Source: Guardian, The (UK) Contact: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Pubdate: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 Author: Duncan Campbell BULLY AND THE BALLOT Once Maltese gangsters such as Big Frank Mifsud, the Messina brothers and Victor Spampinato ran Soho's vice rackets. These days the island's drug traffickers provide a key staging post on the smuggling route to Britain. Now a policeman called Michael Cassar means to stop them. The young man giving evidence in Hall Number 8 of the Courts of Justice in Valetta is sweating profusely. It is not just his unsuitably thick maroon jacket, or the 33 degrees heat outside in Republic Street, nor even the painful bullet wound in his leg, that makes his shirt stick to the intricate tattoos on his arm but the nature of what he is being asked and the person against whom he is giving evidence. Emanuel Camilleri, who sits before him in court, is charged with wounding the young man, with running a major heroin and cocaine trafficking operation for the last four years and, most crucially, with trying to blow up Assistant Commissioner Michael Cassar, head of the police's anti-drugs operations in Malta. Camilleri, who owns one of the island's largest quarries, is a well-known figure who has a nickname which does not require a masters in linguistics to translate from Malti: "Il-Bully." His younger brother and father sit in the public gallery just behind him and he smiles as he adjusts his uncomfortable, borrowed tie, which Maltese court etiquette requires all men to wear. As he waits to hear what his accuser has to say, he offers bonbons to the officers of the Special Assignment Group who guard him and to the press. Not that too much of what is about to be said will appear in the newspapers. Magistrate Noel Cuscheri asks all the journalists to leave his court so that the sweating young man can say his piece behind closed doors. And, anyway, the papers are preoccupied. Malta, this most political of countries where 96 per cent of the population vote, has other swordfish to fry: September 5 is election day and one of the most closely fought campaigns since independence in 1974 is under way, for the election could decide whether Malta enters the EU and what future economic direction the island takes. And yet it is the election, called mid-term by Prime Minister Dr Alfred Sant after the collapse of his Labour Party's tenuous majority, that adds a special frisson to this case and gives it a significance far beyond the walls of Hall number 8. First, a brief criminal history lesson. In the thirties, a small group of Maltese - the "Epsom Salts", as London villains knew them in rhyming slang - - ran the vice rackets in Soho and the West End. But Joe Spiteri, one of their number, was so innocent when he arrived in 1952 that, when he saw prostitutes in the West End, he thought they were well-dressed beggars because why else would they be approaching people on the street? He learned fast. Spiteri claimed that the Maltese were able to take over prostitution because the women preferred them to the less hot-blooded Englishmen. Whatever the reason, Spiteri, the Messina brothers, Big Frank Mifsud, Victor Spampinato and George Caruana all featured heavily in the gang and vice wars of the era. Some were jailed, some died, some fled. Some are back in the Maltese sun but still running prostitutes, albeit more discreetly than in the sixties, when the women had to hustle for work on the streets rather than through photocards in public phone booths. The old fascination with London gangland remains in Malta. In the Wise Guys bar in Bugibba, for example, you can drink the locally-brewed Hopleaf pale ale beneath a photo of the Kray twins. "Be there, or sleep with the fish," says the bar's publicity material. And the connections between British and Maltese organised crime have also remained. Malta is a popular place for law- abiding Britons too, of course, and some 500,000 will go there on their holidays this year, not put off by the recent court case when holidaymakers sued the holiday firm Malta Sun, because their Maltese hotel served cold toast and the judge in the case flew to the island to investigate himself. At least 4,000 Britons have settled there, saved from homesickness by such familiar trappings of home as red pillar boxes, overcooked vegetables and driving on the left, legacies of the island's time as a British dependency. British appreciation of the islanders' heroic stand against the Luftwaffe during the second world war - Malta was awarded a special George Cross - endures, and a major tourist attractions is the war room where Eisenhower and Montgomery planned the invasion of Axis-occupied Europe. Malta is a fairly peaceful country: there are no more than half a dozen murders a year and there are only 280 people in jail, half for drugs offences. Most of the ex-pat Britons lead blameless lives but in the last few years Malta has again been placing a marker on the criminal boardgame. In July, an international gang was jailed at Manchester Crown Court for one of Britain's largest ever cannabis smuggling operations. Seven tonnes of the drug (from Cambodia) had been found in a container in Malta. Drug traffickers on the island now have active criminal links with London, Liverpool and Amsterdam. Malta is a useful transit point, accessible by sea and air. Maltese voters are only too aware of all this - and of a recent series of drugs-related deaths. On August 17, 17-year-old David Spiteri from Ghaxaq fell ill at a party and has now been recorded as Malta's first Ecstasy death. A number of young people on the isalnd - estimates vary between three and a dozen - have died of heroin overdoses this year. Heroin sells for A25 a gramme at 25 per cent purity but, heavily cut, can cost half that. Cannabis - haxixa - is freely available as are klamanti (downers) and stimulanti (uppers). Malta is a small country of only 370,000 and the deaths of young people has a particular impact. The drugs problem has to be part of the election campaign. As the Sunday Times of Malta put it last week: "Enough words have proceeded from our politicians' mouths on the scourge of drugs to fill volumes...It is incredible that on a small island like this we cannot get to grips with this modern plague." Labour is anxious to show it is active against drugs and any corruption that may protect the traffickers. Camilleri's arrest earlier this month features in a television clip that demonstrates how the government is tackling law and order. Full-page advertisements promise "New Labour - Clean Government" and claim that "Old PN [the Nationalist Party] prefers closed cupboards". They hint that the Nationalists, headed by Dr Eddie Fenech Adami, cannot be trusted. In rather wilder political days in the past, the Nationalists used heavies as bodyguards during campaigns. Just before the 1996 election, which Labour won, a book on criminal connections on the island, called The Diary Of Ciro Del Negro, appeared and - although essentially just a collection of court documents - Camilleri was featured among them as being close to the Nationalists. The documents have now been cited in evidence in open court in the current case against him. There are other echoes. In 1996, the son of the former head of the armed forces in Malta, Meinrad Calleja, 36, was charged with contracting two men to kill the assistant of the then prime minister and current leader of the opposition, Dr Fenech Adami. He is pleading not guilty and still awaits trial for this and for drugs trafficking and possession offences. So the island awaits the results of two high-profile cases involving allegations of attempted murders of senior public figures and men accused of being major drugs traffickers. The cocktail is as heady as any offered in the waterfront bars of Gozo. The man with the task of pursuing the drugs trade on the island is Assistant Commissioner Michael Cassar. Big and imposing, and the oldest of four brothers in the police, he heads the unit targeting drugs, vice and 'economic' crime. At 1.35am on May 23, 1994, he was asleep at home with his wife and two children, Melanie, 11, and Mark, three, when there was a mighty explosion. A pipe bomb had been planted on his doorstep. "I ran outside but the coward had not stayed long enough to show his face," he says. No one was injured but it was the fourth such attack on a senior police officer. Cassar likes his work as head of the 50-strong drugs squad. "There's job satisfaction. But you get a lot of ups and downs. Mostly downs." Camilleri's name was soon mentioned as the perpetrator of the attack on him but, Cassar has told the court in Valetta, no one was prepared to give evidence against him. Then a heroin addict, the sweating young man, was arrested. He claimed he had been shot by Camilleri because he owed him A50,000 in unpaid drugs bills and was now prepared to testify. He signed a statement. Camilleri was arrested and his handcuffed image was splashed across the papers just as the election campaign got under way. As far as Camilleri's defence team is concerned, he has been arrested in order to make Labour look good just before the election. The case against him is weak, it says, and his protestations of innocence on all charges are genuine. That was the gist of his case when he arrived in court this month. Then came the twist. He asked the magistrate to take personal control of a tape that was to be found in his wife's car. He was anxious that the police should not hear it. The magistrate agreed. It has not been played to the court and is now to form a key part of his defence. It is, Camilleri's friends say, his ace in the hole. So what is on it? The police say they have not heard the tape and therefore cannot say. Others say it contains material damaging to politicians. If it is as explosive as Camilleri hints, then he not surprisingly wants to keep his powder dry. Do shivers go down the spine of any politicians at the possibility of what the tape might contain? Or is this a bluff? The trial of Camilleri will not be resolved for many months. He is being defended by two of Valetta's smartest young lawyers, Dr Michael Sciriha and Dr Ian Farrugia. Last week, they applied for Camilleri to be bailed before the election. The magistrate turned them down. The election will come rather sooner than his trial. As government supporters handed out red roses and advertised themselves as New Labour in a harbour-side rally last week, the Nationalist Party was warning of the dangers to the island of not entering the EU and of allowing Labour another term of office. Each side accuses the other of dubious practices. Labour is mocked for an image-led campaign that shows young women with mobile phones and the Nationalist Party is chided for its lacklustre performances. No one is predicting with any certainty either the election result or what will happen to Il-Bully. As one senior police officer, commenting on the small, tightly-knit nature of the island, says: "It can be very difficult to get people to give evidence in cases here. They know that whoever they have spoken against is only a nine-mile walk away from where they live." Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.1998 - --- Checked-by: Mike Gogulski