"Pirates? Pirates?" he exclaimed, staring at me like I was an idiot. "This jail is full of pirates! This whole city is pirates!"
I quickly learned the pirates had special status here. One after the other told me about how rich he was, how rich they all were, how they had so much money they could have whatever they wanted.
One of them, Jama Abdullahi, was a tall, lean pirate with a checkered, Arab-style scarf and a serious case of ADD. "We got more than 500 people working for us," he said. "We make millions."
Who knows, maybe this was true. Maybe for a bunch of them it was true. Maybe they had million-dollar homes in New Boosaaso with Land Rovers parked in front of them. Maybe when they went into town, the women swooned around them and gave them whatever they desired. Certainly this was the case for some of Somalia's pirates, but the more I talked to these guys, the more their bravado struck me as an act and the sadder it began to seem.
The real pirate money was going elsewhere, to men who wore suits and had secretaries and went to offices in towering buildings, men who would never see this jail and likely never even see the shitty, lawless city of Boosaaso. The notion that the Somali pirates were Robin Hoods fighting back by going after the boats that have raped their seas--that notion is nothing but a sentimental fantasy to lay over the much uglier reality of Somalia. At best, the richest men in Boosaaso are just the current iteration of the country's infamous warlords, making millions off the chaos around them and spreading some of that wealth to the grunts beneath them. That wasn't these guys. These guys were fighting just to survive. They picked up a Kalashnikov and got on a boat because it was their way to eat.
