Coming to a Parish Near You: Black Axe, Human Trafficking, and a Lot of Bad Juju
Those Icy Fingers Up and Down my Spine
…that same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine!
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Will Ireland have to spill some budgetary resources for a West African witchcraft mission? If so, next comes the vexed question: which department or private contractor should overcharge government for working with dangerous juju? Maybe a whole new type of NGO needs to be summoned into being, or an occult branch of the Aonad Speisialta Bleachtaireachta (that’s Special Detective Unit to you). Cursory attention to the ghouls that may be incoming tells us that this might not, in fact, be such a bad idea. In the meantime, oíche shamhna shona duit!
Roderic O’Gorman Suspected of Bad Juju?
As Minister for Children (and integration, and something else) Roderic O’Gorman might be expected to show a special interest in stories involving missing refugee minors. Rather, O’Gorman is currently attempting to writhe his way out of a scandal courtesy of ‘Child and Family Agency’ Tusla, one involving missing, trafficked and deceased children, as well as mysteriously vanishing medical data and documents. It is frustrating to many that the information supply may not move until after the election, or at all. The story began to break at the start of this year, when, in a weird exception to form, internal Tusla findings were shared with newspapers and worrying questions raised in the Dail (apparently their hand was forced by a whistleblower). The matter in hand was the question of private companies paid millions by the state agency to care for and accommodate vulnerable children—kids we now know have been going missing, trafficked (back into?) sex slavery, and even dying in numbers that are finally shocking to everyone, not just opposition leaders. Here’s Peadar Toibin of Aontú in the chamber, back in February:
“Tusla has admitted to me by way of parliamentary questions that they are putting many of these children into unregulated residential units, called ‘special emergency arrangements’ (SEAs). These are typically just rented apartments, typically staffed by unvetted staff.” (15 Feb 2024)
As it turned out, many were not simply ‘unvetted’ but equipped with fake forms and references, something which is arguably a shade worse than nothing at all. The name of a company was soon released as under Garda investigation, along with its owner. “Jossy Akwuobi,” wrote the Irish Times, “is listed as the operations director of Ideal Care Services, registered to an address in Mulhuddart.” Akwuobi was (is?) also a “pastor with the Wisdom Christian Centre, an evangelical group based in West Dublin.” Back in the Daíl (29 February), O’Gorman seemed to feel a chill when Peadar Tóibín asked about Ideal Care director Akwuobi:
“– Have you ever met with the owner of that company?
– I… I don’t believe that I have, but I can clarify that point for you.
– I have in my hand minister a document which shows that the owner of this company — which was investigated for alleged falsifying of vetting documents, and which received millions from the state with regards the unregulated care of vulnerable children — was on the same committee as yourself when you were a councillor in your constituency.”
How much of the Tusla budget has been sent into unaccountable, and possibly criminal, SEAs?
A figure quoted in the IT in February (€14 million) seems likely to be modest. After all, the minister himself has referred to its ballooning budget. Sarah McGuinness (Irish Daily Mail, October 30) wrote this week that:
“Roderic O’Gorman has refused to answer a question on whether he has failed the more than 50 children who died on Tusla’s watch in the last three years… Mr O‘Gorman insisted Tusla is ‘extensively’ resourced, adding that he has boosted its budget by 50% since he took over the Department of Children in 2020.”
Nothing much has been heard of Pastor Akwuobi since the springtime, but as we await the findings of a (no doubt) rabidly curious Irish Times team assigned to find out more, it may be worth dwelling on some of the interesting occult strands of this story, namely those connected to the Nigerian (“West African”) networks combining organized crime fraternities and “traditional spirituality”, most notably the Black Axe.
As a disclaimer, MEON is not in possession of any evidence of West African witchcraft activities being practiced in situ in the Republic of Ireland. Yet, as it happens, many of the phenomena occurring here for which a cold hard corpus of proof does exist are very much related to witchery, and the fear thereof, and the difficulties faced by other jurisdictions in Europe and in Africa in dealing with the scourge should give us pause for thought.
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Magic, as a multitude of anthropologists have observed, works a lot like economics (and perhaps vice versa, if one looks at the behavior of central banks): there exists a ledger, with energies and ghosts floating from one side to the other, and witch doctors are the certified accountants moving them around. When one wants to achieve a goal, or relieve a curse, one must offer a sacrifice, usually with the help of this dubious gentleman. One may also be locked by these cultic salesmen into believing oneself in debt, beholden to a party until the spiritual contract is somehow unwound, usually along with a financial one. This is from an article in Gript three years ago, dealing with the conviction of two Nigerian women in Ireland for “human trafficking, prostitution and money laundering”:
“Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions Fiona Murphy SC said that it was a tragic case of exploitation, and that the four women had been led to believe that they were coming to this country to engage in legitimate work.
Ms Murphy told the court that all four women took part in a voodoo ceremony in which they took an oath to the people arranging their journey before leaving Nigeria for Ireland.
However, when they arrived in Ireland, the women were told they would have to repay the accused “extortionate amounts” by working as prostitutes. The women were then forced to travel to various locations around Ireland to engage in prostitution.”
While this story does not mention Black Axe, and while the increasing number of Black Axe stories in Ireland have focused on the fraud and money laundering part of the picture, the criminal networks, of which Black Axe is merely the biggest and best known, are certainly hooked on human trafficking and sexual exploitation. That, and the deployment of occult forces to put the fear of a pre-Christian god into their enemies and exploitees.
Black Axe shenanigans are growing in Ireland, without a doubt–just Ax anybody. The Gardaí are open about it: “Members of a specialist garda unit tackling a fraud epidemic are becoming increasingly concerned about the ‘insider threat’ in financial institutions from the Black Axe criminal organisation,” wrote Ken Foy in the Independent (26 October), as “Funmi Abimbola (26), of… Lucan” was sentenced to three years for being a Black Axer as well as a Bank of Ireland employee. Abimbola, one of ten Black-Axe-bank-employees arrested by the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau (GNECB) over the last four years, had “a master’s in human resources, but his organised criminal activity enabled him to own a top-end Mercedes. The fraudster was also known to ‘splash his ill-gotten cash’ on expensive clothes and jewellery.”
As well as the fraud mentioned in this case (€121,000 was stolen from a Dublin solicitors’ firm through an invoice redirect scheme) money laundering is the key Axe activity coming to the surface here. This is Ken Foy again, in the Indo in September: “A 50-year-old woman suspected of playing a major role in the activities of the Black Axe crime gang has been arrested under organised crime legislation. The woman, who is based in Tallaght, Dublin, is associated with a cell of the gang that has laundered over €10m in fraud funds.” Well, we may ask, are these rookie numbers? The major GNECB sting this year, Operation Skein, arrested hundreds of people and was linked to stolen sums closer to a hundred million. Worldwide, Black Axe-style criminality is an economy of unknown 10s of billions yearly, perhaps 100s—that’s dollars, not Naira.
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When serious sums of money come into play in the occult-criminal economy, serious magic may be used to steer the forces of fortune. Animal sacrifices that might work against HIV probably won’t cut it.
People in the lower parts of the chain are sacrificed easily.
Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria, seems like a remarkable place—somewhere where houses full of dried human cadavers, including a child’s, may turn up as part of a pretty straightforward if bad day at work for the local cops. (This Twitter poster [in January ‘24] added “Looks like they sell the corpses.”) Benin comes back again and again as a center of witchery, the “cultism” of which Black Axe is the most powerful offshoot, and criminal exploitation. Ben Taub, in a piece for the New Yorker in 2017, wrote of how Benin was known to Europeans as “a kingdom rich in palm oil, ivory, and bronze statues, but also one that engaged in slavery and human sacrifice.” The British laid waste to the place at the end of the 19th century, as an act of revenge but also a colonial sanitation—something like Caesar having no choice but to smoke the whole of Gaul after witnessing the barbaric Wicker-man sacrifices of the druids (at least in his own telling). “In 1897, after the Edo slaughtered a British delegation, colonial forces, pledging to end slavery and ritual sacrifice, ransacked the city and burned it to the ground.” Seems reasonable—and yet all we ever hear about are the stolen bronzes!
Taub tells the story of “Blessing”, whose life is obviously set to be anything but, as the “richest country in Africa” quickly offers her trauma and disarray, with nothing but sexual enslavement as a way out, bronze-fastened by a juju practitioner:
“In Benin City, important agreements are often sealed with an oath, administered by a juju priest. The legal system can be dodged or corrupted, the thinking goes, but there is no escaping the consequences of violating a promise made before the old gods. Many sex traffickers have used this tradition to guarantee the obedience of their victims. Madams in Italy have their surrogates in Nigeria take the girls to a local shrine, where the juju priest performs a bonding ritual, typically involving the girl’s fingernails, pubic hair, or blood, which the priest retains until she has repaid her debt to her trafficker.”
The total lack of a reliable set of state structures reinforcing the use of black magic, along with organized crime: this theme comes up in the work of Sean Williams, who travelled to Nigeria to report for Harper’s Magazine in the years before the pandemic. Williams writes of how the 80s military regime of Muhammadu Buhari, and the unemployment and impotent rage it induced in a generation of students, made 70s black power movements morph into secret societies which leveraged power through ritual violence and killings. ‘Black Axe' had been the name of the magazine of the ‘Neo-Black Movement’ (NBM) that had even attracted the likes of nobel-winner Wole Soyinka. The ‘Axe’ in the logo was a tool to smash the chains of colonialism and slavery. Now it drew on its own separate life force and went down the path of weaving ritual power to wage war on other Africans—and ironically, to enslave them, as in the case of Blessing and a million others. Says Williams on the Harper’s podcast:
“Through a succession of military coups and violence at the the top end of Nigerian politics, it infuses this idea that legitimacy is not the way to gain wealth or power in the country. You get the flourishing of the early forms of the scams that we still recognise as the Nigerian prince scams, that are still making billions of dollars... When everyone is desperate for diminishing wealth and there is less of everything to go around, the people at the top are going to do whatever they can to keep hold of power. You get this crystallization of power in which politicians are like feudal lords."
Black Axe, he describes, is no single gang but a web of networks which spreads into places where it can take hold, normally preferring not to take on violent confrontation with rivals overseas. Italy, especially Palermo, is host to one nexus where the Axe has made a remarkable symbiosis with the Cosa Nostra (note that the February GNECB raids in Ireland this year picked up at least one laundering Dago):
"They're operating as gatekeepers into Europe... You go to the middle of Palermo now you can't help but see this group. They're very visible on the Streets and they run a lot of prostitution and drug crimes there.
…Who gets the worst deal out of this? Often the women. Oftentimes they're brought to a local healer or witch doctor and told that they're going to go into prostitution in order to make money in europe... They're trafficked through the borders by groups like the Black Axe. They're kept as sex slaves in cities like Palermo, Turin, other parts of Europe."
In Nigeria, and wherever the cultism that underlies the criminality spreads, an interesting relationship with respectability can be seen, an alibi trying to sketch its own outline into being. That means: politicians, professors, pastors... In a recent BBC exposé for their Africa Eye programming, the Beeb's man finds NBM still exists and spends its time decrying its connection to Black Axe and any kind of cultism or butchery. (Here is the NBM seemingly delighted that Longford had received its first female black mayor, back in 2021). In the BBC film, published in 2021, the Nigerian reporter Peter Macjob delves into the viscera of the cults as they are now. Nationwide in the Giant of Africa, “more than 90% of cult killings are never reported. Thousands of tragedies like this are playing out across Nigeria. Even in the richest parts of Nigeria, in Lagos, cultists wage war in the streets." Bodies missing heads and genitals stack up in Benin. When Macjob finally meets an NBM leader, the boater-hat wearing chief comes in laughing, flanked by two lawyers who shout down the journo. Any wrongdoing he has uncovered is simply the organization being hijacked, they insist. “I still have my plane to catch,” the strong man barks, to underscore how precious his time is.
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The difficulty of investigating the more extreme forms of traditional West African spirituality may be seen in the case of ‘Adam’, the name that Scotland Yard gave to the torso of an African boy that washed up on the banks of the River Thames over 20 years ago. The “longest-running unsolved child murder case” in the history of the Met, the Adam case was one that attracted comment from Nelson Mandela, led the Yard’s detectives to launch wire and sting operations and produced several “breakthroughs”—yet no prosecution. The child’s body had been found without head or limbs, and signs of a ritual killing, including the way these were expertly removed and the contents of the stomach: “an unusual substance made of African river clay—including vegetation, ground bone and traces of gold and quartz.” Further chemical analysis found two plant substances known to cause paralysis and hallucinations. Despite mapping the whole manufacturing chain for the single item of clothing that the victim was wearing, and finding identical orange pants in the possession of a Nigerian woman living in Glasgow, and through her finding a Nigerian trafficker whose flat contained a bag of similar juju powders as the stomach contents, the police never pinned anyone to the crime. “Joyce Osagiede” was the woman in Glasgow. She claimed to have handed over a boy to a man called Mousa Kamara, who was tracked down and found to be really called Kingsley Ojo, and who claimed that the baggie of magical gear in his gaff—and the Nollywood snuff videotape featuring a staged decapitation—belonged to his flatmates. Fair enough, said the London sleuths. Joyce was arrested but not charged, then deported after the Home Office rejected her asylum application. A detail in the 2021 article by Angus Crawford and Tony Smith may illustrate how much the Yard really wanted to nail this one down:
“Nick Chalmers and his boss Detective Inspector Will O'Reilly travelled with her to Nigeria on a specially chartered private jet. It was hoped she might open up on the flight and reveal crucial information about the murder. But she didn't. The detectives didn't get off the plane when they landed in Lagos, and flew straight home. Joyce then disappeared.”
Joyce reappeared with fresh evidence, perhaps when she or her family realized how much in terms of available budget London’s finest were willing to assign to finding justice for this single lost boy. Yet her ravings were deemed so authentically other-worldly that nothing could be done with her evidence. Kingsely Ojo meanwhile, was also deported and vanished completely, perhaps into one of his multiple identities; one can always count on Nigerians to cook up some documents in a hurry.
Scotland Yard was determined to learn something from its investment of time and energy, and years later would start assigning specific resources to undoing juju—a story in the National paper reveals how Officer Andy Desmond turned to the logic of the witches to secure the 2011 case against a trafficker who had bought a girl subjected to a particularly horrible ritual designed to keep her silent:
“This time, the ceremony… was more elaborate. She was taken to a shrine next to an open black coffin. Inside, the girl saw, some of her clothes had been arranged to look like a human figure. The priest poured blood into her coffin, tied her up and put her in the coffin. The lid was screwed down and she remained there all night. Suitably cowed, she was ready for trafficking to the UK where the plan was to move her to another European country to work in the sex industry.”
At the trial, Desmond is able to convince the accused that by tricking the victim he had not balanced the magical ledger: that he in fact owed a spiritual debt himself.
“But Mr Desmond turned Harrison’s juju tactics back on himself. He had not lived up to his side of the bargain, he told the suspect. He had not given the girls the education they were promised, or helped them to get jobs and earn money. ‘You are going to prison for a long time because my juju is stronger than yours,’ he told Harrison. And his face just collapsed. I was speaking his language. I was using his beliefs and turning it on himself.”
The rest of the saga of Scotland Yard’s Van Helsing only gets weirder, as Desmond goes off to fund “reverse-juju” ceremonies in Africa, which are recorded and then played back for trafficked victims in the UK, who agree to testify. The UK government pays for the juju:
“Nigeria’s own anti-trafficking agency, Naptip, part-funded by the UK, championed the practice of reverse juju ceremonies, breaking the curses imposed by the entrepreneurial priests at the behest of the criminal gangs…The UK’s former anti-slavery commissioner, Kevin Hyland, visited Nigeria to see how it was done and to bring the tactic to Britain.”
We learn that the different attitude taken by authorities when confronted with “irregular migrants” who are underage is deliberately taken advantage of:
“The gangs relied on child victims not being detained by the authorities on their arrival in the UK and substandard checks when they tried to leave the country again for other European destinations. But Italian and Spanish police have also taken aim at the gangs because of their impact on organised crime and sexual abuse.”
Remarkably, Brexit seems to have had a dampening effect on the slave merchants, who love a fluid border to bundle their victims over:
“Britain’s departure from the EU and the end of free movement across the bloc has also had an impact. ‘The UK is virtually not viable for them—it doesn’t fit into their business plan,’ said Mr Desmond. The cumulative impact has been to hit the trafficking gangs hard.”
As well as the convictions, a happy outcome for some survivors from the Black Magic Kingdom was a decree of royal sorcery against the traffickers:
“Oba Ewuare II, the new ruler of the kingdom of Benin, placed a curse on anyone involved in trafficking. The Oba, who has authority over all of the spiritual priests in the kingdom, summoned hundreds to his palace to hear him issue his decree... Recruitment of girls shifted from Benin City to other parts of Nigeria and outside of the country. [The anti-trafficking] charity has received reports of victims from Ghana arriving at UK airports who have been trafficked.”
These beneficiaries of reverse-juju are alive and able to tell their tales. In the shadowy background however, there stalks the undeniable reality of the ritual murder. Just this year, researchers in the University of Ibadan (Department of Peace, Security and Humanitarian Studies) took a look at the stubborn problem of such killings (1). Their paper is one of many that pings from a simple search for the term:
“In recent times, this phenomenon has evolved… encompassing heinous acts such as organ harvesting and ritual killings, particularly exacerbating the situation within Nigeria. Notably, the escalating incidence of human trafficking and its profound implications on human security have sparked extensive discourse within the country, permeating both formal and informal dialogues. Furthermore, the emergence of new manifestations of this criminality, including heightened occurrences of rituals across borders, underscores the urgency to comprehensively grasp the dynamics… of ritual killings within the context of cross- border human trafficking.
…In contemporary Nigeria, individuals are increasingly enticed into ritual killings through sophisticated networks. Integral to these nefarious activities is the pervasive issue of corruption, which enables and perpetuates these criminal acts.”
In the context of the Irish Minister for Justice assuring us (with laudable intent) that anyone trafficked into Ireland for sexual exploitation will never be deported, one wonders if that policy doesn’t present the sort of fertile ground for moving living bodies into the state that the Axe might be looking for: move them in, let them enter the “care system”, retain control through juju—who will stand in your way?
It’s all ahead of us—or not. A well-run and financed spiritual taskforce could see off some of the gristly aspects of all this, and ensure the Irish Black Axe is more into Crypto than the Crypt. As a comfort to ministers and others in power who might soon feel a bit dizzy contemplating the possible occult–mafia-asylum and trafficking complex, and long for a way to spin themselves out, I offer the words of Sinatra (actually Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen):
That old black magic has me in its spell
That old black magic that you weave so well
Those icy fingers up and down my spine
The same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine…
And every time your lips meet mine
Darling, down and down I go
'Round and 'round I go
In a Spin, lovin the Spin that I'm in…
Under that old black magic called love!”
Footnote
The Activities of Ritual Killings and the Responses of National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) in Fighting Cross-Border Human Trafficking in Nigeria ( Akinwale Victor, Ishola, Mercy Funso, Olumuyiwa, in: International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology, 2024)