Something about this soap business just doesn’t wash

The air has been thick with wisecracks about slippery customers, clean police records and laundering money. You have to admit that the story of a police sting on a cannabis-smuggling operation has all the elements of farce about it: a dark night, a sheer cliff, a yacht called The Jolly Roger, cops and soldiers, helicopters and fast cars, radioed instructions, a dinghy lowered from the yacht, large boxes lowered into the dinghy, shots fired at getaway cars, and then it turns out to be sapone di Marsiglia or a close cousin, much to the surprise of the police who released a statement claiming they’d seized 30 kilos of cannabis, and to the even greater surprise, I would imagine, of the people who had smuggled it in to Migra l-Ferha from Libya under cover of darkness.

“They smuggled soap?” a friend cackled, much taken with the idea. “They’ve been in a deep coma for the last 22 years and if the police dig deeper they’ll find 30 kilos of Barilla, a couple of crates of toothpaste and some nice nylon stockings on The Jolly Roger.”

I have to admit that it’s an endlessly cheering story, like a script written by Guy Ritchie about bunglingly hapless London hoodlums who end up fed to the pigs by a bespectacled gangster called Brick Top for their ineptitude. And let’s face it, even the Vice Squad didn’t realise that the cannabis resin was something that usually stars in Italian television advertisements featuring grannies in white top-knots giving advice to daughters-in-law about how best to wash their sheets white to keep their marriages serene.

It is almost as cheering as that other story yesterday in which a car dealer, when police and transport authority officials arrived to seize his flash contraband Mercedes, made a desperado dash in it with three police cars in hot pursuit, then crashed into another police car which had been driven across his path to stop him. One wonders what he was thinking. Perhaps he was hoping to start a new life in Fgura, living incognito in a rented flat under an assumed identity, disguising his beloved Mercedes with a painted moustache, a ginger toupee and a pair of dark glasses (“They’ll never find us, honey.”), while the neighbours wonder about the mysterious odd couple next door and tactfully fail to ask probing questions about their childlessness, despite their consuming curiosity.

All this chortling about soap has distracted us from the rather more interesting aspects of this botched smuggling operation. The news reports since 27 December, when the sting took place, have invariably mentioned more than four persons caught by the police on The Jolly Roger and in cars waiting for the smuggled goods on land. Some reports gave the number as five – three in the cars and two on the boat – while others mentioned as many as eight. Yet only four men have been formally charged. Did the others claim to be unaware of what was going on, that they were just along for the ride, and were they taken at their word? Or were there just four people involved on land and on the boat, despite initial reports from the police?

Yesterday morning I read that these four men have been released on bail because all civilian witnesses have been heard already and so there is no risk of any attempt at threatening or corrupting them. I wondered how I could have missed the reported testimony of these witnesses, given that I scour the newspapers every day. Then I found out why: not one bit of their testimony has been reported, because the court proceedings took place behind closed doors. The only time those doors were opened was to allow people to hear an expert witness say that the smuggled goods were not bars of cannabis resin but of green soap. Then they were closed again.

No reason has been given for keeping this testimony secret. Are public morals going to be offended? Are the sex lives and marital relationships of four people being closely examined, as with the recent Qormi shooting of a man by his lover’s husband in their home – another ‘closed doors’ case? Is there information which the police don’t want to see bandied about because it might frustrate on-going investigations? Whatever it is, when the unusual decision is taken to close the doors on what should be the public process of justice – public even in the interests of the accused – the reasons should be given to the public, and the rationale explained and justified. Once again, this has not been done, but there has been no objection from the public, which prefers the myriad possibilities of gossip to the facts, which might be more boring. Precisely because of those closed doors which prevent the facts from getting out into the public domain, some extraordinary stories and rumours are flying about. Far better to open those damned doors and let the public know the truth.

It is easy to keep things hidden from the many in Malta, but next to impossible to keep them hidden from the few. Information invariably leaks out one way or another, usually by way of a person who is resentful that he has been instructed to keep a zip on things. No more than a day or two after the soap-smuggling arrests were made, I heard from a reliable person not given to gossip, and who has extensive business connections in Libya, that the notorious brother of a cabinet minister had been picked up by the police for questioning as to his involvement with this ‘soap run’. I had no reason to doubt his word. None of my contacts in the media had heard anything about it, so I thought that maybe the information was dubious, after all. The police weren’t saying anything. I was reluctant to ring the cabinet minister to ask him outright about it because if it wasn’t true it would have come across as personally insulting, if you see what I mean (“Happy New Year, and has your brother been questioned by the police about this drug-smuggling operation by any chance?”).

Then police sources leaked the story to L-orizzont, which carried it on Friday. The newspaper wrote about a “prominent Maltese businessman” who was kept for questioning at police headquarters in connection with the financing of this ‘drug’ run, and who went to Libya when he was released after interrogation, not returning since. Despite the fact that this “prominent businessman” featured heavily in Labour’s anti-government campaign in the mid-1990s, when he was put across as a huge liability for his brother and for the cabinet of which his brother formed part then as now, L-orizzont stopped short of mentioning the connection. However, I know through sources at the newspaper that they have the information, and that it was supplied to them by somebody within the police force.

Perhaps L-orizzont believes, as I do, that we are not our brothers’ keepers (or the keepers of our sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents, sons or daughters, for that matter). Without question, announcing that X was interrogated by the police for suspected involvement in this drug run will come across as a direct or indirect attack on his brother the cabinet minister. This is different to the situation with parliamentary secretary Chris Said, whose brothers now stand accused of gang-raping a 15-year-old girl in Gozo. There I had no dilemma about being the first to break the taboo on mentioning the fraternal connection, for the simple reason that the story had news value, ‘right to know’ implications and – most crucial of all – the parliamentary secretary was not going to be suspected, by even the most suspicious conspiracy theorists, of being involved in gang-rapes himself, of conspiring with his brothers to organise gang-rapes, or of extending protection to his brothers while they gang-raped merrily away. On the contrary, people were going to sympathise with him, as I do, for having such problematic brothers while he seems like a decent sort of person himself.

But drug-smuggling is another matter altogether. It depends on finance from hands-off investors who provide the cash for the deal, then take a share of the profit and remain unknown even to most of those involved. It depends on networks of information and contacts, on protection, blackmail and bribery. You can see the implications, in the public mind, of a man who is questioned by the police in a drug-smuggling sting having a brother who is a long-standing government minister. The implications for the government minister and for the government are considerable, even though none of us is our brother’s keeper.

And that is why it would be best for the government minister to release his own bad news or to scotch the story altogether, whichever is the case – or to get the police to do it officially and then to release a statement himself afterwards. Unless this happens, the poisonous and dangerous backstreet-information-cum-rumour-mill that was his (and the government’s) undoing in the mid-1990s will have the same effect again. Left in the dark, things fester.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.