ITALY: Couples desperate for children can buy them in Italy, Paddy Agnew reports from Rome
"Are you interested or not? If not, I'll sell these tomatoes to other buyers or maybe I'll buy them myself and then decide what to do with them."
The speaker is 36-year-old Ukrainian Nadia Tkachenko, alleged organised crime boss, and the tomatoes in question were in fact newly-born baby boy Vicenzo, which is not his real name. Asking price for the tomatoes was €350,000.
The above conversation, as reported in Bari newspaper La Gazzetta Del Mezzogiorno, was recorded by a team of three undercover police officers from Foggia, southern Italy who last weekend arrested Nadia Tkachenko and three other Ukrainians on charges related to trafficking in people. Although Nadia has been described by police investigators as a "tough, determined and cold" criminal, she had nonetheless been duped by the undercover officers to whom, unwittingly, she had tried to sell Vicenzo.
The story of Nadia and Vicenzo is but the latest evidence of an all too flourishing clandestine traffic of people and drugs onto Italy's southern-eastern coastline in Puglia (the heel of the Italian boot). Regulated by inter-linked organised criminal gangs in both Italy and Eastern Europe, this clandestine traffic has flourished and prospered ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
When undercover officers from Foggia last year began the dangerous task of infiltrating one of the gangs operating in Puglia, their intention was to unmask a drugs trafficking ring. It was therefore a major surprise for them when their new-found business partners came up with an unexpected offer last December: "You're a serious person," said Nadia to one of the policemen with whom she had struck up a particularly good relationship, adding: "I can trust you. We've got a five-month-old package for you lot, if you want it."
The five-month-old package was baby Vicenzo, still in the womb of his mother Oksana Fedanova, a 28-year-old Ukrainian prostitute who had become accidentally pregnant. For her part in the scam, Oksana was set to receive €25,000.
Oksana's story makes for one of the saddest pages in this whole unedifying tale.
Like thousands of young Eastern European (and indeed African) women before her, she had been attracted to Italy by the false promise of work as a family maid. Once arrived in Italy, she was press-ganged into a life of prostitution by those same criminal elements who had organised her clandestine entry.
Given Italian legal restrictions, not to mention the delicate nature of the undercover operation, the police officers took their time before agreeing to "buy" Vicenzo. While the officers were apparently still considering their purchase, Nadia suggested that she would have no problem finding an alternative buyer for the "tomatoes".
Investigators believe that Nadia had indeed made contact with an Italian couple who were desperate to buy the child but who could offer "only" €50,000. In the end, the undercover officers agreed to the €350,000 price tag. All they could do was sit and wait for a phone call. Last Friday night, the phone call came through: "The child is born, come and pick it up."
The agents were instructed to go to a small apartment in the little village of Giovinazzo, outside Bari. Once there, they picked up Vicenzo before promptly arresting Nadia Tkachenko, Oksana Fedanova and Olena Kaurova, the midwife who delivered the child in the apartment.
Later that same night, police also arrested Misha Mamot, partner of Nadia Tkachenko and the man who lived with her in a suspiciously large and comfortable house in the little town of Cerecola, in the hinterland of Naples. (Nadia had driven down to Bari on Friday night in order to be present for the consignment of the "goods".)
Commenting on the police operation, anti-mafia investigating magistrate Ginarico Carofiglio, the man who co-ordinated the investigation, hardly cast matters in an optimistic light when saying: "These people were involved in a whirlwind of trafficking in humans, they trafficked in domestic helpers, maids, strippers, prostitutes and children of all ages."
Magistrate Carofiglio and his colleagues are convinced that the proposed sale of Vicenzo was not a one-off matter. The expert manner in which the midwife delivered the baby and cut his umbilical cord with a common kitchen knife leads them to suspect that this particular gang had sold babies before.
Perhaps two positive notes emerge from this grizzly tale. Firstly, little Vicenzo is alive and well and will now be inserted into the adoption programme operated by the Italian state's Tribunale Per I Minorenni.
Secondly, the publicity generated by this case has prompted the Minister for Equal Opportunities, Stefania Prestigiacomo, to promise to speed up draft legislation, currently in parliament and intended to deal with the phenomenon of trafficking in humans and in human organs.