north of the capital Mogadishu.
Harardheere is a stronghold for hundreds of pirates and their families, and Cyrus Mody of the International Maritime Bureau confirmed its existence.
The other more well known modern pirate town is the port of Eyl in the Somalian region of Puntland, a modern day version of Tortuga, the 18th century Haitian island pirate town made more famous in the movie trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean .
Eyl is an infamous nest for Somali pirate-captured ships as well as a supporting industry feeding off an estimated $30 million in ransom booty that Gulf of Aden pirates bagged in 2007, a staggering indication of the extent of piracy in the Gulf of Aden. Vijayan was chief officer of one of two South Korean ships Mavuno I and Mavuno II that Somali pirates captured off Mogadishu at around 2.30 am on May 15, 2007. The pirates were heavily armed, on a high speed white vessel and began firing before boarding the ships. "We came to know of this pirate town because three South Korean crew members were taken there and imprisoned for 17 days," says Vijayan while narrating details of his harrowing nearly six-month captivity. "The pirates extracted $2 million dollars over a period of time from my company," says Vijayan, now rebuilding his life from his residence in Kanyakumari, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The United States Navy finally rescued Vijayan and his badly traumatized crew on November 4 2007, after keeping continuous surveillance on the pirate-captured ships. The Indian government, Vijayan said, did nothing. The Somali pirates doing the actual daily dirty work are simple, poorly paid unemployed youth recruited from the interiors of civil war-torn Somalia, according to Vijayan. "I think they must be barely paid $20 or $30 for a piracy operation," he laughed, compared to the $2 million or more ransoms the pirate chief masterminds extort.
"The pirates are well-organized in groups of 15 to 20," says Vijayan, who did not rule out involvement of sections of the Somali army or warlords now tearing the country apart. How strongly the Gulf of Aden pirates have entrenched themselves became clear when, despite an American navy presence and successful French commando assault on September 15, Aden pirates the next day brazenly seized a Hong Kong and a South Korean flag-bearing ship. "The world cannot accept this ... today, these are no longer isolated cases but a genuine industry of crime," French President Nicolas Sarkozy had said a day earlier on September 15, after the French navy parachuted commandos to rescue an elderly French-Polynesian couple, Jean-Yves and Bernadette Delanne from Somali pirates. The world pays a high price to pirates terrorizing the Gulf of Aden. "3.3 million barrels of crude oil - nearly 4% of daily global demand - daily pass through the Gulf of Aden waters that is also a crucial access route for cargo ships from Asia to Europe and the US, " said Manoj Joy of the Chennai-based Sailors Helpline. "So going by these figures, the Gulf of Aden is becoming a gold mine for the pirates." A gold mine it is. Aden pirates freed a Spanish fishing boat after receiving a $1.2 million ransom this April. A German piracy victim Niels Stolberg told the weekly Der Spiegel that pirates had seized his ship 'BBC Trinidad' and its crew for three weeks, threatened to blow up the $23 million ship, demanded a ransom of $8 million and finally settled for $2 million. "The governments have to act very fast to save hostages," says Vijayan of the estimated 250 sailors of many countries now suffering hostage trauma. "Having experienced what it is to be held captive by pirates, I know what the victims must be going through." He says the Indian government and navy must get involved as thousands of Indian workers sail the Gulf waters. Indian seafarers are particularly aggrieved, complaining of government inaction even though Indian seamen are among the worst-hit piracy victims. While Vijayan gratefully acknowledges American and South Korean governments for rescuing him and his crew, he says that no Indian government official has met him, and more astonishingly, no one from the Indian Navy has interviewed him. Yet the Indian Navy, sans homework, has sought government permission to intervene after 18 Indian sailors were among the crew of 22 of the MT Stolt Valor, a chemical tanker carrying a Hong Kong flag that Aden pirates hijacked on September 16. Unconfirmed reports say the pirates are demanding a $9 million ransom. The Indian Navy finally announced plans on September 20 to patrol the Gulf of Aden, along with navy forces from other countries. "India is one of the largest suppliers of manpower to the global shipping industry and it is of paramount importance for the government to make sure their lives are safe," said Manoj Joy, of the Chennai-based Sailor's Helpline. "The seafarers are contributing in a big way to the Indian economy." Other Indian sailor associations are threatening to strike if the government does not effectively act soon. War-torn Somalia has allowed foreign warships to enter its territorial waters to tackle piracy, while the UN Security Council has passed a resolution letting naval vessels enter Somalia's territorial waters and repress piracy "by all necessary means". Successful multi-million dollar ransom demands are multiplying "copycat" pirate attacks, say International Maritime Bureau officials, with pirates running amuck in Somalia, which has had no functioning central government since former dictator Mohammed Siad Barre was booted out in 1991.
Since trigger-happy, heavily-armed Gulf of Aden pirates also fire rocket-propelled grenades, fears increase of an oil tanker being blown up and throwing the crucial global trade waterway into a oil-spill nightmare. An IMB official said it's a "miracle" that no oil tanker has been hit with rocket fire. The IMB website has published two photographs of three white-painted pirate "mother ships", said to be Russian-made trawlers and a tugboat that pirate gangs use as base to launch fast, inflatable boats for attacking victim ships. Seafarer associations globally also say that ship owners are not doing enough to protect their vessels and crew, and must invest in better security, a few thousand dollars to protect lives and avoid paying million dollar ransoms. The IMB recommends that ship owners use latest security systems such "Secure-Ship", a non-lethal, electrical fence to repel uninvited guests visiting with rocket launchers. Other Inmarsat and other satellite systems-based anti-piracy gizmos include the ShipLoc, which lets shipping companies easily track their vessels, as well as enabling an attacked crew to send a SOS. Though some governments are waking up to the Gulf of Aden piracy threat, there is little coordinated, sustained global action. Yemen and Oman, two Gulf of Aden countries, are discussing establishing a regional center to combat piracy. European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels this month created a crisis group to deal with future hijackings. Spain announced that it is sending a P-3 Orion military aircraft to patrol the waters off the coast of Somalia, while the US Navy and France have made clear they will not be handling pirates with kid gloves.
Cyrus Mody of the IMB says some governments unfortunately try to hide the piracy problem, partly to avoid fears of safety about their ports, fears that could affect trade interests, aid, grants or concessions they get.
"Either governments may accept piracy as a problem and deal with it," says Mody, "or they may try to suppress reports." In which case 21st century pirates have not to much to worry about, while the rest of the world increasingly does.

Montreal Mafia apparently had their hands in half the pots in Montreal- threatening coffee shops that didn’t purchase their beans from their approved wholesalers, threatening non-Montreal contractors who did work in the city, and driving shops that didn’t comply with their demands out of business.They also trafficked drugs through the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport, involving employees in several levels and divisions of the airport. They brought hundreds of kilos of cocaine through the airport into Canada- enough to keep the Navy supplied for a few years, at least.
They also beat, severely, people who owed them money- gamblers and other people who owed them money. Notably, they beat up John Xanthoudakis, the CEO of a Norshield Financial Group, in a law office on Place Ville Marie, where apparently his face “opened like a pancake” and that he “was pissing blood”. Xanthoudakis, they claimed, owed them five million dollars. They also drove insurance broker and financial advisor Magdi Samaan to suicide, and forced his widow to remortgage her home to pay off the mobsters, who claimed that her husband had defrauded. funds from members of the Montreal Italian community. (via)While all of this is sordidly interesting so far, we have to wait until mid-October for the full charges and details, sadly. However, while these six have gone in through plea bargains, many other lower gang members will be working their way through the courts- so hopefully some of this information, and more, can be a part of the legal record.