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It's a loud, lively night in Palermo, Sicily. It's 2014, the tip of a wave of African immigration into the city, and a group of Nigerian men are drinking at a bar in Balloro, a tight-knit market district that's a downtown for drugs, sex, and organized crime. Four of the men get into an argument. Three of them are gangsters laying down roots alongside Sicily's feared mafia, the Cosa Nosta. They want the fourth, 25-year-old Don Emeka, to join them. He's having none of it. He's already faced death threats crossing the Mediterranean from Africa.
Italy's a chance for a new life, straight and narrow. The other guys don't see it that way. Ron grabs his beer glass. Next minute Emika's on the floor, blood pouring from axe wounds across his face and arms. His attackers run, leaving him to bleed out. It's time for Emika to say a prayer, make peace with God, and wait for death. Then, in the distance, he hears sirens.
The attack's a wake-up call for cops in Italy and beyond. For a while, there have been reports of something called the Nigeria Mafia that set up shop, but this is different, far more complex. Emeka's attack is a blood-soaked calling card of a gang called the Black Axe. It's been terrorising folks in Nigeria for decades.
Wait, hold on. They're called the Black Axe and they killed him with an axe. So do they have to carry around an axe as like a calling card? Because if so, you should just call yourself like the Black Glock. It would be a lot easier and efficient, you know? Yeah, I'm not sure how available glocks are to guys rocking up on boats in Palermo. But yeah, maybe that's the next stage for the guys. Just seems easier.
So this Black Axe is one of dozens of mafias that began life way back under British colonial rule, when high-minded Nigerian students railed against their European oppressors. They were a chance to unwind among friends too, kind of like Greek frats in America, but with poetry and protest instead of pop collars and beer bongs. I mean, look, I think that there are some American frats that do poetry and protest as well, especially these days, you know? I'm just saying they're not the ones that I'm getting in the news over here, that's all. Matt? Yeah.
But they didn't stay that way, these Nigerian frats. Today, these confraternities, as they call themselves, they're massive international crime networks. The Black Axe is the deadliest of them all. It's cash cows, emails, scams and extortion. But some members who call each other Axemen have gotten bolder. They sell women into sex slavery, they shop drugs, ship desperate migrants across the Sahara Desert, sometimes to their death.
That seems like a pretty far cry from email scams. You know, email scams seem pretty relaxed and easy, a lot less messy than human trafficking and sex slavery. Yeah, true. I mean, as we're going to find out, I think the...
The scams are really the gateway drug and these other kind of transnational crimes are where the group's really branching out these days and what makes it kind of such a standout organization. I mean, that's a big jump, man. It's a pretty big jump. But there are stepping stones in between. So it's not just straight from punching buttons on a keyboard to trafficking people through the deserts. Kind of a bit more complicated, but, you know.
Only now are cops getting to grips with these guys. They've discovered Axemen all over the world, from Austin to Zurich, moving millions of dollars in black money and leaving scores dead. This is the Underworld Podcast. So is this like what people would call the Nigerian Mafia, or is Mafia just being used as a catch-all term? Yeah, it's kind of a catch-all. Like, there are dozens of these different groups that have popped up across Nigeria and kind of branched out as the diaspora has moved around the world. So yeah, like, some of them do different kind of stuff, and...
And the Black Axe is really like the biggest of these groups that's made most headlines around the world. But yeah, there's like loads and loads of different groups and they're active all over the world.
And you've actually gone to Nigeria to investigate these groups, I think, for Harper's Magazine, right? Yeah, yeah. A couple of years ago, I went out to Nigeria, was there for like a month or so traveling around, trying to find guys, which wasn't easy, and kind of seeing what they get up to there. And really, you know, what people know in Europe and the States, maybe, which isn't a lot anyway, is really the tip of the iceberg. And there's a whole bunch of history and interesting kind of culture behind these guys that's really taken a turn in the last few years.
Well, I, for one, am excited to hear about it. I'm glad. OK, so we've all gotten one of those shitty scam emails, right? The ones claiming to be from some Iraq veteran who's buried a bunch of cash in the desert or some politician on the run, right? They're pretty shambolic, but they make bread. They're called advanced free frauds, also known as the Nigerian print scam. And they make billions of dollars. It might be obvious that the Nigerian print scam comes from Nigeria.
Yeah, I think I figured that. I cracked the case. You know, I figured that out. Actually, Nigerians know them better as 419ers after the Nigerian law code they're jailed under. Or Yahoo boys because they love using Yahoo to send mail. So are there Gmail boys or like AOL boys that faded away a couple, I don't know, a decade ago? There might be. They're just not doing so well. Maybe Gmail has to up its game. Don't know.
I mean, I feel like Gmail is probably like a harder sell, people on Gmail, whereas AOL is just like, you know, a decade ago was wide open for the kind of people that would buy into this. Yeah, they really took out the Alta Vista boys, right? So these guys have got their own jargon, right? They've even got their own music. There's this one song from 2012 called I Go Chop Your Dollar, which is their unofficial anthem. It's got like millions of views on YouTube.
But 419 is at the tip of a giant iceberg that pulls in tons of Nigerian groups trying to go global. Black Axe, which claims it has 30,000 members worldwide, is the biggest and most notorious of them all.
Cops are just figuring these guys out now, but their story goes way, way back. All the way back to 1952, actually, in Ibadan, a city near Lagos. In 1952, Nigeria has 30 million people. It's one of the world's biggest countries. It's just sent 45,000 troops to fight the Second World War for the Allies. But that doesn't stop the UK, Nigeria's colonial power, grabbing resources and doing next to nothing for the people. They divide Nigeria between wealthier Christians in the south and poor Muslims in its arid north.
Yeah, I mean, the dividing the Muslims and the Christians in a country, you know, that doesn't really work out too well. You can kind of see the foreshadowing right there for some of the problems that Nigeria has right now. Yeah, yeah. And there are a lot more bad groups going around Nigeria than just the Black Axe. And that's a lot of that's down to this separation, the two faiths. Yeah. Good job, colonial overlords. Yeah. Well done, Britain, as always.
In the South, the British actually built universities, but they're full of this arcane bullshit British etiquette. And students still pledge allegiance to the Queen. Is that something that you guys do in British schools still like right now in England? We just do it, but we pledge allegiance to Adele. Yeah, I mean, I would too. Yeah, fair. Fed up with this, a group of seven students in Ibadan decide to do something. They create Nigeria's first campus fraternity, which they call the National Association of Sea Dogs or Pirates with a Y.
One of them is a writer called Wally Soenker, who will soon become Africa's first Nobel literature winner. Ibadan's about 100 miles from the ocean, so the pirate stuff's more to do with the Brotherhood's ideology. They're a progressive force against the British, swashbuckling for the oppressed, as one founder says. I mean, that's a pretty badass title or name. Yeah, swashbuckling for the oppressed is solid. Sea dogs, pirates. I mean, I dig it.
So members have names like Long John Silver and Black Dog, and they use the skull and crossbones as their logo. They sing sea shanties and get wasted at giant parties, just like Greek frats today. Yeah, I mean, this whole thing so far, like, I'm in, you know? Swashbuckling for the oppressed, giant parties, getting wasted, like, it objectively rules. Yeah, I'm in.
So Inka in Lagos and he was pretty clear on the fact that he wanted to get fucked up as well as like politically go for it as well. But they've definitely got a serious side these guys. So Britain has spent decades trying to divorce Nigerians from their African culture and the pirates want to break that mould.
In 1960, Nigeria wins independence from Britain. The pirates are still the country's biggest confraternity, as they call themselves. Why confraternity? What does that mean as opposed to regular fraternity? So, yeah, I mean, I'm going on Wikipedia, which is always the best source of information, but it says that I think a fraternity is a group of brothers outright, and then a confraternity is a group of guys just based on some common interests. That's pretty much it. Oh, that's clear. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah.
In 1963, another group called the IA Confraternity kicks off as well. Four years later, civil war breaks out over the separatist region of Biafra and three million die before it ends in 1970.
In the 1970s, though, more frats spring up all over Nigeria. Older members graduate and grab power among their friends, a bit like Freemasons, you know, hundreds of years ago. Military despots crush Nigerian democracy. They suck up its wealth and leave millions jobless. One of them, Sani Abacha, is thought to have stolen up to $5 billion. That's like Ferdinand Marcos territory right there. So with all this chaos, the frats go rogue. On campus, they might deal drugs or shake down other students. See, that's kind of American frat.
territory as well. They're dealing drugs. You know, I'm sure there's every fraternity in America has their own dealer or house dealer or something like that. Or so I've been told. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, everyone's got a friend who's done this kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah. So those who've left college, though, begin acting like mini versions of the Italian mafia. They extort local businesses and they make cash off the black market. And by 1977, this has gotten way out of hand. So nine students at the University of Benin, in southeastern Nigeria, found the neo-black movement of Africa. Their frat, they reckon, is going to be different. They're going to be political activists. Get back to the roots of the pirates. So I don't know if this is foreshadowing or not, but it kind of, you know, every time there's a group that, uh,
up to defend from the other groups, they end up being worse than those other groups. But I guess we'll see how that goes. I'm just noticing that trend a lot. You know, with the auto defenses in Mexico, that's a, you know, then they become the worst cartels. It's just kind of par for the course. Yeah, I mean...
Yeah, spoiler alert, it's not going to quite go to plan for these guys. It's worth remembering, actually, that the mid-70s, late 70s is a huge time for Africa. Loads of African states are shaking off European colonialism. Black South Africans are rallying against apartheid. The Black Panthers are terrifying America's white establishment across the Atlantic. Throw in the Cold War, and ideologies of black emancipation and freedom are bubbling all over the place. That year, Nigeria's military dictator, Olusegun Obasanjo,
pounces on the moment for his own benefit. He builds this town outside Lagos and sets up a cultural festival called Festac that's fucking huge. Audre Lorde and Stevie Wonder show up, play into thousands and thousands of people and preach a message of pan-Africanism and negritude, which is a black consciousness philosophy popular in French-speaking Africa.
Seeing Stevie Wonder there must have been pretty incredible. Yeah, yeah. By all accounts, it sounds like this thing is off the hook. I mean, FESTAC is huge, right? And it dazzles the NBN founders into action. They pledge to purge Africa of racism, promote research into traditional culture the British have stomped on for years.
Juju, which is a belief system similar to voodoo, is one of them. The MBM called their philosophy neo-blackism. They create this dense set of rules on how to follow it. So one of the founders writes that our organization was going to be the vanguard in the move to create a new black nation. We were going to see ourselves as leaders of all black men worldwide. So these guys mean business, right? They're not like the frats that have kind of descended into drinking and sloganeering. No, they are. They're going to change things. Yeah, they're definitely going to change things.
So their hometown, the MBM, or Mother Temple as they call it, is Benin City. It's once called Edo and it was the capital of this large kingdom with walls longer than the Great Wall of China. The city's king, who folks worship as a demigod, reportedly never slept or ate and his feet never touched the ground, which sounds completely legit to me.
Edo was a world wonder and its artists created thousands of famous bronze statues. You might have seen these busts in the Met in New York or London's British Museum and there's a depressingly obvious reason. In 1897 British soldiers massacred hundreds of people in Edo, gunning down so many people with their new shiny Maxim gun that a London reporter described Edo as a city of blood. When the
When the Brits reached the Oba, they made him grind his head into the dirt three times in an act of ritual humiliation before flushing him into exile. That just sounds so petty. Like, what's the... We're just going to grind you into the... We just killed everyone in your city and took over, but we're still going to make you grind your head into the dirt? Oh, welcome to Britain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just so petty, man. Yeah, yeah. And we don't learn none of this shit in school either. It's crazy. So this...
The moment in history is this act of terror and it tears right through the city and its people, obviously. Even today, the modern Oba's palace is lined with frescoes of the killing. There are statues to the era dotted all around town.
So this is the background to the NBM. You can see why they so badly wanted to create this confraternity that would fight for black rights and culture instead of just getting wasted and speaking about it at lectures. They published a quarterly magazine called The Black Axe that's stuffed with self-help and poetry. The day of their annual group celebration is March 21st. That's the day white apartheid troops mowed down dozens of black protesters near Johannesburg in 1960.
The MBM's colors are black for blackness, white for peace, and yellow for intellect. Its symbol is an axe breaking the shackles of a slave. Drug-taking, theft, or violence of a bone. Initiations usually involve wrestling and some basic athletic tasks, but they're mostly for banter. You gotta have good banter. Like, no matter what you're doing, you gotta have good bants. You gotta have the bants. It's all about the bants.
More importantly, though, is that members are given something called a strong name that others inside the frat know them by. Some of these names include Martin Luther King, Shaka Zulu, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader killed with help from the CIA in 1961. What would your strong name be? Cool. Yeah. Put me on the spot. Can I just go Adele again? Adele X. Adele X. Shit. It's not bad. Yeah.
The idea is to make something far more political with these strong names out of a frat scene that's obviously fallen a fucking way since the pirates came about. Nigerian students really take to these guys. It helps them fight corrupt college officials, which is common then, and it organises against the state. The state hates them right back.
Abbasanyo, the guy who organized FESTAC, couldn't stand students and he thought they were a useless elite. When he took money away from uni, students rallied some more. Then he shouted a bunch all together and he broke up Nigeria's student union. This kind of makes the US campus wars about free speech and pronouns and whatever else people are arguing about like a bit silly, you know? Yeah, I'm not sure how well Ben Shapiro would fare on a Nigerian campus. No, it doesn't sound too well. I wouldn't mind seeing it.
Yeah. It's, I mean, it's crazy because I guess in the 60s there were a lot of protest movements in the U.S. and you had Kent State and you had SDS and other groups coming out of it. But it always seems like international universities are just like hotbeds of people
either radicalism or violence groups rising up. I mean, protest movements, whether even now, you know, like in Athens, I know police are banned, even places like, like El Salvador. It just, it's crazy. You know, international universities just seem like, like things really get hectic in there. Yeah. I mean, like you've got what Stanford in the U S is like billions and billions of dollars, right? It's funded by all these crazy billionaires and,
entrepreneurs and all kinds of stuff that is not going on in Nigeria. These places are state owned, state run, and they kind of like flow and ebb with how the money's coming in from the state. So you can imagine that it's kind of like a barometer for how things are going more generally in the country. So this rivalry continues into the 80s when corruption meets a nose diving economy and makes things even worse for regular Nigerians.
Other frats are now just functioning so well as old boys clubs that some people begin calling them cults, fetishizing their traditions and use of juju worship. But it kind of sounds like they are cults in a way, you know? There's an aspect to that. I mean, when I was out there, I met a bunch of guys in this city in the south who were studying at university, and they would go to a witch doctor every now and then, and they would get a blessing or they would curse something.
uh guys in rival frats and they would tell me that like these blessings would make bullets ricochet off their chests although i'm not really sure they were going to put that into practice in front of me but uh yeah it's kind of it's it's there yeah it's there you should you didn't ask for a demonstration to like really liven up your article yeah that would have been a nice scene for the piece right i feel like i feel like there's ethical concerns there yeah i'm not sure harper's would have gone for it maybe someone else though
But the frats are just doing back then what pretty much everyone in charge of Nigeria is doing anyway at the time. Bribing officials is just how folks do business, especially foreign firms in it for the oil. According to the brilliant book This Present Darkness by Stephen Ellis, I quote, the country became an enormous and grotesque carnival of consumption. Many people wondered where wealth on the scale they were now seeing really came from and what its precise relationship was to the spiritual world. And he goes on,
Given the deeply rooted assumption of a connection between prosperity and the invisible world, many people assume that somewhere behind the most outrageous displays of wealth lay hidden networks and cults. So in this time, joblessness and crime shoot up. By this point, the leader is Muhammadu Bihari, a skinny general who had taken power in a 1983 coup.
Bihari premises to crack corruption. Instead of getting rid of big grifters, he goes after the little man. He starts a so-called war on indiscipline in 1984. That includes beating workers for being late and making folks form orderly queues at bus stops. Yeah, I would not have survived the war on indiscipline. I would have been straight against the war in that country. I would have been a fallen soldier in the war on indiscipline. It's nice to be so grand about it.
I just wouldn't have made it in on time. So we've got this tinderbox of poverty, joblessness, graft and violence. And the money going into Nigerian university campuses dries up. Conditions get way, way worse.
Furious students protest as Buhari sends in troops to quality unrest. Yeah, that's the real Campus Wars right there. Yeah, here we go. It's really getting going now. So the MBM really comes into its own. It helps students organize and make masks to combat mace, for example. The Black Axe magazine becomes this popular source of anti-government propaganda.
Bahari tries unsuccessfully to ban frats altogether before he gets the coup treatment himself in 95 and he's gone. So it's around this time that real consolidated organized crime groups begin to emerge in Nigeria. And among small pockets of a Nigerian diaspora that was rapidly fanning out across the world, the military had taught its citizens that power was better snatched than earned. At first, the MBM provided a counterpoint to this. It carried out charity work and continued to publish a black axe magazine. But things got worse.
As Nigerian politics got more fraught, leaders eyed up the frats as ways to cling on to power. They began paying frat boys, or cultists as most know them, to beat up rivals and squash student uprisings against their blatant massive corruption. Some of them even got knives and guns to do the job.
This was kind of crossing the Rubicon for the frats, which used their cash and muscle to turn into mafias altogether. Initiations weren't just banter anymore. They could include beatings or even gang rape. Frats also carried out gruesome ritual abuses. So Inca at this point distanced himself from the pirates, believing they were no longer a force for good. Which I'm confused. The MBM are all the frats? The air lords, the black acts? Is it a mixture? Yeah, see, that's the thing, right? So there's still this kind of
big group of different frats and they're all kind of fighting each other for turf dominance and they're all trying to vie for some kind of control over this dwindling economy where it's kind of all about who you know rather than what you know so it's getting pretty desperate but the nbm are definitely trying to go against the grain um but yeah we're going to find out that doesn't really go to plan
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So throughout the late 80s and early 90s, there's an attempt by NBM leaders to reel in young members getting their heads turned by crime. But in 1997, they basically give up. They suspend campus activity altogether, decide to organize themselves not by university chapters, but zones, that is, cities. So they've gone off the campus at this point. So things hadn't gone completely downhill by then. They were going in that direction.
Members christened themselves MBM without the Ning City's blessing, and they even started foreign zones starting in London. Many called the group by its magazine's former title, The Black Axe. They still wore yellow, black and white, and they celebrated on March 21st. Recruits are called Axemen, and most Nigerians knew them as a terror.
At this point, there were many cults, including the Buccaneers, Klan, Black Berets, and Vikings. A lot of them had this seafaring identity because they'd either split from the original pirates or took inspiration from them. It kind of reminds me of all the names for the gangs in New York and like the Bronx in the 60s and 70s, just the way they've chosen them. But also like the Klan for a Nigerian gang doesn't really, I mean, I get it, but it's spelled with a K, right? Yeah, yeah, I want to know myself.
Yeah, it's a bit off. Pretty nuts. But it's getting a bit Warriors at this point, but they're all pretty nasty groups. I guess the Warriors were as well, right? They weren't that fun loving. Yeah. Now, you have this movement at this point that was once a Pan-African, anti-racist, revolutionary group, and it's just become a mafia this time. They extort, defraud, and rob locals, much like the Italian mafia does.
It beats up and it sometimes kills on the order of corrupt politicians. The MBM's leadership maintain at this point that it's still a political force, which is either a lie or just blindness. So are they just tied into the state structure by now? But what is the late 90s, early 2000s? Yeah, it's kind of a combination of these old guys being either like in positions of power and wanting to consolidate with their friends or they're part of the old guard, right? They're the old guys who grew up with this kind of fighting spirit.
And these guys have really thought they were changing the world for the better. So there's a certain level of the MBM or Black Axe or whatever you want to call it at this point. They really believe that they're freedom fighters, but the whole organization below them has just completely gone to crap. And then it gets way, way worse.
On July 10th, 1999, 40 masked intruders burst into a dorm at Obafemi Abuelowo University in the southwestern city of Ileife, and they massacred students with shotguns and hatchets. Five die. The organisation of the bloodshed was never determined, but there are strong rumours it had been quarterbacked by the university's vice-chancellor, who'd rubbed student unions the wrong way and refused to ban cults. The murders have covered extensively by the media, and Nigerians are horrified.
The Black Axe has done almost a 180 since its foundation. Pretty soon after, these Axemen realize they're going to be able to get the bedrock of their money from email scams. According to a piece at Business Insider I read, these kind of scams actually begin around 200 years ago as something called the Spanish Prisoner, where a scammer would send a letter to their mark pretending to be a wealthy Spanish guy locked up who has a vast wealth he can't get his hands on. I don't know why he's Spanish. Yeah, that, it just sounds like a lot of work.
you know, at that point, like sending an email is one thing, but this is just like they're writing letters out by hand. Right. I guess people were a lot, like a lot more believing back then. So maybe the return, maybe your average of returns, you know, like maybe you sent out a hundred letters and you got like 50 hits. Whereas now you send out 50 million emails like that and you get like two hits. But it just sounds like a lot of work to me. I'm just saying. I mean, like the alternative back then is either to like,
run a railroad or die of cholera, right? So maybe writing letters isn't that bad. Yeah, maybe it's a little easier than toiling in the fields. Yeah, yeah.
In 1898, actually, the New York Times even wrote about this scheme. Some folks were losing five figures to these things back then, which must be like a million bucks in today's money. Okay, that's solid. I get it. Yeah, now I'm making sense, right? Yeah, yeah, now I'm with it. Anyway, fast forward to the 419ers or Yahoo boys and nothing's really changed. These things seem really stupid at times, but remember these guys send out like thousands and thousands of emails a day. So all they need is one reply and they've made a bunch of money.
In 2013, the world lost almost 13 million bucks to 419s. There's even a new version called the Romance Scam, where bogus soldiers or doctors or whoever trick most of the old ladies into wiring them thousands of bucks by starting online relationships. These things cost 18 million bucks in Canada alone, and they're done mostly by Axemen in Toronto, which is this major hotspot for the group for some reason.
Most of this money finds its way through networks of Axemen known to each other only by their zone and their strong name. And the cash usually goes through Hong Kong or China where banking laws are really relaxed. These two bits of information, the zone and the name, means scams are tough to track for cops. It means Axemen who screw over their associates can be quickly punished. The breadth of this group is...
Just amazing. They've got zones all over the world. There's even a Venezuela zone. If you're living in a major North American or European city, it's pretty much nailed on there's one where you are too. What makes that more confusing is that the MBM still claims it's separate from the Black Axe. There are definitely some older guys, like we said, that are standing up for the political causes, but by and large, the idea they're separate is complete BS.
But there's even a new fraud in town, and this is called business email compromise scams. This is when scammers pretend to use a company email to get money out of firms.
All in all, scams like this earn up to half a billion dollars each year. So that's actually, that's, I mean, the 419s didn't sound like they were getting too much for a transnational global mafia, but half a billion dollars. I mean, that's pretty solid, man. Yeah, I mean, like the 419s are like the pill pushers on the street corner, right? But this is like the real cartel shit right here. And are they actually, are they doing, they're still doing the other stuff as well, right? The more violent, the more criminal stuff. These guys are doing everything. That's what makes them stand out, really.
Yeah, like and when you think about the amount of stuff this group does, it's incredible that law enforcement hasn't cottoned on to them in a bigger way. One of the reasons is actually kind of racism, like American and European cops often don't think African gangsters are clever enough to fool them, which is obviously wrong. The FBI and other U.S. agencies have only just gotten a hold of the scale of it all.
Canada and Italy have probably been the most proactive, and they've scheduled them as a bona fide mafia. But there are dozens of countries that barely acknowledge the existence of the Black Axe. So to continue the story in Nigeria, the country returns to democracy in 1999, but it's hardly ideal. Politicians still use the cults as high muscle. Obasanjo, the guy who'd ruled as a dictator just a generation before, he wins the first vote, and the current president is Buhari. So the strongman thing hasn't gone at all.
These days, cultists are still seen hanging around ballot boxes, but they're seen less and less and they don't have the guns and they're not beating people up as more. So I guess that's progress.
Wait, so hold on. The guy who won the election, like the dictator who says I can win election. Actually, that actually happened in Nigeria. It wasn't like, oh, yeah, have the free vote. I'll win by 90 percent. And they always lose. Like this guy actually had the free vote and he won. Yeah. And then the other dictator said, well, you know, I can do that, too. And then he won. Was any of that due to the Black Axe kind of just beating people? So, I mean, was it actually a free election? Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say. Like, I've read loads of reports where people say that
In the early 2000s, there was loads of pretty dodgy stuff going on around the ballot box with, you know, hired cultists hanging around, some cases stuffing ballot boxes and like intimidating rival voters and stuff like that. So that was going on. But these days, that's less and less. More of the crimes are kind of high level corruption, as you'd expect. So, yeah, it's a problem, but it's not so much these days. But it's definitely got some of these old strongmen into power.
But the Black Axe is still around on campuses. So I went to this university in the south of the country when I was there. And one of the kids told me he'd been shaken down by a child around 10 years old in Lagos who was wearing Black Axe colors. So really, the group has become more sophisticated. It's gone outside the country's borders, but it's also kind of swept up kids all
all sorts of members of society that weren't part of this original campus idea. But what separates the Black Axe from other Nigerian cults above all is its global ambition. No other groups have the reach they do. They've also been the boldest shifting from scams, drugs and extortions into other darker crimes.
So in the past two decades, the Nigerian population has exploded to around 200 million. The economy's spluttered along gamely, more and more Nigerians actually making a deadly journey up through Niger and the Sahara Desert into Libya and across the Mediterranean on these creaky tiny boats into Europe.
The Black Axe is one of the mafias helping traffic them. Thousands of women are sent, mostly from Benin City, which has a massive problem with trafficking, through the country and out across the desert. A lot don't even make it. Many of them are sold off by their families as prostitutes and handed over to Axemen, who control the route into Europe.
Yeah, I feel like anytime you walk around a big European city or a lot of big European cities again, it was pretty obvious you're going to see a lot of African prostitution that seems like it's run in a very organized fashion and controlled by –
you know, people who are not, not good, I would say like terrible human beings. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these trafficking routes through Northern Africa are run by these like super shady mafias from Algeria and Niger and other countries around the area. But yeah,
Yeah, what's interesting is that some of the cults, especially the Black Axe, have tried to gain a foothold in either end of that route. So, yeah, that's kind of a new thing. And it doesn't even seem like it's that. I mean, a guy decades ago, I remember seeing that in cities and wondering what was going on. And that was before the recent explosion of the last two decades. And we're talking like 2003, 2004, so I can't imagine how much worse it's gotten. Yeah, I mean, the diaspora has been spreading out for like...
40 years now in a big way. So people coming over from Africa and trying to find work in sex work or wherever it is, is nothing new. But what is new is that these groups are making it more of a business. They're making it more organized and it's becoming a bit of an industrial kind of a production line, really. These seedy deals are usually blessed by a juju priest. And that's detailed in this scene from a New York story by Ben Taub.
The legal system can be dodged or corrupted, the thinking goes, but there's no escaping the consequences of violating a promise made before the old gods. Many sex traffickers have used this tradition to guarantee the obedience of their victims. Madams in Italy have their surrogates in Nigeria take the girls to a local shrine where the juju priest performs a bonding ritual, typically involving the girl's fingernails, pubic hair or blood, which the priest retains until she has repaid her debt to her trafficker. So yeah, this is pretty dark stuff going on.
And I actually went out into the bush a few hours from Benin City myself and I saw one of these rituals in person. It was pretty, pretty grim.
The local village elder said there were a few girls and they were definitely girls lined up for the journey. They showed me one and she couldn't have been older than 16 or so getting blessed or cursed depending on who you talk to by a guy who was down in a bottle of vodka while he was doing the whole thing at like 9am. It was pretty awful. Basically the young woman is getting told she needs to repay debts for her journey or she's going to face spiritual damnation.
As usual, there's always a queue of shitmen who do all sorts of sex, alcohol, and cash. Yeah, the drinking vodka thing strikes me as...
I mean, don't get me wrong, the situation's awful, but it's like, I would assume some sort of ritual or moonshine or whatever, but he's just downing a plastic bottle of Smirnoff. Yeah, pretty much. That doesn't strike me as too spiritual, to be honest with you. No, I mean, I guess it's pretty spiritual. But yeah, I mean, he spat a load of the stuff in my face, but yeah, most of it he downed. And it was pretty early in the day to be doing a bottle of vodka. Yikes. Yeah, so...
So the Black Axe doesn't just control that side of the equation. It actually controls the routes into Europe itself. There are mafiosos all over Italy and in Germany, France, Spain, the UK and all over. But it's Palermo where they've really carved out a base in the last few years. You'd think that would rub the Cosa Nosta, the local mafia, the wrong way. They kind of act as these mutually beneficial business partners.
The Nigerians do stuff like prostitution that the Costa Nostra considers below itself. The Black Axe pays the Italians a pizzo, which is basically a tax. They also sell drugs and extort just like they do back home. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of shocking to me too because you don't think of, I mean, the Italian mafia in general as being too tolerant, right?
of A, anyone moving into their territory, or B, Africans in general. I mean, Tony Soprano did not have nice words for Meadow's black Jewish boyfriend, let me say. No, that is the case. But I mean, there's a buck involved, so these guys are up for it, I guess. And they're cool with them just coming into their homeland and letting this stuff happen? Yeah. I would just assume them to be racist and violent about this sort of thing. I mean...
They probably are. But I guess if the Nigerian guys are doing stuff that they don't want to do, they're happy with it, right? As long as they get paid, yeah. Yeah. The Italian cops have kind of gotten wise to these guys slowly over time. They all live in Ballaro. It's this beautiful...
super ancient part of Palermo. It's always been this kind of crossroads between Europe, Asia and Africa. The road names are in Arabic, Hebrew and Italian. Tons of the locals even consider themselves something other than Italian altogether. Anyone who's been to Palermo will know it's just unbelievably stunning. Yeah, I'd love to go if they ever let Americans into Europe again. I think it's definitely a destination that I haven't read. Yeah, maybe if we, you know, get travel in like 2025, come over to Italy and
Enjoy some actual Italian food? Sorry, Americans. Please, please, let's not go there just yet. Still early on in the podcast, we don't have to have these. Yeah, it's true. There's no need for that. And it's this melting pot in Ballarò, especially in Palermo. That's the thing that the Black Axe has exploited, shipping so many women into European sex slavery. The IOM claims that 9,000 Nigerian girls were trafficked into Italy alone in 2016.
The Vikings and Icon fraternities have actually tried to edge in on the Black Axe turf a bit. And there has been some violence. A few years ago, a guy was bludgeoned almost to death with an axe. And you've got your Emeka situation as well.
But it's the Black Axe area for sure right now. I guess it's this slavery that's probably the most startling example that the Black Axe, or MBM, or whatever they want to call it, has just completely 180'd from the freedom-fighting force it was in the 70s to this huge consuming mafia that's actually perpetuating modern slavery itself. Yeah, that's about getting as far away from the mission statement as possible, from freedomism.
freedom movement to running a slavery trafficking ring yeah like it does those are those are the two opposite ends of the spectrum right there i mean i guess it ended up being the vanguard in a new kind of movement right but it's not exactly what they had in mind when they started in the 70s yes the most heinous movement of all time i mean i'm just shocked too like i still can't get over them moving into you know the quintessential mafia organized crime territory of southern italy
and somewhat getting away with it. Oh, yeah, thriving, thriving. They're doing really well there. And all over Europe as well. No one's really kind of twigging onto these guys either. And do they just target, like, are they mostly targeting their own? Like, I mean, they're not targeting Italians, are they, right? They're mostly just targeting the own African migrant or refugee population? Yeah, pretty much. I mean...
With them and the local mafias, it's more of like mutually assured destruction. I mean, if any of them kick out any of the Italian guys, they're going to get completely screwed. So...
It's kind of just a mutually beneficial business transaction, really. And what happened to our guy from the beginning, Don Amica? So he actually died last year in October. And it turns out he was actually a member of the Vikings. So he might not have been that keen not to get involved with a mafia group after all. The ringleader of his attack, a guy called John Ball, he's still in jail.
And I think there are cases open all over the city for the guys that were involved in that as well. I still kind of like that. He's like Don Amica, even though like he's not a Don, his name is just Don. I wonder if that was confusing for the Italians. Anyway. Um, yeah, that, uh, that, that is a crazy story. Yeah. Um,
But, but thanks for that. Anything else to add? I think that's it. Yeah. It's just this group that went from really high to really low in a pretty short space of time. And their bank accounts are getting pretty high. It sounds like. That's true. That's definitely true. Yeah. Some of the money involved in this group is staggering, really. Speaking of money, if you don't want me and Sean to have to get involved in organized crime, go to the Patreon, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast, and
where you can donate and get bonus episodes. Please subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher. I mean, if you have all three, just subscribe on all three, man. You don't have to listen to it. Just subscribe and download it. You know, help us out here. But yeah, thanks again for joining us on another episode of the Underworld Podcast. Thank you. Not you. I mean, thank them. Thanks. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.