A clan leader who sent gangs of child pickpockets to target tourists in the Paris Métro and popular attractions such as Disneyland Paris has been jailed for human trafficking.
Roberto Hamidovic, 48, likened to Fagin, Charles Dickens’s notorious criminal boss, ran a network of child thieves, mostly girls, some as young as 10, who brought in an average of €25,000 (£21,500) a day, according to police.
If the terrorised youngsters failed to hand over enough money, they would be beaten, burned or sexually abused, the Paris court heard.
While Hamidovic, the patriarch of a Roma family of Bosnian origins, and the adult family members lived a “life of luxury” – enjoying designer clothes, five-star hotels, expensive restaurants and cars, and flashing their cash at casinos – the girls were put up in budget hotels or dilapidated squats.
Seven members of what detectives called the Hamidovic clan – four men and three women – were on trial for human trafficking, organised theft, corruption of minors, money laundering and criminal association as part of what detectives say is an international pickpocket network spanning several European countries. All denied the charges.
The court sentenced Hamidovic to the maximum eight years in prison and a €500,000 (£430,000) fine; his wife, Lejla, was given a six-year prison sentence and €300,000 fine. Two of the couple’s sons, a nephew and two female relatives were given between five- and seven-year prison sentences and fines. All were told they would be extradited and banned from entering France on their release.
For detectives who have been investigating the Hamidovic network for decades there was a grim sense of deja vu. In 2010, French police arrested Roberto Hamidovic’s uncle Fehmi, 58, who already had a conviction for people trafficking in Austria, along with his two sons near Rome and a dozen other clan members in the south of France and Italy. At the time, Paris’s judicial police chief, Christian Flaesch, said: “It feels like we have broken up a completely medieval structure.”
After Fehmi Hamidovic was convicted in 2013 and sentenced to seven years in prison, his nephew Roberto took control of the clan, believed to be responsible for up to 75% of thefts in the Paris Métro. In court, however, Roberto Hamidovic claimed he was a secondhand car dealer earning between €2,000 and €5,000 a month.
Alice Guillet, the public prosector, put forward a different story. She said the Hamidovic family used minors “to ensure a kind of impunity”. The pickpockets were told to tell police they were 12 years old – a year below the age of criminal responsibility in France – forcing police to release them. She described the girls’ daily lives as particularly “challenging and painful”.
They were “children without roots, without a future, whose parents sometimes don’t even know their birth date”, she added.
A pre-trial investigation by Le Monde revealed that Hamidovic’s son Roberto Hamidovic Jr, 22, nicknamed Gony, oversaw the pickpocket gangs on behalf of his father – booking taxis to transport them to various sites around Paris.
Investigators said groups of six to nine youngsters were sent each day at Disneyland Paris, Charles de Gaulle airport and the Métro and told to target foreign tourists. At Disneyland they would mingle with crowds gathered for the evening parades.
They would also hang around bank cash machines, wait for customers to put in their pin numbers, then surround them and steal the money and their wallets.
Hamidovic and his wife are believed to have amassed an estimated €2m, much of which is reportedly hidden abroad. The couple spent part of their time in the Adriatic seaside resort of Pula in Croatia.
His son, Roberto Jr, one of 13 siblings, grew up in Rome in the care of a grandmother and moved to France at the age of 14. Like his brothers and sisters he did not attend school regularly. Most family members are unable to read or write. He and his wife, Alessandra, have a three-year-old son called Al Capone who is being raised by a nanny in Bosnia, Le Monde reported. The paper said Hamidovic Jr told detectives he did not drink but they discovered he had spent €1,420 on two bottles of champagne at a Paris nightclub to celebrate his brother Goran’s release from prison.
Guillet described the network as a grim cycle. The exploited children sent out to steal became exploiters in turn when becoming adults.
“During this trial, the issue of determinism arose, an issue that is glaringly obvious from the very first line of the case file,” Guillet said, pointing out that the seven accused had themselves been forced to steal for their parents during their childhood.
“What chance did they have of not putting the younger children to work in turn as soon as they were old enough?” Guillet added. “The chances were slim, if not nonexistent. They went from being victims to perpetrators … we have to stop this defeatism and fatalism.”
Guillet said the only way to challenge the impunity with which the Hamidovics continued to operate through three generations, in defiance of previous convictions of family members, was to impose long prison sentences followed by extradition from France.
“In the face of such a system, the only tool is severity. This sends a message,” she said.
After the sentencing, Emperatriz Aguirre, Roberto Hamidovic’s lawyer, said: “The sentences are too severe because they relate to the crime of human trafficking for which there was no tangible evidence.”
Many of the dozens of children used as pickpockets, who were not called to give evidence in order to protect their identities, disappeared after the seven were arrested or were taken by social services and placed in foster homes. Almost half of them are believed to have since run away.
