Louis Theroux TV - Misha Glenny - The French Connection: Inside the New Mafias 2017 -
Area Boys – local toughs who run the neighbourhood. Louis Theroux: Law and Disorder in Lagos, BBC 2010
Many are union members and it’s commonly believed that they use their positions as a pretext for extortion. ibid.
The city [Lagos] and its institutions had been hijacked by gangs. But I also felt a strange empathy for the plight of the Area Boys born into poverty and leading lives of desperation and violence. ibid.
Jaime Queiroz had reached the end of his tether. For several days, Nelson Sakaguchi, a fellow director at the Banco Noroeste, a leading Brazilian private bank, had been stalling on an urgent request. The board had ordered Sakaguchi to hand over to Lopez all the documents relating to the previous three years’ business of its overseas operation in the Cayman Islands ... In the fax, Mr Williams explained that a Nigerian customer of Banco Noroeste had suggested the bank might be interested in an investment opportunity with the Ministry of Aviation ... The Nigerians were seeking about $50 million for the airport and Banco Noroeste’s capital only totalled $500. Before long, he had authorised the first transfer of $4 million and there was more to come ... The biggest single Advance Fee Fraud (or 419 scam, as it is also known) in history. Misha Glenny, McMafia
There are important reasons why Nigeria has become the Broadway of Crime – it is home to the most successful culture of financial fraud in history. ibid.
The legacy of colonisation has been decisive in the fashioning of modern Nigeria. ibid.
Nigeria’s passage into the global market, floating atop the world’s sixth largest oil reserves, has created one of history’s most divided societies in terms of income distribution. ibid.
The Nigerian elite has become rich even beyond many Westerners’ imagination. Since the 1970s, they have been sucking the profits from the country’s oil resources almost directly from the wells and into their pockets. ibid.
With the petrodollar rush came huge contracts for public works, which were handed out to Western companies that were colluding in the bribery process. ibid.
A series of military coups allowed the consolidation of corruption as an ideology. ibid.
It was during the rule of the IBB that the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) noticed how Nigeria was becoming the major trans-shipment centre for cocaine destined for Europe, and for heroin en route to the United States. ibid.
The unwillingness of its small band of hyper-rich to distribute its billions in any equitable manner has very serious implications and unpleasant consequences. ibid.
In the mid-1980s, the giant investment house, Merrill Lynch, contracted two different firms to clean and guard their headquarters in New York’s financial district .... They held credit cards with which they could enter any financial institution and withdraw $52,000 on any one occasion, no questions asked. The Nigerian cleaners and night watchmen busied themselves for several months photocopying all these details on the company Xerox, before transferring the information on to blank credit cards in preparation for one mighty spending spree. ibid.
One night the Nigerians let down their guard and left one of the photocopied pages by the machine. ibid.
Civil war devastated the east until 1970 when Biafra – broken, battered and famished – surrendered. ibid.
By 1990 Nigerian nationals (the majority of them Igbo) made up 30 per cent of all people imprisoned by British ports of entry for heroin smuggling, according to the Howard League for Penal Reform. ibid.
By the end of Babangida’s rule, the country had racked up almost $30 billion of debt. Large-scale criminal fraud had been a persistent problem since independence, but with rising unemployment, rampant inflation and a collapse in the value of Nigeria’s currency, the naira, defrauding indigenous Nigerians was becoming every less profitable. ibid.
The scammers put an immense amount of work into their ploys, and again it is hard not to admire their commitment to theatricality and detail. ibid.
Nigeria’s very own Elliot Ness appeared on the scene ... What few expected when the EFCC started work properly a few months later was that its director, Nuhu Ribadu, would develop such an unbending devotion to rooting out corruption and crime wherever it might be found. ibid.
The Nigerians were branded as criminals in South Africa where crime had, in a few short months, because the decisive political, social and economic issue. ibid.
South Africans came to perceive Nigerians as the worst criminals because they were highly visible, working tirelessly to expand the consumption of drugs and the use of prostitutes across all communities in South Africa, and offering further evidence of their unparalleled ability in devising financial scams and fraud. ibid.
By 1994, Nigeria had developed into a new and very significant hub for the distribution of cocaine from West to East, and of heroin in the opposite direction. ibid.
One of the most profitable crimes in France is prostitution; for some fifteen years a new foreign mafia has been placing its girls on the country’s streets. Gangs from Nigeria are believed to control virtually all of the African recruitment and exploitation networks. The French Connection: Inside the New Mafias, Youtube 2017