Italian authorities said that the Nigerian criminals were used as drug dealers by the higher-up Italian mobsters, who banned the West African gangsters from carrying guns to maintain their superiority.Ī police source told The Times that the Vikings had a fluid leadership structure, which made them harder to shut down compared to the Black Axe, which had local bosses in each town and national and European figureheads. Police arrested more than 20 Black Axe members in raids across the country for alleged involvement in a range of criminal activities, including drug dealing and prostitution rackets, Sky News reported.
Nigeria black axe series#
The Vikings, who wear red berets and use a secret handshake, have eclipsed the Black Axe as the premier Nigerian gang in Sicily after police targeted the latter in a series of sting operations last year. Read more: 70 percent of migrants heading to Europe via North Africa are exploited "When you take one out, others will try to fill the gap," Ruperti told The Times. Rodolfo Ruperti, head of the police flying squad in Palermo, Sicily, said that the Vikings had stepped in to fill the vacuum after senior members of another Nigerian gang, the Black Axe mafia, were arrested in late 2016. Nigerian women began traveling to Italy in the 1980s to work as fruit pickers but soon turned to sex work, and an estimated 30,000 have since been trafficked from the West African country to work as prostitutes in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, The Guardian reported. The groups have worked together on vice rings involving Nigerian women who have been trafficked to Italy as sex workers. Police sources told The Times that members of the Vikings-a gang that sprung out of Nigerian universities in the 1980s and demands that members have no criminal record-have collaborated with the local Cosa Nostra, or the Sicilian Mafia in Ballaro, a town in Sicily, and were threatening to expand into the capital Palermo. The group also has a strong presence in Italy where authorities there arrested several members this year, alleging the group works closely with the Camorra, one of the biggest Italian mafia groups, in other illicit activities including the drug trade and human trafficking.Mafia members in Sicily are teaming up with a Nigerian gang that uses machetes on its enemies and only accepts degree-qualified members, to run sex rings on the Italian island. Law-enforcement sources told TimesLIVE that the Black Axe has a strong presence in SA where members often marry South Africans to get residency or citizenship, making it easier to access countries including Canada, the US, the UK and Germany. However, it was soon labelled a cult and banned under Nigerian law after it became synonymous with criminal activity globally. The Neo-Black Movement of Africa is a name interchangeably used for the mafia-style organisation that started on university campuses in Nigeria in the 1970s.īlack Axe positioned itself as an organisation for the liberation of black people around the world. The scams are sophisticated and have highly organised Nigerian syndicate members, operating mainly from the Table Bay area along Cape Town’s west coast, posing as wealthy pensioners looking for love. The Black Axe members arrested in the early hours of Tuesday morning are also alleged to have scammed companies out of millions of rand using a business email compromise scam. The Sunday Times previously reported on SA victims of the group, some of whom were fleeced out of their life’s savings and even their entire pensions. These were allegedly perpetrated by members of the group who used dating sites to meet elderly men and women from around the world who were either widowed or divorced, and scamming them out of their money. The group is believed to be behind hundreds of thousands of “romance scams”. The founder of the Black Axe “Cape Town Zone” was among those arrested, TimesLIVE sources said.
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