Akasha drug empire about to crumble as heir faces time in jail

From left: Ibrahim Akasha Abdalla, Gulam Hussein, Vijaygiri Anandgiri Goswami and Baktash Akasha Abdalla in court during their bond hearing on December 13, 2016. They were extradited to the US to face trafficking charges. PHOTO | WACHIRA MWANGI | NATION MEDIA

What you need to know:

  • Shortly after Akasha died, the Yugoslav gang killed Klepper’s right-hand man, John Femer. Then Klepper was killed that September, Magdi in 2002, and Mounir in 2004.

  • In Kenya, a different problem was brewing. Akasha’s death began what American diplomats later described in cables leaked by WikiLeaks as “a falling-out among thieves over control of the port”.

  • The age of the lone cartel boss was over, and many new ones with different links, to the Russian Mafia and South American cartels for example, would emerge.

  • What grabbed the headlines, though, was the falling-out  in his family.

  • While most of them were about the fight for his immense wealth, a bloodier one was for the control of the illegal business he had built.

In a few hours, the Akasha empire will be crumbling. The heir apparent, Baktash Akasha, will face his destiny as a court decides whether he will spend the rest of his life behind bars. While his younger brother was to be sentenced Thursday, the court deferred the ruling to a later date.

SEVEN BULLETS

In early April, as he languished in a cold jail cell in New York, Baktash had his lawyer write a letter to Judge Victor Marrero, who will decide his fate.

The lawyer, George Goltzer, wrote that Baktash is a man with “severe health issues, which include depression, with a history of suicide attempts, diabetes, asthma, and morbid obesity”. He also described him as an “emotionally tortured young man”.

The emotional torture was clearer in a second letter by a mitigation specialist, who mentioned that Baktash had grown up in an abusive home, where his father was “a violent alcoholic who the entire family feared”, and his mother, Abdurahman Musa, suffered “cruel and pervasive abuse” at the hands of her co-wives and stepchildren.

While a man staring at a possible life sentence will say anything to save himself, Baktash’s mitigation is yet another window into the fractured family of the drug kingpin, Ibrahim Akasha. It is also the story of Kenya’s first family cartel.

On Wednesday, May 3, 2000, Ibrahim Akasha and his wife, an Egyptian called Gazi Hayat, were walking down the seedy red-light Bloedstraat in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Akasha was on his way to meet Magdi Barsoum, an Egyptian coffee shop owner and the elder brother of a drug dealer called Mounir Barsoum. A few metres into the walk, a lone gunman on a motorbike rode up to Akasha and shot him seven times.

The first bullet ripped his face, as did the next three. The fifth and sixth tore through his heart, and the seventh his stomach. He died on the spot, in his wife’s hands.

Ibrahim Akasha was in Amsterdam for many reasons, and not all of them were related to the drugs trade. He was sick and needed medical attention, according to a letter one of his daughters wrote to the Nation days after his assassination. But the main reason he stayed for almost six months was that he was on the run.

SO SHAKEN

Shortly after Akasha left Kenya on a Dutch passport in December 1999, he became a wanted man. A raid on one of his houses found tonnes of hashish, and Kenya asked Interpol to find and arrest the drug baron. Had he been caught, it would not have been the first time.

Three years earlier, Akasha had been arrested and charged with drug trafficking. In and outside the trial court, his sons, including Baktash, who was barely out of his teens at the time, served as his bodyguards. They were the musclemen for a father who had brought the drug trade to heel and become the most important drug lord in the region. They intimidated and had an altercation with journalists, for which the unnamed daughter would apologise in her May 2000 letter.

Even with the trial, Ibrahim Akasha and anyone associated with him were still untouchable.

In 1995, for example, he kidnapped a police officer, Price Kalume Chai, and held him for three hours. Chai, who rose through the ranks to Assistant Commissioner of Police, was so shaken that he talked about it only in 2003, three years after Akasha’s death.

Another man who fell afoul of the Akashas around the same time was a contractor called Khurshid Butt. After renovating the Akasha home, Butt went back to ask for money he was still owed. When he testified before the judicial inquiry into the conduct of Justice Phillip Waki in 2004, he said that Akasha and his sons abducted and beat him up.

Ibrahim Akasha Abdalla was a Kenyan of Palestinian origin. His father, Abdallah Ibrahim, came to colonial Kenya from either Ethiopia or Sudan. He had spent most of his adulthood in Iraq, but he settled his family in Kenya, perhaps hoping for a better future.

One of his sons, Ibrahim Akasha, settled and built a legitimate transport business in Mombasa. He had several companies – and was at one point involved in the Kenya National Taxi Corporation (Kenatco). His main business, Akasha Transport, was struggling in the 1980s. Licensing records show its registered fleet reduced from 12 in 1982 to just five six years later. The company was also mentioned in Parliament around the same time for not paying a driver his full dues for six months of work.

POWERFUL CARTELS

Some reports claim that it was through gun running, not drugs, that Ibrahim Akasha plunged into the criminal underworld. Arms trafficking was becoming even more lucrative as conflicts escalated in the region, but that increasing demand could have pushed Akasha out as more powerful cartels took control. So he switched to the drug trade.

Using his transport network, he connected heroin suppliers in Pakistan with Yugoslav and Dutch gangs in Amsterdam. The circuitous route through the Kenyan coast was not known as a major smuggling route at the time, which meant many things could go unnoticed. Records from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime show small, by today’s standards, seizures of drugs in the 1980s. The biggest then were 20kg of heroin in 1987, and 44.39kg in 1990, but a lot more of the drug shipments were moving unimpeded.

By the mid-1990s, Akasha was the main conduit for hashish, opium, heroin, and cannabis passing through East Africa. It is almost impossible to trace all of Akasha’s misdeeds in his heyday, but he was also once under investigation by the Special Branch for possible ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) terror group. The ties were unproven, according to a short paragraph in former top spy Bart Kibati’s memoirs.

In the drug trade, though, Akasha was building a cartel centred around his family. His son, Hassan/Habab, was jailed in Tanzania in 1997 for smuggling Mandrax. His younger brother, Yusuf Abdallah, was arrested in Kenya in 1998 with two Pakistanis who had sneaked in drugs disguised in a consignment of bath towels and drinking straws.

The deal that led to Ibrahim Akasha’s death, and the subsequent murders of nearly everyone involved, began with an unpaid bill. A Dutch gang leader called Sam Klepper had refused to pay for a consignment of heroin delivered to Yugoslav conduits, who then passed it on to Mounir, who forwarded it to Klepper’s gang. Before he left Kenya, Akasha kidnapped the Yugoslav conduit who had connected them and demanded $2.5 million for his return. In this web, Magdi became the mediator, and the probable assassin.

STOLEN HASHISH

Shortly after Akasha died, the Yugoslav gang killed Klepper’s right-hand man, John Femer. Then Klepper was killed that September, Magdi in 2002, and Mounir in 2004.

In Kenya, a different problem was brewing. Akasha’s death began what American diplomats later described in cables leaked by WikiLeaks as “a falling-out among thieves over control of the port”. The age of the lone cartel boss was over, and many new ones with different links, to the Russian Mafia and South American cartels for example, would emerge.

What grabbed the headlines, though, was the falling-out  in his family. While most of them were about the fight for his immense wealth, a bloodier one was for the control of the illegal business he had built.

It was a fight that would cost at least one life, and that would lead to Baktash and Ibrahim sitting in a jail cell in New York almost two decades later.

In the feud, another son, Kamaldin, soon emerged as the stronger candidate as Akasha's heir. Kamaldin was as adept at using his father’s links to intimidate anyone who interfered with his business. Two months before his father’s death, a People Daily journalist was arrested for writing a story that Kamaldin had been arrested for stealing four tonnes of hashish from the police station.

Then, in March 2002, Kamaldin was shot and killed while sitting in his Land Rover at a petrol station he owned in Makupa. His brothers Baktash and Hassan, when they got to the scene, immediately blamed their other brother, Tinta. Three years later, in 2005, Baktash told a Nairobi court that Kamaldin could have been killed in a vicious family feud over a hashish payment he had cut everyone else from.

Tinta, the brother they first suspected of killing Kamaldin, has also been blamed by his siblings for the February 2000 raid, and the sting operation that led to Baktash and his their younger brother Ibrahim being arrested and extradited to the United States.

FRACTURED HOME

Although Ibrahim Akasha’s death, and the infighting, marked the end of the Akasha clan’s time at the top of the drug food chain, it did not end their involvement. Ibrahim confessed in March 2006 that one of the infamous Artur brothers, Margaryan, used his Mercedes Benz. His defence was that another businessman had given the car to the Armenians, who worked as enforcers for the Russian Mafia.

They were also still as ruthless. In November 2004, for example, they kidnapped a Serb called Stojanovic Milan and a Kenyan called Jackson Waweru while the two were on their way from JKIA. They chased the car down, pulled them out, and drove them to the Grand Regency at gunpoint. Then they took them to Central Police Station where they were formally arrested and charged with Kamaldin’s murder.

When acquitting both men in 2007, Justice Nicholas Ombija compared the Kamaldin’s assassination to “the Chicago drug cartel “wars” during the “reign” of Al Capone. Then he added “No wonder Hayat Akasha testified that her husband was involved in mafia like activities.”

More misfortune soon followed. That same year, 2007, one of Akasha’s grandchildren crawled into a pool and drowned during a police raid. Three years later, Saud, Baktash’s wife, was found hanging from a thin rope in their Nyali home in an apparent suicide.

Almost two decades after his death, Ibrahim Akasha’s crimes are still catching up with his family. While his children are adults now, Baktash’s mitigation letters lay blame at his father’s feet. This was the man, he says, who built an abusive, fractured home. The only way to escape the abuse, which Baktash’s lawyer says included sexual molestation by his half-brothers, was “at his father’s side learning the hashish business.”