Kenya awash in Somali pirates' cash

NAIROBI, Kenya — Young, newly rich and restless, Ali Abdinur Samo wasn't long for his dead-end homeland of Somalia. The 26-year-old recently decamped to Kenya, East Africa's land of opportunity, to put his wealth to work.

"I'm looking around," said Samo, whose close-cropped hair is already flecked with gray, an occupational hazard in his line of work. "I know people who are buying shops, hotels, properties. The economy is strong here, not like back home."

Samo, if you hadn't guessed, is a Somali pirate.

"Was a pirate," he corrected. After making about $116,000 in two heists, Samo bowed to his worried parents' pleas and took early retirement in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, where the fast-growing yet shady economy has quickly become a favorite haven for pirates with ransom money to spend.

The pirates often describe themselves as saviors with AK-47s, an ad hoc coast guard that's retaliating against foreign countries for fishing illegally off Somalia's coast while civil war consumes the government. Follow the trail of their multimillion-dollar booty into neighboring Kenya, however, and you grasp the pirates' capitalist ambitions.

Rather than investing in their wrecked homeland, pirates are laundering huge sums through property, hotels, shopping arcades and trucking companies in Kenya, according to family members, real-estate brokers, money traders and pirates themselves.

They say that ransom money is being funneled to pirate custodians — often well-connected Somali businessmen or religious leaders — through the extensive and largely unregulated Islamic cash-transfer network known as hawala.

"Pirate money is definitely being reinvested in Kenya," said Stig Jarle Hansen, a Somalia expert at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research. "There's a boom among Somali businessmen in Kenya, and it's easy to hide the money because there's so much coming in. And I don't think Kenyan authorities control or monitor this."

For a shrouded but unmistakable glimpse inside the pirate money network, visit Eastleigh, a dilapidated, Somali-dominated section of Nairobi dubbed "Little Mogadishu."

The starting point is often a one-room, Somali-owned hawala bureau such as the one where 34-year-old Abdirahman works, in a crowded shopping arcade on a noisy dirt road that turns to muck in the rain.

Abdirahman, a round-faced clerk in a yellow dress shirt and fraying khakis, estimated that over the past several months his office has transferred more than $10 million from Puntland, the lawless northeastern Somali region where most pirate groups are based.

One day in February, one person received $500,000.

The cash came from four different names in Garowe, the Puntland regional capital, and Bossasso, a wild port city.

The recipient was a simply dressed man with a Muslim cleric's long beard.

He stuffed the bricks of cash into his socks, belt and waistband, and disappeared.

With such riches on the table, experts say, pirates are unlikely to abandon the business anytime soon, despite worldwide condemnation and an international fleet of warships patrolling the Indian Ocean.

However, some, like Samo, are cashing out.

He'd been working as a dock hand in Bossasso last year when he was recruited into a pirate gang and tasked with guarding hostages. After two jobs, he'd had enough of the searing heat and heart-pounding risk. He feigned illness and walked away.

He proposed to the mother of his young child and spent $5,000 on their wedding. He assuaged his parents' anxiety about his career choice by buying them two modest homes and handing over most of his earnings.

Then, with $15,000 in his pocket, he set off for Eastleigh, where he's renting an apartment with three other former pirates and trying to find his niche.

One day he visited a clothing shop that a slightly older pirate he knew had acquired recently. Samo scanned the neat aisles with their colorful fabrics and tried to imagine his future.

"It was nice," he said later. "The guy sells ready-made men's clothes from Dubai. There was an old man running the store, maybe his relative.

"It looked like a nice business. Something to think about."