Remember the shocker when Saddam Hussein was delivered to justice by Barrack Obama in his reign of legendary presidency?Its the same shock that arrived when drug lords of history, the Akasha organization brothers were not only arrested but recently pleaded guilty?
Nobody dared touch the Akashas, and for years they were the law just like their father Ibrahim Akasha, a glorified trafficker who was shot dead in May 2000 by a lone cyclist in Bloedstraat, or Blood Street, a red-light district of Amsterdam where prostitutes work side by side with drug dealers.
In The Netherlands, Akasha did business with drug dealer Mounir Barsoum, an Egyptian who masqueraded as a coffee shop proprietor.
Mounir and his brother Magdi owned Bar Red Light on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal district, the centre of drug tourism where coffee shops also sold bhang and other drugs in the open.
For decades, the Dutch tolerated the smoking of marijuana in coffee shops and turned a blind eye to the proliferation of dope smokers in such neighbourhoods. The Akasha family took advantage of the networks here and built a multi-million-shilling empire based on trafficking of both soft and hard drugs. Magdi was the broker between him and a Yugoslav dealer named Sam Klepper.
But in the drug trade, as the senior Akasha would soon tragically realise, there is a thin line between being shot dead while pursuing a debt and rotting in jail.
He was shot dead while walking towards Magdi’s cafe alongside his Egyptian wife Gazi Hayat to pursue a debt from the Yugoslav cartels led by Klepper.
The assassin emptied a burst of six rounds into Akasha, tearing through his face, heart and abdomen, and killing him instantly. Police thought Magdi was behind the assassination in order to vanish with the money.
The death of the senior Akasha came at a time when police were pursuing him after heroin worth Sh900 million was found in one of his homes in Mombasa.
But this kick-started another feud within the family over the sharing of the properties. And, privately, on who would inherit the drug networks.It was a drug war with no victor only victims.
The Akashas were finally arrested in Mombasa, Kenya, in November 2014 in a U.S.-led sting operation, in which authorities said the Akasha organization provided 99 kilograms of heroin and two kilograms of methamphetamine to DEA informants posing as drug traffickers.
Two brothers, accused by U.S. prosecutors of playing key roles in a major Kenyan crime family called the Akasha organization, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to U.S. drug trafficking charges in New York.
Do you think the Akasha organization will fall down entirely or the business will continue as only the Akashas serve their sentence?