Deca's Blog, page 3

Dr. Shock

Inspected from above, there is nothing—just the converging serpents of the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers, and a plateau surrounded by endless tracts of veld. In 1970, a military camp was built here, overseen by a psychiatrist who believed firmly in the curative power of pain. In apartheid’s darkest corners, he was known as die Kolonel, his camp was christened Greefswald, and no two terms inspired more dread in the members of the South African Defence Force, themselves experts in the creation and dissemination of terror.

Hundreds of white teenage boys were processed through Greefswald in the 1970s, and its survivors still drift through the country like ghosts. I recently met one, who insisted I refer to him only by his Hebrew name, Itiel. He was born in 1951, he told me, and in his teens succumbed to the Aquarian drug warp. Through a scrim of hallucinogens, he watched the apartheid regime congeal around him. “I was basically psychotic,” he said. “I felt as though I’d come to a strange planet.”

South Africa in the ’60s was the strangest planet. The Sharpeville massacre, in which the regime killed sixty-nine unarmed black protesters, served as the decade’s bloody opening allegro. Black opposition parties were banned, dissenters filled the prisons, and in 1964 Nelson Mandela was sentenced to a life term. Two years later, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called architect of apartheid, was stabbed to death by a parliamentary messenger who claimed to take orders from a tapeworm in his stomach. As if serving the same parasite, the government introduced universal conscription in 1967. Almost every white male in his late teens was churned through the SADF’s meat grinder, and if any failed to emerge as “normal,” he was processed again until he did.

Itiel’s conscription papers ordered him to a Pretoria drill hall in January 1971. For a habitual drug user quitting cold turkey, basic training made for a cruel comedown. He committed a near-fatal error: after deciding that he no longer wanted to be in the military, he informed a solicitous officer about his substance abuse. A week or so later, without warning or explanation, he was sent to 1 Military Hospital, or 1 Mil, the SADF’s sprawling medical campus in Pretoria. Within its austere fortifications lurked the psychiatric wards, infamous throughout the army as the loony bin, the nuthouse, the abyss within the abyss. Military psychiatric hospitals were first established to mend minds damaged by war, but only a few of the wards’ inmates had experienced combat. Instead, about half the forty beds were occupied by gays, rock ’n’ rollers, and dope heads—the counterculture’s ragged foot soldiers. “They were most interested in what songs we listened to,” a former patient named Gordon Torr told me. “What they feared most were people who didn’t think the way they did.”

The wards were die Kolonel’s domain. He was everywhere and nowhere, a god but not a benevolent one. It was understood that he subjected homosexuals to shock treatment in order to straighten them out. But there were also whispers of palliative circle-jerk sessions in which the psychiatrist allegedly participated. The showers were often splattered with semen, and the enormous doses of psychotropics only enhanced the wards’ purgatorial edge. “There was just this feeling,” Torr said. “A loss of innocence, suddenly, when you realized there was a dark subculture of sexual perversity.”

When Itiel was summoned for a consultation, he found that die Kolonel was not the bogeyman he expected but a stout thirty-two-year-old with sharp eyes and a waistline so considerable that it had earned him a second, more derisive nickname: Bubbles. The doctor performed a Rorschach test and asked his new patient to fill out several questionnaires. Then die Kolonel—properly known as Aubrey Levin, rank of colonel, SADF psychiatrist principal grade—uttered the words that, by almost any measure, proved to be Itiel’s death sentence.

“To get to the essence of who you are,” he said, “we are going to peel you like an onion.”

Several days later, Itiel was loaded onto a Bedford truck and driven north to Greefswald, near the Zimbabwe and Botswana borders. No one in his family was contacted, and no one outside of a select few in the SADF knew where he was going. He was now a subject in a social experiment led by Levin in his capacity as the military’s head shrink—one of many brutal psychiatric ventures that, over the course of nearly half a century, would destroy innumerable lives on two continents. Four decades later, Levin would be convicted in Calgary for the sexual abuse of three male patients—although there were likely scores of other victims. The newspapers would call him Dr. Shock, a reference to his history of applying non-consensual shock therapy to gay SADF recruits. No one stopped him during apartheid; no one stopped him during South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994; no one stopped him in Canada until 2010. How did this happen? How was Levin granted a comfortable career in his adoptive home, protected by its medical colleges—all when he had such unambiguous ties to one of the twentieth century’s most loathsome regimes?

These questions would only occur to Itiel much later. In July 1971, rattling around in the back of that Bedford, he was just another link in a chain that would eventually bind him to countless young men in Alberta. All were as vulnerable and broken as he was, and all were victims of an ancient and remarkably persistent trope: the monster disguised in the robes of a healer.

Aubrey levin was born in Johannesburg on December 18, 1938. “The first things you’ve got to understand about Levin are that (a) he’s Jewish and (b) he comes from not just an unusual Jewish family, but one that may have been unique in South Africa,” a forensic psychiatrist named Robert M. Kaplan told me. A South African now based at the University of Wollongong, in Australia, Kaplan has followed Levin’s career for almost two decades. The Levins, he said, were devout right-wing racists, and they existed on the fringes—boxing promoters, tombstone carvers. This made them unsuitable Shabbat table companions, so they looked elsewhere to belong. Although the ruling, largely Afrikaner National Party maintained a clause excluding Jews from membership, the Levins nonetheless managed to graduate from outspoken apartheid apologists to card-carrying nationalists, their prospects for advancement improving as they did so.

Overweight, bookish, and brilliant, Levin graduated from high school at fifteen, and in 1956 he signed up to study medicine at the University of Pretoria on an SADF scholarship. His ambition was relentless. He acted as foreign correspondent for the university newspaper, chaired the university’s Student Jewish Association, vice-chaired the SA Federation of Students’ Jewish and Zionist Associations, and helped run the Coordinating Committee of University Societies. None of these exertions took the edge off his politics. He was known to break up meetings of leftists and communists, hurling chairs and ripping down posters. While blacks came in for plenty of opprobrium, Levin hated nothing more than dope smokers and gays—cohorts he routinely conflated.

By 1966, he was treating patients with acute mental disorders at Johannesburg General Hospital. International watchdogs considered South Africa’s psychiatric institutions dumping grounds for the regime’s black opponents. While this was certainly true in isolated cases, black dissidents were by no means the target demographic. “After 1939,” writes Tiffany Fawn Jones in Psychiatry, Mental Institutions, and the Mad in Apartheid South Africa, “institutions and practitioners focused on the very people that the apartheid government wanted to uplift—poor white men.”

But how to define madness in a country that itself displayed all the symptoms of collective psychosis? Levin devised an answer: no member of white society, regardless of how deviant, was beyond the normalizing power of modern psychiatry. In 1968, he submitted a letter to the secretary of the South African parliament, asking to pitch conservative legislators on a treatment program that would rehabilitate gays and lesbians. “The problem of sexual deviation,” he wrote, “requires re-evaluation; without encouraging an unnatural extention [sic] of this problem, it would be better contained and treated by the doctor (rather than by imprisonment).”

Levin didn’t believe in criminalizing deviancy out of existence. Rather, he believed in medicating it into oblivion. Early in his career, he researched the effects of Lorazepam, Diazepam, Maprotiline—the psychotropic era’s unguided bombs. He was also an enthusiastic proponent of electroshock therapy. His clinical obsession, even more so than homosexuality, was the eradication of marijuana use in the SADF. His doctoral thesis, “An Analysis of the Use of Drugs and Certain Sequelae Thereof with Emphasis on Cannabis sativa in a Sample of Young Men Conscripted for Military Service,” was considered by the head of the South African Medical and Dental Council an “original and important contribution to the psychiatric field of drug addiction.”

In 1967, he married a young university research assistant named Erica, who hailed from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Over the course of Levin’s life, Erica would provide unfailing support, not just as a wife and mother but also as an on-hand typist and dogsbody. At what would prove to be enormous personal risk, she remained in awe of her husband until the very end. Together they raised four children, and if their Judaism held them back from becoming model members of the volk, it barely showed.

Two years after marrying, still enlisted in the SADF and under the supervision of Surgeon General Colin Cockcroft, Levin began to design a program that would implement his earlier recommendations to the government. Along with a number of other doctors who helped the regime medicate difference and pathologize dissent, he now had the full might of the South African military-medical complex behind him. He got to work immediately.

Levin’s primary innovation was the establishment of a treatment pipeline that extended from 1 Mil in Pretoria to Greefswald in the scorching northern bush. The SADF’s wayward boys (and, later, girls) were flagged by commanding officers, chaplains, or medical staff and processed through 1 Mil’s psych wards. There, in a highly insular environment, Levin “fixed” inmates’ sexuality and other deviances with a combination of drugs and electroshock equipment. Those who didn’t fit this treatment profile, or who refused to co-operate, were sent to Greefswald, which die Kolonel began to oversee after Cockcroft installed him at 1 Mil. If his methods were grotesque and unethical, he was the regime’s ranking psychiatrist, so it hardly mattered.

No account lays bare the extent of Levin’s sway more comprehensively than a document called The aVersion Project. Subtitled “Human rights abuses of gays and lesbians in the South African Defence Force by health workers during the apartheid era,” compiled by activists and academics, and published in October 1999, it is a multidisciplinary text that reads like Dostoevsky. The report took its cue from South Africa’s controversial Truth and Reconciliation Commission process. Convened in 1995, the TRC was meant to cauterize apartheid’s suppurating wounds: if the country had any hope of overcoming its past, the reasoning went, then its people needed to hear testimony from both the victims and the perpetrators of the regime’s atrocities. The TRC offered certain perpetrators amnesty in exchange for information. Most of those called to the commission came before their fellow citizens to confess their crimes and cast around in the carnage for forgiveness. Levin was not among them.

One TRC submission, compiled by the Health and Human Rights Project and titled Professional Accountability in South Africa, implicated twenty-four doctors in human-rights abuses, with Levin making the cut for his torture of SADF recruits at 1 Mil. The TRC proved that regime-doctor complicity was coded into apartheid’s operating system, and The aVersion Project was an attempt to challenge this hierarchy. Levin goes unnamed in its pages, because the terms of its funding forced the compilers to refer to him as the “Psychiatrist” or the “Colonel.” But he exists between the lines as its open secret, its Baal.

One of the primary questions posed by the report was whether gay recruits under Levin’s supervision consented to conversion therapy or were forced to comply. Shock treatment was a frequently used and much studied method of “averting” patients from engaging in homosexual behaviour, and although it had fallen out of favour in the United Kingdom and the United States by the 1970s, it was hardly a radical practice. It was, however, behavioural psychiatry at its crudest: show patient image of same-sex nude, apply shock; show patient image of opposite-sex nude, withhold shock; and, lo!—“normalcy” emerges from a chrysalis of pain. Needless to say, there was scant scientific evidence to suggest that the procedure worked.

If, as The aVersion Project asserts, the shock therapy became excessive, or if the patient resisted, there was little to distinguish treatment from torture. According to testimony from seventeen informants, including patients, family members, and health care professionals, refusing the Colonel was not an option. Recruits did not check themselves in voluntarily; instead, they were channelled into the wards by authority figures. One such recruit, identified as Clive, told the researchers how the Colonel had claimed that there was nothing to fear from shock treatment, and that he’d used the procedure himself to cure a “predilection for chocolate bon-bons.” Clive saw things otherwise. “It kind of like twisted the muscle,” he told the researchers. “And then when you kind of reached the maximum point, and then you’d say ‘No, no, no, I couldn’t stand it any more’ then he would say, ‘Now you must think about your girlfriend.’ ” An intern psychologist named Trudie Grobler told the researchers that she once witnessed a lesbian recruit shocked with so much force that her shoes blew off. “I couldn’t believe that her body could survive it all,” Grobler said.

The report included other accusations. “My first experience with the Colonel,” a patient said, “was when he ‘checked’ my penis for hygiene. I thought that was very unsuitable as his examination had little to do with my mental condition.” Levin swamped his patients with medication. Parents were rarely informed. Most recruits cracked; some were broken beyond repair. As one former SADF member told the The aVersion Project’s authors, “A chap in our unit couldn’t come to terms with the military or his homosexuality, and put his rifle to his mouth and shot himself. Two weeks later, his family [was] notified.”

The evidence was overwhelming. The report concluded that inmates “suffered human rights abuses” because they were treated “without proper informed consent. Almost all suffered varying degrees of harm as a consequence of treatment.”

And then there was Greefswald. A 1973 United Press International article reported that it was designed “to group addicts together and expose them to the rigors of a fighting military unit.” But if at 1 Mil Levin abused conventional psychiatric practice, his camp belonged to a long line of twentieth-century institutions that subscribed to a much darker ideal: Arbeit macht frei. Work makes you free.

On arrival, each new boy, or “roofie,” was offered his own bespoke welcome. The corpse of a mutilated wild cat was flung onto Gordon Torr’s lap; Itiel was pulled from the truck by his hair, a knife against his throat. The boys were dropped into the middle of an Africa they had only encountered in storybooks. Cheetahs and leopards loped beneath acacia, baobab, stinkwood, and buffalo thorn. Shadows revealed themselves to be browsing kudu. Every so often, SADF brass would drive up in Jeeps and Mercedes Benzes for some R and R, drunkenly spraying game with machine-gun fire.

The boys were stripped of their identities the moment they stumbled out of the Bedfords. The first things they lost were their names. They became symbols, and then they became nothing. “The deprivation of food, water, incredible stress and strain we were put under,” Itiel told me. “You went through the next threshold, then the next one—then the next one.”

They rarely slept, marching through veld, carrying guns with no ammo. Sometimes they worked eighteen hours a day—cracking rocks, digging ditches, building barracks. Contact with their families was forbidden. Violence from the officers begat violence from the other roofies. Itiel worshipped at a big rock in the middle of the camp, supplicating himself before it as the sun rose. “I went back to primal man,” he explained. “I saw things there of such mystical meaning, things that were reptilian in myself.” There was a term for this in the SADF: Bosbevok. Bushfucked.

Every so often, the wacka-wacka of a chopper would crack the stillness below Greefswald’s plateau, and an SA-330C Puma would disgorge Levin for consultations. When Bubbles arrived, sweating through his khakis, Itiel knew that he and his fellow recruits would be spared hard labour until the doctor returned to Pretoria. In an unbreakable cycle, their tormentor became their saviour became their tormentor. “There are very few people on earth that went through what we went through physically and mentally,” Itiel told me. “It was hell.”

But the secret could not be contained. Although Levin left the camp’s administration in 1974, the death knell was not properly sounded until 1977, when Greefswald’s violence spilled over the Botswana border. Three roofies gang-raped a woman, who was eight months pregnant at the time. The attack occurred within full view of her mother and sparked an international incident so serious that even the apartheid government could not cover it up.

After Levin’s discharge, he transferred to Addington Hospital, in Durban, where he served as principal specialist and head of the department of psychiatry between 1975 and 1981. He then took a university post in Bloemfontein, followed by a quiet stint as a psychiatry professor at Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, treating patients in a reviled institution called Fort England. His notoriety faded along with his influence. “He had this attitude of, Why would you listen to me? I’m just a big fat frog,” a former patient told me.

Nonetheless, like many of his peers, Levin must have known that when apartheid ended, his medical innovations would be recast as his crimes. In 1995, just a year after the inauguration of democracy in South Africa, the doctor and his family evaporated. One day, he was in his rooms at Fort England. The next day, he wasn’t. He left in such a rush, claimed his successor, that he didn’t even clean out his office. South African justice, blinder than most, would never catch a glimpse of him again.

The Levin family moved to Calgary in 1998 and soon settled in a quiet, leafy neighbourhood in the city’s southwest. Aubrey joined the House of Jacob Mikveh Israel synagogue, participating in the familiar rhythms and rituals of Orthodox Judaism, and he became familiar in turn—the obese, devout psychiatrist, an avid reader of non-fiction books and newspapers.

Three years before arriving in Calgary, Levin had moved to Canada and been granted a medical licence based on a dazzling fifteen-page CV he presented to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan. He quickly became chief of psychiatry at the Regional Psychiatric Centre of Saskatoon, a correctional facility. His resumé read like an inversion of The aVersion Project, trumpeting his past as an apartheid-era military psychiatrist, detailing his work with drug users, and quoting proudly the review of his doctoral thesis. The CV made no mention of his conversion program, nor of the camp built near the banks of the Limpopo and Shashe.

Nonetheless, there was more than enough in its pages to give one pause. Had the CPSS investigated Levin more thoroughly, it would have found several black marks on his record after he was discharged in 1974. During his tenure at Durban’s Addington Hospital, two complaints were filed with the registrar of the South African Medical and Dental Council. Both concerned invasive physical examinations that accompanied psychiatric consultations. Even when one of the patients later retracted his complaint, his account was disturbing:

He asked me to take off my shoes, socks, and shirt and lie on the examination table . . . he asked me to pull down my underpants and examined my penis, about which I had complained, he pulled the skin completely back, and then he showed me the redness and the inflammation, asked how it felt. He then took a cream or ointment from a small jar and put it around the inflammation, which aroused me physically, although it was not my intention or Dr. Levine’s [sic] intention to do anything which might have been abnormal. . . .

The doctor’s eleven-page rebuttal dismissed the accusations as an elaborate conspiracy. In what would emerge as a theme throughout Levin’s career, the SAMDC deferred to his power and reputation. “The committee resolved that the explanation of dr [ sic] Levin be noted,” wrote the registrar, “and that no further action be taken.” In an enraged follow-up letter, the other patient’s father described the investigation as “quite astonishingly unsatisfactory.” Nor were all members of the SAMDC as sanguine as the registrar. “I must express in the strongest terms my objections as a member of the Medical Council,” wrote a professor referred to as I. Gordon, “that both cases would seem to have been disposed of.”

Dealing with complaints from psychiatric patients constitutes a nearly impossible balancing act: How does an outside arbiter distinguish a lucid grievance from a delusional invention? But in Levin’s case, a pattern was taking shape. His most dogged critic was Robert M. Kaplan, the forensic psychiatrist based in Australia. Like Levin, he had grown up in the South African Jewish community and trained as a psychiatrist. Unlike Levin, he had developed an obsession with doctors gone bad and written numerous papers and books on the subject. According to Kaplan, Levin’s pro forma licensing by the CPSS was typical when it came to overqualified medical practitioners seeking to flee former conflict zones. “I think Levin got into Canada simply because they were looking for well-trained doctors,” he told me. “There’s always a shortage of psychiatrists, and of course he gave himself a wonderful CV.” The Canadian immigration system leans heavily on professional qualifications and experience—the higher the number of points accorded for the applicant’s skills, the likelier it is that immigration authorities will rubber-stamp a residency permit.

Levin was also becoming an expert at disappearing. In 1997, he had his name wiped from the SAMDC’s register. His last publication was a short essay in a 2004 anthology of psychopharmacology. Referencing only his own work, he wrote an ode to psychotropics called “A Fly on the Wall.” By then, he had reinvented himself as a psychopharmacologist and forensic psychiatrist. “My interest,” he wrote, “has shifted to borderline personality disorder, risk assessment, management and prevention of violent behaviour.” Which meant that, once again, he was given access to an infinite supply of powerless young men—this time in the Canadian correctional system.

If Levin’s licensing by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan can be explained away by provincial naïveté, a desperate need for forensic psychiatrists, and the pre–search engine era, his licensing by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta presents a much more complicated case. By 1998, the TRC submissions were world famous, and Levin was instantly searchable—and his story was soon making headlines internationally.

Around the time The aVersion Project was published, he felt compelled to tell a Guardian reporter that at 1 Mil “nobody was held against his or her will. We did not keep human guinea pigs, like Russian communists; we only had patients who wanted to be cured and were there voluntarily.” Shortly thereafter, an error-riddled and unverifiable article was published in South Africa’s weekly Mail & Guardian, claiming that Levin had forced gender-reassignment surgery on unwilling recruits. (This rumour had been circulating for a long time but was never proven.) The doctor retained Grant Stapon, from the law firm Bennett Jones, who threatened legal action against media outlets that covered the story.

By the mid-2000s, however, the CPSA had received legitimate queries about Levin’s past. In 1998, when the college granted him a licence—which he earned without completing a residency or any further training—a doctor with the TRC’s Health and Human Rights Project sent the college a letter of concern. He received no reply. In 2003, a film called Property of the State: Gay Men in the Apartheid Military was released, featuring an interview with a patient named Michael Smith, who described in detail an electroshock session that Levin oversaw. Kaplan contacted the CPSA, armed with the TRC submissions, The aVersion Project, and his own researched, footnoted work. “I got back pretty much a form letter,” he told me, “and I understood other people in South Africa got the same letter: ‘Dr. Levin didn’t fall into our jurisdiction before he came here, and therefore we have no authority in this.’ I then tried writing the Canadian Medical Association, and I got lost in a mire of bureaucracy.”

The problem is that the medical-college system has a crucial flaw. On the one hand, the CPSA is a self-regulating body empowered by the Health Professions Act to serve “the public by guiding the medical profession.” On the other hand, it arguably privileges professionals over the public, because its stakeholders are right up there on the letterhead: physicians and surgeons. Medical colleges play an important role in firewalling doctors from spurious malpractice claims, but self-regulation inevitably slams into the wall of self-interest, and the system tilts toward those who fund it.

At its worst, the system seems like an endless game of whack-a-mole. “Any allegations that we may hear against any physician coming from anywhere are only that: allegations,” said Kelly Eby, the CPSA’s director of communications and government relations. “We do our best to investigate those within reasonable resources, but until we have proof, it’s very difficult to move forward.” How the college defines reasonable resources, she did not say. And while this would lead an outside observer to assume the CPSA is flooded with sexual impropriety complaints made by unstable patients, forcing the college to be selective about which to investigate, that is not the case. “I would say it’s reasonably uncommon,” Eby conceded. “If you look at our complaints statistics, sexual-boundary issues are relatively rare, and proving them is even rarer. I would say one to two a year, and not against psychiatrists.” The flood, in other words, was barely a trickle; the complaints against Levin did not get lost in a torrent, but a vacuum.

The Bowden institution, a federal penitentiary, feeds troubled probates to the forensic assessment outpatient service at the Peter Lougheed Centre, one of Calgary’s major treatment locations for men moving through the prison system. By 2002, Levin was assessing patients at both facilities, providing them with psychiatric treatment as per judicial order. His choice of specialty put him in contact with men who were in no position to complain about his conduct, since their freedom often depended on positive evaluations.

Lougheed was his primary hunting ground. The most typical—and most fateful—of his prey was a young man who, due to a publication ban, can be identified only as RB. Levin first assessed him in Bowden, following a drunken, near-fatal car crash in 1999. RB had grown up rough—“there were some alcohol issues and substance abuse issues in his family,” his lawyer, Richard Edwards, told me—and spent most of his life pinging around the correctional system. Levin was assigned his case and diagnosed the young man with borderline personality disorder. When RB was released on probation in 2002, he entered into Levin’s care. According to RB’s testimony, that was when the first sexual assault occurred. They continued on and off for eight years.

Levin groomed RB by offering him bus fare, helping him access social assistance, and plying him with so much medication that at one point a pharmacist refused to fill the prescription. As the young man’s life unravelled, Levin’s influence only increased. In 2006, he was appointed professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Calgary—despite the fact that Thomas MacKay, Levin’s superior at Lougheed, had received at least one boundary violation complaint and asked that a third party be present when Levin conducted physical examinations. (Why a psychiatrist was conducting physical examinations remained a question for another time.) Levin ignored this, just as he ignored requests to conduct sessions with his office door open and to refrain from seeing patients after hours.

RB would sit in his girlfriend’s truck before appointments and weep with shame and rage. In one instance, Levin’s examinations were so rough that his scrotum began to bleed. The young man understood that there was no point in telling anyone about the doctor’s behaviour, because no one in a position of authority would believe him. On the verge of suicide, he purchased a wristwatch spy camera he couldn’t afford and wore it into Levin’s rooms on two occasions.

The fourteen minutes of footage given to Calgary police in March 2010 told a story much larger than his own. The images revealed a pair of hands, nimble with practice, as they unbuttoned RB’s pants and went to work. The sound was inaudible, but, at considerable expense to the Crown, a forensic analyst coaxed meaning from the dissonance:

Levin: That’s getting harder, ultimately getting bigger. You can feel it. Just contract it at the bottom as well. That’s it. It’ll [indiscernible] (clears throat) [indiscernible]. Just try and contract at the balls. There. I’m sure you can see it getting harder.

RB: Mm-hmm.

Levin: And feel it getting harder.

RB: Mm-hmm.

Levin: You could come [indiscernible] already and easier. Can you try coming now? Can you try coming?

When the police arrived at the Levin home on March 23, Erica tried to stop the arresting officer. “Please leave him alone!” she exclaimed. “He was just trying to help those boys!”

Chief crown prosecutor William Wister and his paralegal, Valerie Wallace, make an odd couple. He is thin and stands about six feet five inches tall, while she is rounder and a foot and a half shorter. When the Levin docket landed on their desks in 2010, Wister was based in the Edmonton Crown Prosecutors Office. (Because Levin had so often testified for the Calgary Crown in his capacity as a forensic psychiatrist, the prosecution had to come from elsewhere, to avoid a conflict of interest.) By October 2012, Wister and Wallace, along with a third member of the team, Dallas Sopko, were inhabiting the second floor of the Calgary Delta Hotel, facing off against the doctor and his defence counsel, which was bankrolled by the Canadian Medical Protective Association.

The prosecution had access to hours of police interview tape that depicted Levin as he watched RB’s footage, his hands covering his face. He did not apologize or admit guilt, but he told his interlocutor, “Whatever happens, there will be mud on my face. I’m horrified also to the name and the reputation of psychiatry to have somebody charged.” It is impossible to decode this statement—to know if it was intended to suggest contrition, a genuine if morally mangled sense of responsibility to uphold the standards of his profession, or if it was merely an acknowledgment that the coming fight would be a hard one.

By then, nearly fifty former patients had come forward. Over the course of what Wallace described as “a very hard few days,” the Crown whittled down this group to twenty and then, finally, to nine feasible cases. All of them were troubled, all their stories tragic. One patient would eventually tell the jury that Levin had masturbated him without wearing gloves—a significant detail, since the young man was battling leukemia at the time and was susceptible to infection. “I was so distraughted [sic] because of so much medication, I wasn’t—I was in—I am in chemo,” he testified. “I felt—well, I mean, humiliated.”

The defence first moved for a fitness hearing. The submission portrayed Levin as a man in his seventy-third year who was chronically unwell—and the psychiatrist played the part by sitting dead eyed and slack faced beside his lawyer. “His memory has deteriorated, his concentration,” his wife told the judge. “I don’t even like to mention it, but he—after he goes to the washroom, often he doesn’t do up his zip.” The jury dismissed the request, and Levin made a stunning recovery. Supportive colleagues were brought in to attest to the absurdity of a doctor of Levin’s stature standing trial. Then the tricks turned dirty. Levin used glaucoma drops to decrease his blood pressure so that he’d be deemed too unwell to stand or so that the trial would be adjourned. He fired his attorney, Alain Hepner, in what seemed like a bid for a mistrial; when the judge refused to call one, he hired the similarly top-drawer Chris Archer.

Once the trial got underway, a perceived hypersensitivity regarding inappropriate touching emerged as the defence’s tent pole. While his methods may have seemed irresponsible and abusive to outsiders, his lawyers claimed, Levin was in fact a maverick in a field starved for new ideas. The doctor insisted that his practice was derived from a multidisciplinary grab bag that included psychiatry, urology, and sex therapy. RB’s footage, said Levin’s legal team, depicted a vastly experienced professional in the act of stimulating the bulbocavernosus reflex, a test that is typically used to gauge the extent of a spinal injury, but that was in this case meant to elicit a behavioural response.

The Crown contended that Levin was not trained as anything other than a psychiatrist, and even there he seemed unwilling to commit himself to anything approaching a recognizable methodology. His records made no mention of his innovative practices; he gave his patients financial assistance; he made comments like “Your wife is lucky” and “You could do damage with that thing.” According to Wister, “His defence was that the footage depicted an examination. Ours was that it was sexual assault. Obviously.”

As the Crown had anticipated, the defence used the victims’ circumstances against them. “There were lots of things to attack them on, in terms of credibility, motivation, reliability,” Wallace told me. “So, were they credible witnesses? Did they have some ulterior motive? Which goes to the issue of, how can they accurately report what happened to them? ” The jury was confronted with the full extent of the victims’ mental decay: when RB testified, he was so agitated that he could not remain sitting and spun around in the witness box. Bizarre behaviour was not restricted to witnesses for the prosecution. Deep into the trial, Erica Levin followed a juror from the courtroom to a transit stop and attempted to buy her off with an envelope of cash. This almost prompted a mistrial, as it was no doubt intended to do. But Wister and Wallace refused to give up. “They just came across the wrong team,” Wallace told me. (Erica was found guilty of attempted obstruction and is serving an eighteen-month conditional sentence with house arrest.)

Throughout the proceedings, Levin remained a cypher. He made his way to the court using a walker, Erica by his side, tramping through the snow in a coat that made him seem even bulkier than usual. He did not exclaim or weep.

On January 28, 2013, a jury found Aubrey Levin guilty of three counts of sexual assault. He was found not guilty of two other counts, and the jury was deadlocked on the remaining four cases. He was sentenced to five years in prison, which ended up sticking despite a spirited appeal. The penitentiary itself remains secret, in order to protect his safety.

I last spoke with Itiel at a Johannesburg kosher restaurant called Frangelica’s, which serves coffee, blintzes, and cholent to the residents of Glenhazel, the city’s Orthodox Jewish enclave. He wore his grey hair and beard wizard-long, and a pair of yellow-tinted aviators implied a close familiarity with psychedelics. He lived nearby, he told me, in an apartment block maintained for the indigent by the Jewish Burial Society.

When Itiel was discharged from Greefswald in July 1972, he found a patch of garden at his family’s home and did not move from it for six months. “People used to come down and talk to me, and I didn’t know what the hell they were saying,” he explained. “You can’t relate to anything, can’t relate to the future, can’t relate to the past. You are, like, there. The present only.”

Not a trace of Greefswald remains. But many of its ghosts tell a similar story: none survived the journey back to real life intact. Gordon Torr, who managed to build a successful advertising career in the UK, suddenly fell apart a few years ago. He suffered a catastrophic breakdown, became suicidal, and wrote a stunning novelization of his experiences, called Kill Yourself and Count to 10. He has come to an intellectual accord with Levin’s legacy. “I think of the camp as a metaphor for that peculiarly dark and twisted place in the minds of the people who conceived a pure-white world in which ‘otherness’ could be dumped like trash into the ghettoes and prisons of apartheid,” he told South African GQ.

Now that Levin is in prison, has there been any closure—that intangible condition the TRC reached for in the late 1990s? Certainly not for RB, who by September 2014 was broke and homeless. He is now suing Levin, the CPSA, the Calgary police, and the Peter Lougheed Centre in a complicated civil case. The fallen doctor still has his defenders, those who can’t—or don’t want to—fathom the breadth and depth of his crimes. During sentencing, Jakob Mikveh’s Rabbi Yisroel Miller sent a letter pleading for leniency. “The bad does not erase all the good,” wrote the rabbi. “I know all the goodness within him still remains. A prison term would be a death sentence for him.”

Authoritarian regimes have enlisted numberless medical professionals to treat not the disease in the patient but the patient as the disease. The vast majority of people who come to Canada to work as psychiatrists are committed, well-trained professionals who will never be guilty of malpractice. But the Aubrey Levins of the world, anomalous though they may be, cannot be ignored out of existence. Have Canadian medical colleges become more robust in ensuring that people like him do not enter the system? Kelly Eby told me she wasn’t “specifically aware” of any formal process for looking at the history of an applicant’s country of origin. Self-report remains a key phrase in the CPSA’s long list of requirements for those applying for medical licences in Alberta.

A good doctor ends his or her career largely unsung—a cake at a retirement party, a nice obituary in the local paper. A bad doctor destroys hundreds, sometimes thousands, of lives. I spoke with a number of Levin’s former patients, and none of them can quite believe that he’s in prison. They still fear his reach; they still believe he’s out there. One told me, “All I want is to know that he won’t hurt anyone anymore.”

As for Itiel, things eventually improved, but not by much. His life never found a track, and he is now dependent on the charity of the Burial Society. “I haven’t managed to get back into anything,” he said, taking a slug from a can of Coke. “Nobody wants to give me a job.” In the final reckoning, he had to concede that Levin had done exactly what he said he’d do—and then some. He’d peeled Itiel like an onion and gotten to the essence of who he was. Then he kept peeling, until there was nothing left at all.

First published in The Walrus.

Tin Fever

In the first shafts of light to pierce the jungle canopy, the tin porters danced. They swayed and sashayed to the languorous rhythms coming from a radio that someone, in the night, had thought to stash under a bag of beans. The rest, an hour earlier, had been looted—the other radios, flashlights, pocketfuls of cash, half of Adolphe’s precious stock of sardine tins, and two porters to transport it all, nudged forward with assault rifles into the moonless oblivion of the jungle.

We were camped—Adolphe, the tin porters, my guide Ferdinand, and I—in a handful of patched-up tents standing in a clearing that serves as a rest stop midway along a twenty-six-mile, mud-churned footpath through a sliver of rainforest in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Onward, still a half-day’s hike away, loomed Bisie, richest of the east’s tin-ore mines—a lodestone for salivating prospectors and graft-minded brawn from the Congolese Army or any of at least six rebel factions that prowl the surrounding forest. The predatory refuse of the 1994 genocide in tiny, neighboring Rwanda and a five-year war in Congo that nominally ended in 2003, these factions periodically splinter, fritter away into Eastern Congo’s untapped immensity, then regroup into new alliances. On marauding and ransom depends their longevity.

But eight hours of clambering over hip-high roots, slashing through vines, and wading across mud lagoons had a way of drowning out anxieties. Exhausted, lulled by a symphony of jungle creatures and the soft song of porters huddled round campfires, I sank into a dreamless sleep.

Sometime in the night, gruff, staccato shouts jolted me awake.

“Muzungu! Muzungu!”

The word in Swahili means “the white”—and I was the only white person for miles around. I peered out of my tent. A flashlight shone into my eyes. I groped for mine, flashed it back, and caught the contours of a man in army green, tall and lean with a semiautomatic slapping against his shoulder.

It was 4:45 a.m. and a gang from the country’s dysfunctional army was blasting through the campsite like a tornado.

I listened silently to negotiations for what I presumed was a bid for my body. I fingered my penknife, aware of the absurdity of wielding it to fend off a man three times my strength and armed with a Kalashnikov. Beside me Ferdinand spoke gently in a language that I didn’t understand. By luck—or God’s grace, as he would say—he recognized the soldier’s accent as that of his own tribe and offered him a crisp twenty-dollar bill and a compassionate ear for a tale of poor soldiers—unpaid and without prospects, ordered from the mine to the front—in exchange for leaving me be.

The soldier vanished with the money, boasting that I was a VIP.

Another man wanted Adolphe’s black gum boots too, but Adolphe told them they were no good—leaked water, full of holes. He steered them away with some cash, he told me later when he crawled into my tent. It was all the money he’d earned from selling sardines—money he’d saved so he could leave this land of dog-eat-dog and pay his way back to the city, where he’d find an honest job that wouldn’t make him hemorrhage inside.

Adolphe belonged now to the tent city, one among the 1.2 million Congolese caught in a limbo of homelessness and wandering by a conflict fought mainly between boys with rusty, secondhand weapons, and propelled by the usual, interlocking motives: power, revenge, mutual suspicion, manipulated ethnic loyalties, and economic fiefdoms hacked out of a jungle second in size only to the Amazon.

He had joined us that day along the trail, his tale blurring with the passing scenery. His parents had been slaughtered for speaking Kinyarwanda, a language associated with Rwanda whose speakers had twice in the past decade invaded from the east. He had lived for a time in a refugee camp in Uganda, lost track of his lone surviving brother, then headed to Goma, the slapdash provincial capital of the warring region of North Kivu. But the city offered few prospects for employment, even for a twenty-one-year-old with a college degree in information technology. So he had headed through the jungle, to Bisie, to try his luck with mining.

In 2004, on the London Metal Exchange, prices shot up for a conductive metal called cassiterite, a mineral that is the principal ore of tin. Sales of the raw mineral would now outstrip the costs of industrial extraction, even deposits buried in the anarchic jungles of a failed state.

“We’re not all illiterate, you know,” he had pointed out that morning to Gaston, another mine-bound itinerant, as the pair sprawled for a moment on a felled tree along the path. “Some of us have diplomas.”

In the dark tent that night, his hand trembled with the sorry remnants from his pocket: a couple of crumpled fifty-franc Congolese bills, worth a few US cents, and a packet of pills. He took them to staunch the bleeding that began during an ill-fated trek from the mine—a two-day voyage through the forest—while bearing the standard 110-pound load of tin ore. After the burden had torn his abdominal wall, he had opted for selling cans of fish. A few more sales, he estimated, and he would have had the forty dollars he needed to pay his way back to the city.

For all that, when dawn came, the porters danced. Amid scattering chickens and the shifting haze from vats of boiling maize porridge, they melted into the voluptuous, sun-drenched melodies of their soukous. They swayed as if they were rising above the smashed dreams that paved the pathway to Bisie and its vain promise of quick riches. To be robbed of the lone objects on which their livelihoods depended—a pickaxe, five cans of sardines, a flashlight for entering the bowels of a mineshaft—might have been a death sentence. But the porters treated their loss with an almost transcendental sense of their own insignificance. If you have nothing left but the clothes on your back, and no prospects of redress because you live in a land of near-total impunity, what else can you possibly do but dance?

 

From the mine, porters streamed back along the trail with bundles balanced on their heads or slung across their backs or in wooden sleds. Sweat beaded on their foreheads, poured down their torsos and congealed as a stench that blew around them like a cloud. Bent double, they channeled the pain of the weight into a coiled concentration, muscles tensed, brows furrowed, bolting forward.

Because if they stop, they stop.

The wet hump of a fresh grave lay feet from a crook in the path, barely visible among the roots and rotting tree stumps. A few leaves crowned it like a garland. His name was Emmanuel. He had borne 132 pounds; he had weighed only 100. In that spot, he had perched a moment to rest, unloaded his burden, and let the soft, damp soil lull him to sleep. He never awoke. They came and picked up his load of tin, took his two hundred dollars, and left the task of his burial to the manager of the rest stop. At the sight of the hump, Adolphe let out a primal cry.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There was supposed to be another way through the jungle, one involving wheels and paved road so human beings would not die like pack animals hauling sacks of unrefined metal on marathon jungle treks.

In 2004, on the London Metal Exchange, prices shot up for a conductive metal called cassiterite, a mineral that is the principal ore of tin. Sales of the raw mineral would now outstrip the costs of industrial extraction, even of deposits buried in the anarchic jungles of a failed state.

Only four years earlier there had been a sudden spike in the price of coltan, a rare mineral so abundant in some regions of Congo that one had only to scratch barehanded at the soil to find a thick, black lump. Amid a surge in demand for cell phones, PlayStations and other electronic gadgetry, coltan shot up from $30 a pound to $240. And so they swarmed—Rwandans, Ugandans, children, rebels—into the forest, and into the heart of a conflict that at one point drew combatants from nine neighboring countries. Boomtowns rose. Brute capitalism flickered to life among fragile new social hierarchies in the legions of profiteers and prospectors.

 

Then reports started emerging of “blood coltan” and its lethal lubrication of what came to be called Africa’s World War. By 2001, an alternative supply flooded the global marketplaces. Prices nosedived. The boomtowns rotted in the tropical heat. It all suddenly seemed so ephemeral.

Six years later, as the world poured money into Congo’s first “free and fair” elections in forty years, multinational mining companies perched on the sidelines, waiting for the chance to bid on national mining concessions that were frozen in a post-conflict attempt at a cleanup.

Mining and Processing Congo (MPC), a subdivision of a company partly owned by a South African private-equity firm, unleashed a savvy local weapon on government ministers. Yves K was a paunchy Belgian-born freelance pilot who had earned the wartime epithet of the White Mai Mai for flying out supplies to scattered pockets of Mai Mai (defense militias nominally loyal to then-President Laurent Kabila and named for the water amulets they wore to ward off bullets). He still enjoyed flashing his VIP pass to cut through the usual bureaucratic walls that most Congolese bypass only with graft. When the Ministry of Mines opened anew for business, the White Mai Mai emerged within hours with the legal rights to the mining concessions at Bisie.

Then MPC went a step further. Under the customary laws of the Congo, property rights to the mountain fell to two local clans. A dele-gation of MPC bigwigs choppered into the villages outside the forest and signed contracts with about a dozen representatives of Bisie’s two proprietary families, the Bassa and Bandaluga. The deal included notarized pledges to build schools, health centers, a hydroelectric plant, and a manioc mill, and a promise to train and employ local diggers. According to clan elders and documents from the time, the residents had great hopes that MPC would pull them out of poverty. The Muzungu, they said, could help them in a way that their own could not.

According to its director general, Brian Christophers, the company planned investments in the local community worth $3 million. Peanuts, he said, compared to the profits they expected to reap.

“We had a whole development program. We even had NGOs involved. We knew already that the deposit was big enough to proceed at those levels,” Christophers told me. Bisie, in short, promised a treasure trove.

In the jungle, atop the tin-ore mountain, MPC staff set to work building a compound of simple clapboard houses and premises for a workers’ canteen. They built a helicopter landing pad. A narrow stretch of the footpath was stripped of trees and flattened into a boulevard as the promise of a road. But there, development stopped.

 

The colonial-era highway connecting Goma to Walikale town, the first stop on the way toward Bisie, had long ago returned to jungle, another victim of state neglect and war. A last vestigial stretch now served as an airstrip for the creaking Antonovs that daily flew the tin-oxide ore to Goma.

“There goes our cassiterite,” Brian Christophers chided as we watched from the garden of his Goma villa as planes flew overhead. Sometimes twenty, sometimes more, passed each day, he said.

With their track record of crashing under the weight of excess cargo loaded by overzealous traffickers, locals had dubbed them “flying coffins.” Their Russian or Ukrainian pilots were said to down stiff vodkas before taking off.

For a fee of $130 haggled with a broker on the tarmac, Ferdinand put his faith in God, I in his faith, and we stepped onboard. The walls inside were boarded up with wooden planks and a strange wheezing sound accompanied the rumblings of the propeller. We flew for an hour over an unbroken swell of rainforest, the merry chatter of a tin trader with Ray-Ban knockoffs and layers of gold jewelry drowned to pantomime as he demonstrated how to use his small Chinese-made weighing machine. We touched down on the road through Kikambo, sped past the moldering carcasses of two smashed Antonovs, and came to a halt between two lines of sandy-colored mud huts.

The door opened. There with his back to us stood the burly figure of Colonel Samy Matumo. And that, for my purposes, was a dazzling bit of luck. The illegal exploitation of Bisie had long been an open national secret, loudly denounced by journalists, religious leaders, and nonprofits at home and abroad. Enemy number one, mob boss, and warlord extraordinaire was its commander, known to all simply as Colonel Samy.

Dressed in the khakis of the national army’s Eighty-fifth brigade, he was directing the choreography of traffic around the plane and complaining loudly to uniformed underlings that his driver had yet to appear. With balletic precision, laborers spread the plane’s cargo along the roadside, then reloaded the plane with dozens of bags of cassiterite from a truck, and in a matter of minutes turned it about-face with a set of ropes. A second Antonov touched down on the road just as the first lifted off on its way back to Goma.

Minutes later the colonel sat in a wood-carved chair in the corner of a cool mud-walled hut. The chiaroscuro from a paneless window cut across his baby-faced features, partially obscuring his gaze. A fat gold watch hung from his wrist. He spat onto the cracked mud floor among the bones of a chicken or possibly a macaw. Three burly men in basketball jerseys and Nike outfits guarded the door. A woman passed through bearing a silver bowl filled with water and placed it by his feet. He washed his hands, then carefully scrutinized my authorization papers.

It was revelatory of the deep corruption, if not the sheer loopiness of Congolese bureaucracy, that my visit to a mine notorious for falling outside the bounds of the law required seventeen separate stamps and signatures from local, regional, and national authorities, both civil and military. The last of the signatures, before Samy’s, belonged to Colonel Delphin Kahimi, de facto commander of military operations in North Kivu province. Obtaining it had required tracking Delphin’s movements between battle sites in order to catch him on a brief return to his Goma villa. At each stop, the requisite authority would furrow his brow and carefully probe my purposes, often with an ill-concealed suspicion that I was out for a cut of the profits myself. Colonel Samy duly took his time—a languor that accented his self-importance.

I already knew. For many in Kikambo, Colonel Samy was a hero, head of a rebel brigade of former Mai Mai, sons of the territory who had defended it from the foreign invasions that followed the 1997 ouster of the country’s tyrant of thirty-two years, Mobutu Sese Seko. In subsequent peace deals, these men were to be incorporated and dispersed across Congo’s national force. But the Eighty-fifth resisted orders. Entrenched in their tin-ore-rich pocket of jungle, far from the reach of any inchoate law and order, they merely donned national-army uniforms, then skipped the training meant to turn them from rebels into soldiers.

When MPC representatives arrived at Bisie on an official visit in 2006, local residents greeted them with welcome placards and ceremonial dances. The delegation met with clan leaders and local civil-society groups, and challenged Samy’s Eighty-fifth to a friendly soccer game. The soldiers won. MPC handed over a cash gift to Samy. It all seemed hunky-dory. That night, gunfire broke out from Samy’s camp. An MPC engineer was shot in the leg and had to be helicoptered out. More death threats, assassination attempts, falsified documents, and arbitrary arrests followed. The colonel wanted a deal. He demanded that MPC offer a cut of every kilo that came out of the mine, a total that would have been worth about ten thousand dollars a month. Said Christophers, “We just looked at him.”

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In parallel, a rival company to MPC, sprung from a splinter faction of the Bangandula clan, found a willing patron in a well-connected businessman in Kinshasa named Alexis Makabuza (a target of UN sanctions for alleged links to illegal arms imports). For support and a cut of the mine’s profits, the Bangandula Mining Group (GMB) turned to a web of local officials—and to Colonel Samy. A mafia boss was born.

Notarized “contracts” obtained by MPC revealed a system of kickbacks between GMB and local administrators. According to one such contract, dated August 28, 2006, the administrator of Walikale territory, Dieudonne Tshishiku Mutoke, “assures the security of [GMB’s] work throughout the expanse of the territory,” in return for 10 percent of weekly production, fifty cents for every kilo of cassiterite bought at the mine, and 50 percent of the group’s revenues in neighboring villages.

When finally, after several minutes of silence, Colonel Samy looked up from my paperwork and assented with a nod to my passage to Bisie, I asked about his control of the area. He smiled a mite bashfully and meandered through a series of non sequiturs. He talked of defending the territory from foreign militias, of God being on his side, of paying the school dues of needy children. The mine, he said, needed protection from its population of vagabonds and ex-criminals.

“All bad people are there,” he said. “As you can imagine, everywhere in Kivu there is war. Only in Walikale there is peace. God is helping authorities in the territory. For example, myself indirectly I am working for the good of ordinary people.” He stopped to pick his teeth. “I ensure the security of the whole territory.”

For a moment, I wondered if he might be sincere. Couldn’t an army unit, fattened on its own mountain of riches, act as a social service and law enforcement of sorts in the far corners of a country otherwise beyond the reach of government?

 

Less than forty-eight hours later—after Ferdinand had hired porters from among the young men desperately swarming the gateway to the footpath, after we had started on our twenty-six mile trek (our literal marathon) toward the mountain and bedded for the night—the soldiers blitzed us near dawn. Any hint of Samy’s good intentions vanished with the radios. After the tin porters danced, we packed our things and pressed on.

At Bisie, the jungle opened, in a blast of heat and noise, onto a labyrinthine city that sprawled to the base of a scarred, red mountain. The place suggested the transience of a fever, its shacks collapsing upon each other, slapped together from mud, corrugated iron, twigs, and bits of cloth. Vendors crammed narrow alleyways with flasks of brandy, cheap calculators, batteries, and curiosities such as men’s dress shoes. Men dipped pans into the gray waters of a stream that served for basic hygiene, for washing the guts of slaughtered animals, and for sifting for fine alluvial tin-ore dust. They poured the water into rusty troughs and guffawed at the Muzungu as we picked our way past.

Here the harlots in Colonel Samy’s private hotel cursed you if you dared defy their solicitations. Here the bush meat was smoked fresh, but the cost of other food and drink was inflated to at least six times the normal price because everything had to be hauled through the jungle, past the ten rickety wooden barriers that cracked open only for passersby who hand over withered bills or a cut of their mineral burden to thugs in dusty pinstripe pants or basketball jerseys.

At the last of the barriers, three soldiers in civilian clothing had rocked on plastic chairs under a tarp and solemnly passed my papers from one to the next. Gaston quietly handed over a stack of fifty cell phone credit units. The standard shakedown was 10 percent of all entering merchandise.

For a long while, the mine was the sole preserve of Samy, but every time MPC called upon a branch of military or officialdom to investigate, they came, they saw, and then they never left. There was a schedule of those who collected bribes at the barriers that read like a catalog of the military chain of command: on Tuesday, General Gabriele Amisi, head of ground forces; on Wednesday, the chief of staff, based in Kinshasa; on Thursday, military intelligence; on Friday, the eighth military region, responsible for North Kivu; and on Saturday, Colonel Etienne Bindu, the Goma-based chief of staff. Sundays, with only a trickle of traffic, theoretically belonged to kin of the two clans who traditionally owned the mountain. But they had been chased away by members of the firm that acted as a civilian front for Samy’s crew.

It was a Monday when we arrived, so the bouncers we paid off were soldiers from Colonel Samy’s own brigade.

 

A steep climb up the mountain’s face revealed a cratered Martian landscape of semi-naked miners bent double, muscles slathered in mud, hacking bare-knuckled with shovels and tiny pickaxes deep into stinking pits. They called themselves “owls,” creatures of the dark who slept, ate, and defecated deep inside tunnels from which they seldom emerged.

Sometimes they smoked their minds soft. “We have no choice but to drug ourselves,” said Alliance Nanjangi, an owl in a knitted Rasta bonnet who puffed on a giant spliff.

Gazing out onto lush forested hills veiled in shifting mists, he told me that in a previous life he had been a student. He opened his palm to show me a fistful of the mind-numbing herb. “Because there’s a lot of danger,” he said. “If we use our heads, we lose our heads.”

Crowds of owls idled around him. Beyond them, the miner’s camp boomed and throbbed in two rows of skeletal huts that coursed along a narrow ledge. The racketing sounds of spaghetti Westerns and kung fu flicks from a makeshift cinema mingled all day and through the night with the camp’s incessant din and chatter. It was a world devoid of women, clean water, or the concept of garbage collection. Men played checkers on a piece of cardboard colored in with markers, fixed small generators with twigs and bits of wire, or bought cheap perfume off vendors to coax the whores at the camp below. The cook who claimed to make the mountain’s best bush-meat stew served a packed house five times a day.

“There used to be so many people here they’d sleep right here, on the street,” said a pharmacist sitting on a filthy mattress, jabbing a thumb out the window of his pill-crammed shack. “That was when production was good.”

Even in the far reaches of Congo’s jungle, the global economic crisis could be felt—though the owls could not agree on the exact use of tin ore.

“It makes bombs,” said one.

Another: “It goes to Europe.”

“We don’t know,” said a third.

“Bullets,” chimed in a fourth.

In fact, the tin ore finds its way to smelters in Asia, Europe, and the United States, where it becomes solder, tin plating, and alloy for components in electronic devices. According to the International Tin Research Institute (ITRI), a UK-based nonprofit that represents the tin industry, electronic solders alone accounted for 44 percent of the world’s refined tin usage in 2008. A 2009 study by Global Witness, a nonprofit that tracks the exploitation of natural resources, ranked the tonnes of tin ore exported from eastern Congo in 2007 and 2008 fourth worldwide, after China, Indonesia, and Peru. Of that, Bisie accounted for an estimated 80 percent.

Owls worked, spreading fresh, wet cassiterite to dry in the sun, or sprawled exhausted, asleep wherever they fell, mouths open and limbs mud-caked. Traders bearing creaking weights haggled at the mouths of pits with wads of hundred-dollar bills. Commanders in civilian clothes strutted by in packs of two or three, fedoras tipped, immediately distinguishable from the less powerful by their unabashed swagger. A thick, gold collar bulged around the neck of one. I found out later that, days earlier, a local vendor had carried the necklace in his stall, with a price tag of two thousand dollars. Beside a tiny orange tent on a ridge that zigzagged down the mountain, a diminutive man with a large black Bible clutched to his chest smiled at me with an incongruous innocence. He dipped into the tent, no larger than a bathtub, and perched on a dirty mattress beside three other evangelical pastors. They whispered of being looted in the night: two hundred dollars lifted in an instant when soldiers swept by at 2:00 a.m. three days earlier.

“We can do nothing before the soldiers,” said Pastor Emmanuel. “All the fruits of our labor, gone.”

The four had met at Bisie and joined forces for annual two-month-long pilgrimages to the mine, to purchase tin ore direct from its tunnels or to sift it from the river that skirted its base. Sundays they spared for religious services.

I told them of my own experience with soldiers in the night, and they nodded. “We know,” said Pastor Emmanuel. “We heard before you arrived.”

 

Halfway down the mountain, in the sweltering heat of a tarp shelter that served as the daytime sleeping quarters for the dozen diggers he employed, Madi Osikara, sage of the owls and elder of the shaft proprietors, boasted of hiring twenty men to haul an eight-thousand-dollar motor-pump on the two-day trek through the jungle. He required the pump to clear out the water that he and others complained was destroying productivity in the tunnels. The plan seemed the quixotic hallucination of some malarial megalomaniac. But it highlighted a harsh reality: a combination of haphazard artisanal mining techniques and the rabid tunneling out of every last patch of mountain meant the mine’s overall productivity had fallen dramatically since 2006. Tunnels regularly collapsed on miners, and water threatened to clog the rest.

Osikara spoke loudly, decrying the fall in prices for cassiterite, a knock-on effect from the fall in global commodity prices. He decried the exploitative role of Rwanda in the trade. But he waited until dusk, in the shelter of the MPC compound, about three hundred feet beyond the miner’s camp, to denounce the stranglehold of the military.

“A soldier came and slapped me and spit on me,” he said, his voice raspy. “They say they’re here for our security. But there is no security … Sometimes they go into the mine and force my miners to dig for them. MPC should take over this mountain.”

Two hours after dawn the next morning, a fine-framed boy crawled out of the dark of another pit down the mountain. He wiped mud from his eyes, blinked at the light, and ran off past crazily angled tarps sheltering miners awaiting their shifts, his oversize neon flip-flops catching in the trash-strewn mud.

“I work in the major’s shaft,” Bonne-Annee Kitunga said later, when I found him in the miner’s camp. Still caked in mud from the tips of his ears to his toes, he would not give his age but appeared not much older than thirteen. He was kadogo, or little one, a former child soldier who had been demobilized through a UN program and dispatched back home to his village.

“I was very little when they killed my sister,” he said. “Then I got angry.” In a fury, he had joined a Mai Mai militia and, for his ferocity, was named captain.

Readjustment to civilian life had proved difficult. Then a cousin told him about Bisie. “My friends took me here to make money,” he said. It had been two weeks, perhaps four, since he ran away from home. He seemed not to fathom the concept of lapsed time. He had less trouble clocking his shift. He worked daily from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. in a pit belonging to Major Etienne Ilunga. “My wish is to go back home,” he said quietly. He stared at his toes. “No one feeds you. No one pays you.” He could not recall when he had last eaten a meal.

He flitted off down the mountain and alighted on a rock, beside a man with a clipboard who sat outside a crowded pit entrance. The man identified himself as the owner of the pit. The moment seemed apt to inquire about the use of child labor.

“Children? No there are no children here,” he answered, without a trace of irony.

Out of the pit shot a man shiny with sweat and wet mud and wearing nothing but a tight Speedo swimsuit. He was, he told me emphatically, head of the owls. On my notepad he jotted: “Jumene Batulei, The Man Who Is Not Afraid of Death.”

As the pit owner described salaries to me, Butelei shouted: “It’s dangerous work. We work for nothing!” Then he ducked back into the pit, past a soldier who crouched inside with a cigarette, an impervious rock around which the miners were forced to swerve.

Outside, two more soldiers dozed under a tarp, their semiautomatics propped against the mud wall behind them. A third, in police blue, sat up among a crowd of mud-caked miners waiting to begin their shifts.

They might have been from Colonel Samy’s brigade, or from one of the various branches of the police force, or from the others in army green—the ones from the Eighth Military Region, a unit based in Goma that had technically been sent to evict the Eighty-fifth. Like dragons guarding a cave, the excess of uniforms indicated a treasure. The pit’s entrance led into a maze of shafts that included the personal property of Lieutenant Jean Claude, Samy’s deputy on the mountain, a skinny teenager in a pair of tight black jeans and Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt who could often be found in the shade of a tarp atop the mountain riffling through a comic book.

I knew that Jean Claude claimed ownership of his mine shaft because he had boasted as much to me, after I had caught him, surrounded by rifle-toting underlings, scolding an elderly army officer from a separate brigade who had just taken me on a tour of his own pit—newly acquired, he’d said, for a small fee to a tribal chief.

With great fanfare, a uniformed escort brought me down to Jean Claude’s shaft, handed me a headlamp grabbed from a miner’s head, and led me inside.

Dozens of small headlamps lit the way down. Miners gripped the walls with their legs. They scratched and gently picked into the stone. Far from the heat and the noise, their underworld held a kind of artistry. Stillness and concentration prevailed.

 

All told, ten to fifteen thousand souls from hundreds of miles across Congo—ex-criminals, unreformed child soldiers, evangelical pastors, donut sellers, and unemployed dreamers—dared the rule of military brawn for a chance to scratch a living from Bisie’s rock.

Why did they come if they knew the conditions they would face? I put the question to Samba Tabu, MPC’s Congolese attorney who manned the company’s outpost.

Rangy and clear-eyed, with a wide forehead and a long nose, Samba had the patrician air of one born and bred into the thin sliver of Congo’s intellectual and political class; he came from the relative affluence of the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga. He acted as a sort of Virgil, guiding me through the red mountain’s layers of hell. He bid me watch as a listless, elderly-looking man bounced along in a sled, used for tin transport, on another man’s back. They were headed from the miner’s camp, back down the mountain, toward the forest. “That would make a great photo,” Samba said. “Back in MPC’s day, we would have helicoptered that man out to Goma and in forty-five minutes he’d have been in the nearest hospital. Instead they have to walk him back through the jungle. It’s insane.”

Photographs snapped by MPC staff since 2006 document miners who claim that they have been beaten bloody at the hands of soldiers of the Eighty-fifth. One man has his forehead split open, the pockets around his eyes are swollen red, the flesh from his legs is peeled raw as if he had been whipped, and baseball-size bruises across his shoulders and temples suggest a smashing by something solid and forceful. Samba pointed to a wooden sign hanging askew just outside the miners’ camp. It had been smashed a week earlier by a mob of owls who had risen up in a fury and chased the soldiers off the mountain. The riot was triggered when soldiers broke the leg of a miner who refused to pay a five dollar fee for participation in a compulsory census.

Again, I asked, then why come at all? He answered by describing the case of Musa Assini, a pit owner with a degree in engineering who had dropped by earlier that day. Assini’s predicament went something like this: When his tunnel veered into the pit belonging to an army major, he was ordered to dig to the left. When he dug to the left, he collided with a shaft owned by a police lieutenant. This would have posed few problems were it not for the fact that the precise spot of collision yielded a particularly fine concentration of cassiterite, and the police commander, Assini said, was determined to have his cut.

“Ah, but I have a protector, higher even than the police chief,” Assini had said. His patron, he said, was the prosecutor general of North Kivu province.

But the man’s revelation of another tentacle of corruption stretching from Bisie to the highest reaches of Congolese officialdom struck Samba as small fry. (He made a sport of mapping the ever-changing web of patrons with a hand in Bisie’s tunnels.) What shocked him more was another admission: Assini had said he had been too busy making money for the past two years to bother seeing his wife and seven children. He had said it in passing, devoid of emotion.

“Do you find that normal?” he said. “He is a man without a heart. In Congo, we have a lot of people who are extremely wealthy. How does that serve them? Why do they keep searching for a piece of the moon?”

 

I left the next morning. Bisie’s cacophony melted into the cool shade of the jungle. Already it left a bitter aftertaste. The place was a microcosm of the country’s predicament: weak state institutions, entrenched corruption, and a shambolic army whose commanders were too busy preying on the land and its population to rout the region’s equally predatory rebel factions. It revealed also the hapless choices of a broken society. A pastor’s spiritual authority, a university degree—the entire intricate fabric of roles that weaves together any other society—had no meaning here. Naked venality had leveled them all into a bleak, Hobbesian struggle of might against might.

And then there was Samba.

However futile his efforts, he had said, he would lay the first brick. In the purity of his struggle for his country there existed a faith in the power of human agency. The sense of all that merged with the physical pain of every step. It shot through my heels, up my blistering Achilles, into the thighs, into the back. Ferdinand had insisted we traipse the twenty-six miles back in a single stretch. He was afraid of what night might bring. Our military escort, a young doe-eyed soldier, marched on ahead, light as an antelope. As night fell, I walked on, numb. I dared not stop or remove my gum boots for fear of looking at my feet. The blisters and swelling would render me incapable of walking for days.

But the porters laughed or tripped forward uncomplaining, heaving their heavy loads. They sang, told hours-long stories in Swahili, in Lingala, in a harmony of tribal dialects. The rich, cyclical cadences of their voices buoyed us like wings. In the dark, a dark so thick you could not see a foot ahead, they promised possibility.

 

Back in Goma, I tried to follow all those bags of tin ore flown out from Colonel Samy’s mine. Along a typically potholed avenue in the center of town, above a rim of barbed wire, the vast three-dimensional lettering of Sodexmines glinted gold on the side of the mineral trading house, a rare image of polish and functional stability—and mysteriously acquired wealth—in a city of broken facades and slapdash opportunities.

Crowds of young men idled on patches of scrub in front of its towering gates. When the gates cracked apart for the rare visitor in an SUV, the men leaped to their feet and mobbed the security guard, hands shooting into the air with identity cards or work licenses for a chance at a day’s worth of employment.

The directors of Sodexmines, one of Goma’s two most productive trading houses, claimed not to know the precise origin of their supply. They bought it from licensed middlemen, after weighing their clusters of bags on a vast scale. Agents from two separate branches of government hovered nearby checking the middlemen’s licenses.

Inside the firm’s warehouses, machines alternately washed and ground the rocks just enough to meet international standards for export that required a purity of 60 percent tin ore. Then they trucked it to Mombasa, Kenya, where it was shipped to Belgium and on to smelters in Asia. Geographically, said Omar Ramazani, the company’s director general for eastern Congo, the bulk could come from any of the mines that dot Walikale, or from the provinces of Maniema or Katanga, the less volatile mineral-rich province just north of Zambia that is favored by international companies.

But the evidence of Sodexmine’s main source of supply was piled into a mountain of rusty iron ore, rising high above the wall and spilling across half the courtyard. Of all the varieties of Congo’s cassiterite, only the rock at the tin-ore mine of Bisie contains a quantity of iron that approaches 20 percent. The iron accounts, in part, for the mountain’s striking rusty color. Streets away, at MPC’s headquarters in Goma, small plastic bags of cassiterite in dozens of shades, from pale gray to deep brown, sat on sheets detailing their origin and chemical composition. In June 2010, when asked if minerals to make the iPhone 4 came from the eastern Congo, Steve Jobs said, “We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.” But even to the naked eye, Bisie’s sample stood starkly apart from the rest—and offered clear evidence of the main source of Sodexmines’s supply.

Congolese officials have in the past few years attempted to clean up a trade that they understand to be the future of their country. The effort has helped draw almost $3 billion in private foreign investments since 2003, most of it from US or Chinese companies in the pacified, southern mineral-rich province of Katanga. As long as disorder reigns in the east, however, Congolese officials who acknowledge the problem that Bisie represents say there is little they can do.

 

Months later, the fighting in Congo had shape-shifted anew with the arrest in Rwanda of rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and the launching of a brutally anarchic joint offensive by Rwanda and Congo against the Rwandan Hutu militia. MPC continued its efforts to spark action from Kinshasa while public shaming of Congo’s mining sector by various nonprofits and a series of visits from high-level authorities to the area forced the eviction of Colonel Samy and his Eighty-fifth brigade. On August 7, 2009, just three weeks after Global Witness published an extensive report on the militarization of the mining sector, Prime Minister Adolphe Muzito, the minister of mines, and other senior officials, visited Walikale and issued instructions direct from President Joseph Kabila that all military personnel should vacate mining sites. The eviction turned on sending in the 212th, but Congo being Congo, the unit merely picked up where the Eighty-fifth left off. Now, in Samy’s place reigns Colonel Etienne Bindu, the head of the Eighth military region who for years has had one hand in his private mine shaft and another on the Saturday barrier shakedowns.

Adolphe found his way to a refugee camp in Goma where he promptly fell ill with malaria. Gaston returned to the nonprofit he had founded in his hometown which specialized in denouncing abuses by local authorities; within months, he fled to Malawi amid death threats. Samba and I kept up our conversation. Often he would phone in the middle of the night. By flashlight, he would be plotting his campaign ahead of the 2010 local elections. He would run as a deputy for North Kivu province in the National Assembly in Kinshasa. We talked of corruption, and of the redemption of the country’s soul.

“I know there are honest people in the Assembly,” he told me one night. “There might be dozens of them. I could be that last drop of water to turn them into an ocean.”

One night he phoned me in the feverish throes of a slow-acting poison. Karuho, he called it, a Rwandan import derived from the skin of a chameleon mixed with tree bark. It was burning into his stomach and parching his throat. One of his MPC colleagues had died from the poison a week earlier, he said. Traces of it were found on his cell phone. It was the first time Samba told me that he was scared.

But his vision wouldn’t change, he said.

“I’m more realistic now,” he said. “I have to be.” He would be careful about shaking hands and lending his cell phone to distant cousins. He would have to scale back his ready generosity with the extended members of his family, his tribe. When I pointed out that he seemed to have uncles scattered everywhere, he replied with a chuckle, “You know, we’re African.”

But he would redouble his energy, he said, basing his campaign around what he saw as a critical need for education. He would preach civic values, and with it, love of country, to the farthest reaches of North Kivu province. I’ve often wondered how easily his vision could die in the jungle, forgotten as quickly as a tin porter press-ganged in the night. But perhaps political redemption, even in the midst of bloody Machiavellian politicking, begins always as someone’s fragile dream. Bisie, he said, will return to the rule of law—a small victory, perhaps, but on it hinged the future of his nation.

First published in Virginia Quarterly Review.

The Capitalists of Chaos

The day we fly to Juba in an old DC-9, the sun is out and the clouds are distant puffs, and all we can see is green: the dirty green of the Nile, the dark green of the mango trees, the radiant green of the uncultivated savanna. The land is flat and muddy and empty, and it stretches forever. “Just look at that shit,” Phil Heilberg says. “You could grow anything there.”

Heilberg, a former Wall Street trader, is a big man: six feet two, well over 200 pounds, loud and voluble, accustomed to getting his way. Before we boarded the plane in Nairobi for the quick hop from Kenya to Sudan, he’d almost gotten in a fight with another passenger, a middle-aged aid worker, after trying to cut in front of the man’s wife during a baggage check. The aid worker had started yelling at him – something about everyone having to wait in the same line. “Do you want to go?” Heilberg yelled back. “Let’s go! I’m a lot bigger than you!”

A partner at AIG’s commodities-trading unit before he left the insurance giant in 1999 – “I used to be one of the highest-paid guys on Wall Street,” he boasts – Heilberg is now betting heavily that he can profit from Africa’s chaos. He has befriended Darfuri rebels in London, oil-bunkering militants in Nigeria and ethnic separatists in Somalia and Ethiopia, looking to cash in on any commodity – petroleum, uranium, whatever – that might come his way in the wake of independence. If a country is too combustible for most investors to touch, he’s interested. It’s a strategy he dreamed up early in his career, while he was still working for AIG. “I saw the Soviet Union split up,” he recalls. “Saw it up close. I realized there was a lot of money to be made in breakups, and I vowed that the next time I’d be on the inside.”

Now, looking out the window of the plane, Heilberg is en route to the biggest deal of his life. Last year, he snapped up a lease on 1 million acres of farmland in the war-ravaged savanna of southern Sudan – a tract nearly the size of Delaware – making him one of the largest private landholders in Africa. A map crammed in his computer bag shows where he now hopes to double his holdings: another million acres configured in six rectangular blocks to the east and north, close to the border with Ethiopia, outlined in orange marker. The land is incredibly fertile and safe from drought, irrigated by an offshoot of the Nile, largely free of land mines. There’s no asset more tangible than land, Heilberg insists – and, if he’s right, there will soon be none more profitable.

Heilberg is part of a growing wave of capitalists who are maneuvering to exploit the world’s looming food crisis. As the poor riot over shortages in places like Senegal and Bangladesh, investors are racing to corner the market on the world’s dwindling farmland. In the past two years, as many as 50 million acres – the equivalent of all the cropland in France, or 10 percent of arable Africa – have changed hands. Rising powers like China, India and South Korea have snapped up millions of acres from Cameroon to Kazakhstan, competing against oil-rich states like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. All are betting that population growth and climate change – with its accompanying droughts and desertification and flooding – will soon make food as valuable as oil. On a planet of melting glaciers, overcrowded cities and millions of climate refugees, those who control the food will control the world.

“I can see it,” says Heilberg, laying out what he views as the scientific basis of his investment strategy. “The world needs food. Thomas Malthus talked about the problem of finite land but infinite growth. He’s been wrong to date – we can use technology to push out more food. But what happens when technology isn’t coming fast enough? I think people will panic, especially those who have no land to grow on.”

For Heilberg, going long on the coming age of scarcity means “going to the guns” – ingratiating himself with the thugs, strongmen and warlords who hold the chips in places like Sudan. When our plane touches down in Juba, the capital of southern Sudan, we are met at the airport by Gabriel, the eldest son of Gen. Paulino Matip, the army’s deputy commander in chief. During the 1990s, according to Human Rights Watch and other witnesses, Matip’s private militias brutally cleared civilians from their homes – torching villages, raping women, executing men – to make way for oil drilling. The violence was part of one of the longest-running wars in Africa, a civil conflict between Sudan’s Muslim north and the mostly Christian and animist south that formally ended in 2005. Now, to secure his land deal, Heilberg is banking on Matip to come out on top in the semiautonomous south’s struggle for full independence. Matip is the one who approved Heilberg’s lease on the farmland, and the general’s son serves as an official partner in the venture. Heilberg makes no apologies for such arrangements. “This is Africa,” he says. “The whole place is like one big mafia. I’m like a mafia head. That’s the way it works.”

Gabriel, dressed in an Armani jacket and armed with three Nokia cellphones, ushers us into an aging Land Cruiser pick-up. We speed down one of Juba’s only paved roads, passing boys on motorbikes, men tending makeshift kiosks, and shipping containers ringed by guards and concertina wire. The containers, which serve as housing and offices for international aid workers, were driven in on flatbed trucks after the fighting ended in 2005; when and if the violence begins anew, they could be driven out just as quickly. Heilberg is already pressing Gabriel about contracts to sign and meetings to arrange as we reach our destination: the general’s heavily fortified compound in downtown Juba, surrounded by machine-gun emplacements and thatch-roofed huts known as tukuls, the homes of guards and their families.

Heilberg sits up. The monkey is gone. The guards used to have a monkey. Heilberg, whose family pet is a cockapoo named Cookie Dough, thought the monkey was cute.

“Where’s your monkey?” he yells at the guards.

 

 

The global farmland grab got under way in earnest after the spring of 2008, when food prices spiked worldwide. Soybeans doubled, corn and wheat tripled, and rice quintupled, as the world’s stockpiles of food shrunk to a two-month supply. The governments of Vietnam, Cambodia, India and Brazil banned grain exports; hungry rioters took to the streets in the Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Peru, Egypt, Haiti, Yemen and the Philippines. In the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia, once a top rice producer and the world’s second-largest exporter of wheat, thousands of farms failed after six years of drought. At Costco and Sam’s Club, American shoppers were limited to a few bags of rice each. Experts now describe the crisis as a temporary shock, but many of its underlying causes – climate change, soaring oil prices that jack up the cost of fertilizer, China’s growing appetite for meat, a global population that is racing toward 9 billion – are structural, fundamental. That is, permanent. “It’s a fragile situation,” says Nicholas Minot, a senior fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “If food stocks are low, a small shortfall in production can cause a big jump in price. Demand for food is inelastic. People will always pay to keep eating.”

Heilberg looked at the crisis and saw opportunity. “The world is like the universe—ever expanding,” he says. “I focus on the pressure points.” In Sudan, he has found a point that could be crucial to food security: the largest country in Africa, and 10th- largest on the planet, crisscrossed by rivers, dotted with swamps. The Arab-led government in Khartoum, where the two forks of the Nile meet, has reportedly turned over nearly 2 million acres to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, hoping to make the northern region the breadbasket of the Arab world. But in the southern half of Sudan, where the land is even lusher, what little agriculture exists is mostly small-scale: families with a few cows, tiny plots planted with sorghum and corn. Heilberg imagines the landscape transformed by American- style agribusiness, complete with irrigation and fertilizers and 400-horsepower combines. But such ambitions require a huge gamble. A referendum scheduled for next January could give the south full independence from the north, potentially voiding any previous deals. Or the referendum could be postponed or rigged, sparking outright war. Either way, the risk is too great for most investors to bear.

Not for Heilberg. Instability is not only built into his investment model, it’s integral to the equation. “I’m trying to be methodical,” he says. “I think mathematically. I do probability trees and all that. I have secession at 90 percent. I’ve lowered my timetable from five years to four. It could happen in the next 18 months.” Besides, he says, political risk is nothing compared to the systemic risk long favored by Wall Street—the kind that took down his old employer, AIG, along with much of the rest of modern capitalism. “World events are making my point for me,” he says. “Everything has become a risk asset. Had I stayed at AIG, I would have lost everything. That’s AIG, for God’s sake. A stable place. A $200 billion company. Blue-chip. Everything’s a risk asset—you just don’t realize it.”

For Heilberg, the global economic meltdown underscores an essential lesson in capitalism: that no one is actually in control. “When something happens, it happens,” he says. Things can be the same for 40 or 50 years, and then they’re not. Today is one of those moments when they’re not. “We already have a commodities problem,” he says. “I would not be surprised if in a day or a week oil goes to $100 or $150. Like that: Boom! We’re seeing the death knell of the financial instrument – of the paper world. We’re going to see the rise of the commodity. A bushel of corn can’t be $15.”

Before Sudan, Heilberg’s path was conventional, if accelerated. The son of a coffee trader, he grew up in New York and earned both a bachelor’s degree and an MBA in five years at Wharton. He worked on the foreign-exchange desk at Salomon Brothers, then helped found AIG’s commodities-trading unit in Hong Kong. Responsible for all of Asia, he would fly off to Shanghai with CEO Hank Greenberg, off to Tashkent to meet with a dictator. “His star was shining in those days,” recalls Nadav Lehavy, a college classmate who succeeded Heilberg in Hong Kong.

For a time, the lifestyle suited Heilberg. “It’s constant stimulus, constant transactions,” he says. “You’re always looking at markets and trying to get an edge. It’s like a drug.” But after the Asian financial crisis in 1997 – and after scared investors fled emerging markets for the Internet bubble – he quit AIG to strike out on his own, working as a consultant and leasing out his seats on the New York Board of Trade. Then, in 2002, a friend told him about Sudan. Within a year he had signed his first contract there – an oil deal that later fell through. He was stepping outside of the Wall Street establishment; today’s generation of hedge-fund managers has barely heard of him. “What we were doing at AIG was institutional in nature,” says Lehavy. “Now Phil is there at the source, at the bottom of the value chain.”

At 45, Heilberg is exactly where he wants to be – going after value that others don’t recognize, or simply don’t have the wherewithal to tap. “Wall Street used to be a straight line,” he says. “It made people a lot of money. A lot of money. But the mundane bores me. The interest rate on this is six percent, and you borrow at three percent – anybody can do that. As an entrepreneur, it’s never a straight line. When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to create something.”

 

If there’s a moral code guiding Heilberg in Sudan, it is that of Ayn Rand, his favorite author: Place yourself above all else; get in no one’s way, and let no one get in yours; give no charity, and expect none. “Her individualism is extreme – but anything in its purest form is more powerful,” he says. “Howard Roark is the hero of The Fountainhead because he’s pure. He doesn’t care about what anyone else thinks – not about social norms, the right clubs, the right people. We all want a bit of Howard Roark in us.”

Like Rand’s hero, Heilberg has come under attack from all sides, from human rights activists to rival businessmen and European journalists. His land grab in Sudan has been described as “the most scandalous case yet” and “one of the shadiest deals of all.” One British blogger accuses him of forging “a wholly new business strategy – hyperdisaster capitalism.” But those who know him say that Heilberg is often his own worst enemy. “Phil has not made his own case very well in the way that he’s phrased and communicated it, but that’s a function of the world he comes out of rather than his objectives,” says one former colleague. “He’s a straight shooter. My sense is that he is sincerely motivated. For this guy to spend every summer literally hanging around Juba strikes me as something more than a predatory buccaneer.”

Heilberg, an avowed libertarian, sees himself as a virtuous capitalist, doing good in the world by remaining faithful to his own self-interest. “I’ve had to make a lot of personal sacrifices,” he says. “I’m funding this whole thing. I’ve made a bet with my own money that the world will play out like I expect it to. In that sense, what I’m doing is pure.”

His plan for the farmland is straightforward: He wants to farm it, not flip it, and to sell crops locally before selling internationally. There’s certainly a domestic market for it: Sudan is in the midst of a long-running famine, and aid groups are willing to pay top dollar for food. He knows it will be years before the first seeds can be planted, and he’ll need to bring in joint-venture partners for the actual production. Israelis, perhaps: “They have experience in Af- rica. They’ve shown an ability to figure out problems.” Heilberg also likes the irony of bringing in Israelis to farm what some consider Arab land, a way to give the middle finger to the Muslim-led government in Khartoum. “Do you know what a tefillin is?” he says. “The box and leather strap you put on during prayers? It’s a reminder of God bringing us out of Egypt or whatever. I always bring mine to Sudan.”

Heilberg won’t discuss the terms of his million-acre lease, but he’s a long way from making money on the deal. In lieu of salaries, he pays the management team at his investment firm, Jarch Capital, with a stake in the company. Until this year, the vice chairman of Jarch was a man with ex- tensive experience and connections in both Africa and Washington: former ambassador Joe Wilson, the husband of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. Wilson left the firm after vainly advising Heilberg to describe his plans in more diplomatic terms, but other well-connected insiders – including the neoconservative commentator J. Peter Pham and noted security analyst Larry Johnson – are still on board.

To secure a lease on the land, Heilberg placed Matip on Jarch’s advisory board and promised to provide jobs for his Nuer tribesmen. In famously corrupt Juba, Matip is one of the few leaders he admires. “He’s a capitalist,” Heilberg says. “All of the other guys are Commies. He understands that if I put money in, I deserve to make a profit.” Such considerations are more important to Heilberg than Matip’s violent past. “There are no white hats here,” he says. “It’s the Wild West. People get upset when I say you’ve got to go to the guns. Hell, you had to carry a gun back then. You were a cowboy? You would lose all your horses and cows, your women would be raped, and everything you had would be gone. People take their ideals and try to impose them someplace else. That’s colonization to me. I don’t do that. This is what it is. I’m not promoting it or demoting it, I’m just part of the system.”

In an area that most would describe as anarchic, Heilberg sees hints of a libertarian utopia, one in which even lawlessness has an upside. “My view is that you want government to be as small as possible,” he says. “In a sense, Africa can start with a clean slate.” Once he gains control of his land, he figures he’ll be able to do with it as he pleases. “Listen, I want to control that ground,” he says. “I don’t want someone saying, ‘Thank you for your investment, now get out.’ I want a country that’s weaker. There’s a cost to dealing with strong countries: resource nationalism. People forget that.”

 

At the center of Matip’s compound in Juba is a dirt courtyard shaded by mango trees. A crowd of Nuer elders, their faces scarred with tattoos and horizontal cuts, are gathered for an audience. Chickens and a pair of uniformed soldiers with AK-47s shuffle in the background. The general himself wears a tracksuit and slouches in a plastic chair in front of a plastic table with a doily on it. “Ah, Philippe,” he murmurs, slowly standing to hug his visitor. Gabriel translates the rest: “The only white man who is good.”

Heilberg’s primary goal for the visit is signatures: He wants Matip to lean on the southern government’s president and agriculture minister to sign off on the land deal. It’s mostly for show: The farmland is in the general’s home state of Unity, and Heilberg has it because the general says he has it. But official approval would reassure potential investors and silence detractors who claim that the million-acre lease violates Sudan’s new land law restricting foreign ownership. In Heilberg’s computer bag are other documents he wants signed, too – ones he won’t show me – which I assume would give him rights to the region’s uranium and zinc. Such deals could be worth billions if southern Sudan secedes from the north, freeing Heilberg to export the new country’s mineral wealth.

Beyond the signatures, Heilberg also wants to meet with officials who can sell him more land – the king of the Bari people, a Nuer commissioner in Upper Nile state – and check out new acreage by jeep, helicopter or prop plane. But mostly this visit is about the mundane reality of cutting deals with strongmen in Africa, where waiting is an art. This, in fact, is Heilberg’s first principle, the rule that he believes sets him apart from other investors: Do your own legwork. Travel. Find out in person. “There’s only so much you can glean without body language,” he says. “If everyone has the same information, everyone comes to the same conclusions. A lot of traders didn’t understand that.”

Heilberg turns to the general’s son. Gabriel looks to be in his 20s, but he’s actually 34, according to his MySpace page. Or maybe 42, as he later tells me.

“Gabriel, do you have any cows here?” Heilberg asks. Cows are the way to a Nuer man’s heart.

“No, no cows here,” says Gabriel.

“You already moved them? How many cattle do you have in Mayom?”

“Many,” says Gabriel.

A soldier brings us bottled water and cans of Coke. The elders leave. The general remains slouched in his seat, his long arms draped over the back of the chair. He is 68, ancient for Sudan. Heilberg considers Matip one of the savviest men he’s ever met. But sitting here in the courtyard – his eyes blank, his face expressionless and almost catatonic, devoid of any glimmer of human response – the general gives off the impression of a madman.

“The south has got to give the general control of the purse,” Heilberg says, leaning in to flatter his host. “People have been approaching me. A private security firm – mercenaries – they want to come and train the troops. Even the Israelis, they want to sell weapons and training. They want to know if I’ll speak to the general on their behalf. Maybe they see something of interest, because the split is coming. Twelve months? Eighteen months? How long? Independence is coming soon. We all know that.” The general grunts.

Southern Sudan is a welter of tribes and sub-tribes. Most of the men Heilberg has put on his “advisory board” are, like the general, Nuer. Much of the southern government, meanwhile, is made up of Dinkas. If civil war were to break out again, it might not be just between north and south but between the tribes as well. Matip, whose forces were integrated into the army only after the 2005 peace accord, retains leverage over Salva Kiir, the president of southern Sudan: the ability to revive his Nuer militia. “He can cause rapid-fire ethnic conflagration,” says John Prendergast, a human rights activist and former director of African affairs at the National Security Council. At one point, according to Heilberg, Kiir made the mistake of trying to demobilize Matip’s forces. “Forty-eight hours later,” he says, “Kiir was on his hands and knees at the general’s home. If you want to disarm Paulino, you’ve got to kill him. You don’t disarm a man like that.”

Heilberg turns back to Gabriel and gets down to the business at hand. “Now we have the momentum,” he says. “We have to hold Salva accountable. If I could go see Salva with your dad – I would like him to honor his word by signing the papers. I would like to get that paper signed. I would like confirmation. Once we have confirmation of the deal from Salva and the agriculture minister, then nobody can say anything. It’s confirmed by the government of southern Sudan. I would like Salva to sign and we would then shut up everybody. Because then it’s not just your father, it’s the two most powerful men in the country. We’ll shut up everybody.”

When Gabriel finishes translating, the general nods. “OK,” he says. “We will talk to the Israelis.” The signatures don’t seem to interest him – only the mercenaries.

“We will make an appointment at Salva’s house and go and meet him,” Gabriel adds. He warns that everything is moving slowly: Days from now, a European arbitration court is expected to announce who – the south or the north – can claim the contentious, oil-rich region of Abyei, west of the general’s home base. Juba is paralyzed, awaiting a trigger for renewed violence. “They don’t multitask here,” Heilberg complains.

The White Nile. ©McKenzie Funk

That night, Heilberg has Gabriel take us to meet another of his board members, Gen. Peter Gatdet, at an outdoor bar on the banks of the Nile. On the way, we drive down a bumpy dirt road lined with dozens of bombed-out tanks, their turrets bent, their tracks missing. Southern Sudan is rumored to have new tanks now, ones it could use to help win independence, even without the referendum next year. Heilberg’s business strategy rests, in no small part, on such military calculations.

Gatdet, a feared tactician who was recently put in charge of the south’s air defenses, sits alone with two bodyguards at a table near the water. Heilberg moves briskly through the preliminaries to the matter at hand. “You have the anti-aircraft now?” he asks the general. “The ones that have the wings that go higher? OK. Good. And the tanks? Where are the new tanks?”

Gatdet points across the river toward the bush, where he spent nine years during the civil war.

“Right here?” Heilberg exclaims. He peers into the darkness.

“How are all your bullet wounds?” he continues. Gatdet had been shot 28 times during the war. “You don’t need a bullet-proof vest. You know who’s on your side.” He points to the heavens. “Always missing the vital areas – that’s good. Soon, the south will be independent.”

“Yeah,” Gatdet says. “The war good for them.”

 

In New York and London I meet other leading investors who, like Heilberg, are stepping away from the paper world to make commodities plays. But unlike Heilberg, they tend to operate at a distance. On the condition of anonymity, one leading Wall Street banker tells me about his firm’s recent dealings in Ukraine and Russia. Much of the dirty work, he says, is done by local hustlers who take advantage of the region’s poverty to assemble vast tracts of farmland that will appeal to big investors. “Here’s the trick,” the banker says. “All these collective farms collapsed once they decollectivized them, because they had no capital – the guys couldn’t afford tractors. It sort of reverted to pseudo-subsistence agriculture. So you could come to these guys and get thousands of hectares for a bottle of vodka and, like, two months of grain. It was basically a big rip-off of peasants.”

The savviest corporate buyers see global warming as a double boon: In the short term, it’s a push factor, destroying agriculture in regions such as northern China and the American Southwest, which are becoming too dry to support crops, and causing food prices to spike. In the long term, it creates a pull: Higher-latitude countries like Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Kazakhstan and Canada are becoming more productive, not less, as the climate heats up. “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to suggest that production belts in the Northern Hemisphere are shifting northwards,” says Carl Atkin, the head of agribusiness research at Bidwells, the British real estate behemoth. The firm’s consulting wing is helping financial clients make a major push into Eastern Europe.

Bidwells’ London offices are in a narrow building down an alley off Hanover Square. In an airy fourth-floor conference room, with skylights and hardwood floors, Atkin lays out a world map depicting soil qualities – the USDA’s “Inherent Land Quality Assessment” – with the richest areas shaded in green. “You’ve got a splotch in North America,” he says. “A splotch in South America. Pockets in the U.K. But the main interest is this black soil going up through Russia and the Ukraine – some of the best soil in the world.” In Atkin’s view, environmental factors – frigid winters and short growing seasons – have helped keep prices low there; a hectare of black earth in Romania is a fifth of the price of a hectare in England. Overlay a climate-change map on the soil map, Atkin says, maybe add population data, and you could make a fortune. He himself has just returned from Ukraine, and Bidwells has been working in Romania for five years, doing what Atkin calls “parceling” – a plot-by-plot approach to the land grab. “We reaggregate small plots that were reallocated to everybody post-communism,” he says. “You’re getting loads of villagers in a room with the mayor, and the mayor is saying, ‘All right, who wants to sell their plot, and who doesn’t?’”

 

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As climate change pushes farming to higher latitudes, the money has followed. Two of the most visible farmland investors – British-run Landkom and Swedish-run Black Earth – have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into agricultural operations in Ukraine and Russia. BlackRock has invested $250 million in British farmland, Pergam Finance has sunk $70 million into former ranches in Uruguay and Argentina, and Agcapita has put $18 million into Canada’s future corn belt. After Saskatchewan land prices jumped 15 percent in 2008 – the largest increase on record – Agcapita began raising its next $20 million.

One of the most aggressive climate investors is Jim Slater, the co-founder of British-run Agrifirma, who came to fame writing an investment column for the Sunday Telegraph that he signed “The Capitalist.” In one previous venture, Slater made annual profits of 66 percent on uranium and molybdenum in Greenland, where retreating glaciers have extended the range of mining operations. Now, in Brazil, Slater has spent $20 million to buy or option 170,000 acres and survey another 6 million. Brazilian agriculture will be relatively protected from the ravages of climate change, he insists, because the country has “about 15 percent of the world’s recoverable water supply – 90 percent more than its nearest rival.”

In the midst of such far-flung competition, Heilberg is betting heavily on an area that many Western investors have avoided. “Honestly, I don’t advise anyone to do any farming north of Juba,” says an American consultant close to the Dinka leadership. “You never know whose land you’re standing on. They’re pastoralists. One group might say, ‘It’s ours and ours alone,’ but you never know. Land isn’t staked out. It’s common. Ownership is seasonal, and fluid. So when you get an individual laying claim to such a large chunk of land, prime grazing land, you’re basically starting another war.”

Still, even the consultant admits that Heilberg’s holdings are good land. According to Atkin’s soil map, the region isn’t quite as fertile as the belt of black earth in Russia – a shade away from perfect. But by some accounts, parts of Africa will get more rain because of global warming, including southern Sudan. Insofar as Heilberg believes in climate change, he believes in the effects, not the causes – the desertification and the fights over water and land that only make his farmland investment smarter. And he sees other upsides to global warming. On his laptop, he keeps a file on mineral-rich Greenland. He’s heard that the country has a secession movement of its own. “Maybe global warming means we can live in the Arctic,” he says. “The Nordic countries seem to have a good balance. They don’t seem to mind being taxed to death. Maybe we can have Greenland – there’s a lot of land there.”

 

 

After the initial meeting with Matip, things in Juba grind to a halt. Heilberg spends day after day in his hotel – two rows of well-appointed prefab containers stacked on top of each other – waiting for word that the president or agriculture minister is ready to meet. To pass the time, he sits in the air conditioning, smoking cigars and playing Texas Hold’em on his BlackBerry. He reads the book he brought along on the trip: Sailing From Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World.

On the third morning, Gabriel stops by the hotel. It’s beginning to look like nothing is going to happen. No new land deals. No over-flights or jeep tours. No meeting with the president. “Let’s go see Dad,” Heilberg suggests. Gabriel tells us that the general’s family compound in Unity state has just been attacked by a longtime rival, part of the endless jockeying for position as the south inches toward independence. One of Matip’s guards was captured in the assault, and the general is too angry to see anyone.

“OK, so what’s the plan for today?” Heilberg asks. “Have you found anyone for the agriculture?” The minister isn’t available, says Gabriel. “OK, so that’s tomorrow,” Heilberg says, turning the conversation to new land acquisitions. “So we’ll find out about the Bari? What about Upper Nile?”

Soon, there is little more business to discuss. We talk about life. Heilberg tells us that he’s given up diet cherry Pepsi – he worries the artificial sweetener will give him Alzheimer’s. He tells us about the really hot personal yoga instructor he had, a point of domestic tension: “I’m in my living room doing my yoga, and my wife flips out!”

Gabriel tells us that his own wife, who cost him 89 cows, has just run out on him. Heilberg offers him some tea. “We Are the World” blares from the hotel’s speaker system.

“Did you call Dr. Joseph?” Heilberg asks. The doctor – who serves as the south’s minister of health – is another board member. “Call Dr. Joseph, and see if he’s around.” Dr. Joseph isn’t around.

“We Are the World” comes on again – the music is on a loop.

“Is that Bruce Springsteen?” Heilberg asks. We fall silent, listening.

“I think that one is Michael Jackson,” says Gabriel.

“Michael Jackson,” Heilberg agrees. We wait for the next verse.

“That’s Cyndi Lauper,” I say. “Bob Dylan,” Heilberg says next.

“What’s this guy called, the blind one?” asks Gabriel.

“Uh, Ray Charles . . . no, Stevie Wonder,” Heilberg says. We wait. “And there’s Ray Charles!”

Heilberg with Juba’s cows. ©McKenzie Funk

Gabriel finally secures a meeting with Dr. Joseph for six that evening. Heilberg puts on a dark suit and dark tie; Gabriel sticks with his gold-colored tracksuit. Just before sunset, we climb into Gabriel’s Land Cruiser and bounce along pot- holed dirt tracks in the direction of the jebel, Juba’s landmark mountain, passing an open-air market and a field of huts that have been razed by the government. Now the area is populated by mounds of burning trash.

Dr. Joseph lives in an impressive house surrounded by a thick white wall and attended by a servant, who seats us on plush fake-leather couches below a languid ceiling fan and offers each of us a Coke and a bottle of water. Across from us are three Sudanese dignitaries watching a Nigerian soap opera on a widescreen TV. “Stay away from my wife!” yells one actor. “Which wife?” says the other.

Dr. Joseph has yet to return home. We sink back into the couches. Heilberg begins talking nonstop, filling the silence. At first it seems like he’s keeping up appearances for me. Then I realize that he’s keeping them up for himself. He’s spent five years of his life setting the stage in Sudan. That a supposed ally is too busy to meet with him – that there’s any weakness in his plan – doesn’t fit the heroic Randian narrative.

Heilberg starts counseling Gabriel about his dad. The general refuses to leave his compound until he can discuss the recent attack with the president. “It’s called anxiety,” Heilberg says sympathetically. “Everyone gets it. It builds up in your mind.” Gabriel looks worried. “Have you ever seen the movie Analyze This?” Heilberg asks.

“Analyze what?”

“No, no – it’s a movie with Robert De Niro. He’s a mob boss, and he’s getting really angry, and Billy Crystal tells him, ‘You know what I do when I’m really angry? I hit a pillow.’ So he takes out his gun and starts shooting a pillow. Crystal’s like, ‘Feel better?’ and De Niro says, ‘Yeah, I do.’ Your dad needs to feel better. I know the way he is. He can get it all out.”

We wait until 10:00. Dr. Joseph never shows. When we leave, Heilberg looks sick to his stomach. “Are you sure he’s still with us?” he asks Gabriel.

But any hit to his confidence is buried, temporary. The next morning, Heilberg is back to his old self. If any of his allies have been bought off, it’s only more proof that Matip needs to sweep away the rot. If Heilberg’s venture looks tenuous, clouded by political games, it’s only more proof that Juba needs to burn. If an individual’s vision is pure enough, reality bends to it.

 

A week passes. We drive to Matip’s compound. We drive back. We smoke hookahs at the hotel. We order pizza. We drive to the Nile. We drive back. It begins to seem like a farce. Heilberg either has Juba all wrapped up, or he has nothing but his capitalist ideals and a strange friendship with some Sudanese generals. It will be impossible to know which until the fighting begins.

On one of our last mornings, Gabriel disappears. He doesn’t show up at the hotel. He stops answering his phones. Finally, just before dinnertime, he lopes in. “These guys were following me on the road,” he says. He pulled off on a side street, and one of his pursuers cut around him, blocking his escape. When the man stepped into the road, holding a gun, Gabriel ran him over. The second attacker came up from behind. “I opened the door and hit him, and then he fell on the ground,” Gabriel says.

“What did you say to them?” I ask.

“We don’t say anything,” Gabriel says. “I collect their phones, and their guns.”

“And kick them in the nuts!” Heilberg says.

By now, Heilberg isn’t bothering to ask about signatures or meetings. The next day, when the European arbitration court announces a ruling on the oil-rich region of Abyei, it’s not so bad for the south that it causes immediate fighting, but it’s not so good that it calms anyone down. Just in case, the country’s cellphone service is jammed. There’s nothing to do but watch CNN. Heilberg is waiting for Matip to clean house, to drive off his remaining rivals and establish order in the country. He looks at Gabriel. “I was there with your father two years ago, when he told them he would burn down Juba,” he says. “I think this is coming. It is coming soon. It’ll be short.”

We sit with the general once more in the courtyard, guards and elders and wives flitting by in the shadows, a television flickering a few feet away. Matip is still slouching, but this time he looks Heilberg in the eye as he speaks. “What he can tell you is this,” Gabriel translates for his father. “All the things going on here, they are not good. You should go. Go to America, and he will call you. He’s not happy about the way the government works. He will find out what things happen, and why. In a short time, we’ll rise, and put on the Internet, and you will read in America.”

“Thank you,” Heilberg says. “I know you’ll be successful. The way they’re doing things can’t last. History has shown us that’s how revolutions happen. But I hope you will call me back soon, documents in hand, and we will all smile and be happy. Luckily, it’s not all up to us.” He gestures to the sky. “There is a higher power.”

That night, Heilberg goes straight to his room, downs a dose of NyQuil and passes out. The next morning, we are on a flight back to Nairobi.

It’s the same view out the window as before. Green. Heilberg’s million acres are in the opposite direction, but the soil is similar. Nuer tribesmen like to boast about how fertile the land is. Plant a mango tree, they say, and it will be waist-high in six months. Plant green beans, and the vines will be waist-high in weeks. Plant anything, and it will grow. A capitalist has to create something. The world needs food. Heilberg is waiting.

“Which do you think matters more in Africa?” he asks me. “Military power, or political power?” He is sweating in his seat, wearing a baby-blue Lacoste shirt with an alligator on it.

“Military,” I say. He nods. “People say it’s going to be north versus south,” he says. “I say it’s going to be a free-for-all. It’s going to be a free-for-all for about a week. Mass hysteria. Juba burned to the ground. Khartoum burned to the ground. Then we’ll look around and see who’s still standing. They’ll form a new government. A period of chaos isn’t a bad thing. It’ll release that tension. You can’t escape the physics.”

Two months later, Matip’s home is attacked again, this time with a tank, and the general declares the president partly responsible. The compound in Juba becomes a fortress. It looks as though Heilberg’s bet – on chaos – is beginning, at last, to play out in the streets. In Atlas Shrugged, the pillars must fall, the cities must be razed, the looters must be deposed, before a new, braver future can begin. If pure capitalism is good – good for Heilberg, good for desperately hungry Africa – what brings it about cannot be evil.

“The reason I’m so open is so you can see I’m not a bad man,” Heilberg tells me. “I’m a guy with a big heart who also wants to make some money.” He puts his headphones in. “You know what I give them? I give them hope.”

First published in Rolling Stone.

Out of Sight

On a Saturday night in late May, I sat in the back seat of a taxi as it drove through a shantytown in Baghdad. We were not far from Firdos Square, where, in April of 2003, invading American troops famously toppled a large statue of Saddam Hussein. A highway passed overhead, its traffic thudding, and Baghdad’s tallest building, the Cristal Grand Ishtar Hotel—still widely known as the Sheraton, although the hotel chain withdrew from Iraq in 1990—rose in the distance. A forty-year-old woman whom I’ll call Layla sat in the front passenger seat; she wore a black abaya, and strands of dyed-black hair fell out from under her head scarf. Her husband, Mohammad, drove.

We were headed toward a dimly lit cinder-block shack. Children darted in and out of the shadows, and a pregnant woman in a long-sleeved, turquoise ankle-length dress stepped out to see who was approaching. She was a pimp, Layla said. In 2012, Iraq passed its first law specifically against human trafficking, but the law is routinely ignored, and sexual crimes, including rape and forced prostitution, are common, women’s-rights groups say. Statistics are hard to come by, but in 2011, according to the latest Ministry of Planning report, a survey found that more than nine per cent of respondents between the ages of fifteen and fifty-four said they had been subjected to sexual violence. The real number is likely much higher, given the shame attached to reporting such crimes in a society where a family’s honor is often tied to the chastity of its women. The victims of these crimes are often considered outcasts and can be killed for “dishonoring” their family or their community.

Since 2006, Layla, a rape victim and former prostitute, has been secretly mapping Iraq’s underworld of sex trafficking and prostitution. Through her network of contacts in the sex trade, she gathers information about who is selling whom and for how much, where the victims are from, and where they are prostituted and trafficked. She passes the information, through intermediaries, to Iraqi authorities, who usually fail to act on it. Still, her work has helped to convict several pimps, including some who kidnapped children. That Saturday night, I accompanied Layla and Mohammad on a tour of some of the places that she investigates, on the condition that I change her name, minimize details that might identify her, and not name her intermediaries.

The work is extremely dangerous. The pimps whom Layla encounters are women, but behind them is a tangled hierarchy of armed men: corrupt police, militias that profit from the sex trade, and militias that brutally oppose it. On the morning of July 13, 2014, the bullet-ridden bodies of twenty-eight women and five men were retrieved from two apartments, said to be brothels, in a building complex in Zayouna, a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. I saw the bodies a few hours later, at the city morgue, laid out on the floor. Morgue workers blamed the religious militias, singling out the pro-Iranian Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, one of the many armed outfits proliferating in Iraq. Other groups of suspected prostitutes have been found shot dead, but the Zayouna incident was the largest killing in recent years, and it prompted at least fifteen neighborhood pimps whom Layla knew to flee with their girls to Iraqi Kurdistan. Layla often visits apartments like the ones in Zayouna, posing as a retired pimp. As a cover, she sells the madams abayas that are intricately embroidered with colored crystals and diamantés; they serve to identify women as pimps, rather than prostitutes, at night clubs.

As we drew near the cinder-block shack, Layla leaned out of the window and waved. “Darling!” she shouted, then turned to Mohammad and whispered, “Be careful what you say.” The taxi came to a stop, Layla got out, and the two women greeted each other warmly. Layla had known this woman since before the invasion, when they’d both been prostitutes working and living in the area. Layla introduced me as a cousin who was briefly staying with her, and said that she was looking for another madam. The pregnant woman told her that the woman had moved her brothel, and said where. She asked Layla if she had come across a woman from Basra, in the south, named Em Ali; Layla said she knew her.

“She is doing very well with all her girls,” the woman said. “You should see the cars that come and take her girls. I sold Arwaj to her—five million dinars,” the equivalent of about forty-two hundred dollars. “Do you think that was a good price?”

“No, that was a mistake,” Layla said. “You shouldn’t have sold her. She could have been a source of regular income for you.”

Arwaj, a teen-age runaway, had been lured with the promise of safety and shelter, then held captive. The woman said that the girl had been unruly and screamed all the time.

“She was a virgin,” Layla said.

“Not anymore,” the woman replied. She had locked Arwaj in the shack with a man for three days, selling her virginity, then she sold her to Em Ali.

Mohammad offered to steal the girl back for the woman, as a ruse to find her, and asked where the brothel was. The woman didn’t know.

As we drove away in the taxi, Layla said, “This is our work. That’s how I have to talk to them to get the information I need.” She added, “If they find out what I really do, I will be killed, without any doubt, because behind every pimp are militiamen and corrupt police.” The trafficking situation was the worst it had been in recent years, she said. “Every four or five men now are calling themselves a militia. They can do whatever they want.”

Mohammad said that the country’s woes—“the theft, crime, killing, terrorism”—were all tied to the sex trade. He explained the mind-set of the men involved: “If I get used to this life style, I need to drink, to pay for girls, for rooms, for tips, for trips. That costs money, and I’ll do whatever I need to get paid.”

 

Iraq was once at the forefront of women’s rights in the Middle East. In 1959, the country passed Law No. 188, also known as the Personal Status Law, which restricted polygamy, outlawed child marriage and forced marriages, and improved women’s rights in divorce, child custody, and inheritance. Equal rights were enshrined in the Baath-drafted 1970 constitution, and women’s literacy rates, education, and participation in the workforce were all actively promoted through generous welfare policies, such as free childcare. That momentum was reversed by successive wars—with Iran, from 1980 to 1988, and then the 1990 Gulf War and thirteen subsequent years of international economic sanctions. Female civil servants lost their jobs in disproportionate numbers, and welfare was slashed. As part of Saddam Hussein’s “faith campaign,” which began in the early nineteen-nineties, women accused of prostitution were beheaded, according to Amnesty International. Crimes against women only increased in the chaos that ensued after the U.S.-led invasion.

In 2005, Iraq’s new constitution mandated that a quarter of the members of parliament be women, but Saddam’s fall brought to power conservative religious clerics and parliamentarians who favored laws that would give clerics more control over personal matters. In October of 2013, Hassan al-Shammari, the Justice Minister and a member of the Islamist Fadhila (Virtue) Party, introduced a bill that contained two hundred and fifty-four articles based on the Jaafari school of Shiite religious jurisprudence. The bill, which would apply to Iraq’s Shiite majority, proposed legalizing marriage for girls as young as nine, entitling a husband to nonconsensual sex with his wife, and preventing a woman from leaving her home without her husband’s permission. Article 126 stated that a husband was not required to financially support his wife if she was either too young or too old to sexually satisfy him.

Despite strong opposition from rights groups and a few clerics, the bill was approved by the Council of Ministers in February of 2014 and forwarded to parliament, which failed to vote on it before a new house was ushered in, in April. The Fadhila Party’s spiritual leader, Mohammad Yaqoobi, a white-turbaned, white-bearded marja, or religious authority, described women who opposed the bill as outcasts. The real blame, he said, lay with clerics who, in encouraging these women, were “opening the door of evil.” Mohammad Jawad al-Khalisi, another marja, told me in his office in the Shiite Baghdad suburb of Kadhimiya that men like Yaqoobi were ignorant and “do not understand their religion.”

Hanaa Edwar, a prominent women’s-rights advocate, said that the Jaafari bill made a mockery of the 2005 constitution. Edwar, a diminutive woman with a gray pixie haircut, co-founded several organizations that address women’s rights, including Al-Amal Association, in 1992. “If you don’t have power to decide matters related to your children or your pregnancy, how can you contribute to decision-making in your nation, on its future?” she said. The bill “considered women as just sexual tools for men, for their pleasure.” The draft law remains dormant, but Edwar described it as “a time bomb.”

 

The lawlessness overtaking Iraq poses a more immediate threat to the nation’s women and girls, especially those without the support of their families. Since June, 2014, the Islamic State has seized much of the country’s northwest, including the cities of Mosul, Ramadi, and Fallujah. The Sunni extremists have beheaded their male enemies and sexually enslaved some female captives, including several thousand women and girls from the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority, in northern Iraq. In the October, 2014, issue of Dabiq, the Islamic State’s English-language magazine, the group boasted that “the enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers.”

New militias have sprung up to counter the Sunni extremists, and existing ones have expanded. Human Rights Watch, following its 2015 World Report, accused some Shiite militias of engaging in “unfettered abuses against civilians,” including summary executions, torture, and the forced displacement of thousands from their homes. After twelve years of conflict, there are more than three and a half million internally displaced Iraqis, as many as two million war widows, and a million or more orphans. The U.S. State Department noted, in its 2015 “Trafficking in Persons” report, that the vulnerability of women and children to trafficking had “gravely increased” in the past year, and that security and law-enforcement officials, as well as criminal gangs, were involved in sexual slavery.

“I never imagined that we would reach this level of chaos, this degree of complete disintegration of the state,” Edwar told me. “You don’t see that there is rule of law, that there are national institutions. You just see militias, gangsters. There is no respect for diversity, for human rights in this country.”

In 2004, Iraq created a State Ministry for Women’s Affairs, but it was largely a ceremonial body. An engineer named Bayan Nouri assumed the post of minister in October of 2014. When I met Nouri in May, she was working on the eleventh floor of a parliamentary office building, in Baghdad’s International Zone. A soft-spoken woman in her fifties, she wore a long, belted overcoat and a hijab that was pinned under her neck. She said that, if it weren’t for the current war against the Islamic State, the situation for Iraqi women would be “better, over all, than before 2003.” Nouri expressed concern about the Islamic State’s kidnapping of the Yazidis, but she dismissed the claim that sexual violence was increasing: “They say it is present, but this isn’t obvious, it’s limited. It existed during Saddam’s time, too, but the media doesn’t talk about that.”

Nouri’s ministry had twenty employees, who helped to map out policies, programs, and strategies for other ministries to implement, but it had no budget. “Obviously, if we don’t have money or the authority to implement things, it’s catastrophic, it’s a challenge ahead of us,” Nouri said. She and her three predecessors had asked the cabinet and parliament to upgrade the status of the ministry in order to secure a budget. Instead, in August, as part of a government downsizing, the ministry was abolished, along with the Human Rights Ministry, and several others were merged. A former ministry spokesperson told me that Nouri has retired from politics.

 

Layla grew up in a city in southern Iraq, in a family of seven daughters and two sons. In 1991, when she was fifteen, her brothers were arrested by Saddam’s troops, after a brief Shiite uprising. When she went to the prison to plead for their release, she was spotted by a major—she still remembers his name—who said that he would spare them from execution in exchange for her virginity. When she returned home, her mother and brothers refused to believe that she had been raped. Ashamed, hurt, and angry, she left home for the anonymity of Baghdad and turned to prostitution to survive.

She was pimped in Kamaliyah, a rough, predominantly Shiite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. She married briefly but continued working for herself. In 2003, she was a prostitute in Dora, a neighborhood in the southern part of the city, when the U.S. military arrived in Baghdad. In 2006, she and four other prostitutes were detained by an American patrol on suspicion of being militia informants, because different men were seen coming and going from their apartment. After two weeks in an American detention facility, they were transferred to Iraqi police, who put them in the Kadhimiya women’s prison, where Layla spent the next six months. She was released without charge, but her experience in prison persuaded her “to stop being a prostitute who is part of this world of violence and crime.” She became determined to help girls and women like her.

In 2009, Layla met and married Mohammad, who worked as a taxi-driver and, after the Islamic State took over Mosul, joined a Shiite militia as a volunteer. When they married, she refused to wear a white dress, feeling that she didn’t deserve to. He often offers to buy her one and to hold the ceremony again, but she declines.

“I was comfortable enough to tell him my story, all of it,” Layla said, as we rode in the taxi. “I told him, ‘Will you still accept me?’ He told me, ‘The past isn’t important to me—’ ”

“—the future is,” Mohammad said, finishing her sentence.

Mohammad is a tall, gentle man, with a neatly trimmed brown mustache. He and Layla usually spend Thursday nights, the start of the weekend in Iraq, at night clubs, talking with pimps and the girls they prostitute. But for several weeks the threat of raids by militiamen had kept them away. A month earlier, Layla had been at a club called Memories, in the heart of the capital, when a group of militiamen entered and fired off a number of rounds, killing several prostitutes and capturing others. Layla, who fled through the kitchen, watched as young women were dragged by their hair into cars. Six are still missing, she said.

“Sex fuels militias, because it is a source of money,” Layla told me. “There are two options facing pimps—either they work with the militias or the militias kill them.” Mohammad, fearing for Layla’s safety, usually accompanies her into the clubs, posing as a customer who is her friend. Prostitution is also conducted out of private apartments; Layla visits these alone. I asked Layla and Mohammad how many prostitution dens they frequent, “If I were to show you every one, you wouldn’t be able to see them all in twenty-four hours,” Mohammad said.

“My opponent hasn’t answered one of my e-mails.”

As we drove around Baghdad, Layla and Mohammad pointed out dozens of brothels. Many had boarded-up or blacked-out windows, Arabic music blaring from within, and police vans parked outside. Layla rattled off the prices for girls of various ages. The most expensive were “rosebuds,” thirteen or fourteen years old, at three hundred to four hundred dollars a night. Those between twenty and thirty years old ranged from eighty-four to a hundred and sixty-eight dollars a night, and as little as forty dollars for a brief sexual encounter.

We turned off Al-Nidhal Street, in central Baghdad, into an alley jammed with traffic, car horns blaring, and stopped in front of a club. Its front door was an open archway bathed in dark-red and green light. As we sat in the taxi, two young girls—sisters, Mohammad said—rushed out of the club. The older one was fourteen, he said; she wore heavy makeup, a tight red dress, and a thin, pistachio-colored veil over her hair and upper body. The younger girl was nine, her olive skin plastered with face powder several shades too light for her complexion. Bright-red lipstick extended almost clownishly beyond the contours of her lips.

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Layla yelled out to the girls, “Come, come here! Where is your mother?” They approached the car, hugged and kissed Layla, and said hello to Mohammad. “Where are you running to?” Mohammad asked. They pointed to a nearby building that held several brothels. “Our house is over there,” the older girl said. They chatted for a few moments before scurrying away. Their mother was a pimp, Layla said, who prostituted the fourteen-year-old and her two older daughters. The younger girl’s job, Mohammad added, was “to draw in the customers from the street, to stand at the door and invite people in.”

Mohammad and Layla hesitated when I asked if I could enter the club. Inside, I would be as vulnerable as any other woman there to the men who show up. “Any girl they see at a night club, they grab and take,” Layla said. “Even if you go in with a policeman, somebody higher than him—a militiaman or somebody—will take you if he wants.” Layla asked Mohammad, “How many have we seen them just take? I don’t want her to go in. If men from Asa’ib come in . . . ” Mohammad agreed, and we drove away.

Two days later, I visited Abu Muntathar, the spokesman for Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. The group’s headquarters is a complex of walled villas in Jadriya, a neighborhood tucked into a loop of the winding Tigris River. Most of the men in the compound were dressed in dusty, mismatched military camouflage and lounged around clutching Kalashnikovs. Abu Muntathar, who is forty-four, wore a crisp white-collared shirt, a navy pin-striped suit, and polished pointy black shoes.

Asa’ib formed in 2006 as a breakaway faction of the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Asa’ib is engaged in several key battles against the Islamic State outside the capital, and it has a reputation for combatting al-munkar—activities, including consuming alcohol and engaging in extramarital sex, that are deemed counter to Islam—but Abu Muntathar denied that this was so. “Personal freedoms are permitted for Iraqis,” he said. “Whoever wants to go to a night club or to drink alcohol, we have nothing to do with them. Today, the name of Asa’ib terrifies many, so some people say they are Asa’ib when they are not. If I walk down the street, nobody knows if I am really Asa’ib or not.”

He said that the group was trying to root out impersonators, and that it had detained some, although he wouldn’t say how many or what they were doing. The group’s television station, Al-Ahad, broadcasts two phone numbers for people to call if they have been threatened by men claiming to be members of the militia. The numbers are flashed intermittently at the bottom of the screen. When I asked about the Zayouna killings, Abu Muntathar denied that his group was involved. “Where is the evidence that says we were?” he said. “You can’t just accuse somebody without evidence. Show me the evidence that it was us. It’s not true.”

 

Layla’s work takes her all over Iraq, but there’s one area in Baghdad, called Bataween, that is so rough that she won’t enter it. “I’ve drawn a red line around it,” she told me. Bataween was once an upscale, predominantly Jewish neighborhood, with elegant, intricately carved brick buildings and Juliet balconies, but the creation of Israel, in 1948, and the turmoil that followed prompted an exodus of Jewish communities from Iraq and across the Middle East. The façades have crumbled, and the neighborhood is now considered one of the most crime-ridden in the city and an epicenter of prostitution. Still, in the heart of Bataween, and unknown to residents, is a safe house run by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. The O.W.F.I., which is based in Baghdad, has a staff of thirty-five and receives financial support from MADRE, an international women’s-rights group.

The O.W.F.I. runs eight safe houses across the country and is looking to open one for Yazidi women, in the north; it is the only organization outside Iraqi Kurdistan to operate such facilities. The Bataween safe house, a squalid two-bedroom apartment, serves as a sanctuary for victims of sexual abuse and for women who have nowhere else to go. Since it opened, in September of 2014, more than a dozen women have stayed there.

The apartment belongs to a young woman with dark skin, a broad smile, and a squeaky voice; I’ll call her Amira. In 2005, when she was about thirteen, her mother died, leaving her to care for her two younger brothers. (Her father was divorced from her mother and she was estranged from her stepfather.) Amira did the only thing that she thought would protect her: after the traditional forty-day mourning period, she married one of her stepfather’s friends, a man in his forties, on the condition that he also take in her two brothers. Soon after, during the Iraq war, Amira, several months pregnant, was walking to the store with neighbors, when a car drove past and its occupants shot and killed the men accompanying her. She was taken to the Kadhimiya women’s prison. “The neighbors said I set the men up to be killed by a death squad, because I am Shiite and they were Sunni,” she said.

Amira remained in prison for two years, during which time she gave birth to a daughter, Mariam, and divorced her husband. (She voluntarily granted him custody of Mariam.) A judge finally heard her case and dismissed it. While in prison, she met Dalal Rubaye, a grandmother who works for the O.W.F.I., and was distributing clothes and other items to the inmates. “She used to say that they would help anybody who needs it,” Amira said. “When I was freed, I went to find her, and she took me in.” Since 2009, no one from the O.W.F.I. has been permitted by Iraqi authorities to enter the women’s prison. Rubaye continues to push for permission, and is told each time that the visits are indefinitely postponed.

I first met Amira in 2008, shortly after her release from prison, in an O.W.F.I. safe house in Baghdad. She smiled when I reminded her recently of our first encounter, when she was quiet and shy. “I used to be afraid of everything, of everyone. Now I’m not,” she said. “I am proud that I have helped—that one day, whatever happens, somebody might say, ‘There used to be a girl called Amira who helped women.’ ”

The location of the shelter is such a closely guarded secret that only a few O.W.F.I. employees know where it is. It is not officially called a shelter; Iraqi authorities forbid nongovernmental organizations to operate shelters outside Iraqi Kurdistan. (A domestic-violence bill that is currently before parliament includes provisions for shelters, as does the 2012 anti-trafficking law, but no state-run shelter has opened.)

Amira leaves her front door ajar until ten o’clock or so every night. She stepped over a permanent puddle of water at the threshold and led me up uneven concrete stairs into her apartment. The main room was dimly lit, with several tattered red armchairs; a noisy air-conditioning unit filled the one window. Amira has a five-year-old son, who sat on the floor eating roasted pumpkin seeds. She divorced the boy’s father, her second husband, although she’s not sure when; she can’t read or write and often muddles dates.

Girls hear about Amira’s apartment through the O.W.F.I. or from Amira and other activists who carefully approach them on the streets and let them know that there’s a safe place if they need it. I stayed there for several days in May, and there were four residents, including Nisrine, a lithe twenty-two-year-old with hair cut short like a boy’s. Her mother had brought her in, because she couldn’t look after her and was worried that the girl’s stepfather would molest her. The three other girls were sisters. (I have changed their names.) Noor, the eldest, was twenty-one, with two children in diapers. She had arrived at the shelter two months earlier, penniless, after her marriage ended. Sabrine, the youngest sister, who was fourteen, came with her. She had been living with a physically abusive stepfather who, she said, forced her to beg on the streets and would beat her if she didn’t make at least twenty thousand Iraqi dinars, or about seventeen dollars, a day. “Sometimes I’d sleep in the streets instead of coming home, because I was scared of him,” Sabrine said.

The third sister, Maya, who was eighteen, had arrived at Amira’s two weeks earlier. She kept her head down, rarely spoke, and flinched when approached; when another person walked into the room, she seemed to disappear into herself. Only Noor knew what had happened to her. “If you open this subject, you cut her open,” she told me.

When Maya was ten, she voluntarily entered a state-run orphanage in Baghdad, telling the administrators that her parents were dead. Five years later, her mother found her and took her back home. “My mother’s man would watch her when she showered,” Noor said. “He would sexually molest her.” A month later, Maya moved into Noor’s one-room rental in Bataween, but it wasn’t long before a pimp approached her with the offer of free food, shelter, and stability. “She ended up taken by the people behind the red door,” Noor said. “They sold her.”

The brothel with the red door is a few streets from Amira’s shelter. Written above the door is a Shiite religious inscription, “Ya Hussein,” which invokes the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson in Karbala, Iraq, one of the defining episodes of Shiite history. Noor said that Maya was sold to a brothel in Basra, three hundred and forty miles away, for two million Iraqi dinars—about seventeen hundred dollars—where she was locked in a room with five other girls. Two weeks before my visit, she had been sold for a full night to a man outside the brothel. She waited until he fell asleep, then escaped, borrowed a phone, and called Noor, who told her to come to Bataween by bus. “She was scared because they all know each other, the red-door people and the people in Basra, but she made it here,” Noor said.

Since Maya escaped, her pimp has called Noor several times to demand the return of the money she paid for Maya. The pimps don’t know that the sisters are in an apartment just a few streets away. They also don’t know what Noor or Sabrine looks like. Noor said that she was not afraid of them, even though she said they have connections to the police. Once, she filed a police report against the brothel, which prompted a call from Maya’s pimp. “She told me, ‘We know you went to the station and what you said. Do you think they didn’t tell us?’ Everything I told the police, the woman repeated to me. I told her, ‘Fine, if the police won’t help, I’ll go to the militias.’ That scared her.”

 

The anti-trafficking department of the Iraqi police force is situated in a small office within the vast maze of concrete blast walls, topped with coiled razor wire, that divide and subdivide Baghdad’s Interior Ministry complex. Since the department opened, in 2012, it has investigated sixty-eight cases of trafficking, most involving foreign-labor exploitation and the illicit organ trade. Captain Haider Naim told me that only five cases involved sex trafficking or prostitution, but he conceded that the figure wasn’t reflective of the size of the problem. Naim, who is thirty-five, is one of five officers in the department; two of them are posted in hospitals to supervise the paperwork for organ transplants.

The department does not have any patrol cars or any officers out on the beat, but several committees meet regularly, and there is a free hot-line number—533—that Naim said was designed to accept reports of trafficking. When I asked a friend to try the number from a cell phone and a landline, it didn’t work. I told Naim that human-rights activists and nongovernmental organizations seemed to be attacking the problem of sex trafficking more actively than his department was. He noted that the department’s director, a brigadier general, had been transferred to Anbar province after Ramadi fell to the Islamic State. “We are doing what we can,” he said. “But, you know, the sudden emergencies . . .”

Naim wouldn’t say where most of the trafficking was occurring, because it would mean admitting the department’s many inadequacies. “I could tell you this area and that area,” he said. “And then I’ll hear, ‘Why didn’t you combat it there? Why didn’t you post people there?’ We don’t have the ability to put people in these places. If we did, we would have eliminated these crimes. We would have dismantled them. We don’t have the means.”

 

Layla maintains a small network of tipsters whom she pays for information. One afternoon, while we were sipping sugary tea at the home of a mutual friend, she got a call from an acquaintance in Sadr City, an impoverished, mostly Shiite suburb of northeastern Baghdad. A woman had been dragged from her home and shot dead in the street. Layla quickly headed to the scene, insisting that I stay behind, because she didn’t know if the situation was safe. The victim was the third woman who had been murdered that week, Layla heard.

From neighbors, Layla learned that the woman had been killed by a man belonging to a militia, although it wasn’t clear which one. Nearby brothel owners told her that the woman was a pimp, and that one of her girls had informed a militiaman about her activities. “Sometimes I think it can’t be stopped,” Layla told me a few days later. When she sees victims, she said, “I feel like my insides are ripped open. I am hurt witnessing this.” Still, she would continue her work. “I am now confident and strong,” she said. “I know that I am a person, not an animal. My wound, my deep wound, is also my strength, because it makes me help others, to be around these pimps, to take them on. Those who bear scars must help the wounded.”

First published in The New Yorker.

The First Four Hundred Words: Godfathers and Thieves

It would take a revolution and nearly half a million dollars to undo the damage Mezyan Al Barazi suffered one night in 1977. That was the moment he discovered he was an enemy of the state—in the dark hours of the evening before his university exams. At the age of twenty-six, Al Barazi was a diligent student. He had spent the day poring over notes, preparing for his final paper for his agricultural engineering degree from the University of Damascus.

A firm knock rattled his door. He opened it to find a knot of uniformed men with Kalashnikovs, members of Syria’s intelligence services. The men pushed their way inside, telling Al Barazi they needed to search his apartment for illegal weapons. One of Al Barazi’s uncles was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a political party banned in 1964 after the coup that had brought Syria’s secular Ba’ath party to power. But Al Barazi was not involved in politics—or religion. “They asked me, ‘Where do you pray?’” says Al Barazi. “I said, ‘I don’t pray.’”

The armed men scoured his bookshelf looking for religious texts, finding only his copy of War and Peace. “Why don’t you come with us,” said one of the men.

“But I have my final exams tomorrow,” protested Al Barazi.

“Don’t worry about that,” said another.

Al Barazi was brought to a nearby prison, where he spent a cold, sleepless night forced by the guards to sit and then stand, sit and then stand, until dawn came and he was served a breakfast of olives and bread. Later that morning, he was led to an interrogation room and asked a few innocuous questions before being finally allowed to leave. The government had kept him, Al Barazi realized, just long enough for him to miss his exams.

Al Barazi’s trouble with the authorities had begun a few months earlier, when he was taking inventory as part of his job as an inspector at a warehouse run by the Ministry of Agriculture. He had grown up in the lush countryside near the city of Hama, but he had come to Damascus to study. What he discovered there disturbed him. Behind the bustle of traders and hum of government, a deep rot was spreading. Some of his fellow students had paid for their grades. Others had run afoul of the government after their teachers reported their...

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The First Four Hundred Words: The Wizard and the Volcano

I met the wizard of Mount Merapi in June 2006, six weeks into the eruption, at his home on the volcano’s slopes. The one-story structure, built of wood and cement, sat in a patch of bamboo in Kinahrejo, the highest village on the volcano. I had rented a motorbike to drive the hour from Yogyakarta, a college town thirty kilometers from the volcano, near the Indian Ocean shore. The two-lane road was well paved and fast, lined on each side with trees, palm groves, and farmland. Merapi’s smoking cone, which towers 3,000 meters over over Central Java, Indonesia, was visible most of the way. As the road started climbing, the normally lush, green landscape was monotone gray. Ash from inside the erupting mountain had covered the trees and the road.

Though most of Kinahrejo’s 200 people were dairy farmers, the wizard, whose name was M’bah Maridjan, was a government functionary. He earned the equivalent of eighty cents a month to explain the volcano’s behavior to the public and report to a royal court in Yogyakarta. Yogyakarta is the seat of a Javanese monarchy, a young one reaching back only to the eighteenth century, that still runs affairs in that part of Indonesia. Maridjan was entering his twenty-fifth year on the job. His daily duties included reading the volcano’s moods and appeasing its gods using techniques he had learned from his father, the previous wizard. A few times a year, he would hike hours uphill by steep trail from his home in the village to hold ceremonies near the caldera.

When I arrived at Maridjan’s doorstep, a handwritten note was tacked onto a wooden sign. It announced the house as Official Headquarters of the Wizard of Mount Merapi, and said he was no longer granting audiences. I knocked anyway. A man in his forties in an expensive sarong and a peci, a cylindrical cap like a fez, answered the door. He was from the palace in Yogyakarta. Maridjan was a popular public figure, and his refusal to leave the village despite an evacuation order had become a public relations crisis for the monarchy. They had sent this man, a minder, to stay with the wizard. The minder was pleasant and did not seem bothered by me. He said the sign was to ward off TV cameras from the evening news in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, ten hours west. The...

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The First Four Hundred Words: 13 Men

The girls hurried through the forest, dragging the reptile behind them. The ground was moist from a sharp burst of unseasonable rain, and the bloodied carcass was soon coated with mud. It was a cold evening in January, but the girls were barefoot. They had bludgeoned their prey with bamboo sticks and were giddy with the anticipation of savoring the fresh meat. They argued logistics all the way home.

If they roasted the meat on an outdoor fire, as they wanted to, they would attract the envy of the entire village. They lived in Subalpur, a forested neck of land in a remote corner of Birbhum district, located some 117 miles north of Kolkata in West Bengal, India. Few of the people they knew could afford to eat more than once a day.

“Aren’t you alone tonight, Baby?” one of them said, turning to an older girl. They all knew that Baby lived with her mother, who was away visiting Baby’s brother in another village. “Why don’t we cook this fellow at your house?”

Twenty-year-old Baby was a fairly new addition to this group of friends. A few of them dismissed her as aloof, but others liked her because she was stylish. She wore salwar kameezes to work, same as all the girls, but she piled on glass bangles and oxidized silver chains, so her wiry little frame jangled playfully as she moved. Sweet-smelling flowers spilled out of her kinky, bunned hair.

But now she lagged behind the group, preoccupied. Baby was the only woman in Subalpur who owned a mobile phone—a no-brand device that she was always using to call or text someone. Some months earlier, the curious girls had confronted her about the texts. She was messaging a man, she told them, with a note of challenge in her voice. He was handsome, he was good to her. He even bought her groceries.

The girls knew Khaleque Sheikh, who lived in the nearby village of Chouhatta. He worked with them on the construction site where they were helping to build the area’s first high school. Out of trucks that arrived at the site, the young women hauled spires of bricks and mud in steel pans they balanced on their heads with practiced nimbleness. Then Khaleque and the other masons laid down the bricks in cement.

Baby looked up distractedly to answer the question about her house. “Oh no..."

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The First Four Hundred Words: The Wreck of the Kulluk

On December 30, 2012, a tugboat engineer named Craig Matthews threw a grappling hook and caught a runaway drill rig in the middle of a severe storm in the Gulf of Alaska. Late on New Year’s Eve, he was ordered to save his own life and that of his tug’s crew by cutting it loose. The rig’s name was the Kulluk. It belonged to Royal Dutch Shell. Designed for the Arctic, it was the biggest piece in the biggest oil play by what in 2012 was the world’s biggest company, and it was about to run aground.

“The thing was like a Weeble,” Matthews says—one of those egg-shaped, roly-poly toys from the 1970s, when he was a teenager. “Weebles wobble,” the catchphrase went, “but they don’t fall down.”

It was “like a frickin’ bottle top,” said a Coast Guard rescue pilot—“like a Fisher-Price toy.” “Like a floating top,” another proposed. ”Just massive," said a third. Rimmed in 1.5-inch-thick steel, built with an unusual round hull to help prevent it from being crushed in sea ice, the Kulluk was 250 feet tall and weighed half as much as the Titanic. It had no propulsion of its own. Transporting it was “like towing a large saucer for a tea cup,” said the mariner Shell hired to drag it to Alaska. It was “like a buoy the size of a football field,” said one of the Coast Guard rescue swimmers who helped save its crew of eighteen men.

The storm was peaking when the order came. “It was night,” Matthews says. “Winds to fifty knots. Seas thirty-five feet.” Though his tugboat, the Alert, was straining to keep the Kulluk moving forward, "we were going backward”—pulled by the massive rig as it was pushed by gale-force winds—“at two knots.” The Kodiak Archipelago, including Kodiak Island and a smaller barrier island, Sitkalidak, was straight downwind.

In the beam of the Alert’s spotlight, Matthews and the other men on the tug could see 2,800 feet of tow wire jerking out of the water and vibrating under the tension between the two ships. They worried the wire would break and snap back at them. They were in danger of being dragged to shore. But Matthews didn’t feel particularly afraid. “A lot of the time something is scary when you consider it in perspective,” he says, “but there was no perspective.”

He knew he didn’t want to cut...

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The First Four Hundred Words: Of Ice and Men

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The First Four Hundred Words: Come See The Mountain

First you get the dynamite. You can buy it openly and without any paperwork for about a dollar a stick.

This neighborhood in the Bolivian city of Potosí is one of the only places in the world where such a transaction is legal. Dynamite is a common workplace implement here. So is booze. You have to buy that, too —preferably the purest kind, even to the point of flammability. A brand called Ceibo, named for a type of flowering tree, does the job. The liquid is colorless and burns the esophagus going down. A few swigs will intoxicate even the strongest miner.

Dynamite and booze —once this buying ritual is over, you’re fitted with a blue jumpsuit, rubber boots, a helmet, and a miner’s lamp. Then you’re ready to descend into one of the oldest mining complexes on the planet still in operation, and one of the most dangerous. The place is called Cerro Rico (“Rich Hill”), and approximately 16,000 miners toil here using methods that have changed very little since the time when Spanish conquistadors first forced the local population of Indians to dig for silver.

Dozens of men are killed here every year. Hundreds more perish at home from the respiratory disease silicosis, which is caused by the dust motes suspended in the tunnels. In addition to being a phenomenally unsafe workplace, Cerro Rico also happens to be one of the hottest underground tourist destinations in South America, and perhaps the cruelest. Tourists —mainly young Western backpackers —are expected to give the dynamite and the booze as gifts to the miners who work inside the tunnels: a sort of tribute, or maybe an apology.

At least a dozen travel outfits in Potosí, both regulated and not, promise touristic access to “the mountain that eats men.” The mountain is now as much a public spectacle as a workplace. “You will experience the working conditions of the miners,” says one brochure. “For example, some of the heavy smoke after dinamite [sic] explosions.”

It’s a pitch that many have found irresistible, despite the possibility that a hapless visitor could get caught in a rockfall or struck by an errant mine cart. “Visiting the mines is a serious decision,” warns the Lonely Planet guidebook to Bolivia. “If you’re undeterred, you’ll have an eye-opening and unforgettable experience.” For a modest fee, European and American tourists can crawl around in warm tunnels, watch a...

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