It's my pleasure today to welcome Professor Peter Recovery, who is professor of criminology here in Oxford in the Department of Sociology. Which is slightly surprising to those of you who are to a study in the Department of Criminology Centre for Criminology that said a week ago actually used to be part of the Centre for Criminology and then moved over to sociology where there are actually other criminologists lurking as well.
So you might take a look at that. There's a series of talks and lectures. Federico is also the director of the Extra Legal Governance Institute, a research associate at the Centre for Criminology and a senior research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He's best known for the work that he has published over many years about the Mafia. And he's he's published many books about the Mafia.
The most recent one, I believe, was in 2017, which is called Mafia Life, Love, Death and Money at the Heart of Organised Crime. Today Federico will be speaking about the relationship between democracy and the Mafia, paying special attention to recent developments in Hong Kong and possibly in Russia, although I'm not sure exactly just Hong Kong. But anyway, I'm going to hand over over to Federico. [INAUDIBLE] talk for about an hour, which will then give us half an hour for questions.
So thank you. Thank you very much. And it's a great honour to be invited back to to talk to you. So I wanted to tell you briefly about the motivation for this for this stalker. As as you just said, I work on organised crime mainly and I come from Italy. So you might be naturally to, to be interested in the relationship between democracy and organised crime.
But the most immediate reason why I decided to keep thinking and thinking a bit deeper than usual on the relationship between organised crime and the Mafia actually had to do with Hong Kong. So when I was in there in I think this time I look at this mafia martial law.
If something quite extraordinary happened, there was a movement for democracy in Hong Kong and what the students wanted mainly was student led movement for the students wanted was basically what we already have the idea that you have one vote, one person, and the principles of democracy. It was a peaceful movement which lasted between September and December 2014.
Now, as I was writing my book, something quite extraordinary for me happened, namely that the students were attacked in their protest in for democracy, by thugs, by what transpired possibly could have been the local organised crime groups called the Triads of which I was, I was writing in my book. So as soon as I heard that I jumped on the first plane and went to, to Hong Kong and involved a paper on that with a collaborator.
I thought about that paper in a second, so that was the main motivation that led me to to try to on on this particular topic and reflect more broadly on the relationship between democracy and the Mafia. So what I'm going to do today in the hour that I have been allocated is first of all try to make some sense of what we mean by organised crime and the mafia.
It's a very complicated set of concepts, very disputed set of concepts, and I want to make some sort of clarifications and and try to get some analytical distinctions between them. And then I also want to discuss an additional concept which is so my cousin, you know, a relative of the mafia in organised crime, but it's not quite the same, which is what the literature is called, the sons for hire.
And finally, I spend the second half of my talk on this case study on the on democratic mobilisation and in organised crime in Hong Kong. These are the papers upon which I'll be drawing. And so I wrote a once a chapter on the definition of organised crime for the handbook. Well, no, it's collection of papers. We spoke and Campana, we wrote a piece in the British Journal of Criminology about organised crime in this country.
And so I will draw on that. And most importantly of course, this is the paper I wrote with Rebecca Wong. Rebecca was a student in Oxford in a discipline in sociology, and she's a trained lawyer now. She's back in Hong Kong as a as a university professor, we about the paper called Resurgent Triads, democratic mobilisation, organised kind of neo con, which got a lot of attention quite recently. And so at some point recently I was interviewed a lot and the papers became a hit for the Journal.
And then these, some of these work goes into my book. Machado's So let me, let me just put forward the key arguments. I would like you to remember about this talk, the key arguments I'm going to make, because some of them would be more irrational. Other would be extrapolated today. He said mafias prefer democracies to totalitarian regimes. Mafias are. I mean, democracies are born normally at a time of democratic transitions, and they want democracy.
They need democracies. However, nations, as you might expect, are not good for democracy. They are effective. The effect of machines on democracy is actually to reduce genuine electoral competition. So while they thrive in democracy, they only promote and work with a limited number of political parties.
I won't have much time to discuss electoral systems, but there are some electoral systems which are better for the Mafia to manipulate for their own purposes and their legitimate point, which fits with the previous ones, of course, is that as the regime becomes smaller, some Italian mafias might. Obviously, they have less and less scope for action, and they might turn into a just into an arm of the state. What this concept tries to capture stands for high.
So that's the key argument. So in a sense, mafias are not in favour of totalitarian models of Italian regimes. Now, let me start with the first point I want to talk about and hopefully try to clarify a bit on what we mean by. By organised crime in the Mafia.
If you, if you look at the standard definitions of organised crime that you find in the literature or in the UN definition, or there is a UK definition, these are definitions which are pretty vague and general three people or more that exist for a period of time. They act together with the aim of committing a crime punishable by at least four years incarceration to obtain a financial benefit of some material benefits that would cover most of what criminology study.
It's a very, very broad definition. Three people getting together with the aim of committing a crime. Now the UK definition, which shows up in several documents in this country, is pretty similar. Organised crime is people working together with the intent and capacity to commit serious crimes because of what is defined by serious except, you know, could be anything. And these include some sort of planning, control, coordination and structure.
So these definitions tend to be extremely vague on what constitutes organised crime and also tend to focus on the structure. I mean, if you want to be charitable to these definitions, they are aimed at telling us, look, there is some degree of organisation, you know, crime that is organised is organised, crime that's in a sense. So clearly for the three of us to get together and plan to steal, you know, a few pounds from the budget of the Centre for Criminology, which would be organised crime.
Now that then you go to the extreme of starting the Mafia, United would be basically under the same concept. Now it may have to, you know, police reason to have such a broad definition, but analytical. You can't do very much with this. You would put people who are very different for in the same basket, intellectual, conceptual basket. So it's not surprising. It's not surprising that some very distinguished scholars. Smith is an American criminologist from the seventies.
My TV rundown seven do not more negative and more contemporary criminologists. They came up to the conclusion that we might as well take the Council of State into being organised. Crime is a complex concept so overburdened with stereotyped imagery we cannot meet the basic requirements of a definition it does not include. The motive should include. It does not exclude or destroy the school. So damning definition, damning judgement on the concept.
And so as I was saying to me on my TV was a professor in this country, one doing who is in Holland. I think they came to the conclusion that we should dispense all together with the concept of organised crime. Now other scholars, including myself, is I've come to the conclusion that we might try to rescue the concept, try to do something with it instead of the being.
And to cut a long story short, I've published, as I told you, this introduction on what is organised crime in the break room paper. We can finally also come up with an attempt to have an analytical definition which is not what is coming next. I can see the next slide on my computer so I know what's coming next. So what do we try to do with that?
With the concept of organised crime, we try to unpack it and then basically we think there are three key activities that go on in the underworld, in the both legal, especially legal market, but also in some legal markets, you need them. There are some people in illegal markets that specialise in the production of goods and services. So if you go to Colombia, where I was recently, thanks to my sabbatical, in fact I was there for three or four weeks.
So a few months ago, you know, you go to the countryside, you go to the end, to the forest. And peasants who farm leaves that can then turn into coca faced and then eventually produced into a good which is cocaine. That is heroin, of course, produced in Afghanistan, in Burma. Also for this book massacre, I went to visit to the area called the Golden Triangle in the Burma border with China and visit the main activity of the people there is to produce heroin.
And these are people in the fields that produce their peasants based or China is specialised in the production of counterfeit goods. So now these people are very different from those who are involved in very different activity. That requires a different kind of skills, which is to take the goods to and move them somewhere. So there are people who specialise in moving goods as opposed to produce index.
And you can appreciate these three concepts are pretty much standard in economics and sociology. Economics are so. So we're not reinventing the wheel. All we are saying is that why don't you apply the simple concepts that we already have in standard political science, sociology and economics to the world that we studied, namely organised crime.
And so there are an activity which is about moving goods from one place to another human smuggling, drugs, trafficking, the people who trafficked drugs from Colombia to Calabria, for instance. These are very different from the people who seek in the fields and produce the drugs. They have different skills. They are usually businesspeople. They speak several languages and they've travelled a lot. So they are different professionals, a skill set.
They have a different professional skill set. Money laundering, also lots of cybercrime. If you think about cybercrime, which is something I've been working on recently as well. What is cybercrime? Cybercrime is going on to a web page which is usually hidden in the so-called dark web and buying and selling stolen goods. So there is an architecture in this so-called darkweb that puts on it goods and services that you buy and sell.
So a lot of what cybercrime is about is buying and selling goods for trading. I talked about these about payments, informal banking, the so-called hawala. Again, that is a way to move money illegally and formally from, say, Afghanistan to to Italy or back from Italy to Afghanistan, often to pay for drugs.
And finally, we come to this sort of exciting fast, which is the one I've been working on for the past 20 plus years, which is a third type of activity, which is not involved in producing or trading goods, is involved in giving others the permission to produce or to trade. So it's involved in governance. These are people who want to govern what other people do.
And this is where you find what I would call the governance type, organised crime, or, well, you will find the mafia, for instance, the organised crime that we know exists in Italy, in Russia, in Hong Kong and in in other countries in Japan. So what do they do? They are involved in settling disputes between people.
If you have a dispute over access to your driveway and you have a dispute with your neighbours in a place like parts of neighbours or neighbourhoods, then you can go to the local mafia boss to discuss the matter. They protect people against competition, businessmen. They protect against thieves, labour racketeering. They organise able workers. The intimidation of lawful. I told us they recover debts in one of the main activities of the Mafia, in fact, is to enforce cartel agreements.
So there are businessmen who want to call it a certain sector, sector of the economy, a certain market. The Mafia come, sing and make sure that competitors who are outside the cartel do not get in. And also those on the cartel, they are punishment punished too if they cheat on the cartel agreement. I always mean doesn't make sense. Yeah. So this is a very different and it requires different skills, of course.
Here, violence is absolutely crucial. Violence is a key element of this particular activity. Now there is a long list of scholars starting from poppies to chastity. Thomas Schelling was an economist, and that, of course, was written about this. A long list of scholars who have specified the kind of social event derives from this.
You know, if you are in the business of governance, well, obviously there can be two governance structure that is in the same place, on the same activity, obviously, in a sense of exclusivity. So therefore, you know, as much as states fight between themselves so dramatically, you know, and when we see a turf war between two gangs, you know, you might we might think they are crazy or we might think they are actually fighting all the time.
So in order to be the only governance structure in that particular territory. So. To cut a long story short, I think this is a much better way to think about organised crime. And you might appreciate the fact also that it is based on activities. So it's not so much saying, oh, it's about how long you hang together with how sophisticated is your internal structure, not. It's about what you do. So it's a definition based on activities, not so much on organisations.
Then of course we can think of the organisation as a by-product of the activity as a consequence, as a dependent variable. So if you want to govern, obviously you must need some structure is if you want to organise an army, you need the people who run the arm, you need the hierarchy, for instance. So you will be able to derive the structure from, from the activity. I obviously. Yeah. And so let me go to the next slide.
And then I mean, obviously, what this slide is trying to tell you is that the mafia then if you believe this story, the mafia that I study is in the same box, is in the same continuum as the state. Now, ultimately, governance is a function of the state. So although they made Mafia the mafia, as I study, maybe rudimentary may be the you know, not as developed as a fully functioning state. Well, they are in the same business, the business of governance.
And of course, if we're not going to say that the masses in the state are the same thing, maybe anarchists would agree to that statement. But it's a bit unfair on the if you don't fight on a democratic state so that there is a very clear difference between, say, in a mafia family in Sicily and in the United Kingdom.
I think there should be. And the tentative answer to that is that the difference is this kind of cumbersome way of putting it, that the collective action mechanism that constrain the institutions of governance are different. To put differently, if you live in a mafia land, in a massive governance territory, you do not get to elect your boss. The mafia boss does not get elected by you. You know, you don't have any power over who becomes the mafia boss.
So you are a victim, ultimately of an unjust order in an order which has got no justice, because you have no rights in a mafia state, in a mafia state of situations. So that to put it in a more academic way, corrective action mechanism do not constrain the boss anymore. He may be constrained by other considerations like rationality, but not by justice. So there is no there is no criminal code that you can appeal to.
There is no rule that you can appeal to. And as this so the way I think about this, as this mechanism become more and more effective, as the people who live in a given context have more and more choice over who owns them. But then you move from a mafia to a rule of law state and potentially to a democratic state. And if you study insurgencies, some of them are extremely sophisticated.
The insurgency in Colombia at the start, which is now effectively shut down the you know, it was a left wing insurgency that was very active in the seventies and eighties, and now it's disbanded. But the fact that the rudimentary justice system they had the courts and and there was a rudimentary justice system, not obviously was imperfect, but you could go to court.
When I went to Burma to this part of Burma called the Golden Triangle, which is run by a military organisation called the Army, W8 Army. And they are sort of remaining sort of a descendent of the Communist Party of Burma, who is now becoming a sort of independent army. Well, I was told that the the daughter of one of the main leaders of the of the Army and ran over one classroom in a car and she was brought to court and sentenced now.
I'm sure she got a better sentence, a lighter sentence, and some will. Yes, but still, there was a justice system. Even members of the Army would would have to abide, too. So to me, that's the key difference between between the Mafia and the state is you was I was kind of argue that the state is the same as the Mafia. And then we have, empirically speaking, some kind of organisations that do not really govern many domains or even aspire to govern many domains.
They govern only one domain, maybe prostitution. So if you want to all drugs. So if you want to push drugs in a given neighbourhood, you have to ask the permission of the gang. But the gang will not really be able to prevent you from opening a shop. So that to me is a different kind of beast, which maybe will have evolved into Mafia but remains separate. And it needs a special. And controls on a single market.
I go with me. Yeah. Doesn't make sense. So that hopefully helps to understand what we are talking about. Now, let me now go a bit into the meta of democracy and democracy. And let's go back to to Sicily. To Sicily, where arguably a very distinguished mafia emerged. So the mafia in Sicily emerged between 1816, 1812 and 18. By 1838, we know the Mafia was dead. We have a report by a guy called Pietro Carol Law, who was the procurator general in Trapani, and he writes a report in 1838 to the king.
And he basically describes what we observe today. So there are individual families, their rituals, and they coordinate across each other in in western Sicily, which is where the Sicilian Mafia is located. So we know that the mafia emerged around the time of the end of feudalism in Sicily and then transition to the market economy. What happened in Sicily between 1812, 1816 was that this land became acclimatised commodity before it was owned by the Lords, by the feudal lords.
With the Napoleonic invasion there, the land was split up and even church land was auctioned. And so you go from around 6000 landowners to more than 60,000 in a matter of a very few few years, which of course generated a lot of complex dynamics because the state was not that equipped to determine and define property rights and protect them. Anyway, we know that the Mafia merged around 1838 and and we can talk more if you want, about how the Mafia emerged.
But then there is this man called Leopoldo Franco, who was a very sort of well-meaning Italian intellectual, who in 1876 travels to Sicily and writes an amazing report on the mafia in Sicily, who he writes, It's a self-funder. So he was an aristocrat so you could afford. He was particularly upset at the way the Italian state, new unified Italian state in 1860 was dealing with the south in question. And he thought he should see for himself.
So he goes to Sicily with a friend and stays there for a year and writes probably what is the first ethnography of the history of the Sicilian Mafia? Mean book, which unfortunately is not translated into English, but it's on the part of Tocqueville, democracy in America, and it's that kind of intellectual ability to see social obligations. And the key point I want to report to you today is this sentence he writes.
He says, The villains are still ready to serve the purpose of others and become self employed. So what happened in Sicily before the Mafia emerged is that you had feudal lords that employed thugs, you know, by the people who control the were on the fields and they beat up the peasants and they kind of police the countryside. Once the feudal lords retreated and lose the land, they'd have to send to all these villains who still work for other people.
They become self-employed, so they don't work anymore for them, for the law. So they're not just the sons of the law. They're not just they are not a particular employer. They have many employment doesn't make sense. So they are an autonomous entity, an autonomous source of power and delegated to sell their their violence services to whoever would pay. Now, this is, in essence, what the Mafia does from that point in time, and they do it in a very nasty way.
This is a quotation from a book by John Dickey on the Sicilian Mafia, which is a very popular, very popular history of the Sicilian mafia, which if you want to read a good book about this, I recommend it. Mafioso would intimidate and murder countless socialists, communists, trade union leaders, so many, in fact, that they came to be seen as if the Mafia very purpose was to battle organised working class in the countryside into submission.
Now, the reason why he writes this is big is partly because there was a movement in Sicily called the fascist Siciliano, which was started because of a doubt, I think. And so they were not paid. The peasants and the peasants organised a socialist movement to request to strike ultimately. And so what they need to does in Sicily is to use the Mafia to crush this movement.
So the perception we get from many accounts is that all the mass is doing is simply to serve the interests of the landowners to to crush the working class, which is to a great extent. Correct. But. Also examples in which sometimes the market will switch side and protect some local cooperatives, which would ask for their services. So it's not that they were constantly and only crashing and the same group of people, but certainly they have a problem.
The Mafia has a problem with socialists and communists and trade union leaders. And the next quote is from Antonio Calderone, who is a mafia boss which testified against the mafia in the in the eighties. And he makes a very interesting point about the relationship between democracy and mass electoral democracy and the mafia. So the Cosa Nostra has always opposed the Communist Party in the U.S. but why you know, why do they oppose the Communist Party?
And we they also did not like the fascists. I was in Catania. The instructions were to vote only for centrist party, what it calls a Democratic Party. If a totalitarian party comes to power, the Cosa Nostra is finished. And which are the totalitarian parties? The Communists, the socialists, the fascists, and the Christian Democrats, which was the ruling party of Italy from the end of the Second World to the 1990 was actually a good party and democratic path to democracy.
They must love that they would share power. You see, that's the key point of the Mafia. They want a party which shares power, then that accepts their existence. The moment the party would not allow the existence of the party becomes a totalitarian party, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party do not come to terms on a regular basis with the Mafia.
So the Mafia at the time was voting for parties such as the Republican Party, the tiny Liberal Party, a tiny splinter Socialist Party, which was on the right, and the Socialist parties all at some point so-called Italian Socialist Party, but not the the Communist Party. The Mafia couldn't get along with that. It would make it possible to do more. Does that make sense? So that's the kind of political allegiance that you find in in the Mafia.
And then the other question is, what does democracy in in electoral politics? Well, for the mafia, elections are an opportunity. An opportunity in elections is a market is a market for votes where you can buy and sell votes. So as the Mafia was growing in strength, there was there was also an extension of the voting rights in Italy. Italy in 1861, only 2% of people could vote in 1882, six, four, nine, and then in 1912, all males could vote. In the 1946, all anybody could vote, including women.
So it took a long time to get a full electoral, you know, everybody could vote. But as the election and the franchise expanded, also market opportunity for the mass expanded, which was to control the vote. So the Mafia politicians always wanted us to because we can provide the vote. So a key function of the mafia in the electoral system is to provide votes for these parties that they can share power and they come to terms with the Mafia.
And the best electoral system for the Mafia has always been proportional representation with preference voting because so as you understand, the electoral systems, if you have imagine you have a first past the post election in this country with a large constituency. You know what I mean, right. You are basically one guy who gets elected to the empty position and there are 18 or 20,000 people voting for this person.
30,000, a big chunk of the time. Well, it's very hard for the market to control even hospitals. What they would that I mean there are situations in which the voting could be very close and even if you wanted to vote would make the difference. But most in most cases, you wouldn't control a lot of votes.
But if you have a PR system for personal representative with preference of voting within the least of the party, what the Mafia can do is to make sure that the people in that particular list get the Mafia votes, get on top of the list and get elected thanks to the general voting that goes through the PR system. So the competition for votes in a PR system is preferential voting is within the party, least of which are part of.
So if you are a candidate in Palermo in the seventies, you don't care about the communists or the socialists and you don't care about them. That's a problem of the National Party to compete against the, you know, for big issues. What you care about is the other the Christian Democratic Party, fellow guy who he's got who has gotten more preference votes and more friends and would vote with him.
So the temptation is to use the Mafia to vote for you. And the Mafia found really sophisticated ways to make sure. That you could that you could see it sign the vote. So you can actually have a way to vote in a PR professional system so that you can almost know exactly how many people had promised to vote and then would vote for you. I always think does make sense. I can speak and we can talk about more about this, but it's a key.
It's a key. And just as we come to an end of this early part, I wanted to draw attention to this figure, which just came out in which these three economists, they study the effect of the market on electoral voting in in Italy. And they're a measure of mafia prevalence from the 1900, which comes from a report. And this measure of mafia presence in Italy goes from 1 to 3. And they check the fact that this that the change from 1 to 2 to 2 to 3 would have on that on the elections.
And then they have an index of concentration, which is using economics to study how industries are concentrated. So to what extent in industries monopolised, always competitive. So using this index, Hirshman is one of the authors of the index. Incidentally, they come to the conclusion that the presence of the Mafia is associated with a greater concentration of votes on few parties.
So that's the real effect that the Mafia as on elections, fewer parties get most of the votes, so they exclude the other parties. And you can measure this as you go from law, mafia to more mafia and to more mafia, less dispersion of votes and more concentration. So people vote for those parties. Let me end of this digression on Mafia and in politics with this final slide. So I suppose the point I want to make is that the Mafia is got a political dimension.
There have been Mafia groups that have toyed with the idea of taking over the state. If you follow the the start of Colombia's Gustavo Escobar, is he himself was a candidate. He became a candidate in the Senate in Colombia. He had a political program. You know, obviously, it the self-interested he wanted to avoid extradition to the United States. But if you read in detail his political problem, he made some sense.
You know, he wanted to reduce the American influence in the U.S. He wanted to solve poverty. He was a populist in a sense of that kind, obviously self-serving populist. But we have seen many of seven populists winning elections. So even to be the first ones. And he was making money from selling cocaine, which wasn't perceived to be a social arm in the country. But he was certainly Escobar certainly had a political problem.
And even in Sicily, just after the Second World War, the Sicilian mafia, for a moment thought that they might they might want an independent Sicilian. And there was a movement for independence of Sicily called Independent Moustaches Young. So I think just to conclude, mafias always have to strike a balance or trade off between making a deal with the political powers of the time, like in this case, Cosa Nostra did in Italy from 46 to 1982.
So you strike a deal with the political power or on the other end, you talk to the the political point of this. There is a huge research agenda you have to study under which conditions you would want to strike a deal and under which conditions you would launch an all out attack on the states. Escobar famously did that and in the in the boss of the Italian but the Sicilian mathematical arena also did that for two years. They would fail. So maybe that's why it's not a good policy.
But it has been tried and I think in some countries in Latin America maybe succeeding. So let me now turn to the second concept I wanted to discuss a bit more, which is substance. The point of this talk and the society is a very different beast. These are not mafiosi. They are not autonomous governance structure. They are, as we say in the paper. non-State actors used by authorities to impose policies and decisions upon the population.
So you and the Chinese government some time in China, but you also had Suharto in in Indonesia, in Zimbabwe. They are a form of privatised state violence which are drawn from the underworld. Usually they come from outside the terrorism. They are sent to a particular area and they basically beat up and victimised peasants or landowners in order to enforce state policies. And there are examples of this across the world. China is the most significant one, but also Zimbabwe and so on.
One quarter about Egypt. So if you bear with me, I think we should lead it to support the needs of a neighbour. The regime of the Minister of Interior is starting to outsource its most dirty business with increasing impunity. Criminal investigation officers began to promote a new police force. Thugs. And these thugs are killing us with a record of violence who have failed to carry out duties of discipline.
Members of the public, in return for police to unite and turning away from a blind eye to their criminal activities. So these want to get a job description as expanded to include voter intimidation, beating up, raping, sexually abusing criminal suspects and political activists, breaking up demonstrations, forcibly removing farmers from their land and much more. So this is what's happening in in in Egypt. And this is a very different kind of privatise lunch than than what the machines.
Now, I understand I've got maybe half an hour still, 20 minutes, 23 minutes, 15 minutes in this room, as I wanted to, to discuss this work I did with my co-author on the Triads and the Umbrella movement. So this is a qualitative fieldwork we did at the time of the attacks that the students, the students were victims of during the the Occupy movement, you know Kong so fi and very clever which are not I want to show you some of the pictures I took at the time is coming up.
So these are some of the. Just to give you a sense of what was going on in Hong Kong in from September to December 2014. So imagine this is the main throughway, you know, the main highway of downtown Hong Kong, which was peacefully occupied by students who camped there. And you could actually stay there and camp there overnight. And this was called Umbrella Movement, which I was telling you about, about trying to. And it was umbrellas were used to protect against spray.
You can see these are very young children from high school. There must be 14 really facing the police that is facing the police. Just for democracy, what they want is one vote, one person. Let me see. So basically this you know, it was really sweet that because they were not going to school, the students would then come for and study overnight. And so there was a study corner. So there were study groups you could see on the hot end, you know what?
It would be normally working on books by academics, chemistry analyses. So there was a chemistry teacher who would teach chemistry. This is a very famous wall called the John Lennon Wall, which I think now it's been cleared by the police in Hong Kong where people would put stickers on with the sentences about democracy. Every night there would be a meeting of all of these people and we would talk about what happened during the day.
So we attended these meetings. We slept in the campus. So you could sleep actually overnight, but you couldn't pay for the tent. So we I tried to pay and they said, no, we don't want money. You can only help us. So we stayed. And I said, in democracy, which is very nice. And so these are some of the sentences that you would find in Slavic languages, including Russian and Italian.
And then of course, the camp this encampment was barricaded by in this way because the police would try to remove these students from the from the camp. It was pretty easy to do, though, to do that. So I think. Yeah, that's to show that I was there. Yes. You never know what it's like to be off the Internet or something. I mean, but what is behind me is actually a shrine is a shrine to gods.
Right. And so there was this is a god which apparently washes both by the times, but also by ordinary people in Hong Kong. So there was a religious dimension to this fight. And and this was the attack that I'll talk to you in a second. So let me see if I can get off of this now. She could be want. So. How to get out on the screen. You have got that, too. I think that you should be okay and you make it. I knew I should do this. That's fine. That's right. Okay, so that's a go now. Okay, great.
So the Hong Kong stallions are in the local mafia in Hong Kong. The I mean, we don't have much time to discuss why they originated from they originated in the Qing Dynasty in the 18th and forties, 18, 1860s, becoming involved in opium trafficking and slave labour and liberal racketeering. But we know that by 1909 there was a standardised ritual among all of these different gangs. So they all subscribe to a standardised ritual.
So although you might be a member of a given try and you would join it through a ritual which was shared by other gangs within the Hong Kong triads. Doesn't make sense. So that's the key. So these are independent crime groups which share the same rules and standardised rituals. And I put that this yellow bird operation because at the time of the gentleman square, one of the of the Triads actually helps the students, the Chinese students escape China and to come to go to Hong Kong.
And then some of them went to Paris so that the birds were not automatically and always being followed a particular political power. But then by 1993, Chinese officials started to talk about patriotic triads and how much they should be brought into the fold of the new regime. So the attack that I that I witnessed and that I, I report in the paper with Rebecca took place on the 3rd of October between 10 a.m. and 430 in the night.
And what happened is that by 10 a.m., some thugs started to effect that problem right here, started to remove remove the in this particular area of Hong Kong, which is on the other side of Nathan Road, started to remove the sandbags that and also the tents where students were sleeping overnight. And. And then the confrontation increased in in in violence throughout throughout the night. The police have been accused of not intervening so to letting the confrontation escalate.
The police claimed that they were busy doing something else. But anyway, the the bottom line is that these are thugs. These are the kind of people that were involved with removing the barriers and and beating up protesters very much. And there are video evidence that some of the sides were arrested by the police and then released without ever being charged.
Some of them eventually were arrested and charged and released pretty quickly, while the only people actually end up in jail where protesters. And what is most exciting about this event is that eventually the attack failed. So the students held the line and they were not intimidated by this vicious attack by sons. And in a sense, for once, you know, democracy won. At least they held the line. And by 430, they the thugs retreated and the and the site was held.
The lessons here. Right. And the Amnesty International called it an attack by time that the news media in the world decried this particular attack. Now, what we tried to ask in this paper is who attacked the students, how much they were paid? And the question is, did the Thai itself mobilise from the neighbourhood to protect their local business, or did they come from the outside in order to attack the students?
If it was the latter, it would be an evidence that the Times acted on their own, on the order not of themselves, but of other forces that made them do it. And so they were basically starts to hire who paid them and can this happen again? Now, this is the data that we collected. We we did a lot of first we read all the newspaper articles. We did a number of interviews with news reporters and news editor with students.
We interviewed volunteers. There was a first aid, of course, people who had all attended a were there at the time. We interviewed many taxi drivers and minivan drivers. So we can talk. About the importance of minivans in Hong Kong. But basically, it's a business run by the clients. And we also interview trade unionists, the trade unionists of the van driver and the taxi drivers, which is a front for the times.
And we interview shop owners, but also thanks to the ingenuity of my co-author, we also managed to interview people that are in the trials, and they gave us their version of events. So that's the basis. Just to give you a sense of who the taxi drivers are. So they're not exactly the standard taxi driver know. That's the taxi driver that we interviewed. Taxi drivers are very, very outspoken against the movement and they were not great fun.
So let me try to go through the key questions and answer with the fieldwork interviews that we did. Who are the students? Well, according to a news person who was on the site all the time, anti anti movement protesters who are shuttled to Mongkok by minibuses and run some of the kids this guy was working for told him that they were going to have some fun in Mongkok because they were told to do so.
And then the one of the Triad bosses we interviewed told us most of the people who went to attack the students were youngsters aged between 15 and 20. They were not within their target group. So they saw this as an opportunity to prove themselves, to humiliate the police and to impress their bosses. Those who did this. A second thought. Same type of guy. Those who joined the fight were based in Hong Kong. That was in the march. So they're not coming from China. They're not shipped in from China.
But there are basically some of them of India and Pakistan. All of this because this article titled The Singapore Trial, which is based in the new territories, which is in the northern part of Hong Kong, recruiting these communities. And finally, the second part, Boss told us, I know the people who beat up the students on the 3rd of October. I saw them on television. Some came from the new territories, so from outside the neighbourhood.
I was not surprised. They were all released after being arrested because the high command of the police knew they were coming. So this seems to be the person. I mean, the patriarch goes into greater details on the profile of the media. What the key point here is that they are not from the neighbourhood. And then also we try to.
So this is a continuation. Apple Daily, a vocal anti-China newspaper, reported that members of this trial, the Muppets and the well-known bosses were among those involved in the attack. So, again, this is watching what seems to be quite a phenomenon. Now, how much they were paid. Again, our prior guys told us the payment depending on experience and and seniority. So there is a meritocracy always in the top low level. Who knows? We are paid 800 HKD more senior people are paid more.
But basically they were paid. Right. These not that they are self mobilised to protect their turf. These are people who are somewhere else. They were paid, shipped in. I talked to Stevenson last year. So it seems to be a qualifying of thugs for hire as we defined it before. So individuals, some without the guns, received cash to attack the students and the aggressors came from Hong Kong, so not from China.
Crucially, the attackers did not come from the neighbourhood Mongkok, but other parts of Hong Kong, especially the new territories. Now, did they mobilise to protect their business? Now the point is the occupation obviously had an effect on the local business. Taxi drivers couldn't go. So because the road was blocked, the shops didn't have the cars going by. The were also this is an area of triads presence, in particular Mongkok, as you know, from Hong Kong.
So there are buses of the bus there. So was the business affected by the students? So we tried to listen to the question from our interviews. The taxi drivers, not the lost much money during the occupation, told us a taxi driver instead of this taxi driver told us, I hate the students, they should set himself on fire and get away because they hate him. So these are not people who are sympathetic to the students.
And yet he admits that there was no loss of income. Then we interview this trade unionist that she's the owner of the 200 strong taxi company. So although the loss was significant, initially, revenues actually went up towards the middle and end the face of the movement. He noted that people were more willing to pay taxes to return home. The news reporter told us he was told by drivers that they lost no money yet to the owners of these companies and lodged complaints against the students.
So there were legal complaints against the civil occupation of the territory, but it was not for economic reasons because they lost money. And then the leader of the. Minibus trade union told us that the drivers were affected at first, but then they just adjusted then from that, which is very easy to go by these particular occupations. Now I go with more interviews, but we don't have much time left. But this is the legal side of this stuff. Prostitution and gambling, custody, Occupy.
That is Mongkok, where it's first affected. But then that area was quickly picked up, told us the two Thai bosses, the routes, the roads were open. Why would business go down? This is the nickname we give today to one of the bosses and the Triads. Income is diverse. So imagine imagine that, you know, to launch such an attack, which is going to be on every news bulletin in the world. It's a huge cost for the mafia. And it's not that you just do it right.
You must have you must be under such a huge pressure if you do that. And so the mafia boss told us very sensibly, you know, it would be crazy to launch such a direct attack, which would be so high profile for business reasons, because our income is diverse and even we might get some money from the minibars, but we don't do that just on one source versus pubs gambling Mongkok lost little revenue customers, quick return template, loss of income and also protection fees mandatory.
So you still have to pay protection fees even if you don't want to have the guy in the house. So the bottom line, as far as we understood, is that this was not motivated by buying. Now, who paid for them? Who paid for these people to attack? Now, that's obviously we don't know exactly. And then you get into very dangerous territory because it's very speculative.
But one very experienced newsagent person, you news person told us that want us to look at how developers in the new territories managed to acquire land in the new territories. According to the regulation, this is very complicated, so it may not be crystal clear, but there are very odd land deals happening in the northern part of Hong Kong and the government, the Triads, the local triads and the local developers all involved in this in evicting evicting the rightful owners of this land.
So he's referring to that. And if you happen to be from Hong Kong, you might go watch this movie called Overheard. He's a three movies in on this topic. And basically Dates tell the story of how the trials are pushing the peasants and the locals out in order to help the developer. So the argument of this guy is that these connections to this bunch of business interests wanted to show their gratitude towards the central government in Hong Kong and possibly in China,
and they paid for that attack. So that's the idea. Mean we don't really know. We don't have the receipts, of course, but that's the idea. Let me move on. Now, the final point I want to make is that if you think about this with the standard Italian mafia eyes, you would know that in order to do anything in a mafia territory, this is run by a particular mafia group. You need to ask permission to the local mafia.
If I plan to kill a particular person in your territory, I would have to ask permission to you if it's your territory and vice versa. So you have to have permission to enter the services of another group. That's obvious as as you would expect in a standard state. Right. So look, again, it's well, not that's the mission and we are not happy to see such an invasion, told us the journalist. But the to vacate boss has confirmed to us that the local Mongkok gang was not ask permission to come in.
In fact, the local Thai members were very upset about this invasion and in fact later they even started to hang around the protesters site in order to ensure that there was no second attack. So you see that point. It is very important from the latter point of view, there was no permission asked and not given. So let me start to come to a conclusion on this particular field.
Take off in favour of triads did not self mobilise as far as we understand they were paid to do so by not non not well-defined business interests. And there was even a tension between the local clients and the individual from outside that arrived without asking for permission. And the final point I want to to conclude on this, and I think I've made my general conclusion of it. I think the question is, could this happen again? And the question is very easily answered. It did happen again.
It did happen again very recently, because, as you know, the democracy movement is continuing in Hong Kong and on in July this year in. In a metro station in the new territories. When the protesters were in commuters, ordinary communities were coming home from the protest. But those that are coming home from work, they went through the the the metro stations and all a hundred the armed men attacked the commuters.
And so there were there was a pregnant woman who was attacked, was a journalist was attacked. Plus, ordinary members of the public and some some students. And only yesterday. Only yesterday, this man called Jemmy Shum, who is one of the most famous activist against democracy, was attacked by four and five men, is dead now.
So not only could that happen again and the general thrust of this work is that we might be seeing a shift from a standard martial behaviour on the part of the Triads to them becoming really thugs for hire. And on this note, I'm. Thank you. Thank you very much.