1: Albanian Gangster

 Ten minutes before the appointed hour, John Schenk shuts the well-worn brown leather covers of the Bible he takes on his travels and walks over to the window of his room at Tirana’s Intercontinental Hotel. Over his 20-year career he has been witness to scores of things that would haunt anybody. He has surveyed war zones, even of genocide. He has looked into the faces of the near-dead, into eyes hollowed out by hunger and disease. He has seen man’s inhumanity to man, those suffering, neglected and abandoned. Usually his job is to bring back images of what we can’t imagine and sooner not see, to tell us true stories of people in unimaginable distress. Sometimes his job is to reach out himself, to convince someone to do the right thing. That’s the case this time.      

Schenk has come to Albania, once the Communist Bloc’s poor cousin, now an orphan unwanted by the European Union. Were it not for a few former Soviet republics, no European nation would be ranked lower than this country of 3.5 million on the United Nation’s index for quality of life. Schenk knows the quality of his own life during his stay here is better than most in the capital city of Tirana and far better than those in the nation’s impoverished mountain regions. He’s thankful for his relative comfort and apparent safety, though perhaps less safe than he imagines—just days after he’ll leave, Tirana will be rocked by an explosion at a munitions compound that will kill 25 people. Everyone here presumes life is cheap but a former UN prosecutor of war crimes claims that life has been on wholesale here: prisoners from neighboring Kosovo have been spirited into the country by the hundreds, slaughtered and then literally butchered, with their vital organs sold on the black market, shipped right through Tirana’s Mother Teresa Airport.

The scene outside the hotel window doesn’t hint at the Albanian criminal culture, just the nation’s history: a statue of Skanderbeg, conqueror of the Ottoman Empire back in 1450, the Dragon of Albania on horseback wielding a sword; the call to prayer echoing from the scratchy p.a. system of a mosque built in 1798; a Communist-era mosaic depicting revolutionary workers marching triumphantly; and a police parking lot where a cruiser, a boxy Renault, sits on tires that haven’t been inflated since they took jackhammers to the Berlin Wall. 

Schenk has an appointment with a career criminal from the northern mountain region, where the Kosovan prisoners were allegedly slaughtered. He spots his contact, Bhadi, sauntering along the sidewalk. Thirty-four, he wears gangsta-style baggy, low-hanging jeans and a look that’s weary, yearning and chilly. He ignores feral dogs digging through the trash and the outstretched hand of a beggar, a Roma (or, in the pejorative, Gypsy) woman sitting on the sidewalk with her seven-year-old boy asleep on sheet of cardboard beside her.

Bhadi, though, isn’t ignored when he makes his way into the hotel’s lobby. He trips the staff’s social radar. Eyebrows rise behind the front desk. A doorman tails him and then demands identification. Bhadi showers the manager with profanities as he reaches for his wallet, the doorman making sure it’s all he’s reaching for. 

“What’s your business here?” the manager says.

“I’m meeting a missionary,” he says.

John Schenk isn’t a missionary but he could pass for one with his beatific calm. In fact, the 59-year-old works as a communications director for World Vision, a faith-based humanitarian-aid organization. He crosses the lobby to put out the fire.

“He’s with me,” Schenk tells the manager, affecting his professional manner. His words are more hopeful and less certain that they sound.

 

 2: Cop Reporter

We presume that missionaries and others in humanitarian causes work in the sunlight and aid the innocent. In the field, however, idealism alone won’t always get the job done in the shadows; sometimes serving a higher cause requires pragmatism, even street smarts. 

That’s why John Schenk sits across from Bhadi, who has served time for a crime that is rampant in Europe, and Albania in particular: human smuggling. Not body parts but whole people. By some estimates, between 600,000 to 800,000 are moved across borders against their will every year and that number doesn’t include those trafficked within the countries of their origin. It might be selling children to work as beggars for modern-day Fagans. Or even selling young people into the sex trade. “Human trafficking” under-sells the crime—it’s nothing less than kidnapping and slavery. Bhadi claims that he’s going straight now but his chest puffs with pride when asked  about “the genius” of his syndicate. He’s nonchalant when pressed—lightly—about the moral issue.

That’s almost too much to expect so quickly. Baby steps to begin. Schenk focuses on the logistics. He wants to know how Bhadi hop-scotched across the continent, through half a dozen airports on every trip, covering his tracks; how the Albanian mob recruited, bought off or kidnapped children. Schenk believes Bhadi’s knowledge can be put to use by World Vision in its outreach to impoverished Albanians, especially the Roma, though he can’t be sure that Bhadi has indeed severed his ties with organized crime. The way Bhadi tells it, human smuggling is a victimless crime. He calls it re-uniting families, and he denies moving children on counterfeit passports to get them into the sex trade. His confession is less than heartfelt. Maybe he’s just too used to evading interrogators.

I watch Schenk checking the levels on the digital recorder he has placed in front of Bhadi. I’m just the fly on the wall, trying to disappear into the background. This doesn’t look like ministering. It looks like a reporter interviewing a subject, trying to crack a hard case. No coincidence. John Schenk has always been a reporter. And Bhadi can’t have any idea just how experienced Schenk is working on the dark side.

I first met John Schenk at the Toronto Sun in 1980. I was a pea-green copy boy and Schenk worked the police desk. His degree from the University of Southern California’s film school contributed to his status as the most exotic of the tabloid newsroom’s wide-ranging fauna. Most cop reporters could pass for police officers. Not Schenk. At six-feet-five and with hair down to his shoulders and a beard as thick as a scouring pad, Schenk blended right in with the motorcycle gangs he wrote about, the Outlaws and Satan’s Choice. They tried to play him. “They thought we’d write about how they were former town terrorizers and now were just family men who like Harleys,” he says. Instead, he came away with real-life horror stories.

He tried to check his emotions at the door, like when he went to a prison in San Diego and interviewed a hitman for the Outlaws who turned state’s evidence on 80 murders. “They granted him immunity on the murders to just do time for torturing an exotic dancer,” he says. “I interviewed him three days straight and left the prison shaking.”

Sometimes, though, the stories stuck with him. One was a story of human trafficking. “A girl—she had a dead-end life—told a friend that Mother, a head guy in the Outlaws, sold her for a bike,” Schenk says. “She was found dead in a fire in a body-rub parlor in Florida. Smoke inhalation. She couldn’t get out the back door because it was locked.”

For a good story, Schenk could go all day without food, fuelled by byline adrenaline. Too often at the end of workdays like that, he would head over to the Press Club and forget to eat. And after last call he’d make it to another staffer’s house to drink ‘til dawn, crashing on a couch ‘til it was time to start his shift.

Schenk might have cultivated the image of a hard-drinking outlaw newsman, but he didn’t glory in it like his peers thought. “I understood that a lot of what we did was human suffering as entertainment,” he admits. In fact, he was deeply conflicted about his work, and alcohol and drugs were self-administered anesthetics. His friends in the newsroom knew only sketchy details of his background. They knew he had been born in London, Ont., and, at age 12, he moved to the Los Angeles area when his father, an insurance executive, was transferred by his company.  They might have even known that he grew up with Disneyland in his backyard. They didn’t know, however, that he grew up in a family of committed Christians.

“When we were young, our mother used to go on missions to underprivileged parts of Mexico and the southwest U.S.,” says Susan Lofgren, John Schenk’s younger sister. “Those were values that were instilled in us ... the idea of reaching out and helping out the less fortunate.”

When Schenk gave his notice to the Sun in 1981, some were blindsided, others just presumed he was heading back to California, to pursue a career in film. “When I left the Sun I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he says. “But I knew if I stayed it would kill me.”

3: Witness to Suffering

Schenk ended up travelling across Europe with a backpack and a tent, and then crossed into Africa. His most unforgettable experience came in Sudan. He was having visa problems and officials told him to wait on the steps of a police building while they processed his paperwork. While he cooled his heels, he watched as police beat a man. “At newspapers you manufacture intensity, putting yourself in danger,” he says. “Here you don’t have any choice [or] control. It wasn’t a vacation anymore.”

The officials later rubber-stamped Schenk’s paperwork, allowing him to travel to Kenya, but he was shaken. He never again used drugs and he cut his drinking back almost to temperance levels, no more than a glass or two of wine with dinner. “I just thought from here on I was going to need my wits about me,” he says. Sobered, he re-examined his life and his work. “It made me ask what kind of person I was,” he says. “I’m prone to cynicism—it was my shield. Another newspaper job would just be a plunge back into the pool.”

In 1985 Schenk took a communications job with World Vision, an international private relief and development agency headquartered in the state of Washington. It was with the Christian agency that he found fulfillment, his calling.

Professionally, his work utilizes skills he had developed in film school and at the Sun. “I tell stories of people we were extending aid to, stories in print for our publications and on video for our fund-raising broadcasts,” says Schenk, who is based in Cyprus.

Spiritually, he believes he’s doing his part to improve the human condition. “Whether it’s from a war zone or a natural disaster, I’m funneling information into a reservoir where it can have an impact, either raising funds for relief or reaching advocacy groups that can help with public policy,” he says.

Former newspaper colleagues would say he left the business, assuming he did more preaching than reporting. Schenk defends his work and that of the 270 communicators who work for World Vision in almost 100 countries. “Journalists won’t call me a journalist,” he says. “They say [there’s] an agenda working for a humanitarian agency that is not exclusively a journalistic outlet. There are plenty of detractors the instant Christianity comes into the formula. We’re not a church or a missionary group. We are strongly Christian, but that explains why we want to help. We don’t want to be missionaries, we want to be humanitarians and devout Christians—passionate but professional too.”

Schenk believes the rewards from his work can be immediate and even measurable. “I’ve sent off video of a famine relief effort and within 48 hours I’ll hear that we raised a quarter-million dollars in New Zealand, a half-million in Australia,” he says. “That translates into support—in feeding people, ending suffering, and saving lives.”

In his World Vision career Schenk has braved greater risks than offending bikers and seeing freshly murdered individuals inside chalk lines, the stuff of the newspaper trade. Working in Africa he contracted malaria four times. Jungle bugs have bitten him, leaving infected divots an eighth-inch deep over his entire body. But he downplays the health risks and physical danger of his work. “It’s the psychological cost of the work that takes the toll,” he says.

Many peacekeepers, humanitarian-aid workers or missionaries reach a point when they have trouble seeing the dignity in the face of tragedy. Feelings of futility aren’t discussed. “Our human resources people are alert for the signs of stress in those in the field,” says Rienk Van Velzen, the head of the regional communications director for World Vision. “I think we are doing a better job today and that there’s more awareness than when John was in Rwanda.”

Schenk reached his crisis point in 1994. His work in Africa was a long, awful slog, from one famine and drought zone to another, with no relief. The genocide in Rwanda - more than 800,000 lives taken in 100 days - was a perfect storm of suffering, though virtually unreported outside its borders.

Schenk arrived in Kampala, Uganda, and travelled to the Rwandan border with a young World Vision journalist he had mentored, Robbie Muhumuza. They were among the first reporters to arrive in Rwanda. Following up on an anecdotal report of a slaughter at a church, they drove out to a missionary hospital to ask for directions. In a sign of things to come, the missionaries had left for Kenya and a bandaged woman whose life had been spared pointed them to the St. Francis Xavier Church.

“On the drive there we could smell the dead before we could see them,” Schenk recalls. “There hadn’t been many guns. They used machetes. Grenades were tossed into the church and the Tutsis who had sought refuge there were slaughtered when they left. The bodies of men, women and children had lain for two weeks—bloated, rotting, many with vicious head wounds. Maggots were eating at their faces.”

It was a physical challenge to report from the scene. The smell of death was overpowering—it wasn’t just hard to breathe, but see as well. Noxious fumes stung the reporters’ eyes. Going inside the church Schenk was too dizzy to look up and had to avoid tripping over corpses. Three hundred were killed at St. Francis Xavier, and Schenk admits now that he had to fight the urge to flee. Later Schenk found out that the scene at many churches across Rwanda was the same — Hutus slaughtering Tutsis by the hundreds.

His video coverage of the slaughter was the first to come out of Rwanda. Within 24 hours of the video being shipped to London it had played on newscasts around the world. The international reaction was as troubling to Schenk’s conscience as the scene at the church. “Other governments, including the U.S. administration, knew what was happening and just stood by, doing nothing,” he says. “The genocide lasted another two months.”

In his previous life, Schenk had been proudly cold-blooded about crime but he was a different person by the time he reached Rwanda. “I always thought that if I could walk away from something I’ll be fine,” he says. “But I was haunted.”

“At the church we could hear the bombs and shooting in the distance,” recalls Robbie Muhumuza. “We knew that if we were found we would be killed. For days after we could not eat or sleep. There was no getting rid of the smell and even across the border from the front lines we could hear the gunfire and bombs. I went home and my wife helped me through a tough time. John stayed on for a time but he had no one who could help him.”

Schenk took six months’ leave. “It wasn’t my suffering but the suffering around me,” he says. “Where was God’s hand in this?” At the end of the leave, he was still looking for the answer. He couldn’t return to the field and worked a desk job for World Vision instead.

“John’s gift is teaching,” Muhumuza says. “He is a demanding but generous mentor. He inspired me and a whole generation of journalists in Africa. Not just working for him but with him—it was John’s example that made me a better journalist and a better person in the face of the Rwandan tragedy. Whatever time he was not in the field is a loss.”

Even though there were growing numbers of missionaries and humanitarian workers being kidnapped, wounded or killed, even if the stakes were being raised with every conflict, Schenk couldn’t stay behind the desk any more than he could stay in a tabloid newsroom. After a couple of years, healed, he renewed his enthusiasm and regained his belief that he could make a difference. And though some of his protégés, like Muhumuza, had, as he says, “surpassed their teacher,” there were others he could help to help others.

4: A Roma Story

A World Vision Land Cruiser bounces along a hilly road on Tirana’s outskirts, past the city’s graveyard and out to the city’s sprawling dump, acres and acres of garbage piled a couple of storeys high. Though Roma families live in slums throughout Tirana, the worst-off live in lean-tos in a shantytown just across the road from the dump. When the vehicle pulls up, a Roma man is pushing a shopping cart full of tin cans scavenged from the dump and children, some of them without shoes and shirts in the middle of winter, are digging for glass, plastic and other buried treasures. Feral dogs wander through the trash heaps and in and out of the lean-tos, which have no fences, no doors and only mud for floors.

John Schenk and Gerta Yzeiraj, a World Vision communications worker based in Tirana, have gone out to the Roma colony looking for Donika, a 30-year-old woman Yzeiraj has tried to befriend over the last few weeks. “There’s so much that you want to do, but you have to move slowly,” Yzeiraj says. “There’s distrust and suspicion in the community. You don’t want to scare them off. It’s hard not to try to do more. ”

When Yzeiraj and Schenk find the woman it’s then clear why it’s hard to go slowly. Donika has four children and is six months pregnant. She has also taken in a seven-year-old orphan—the boy’s parents died and his sister, age 11, abandoned him to marry a 13-year-old. Donika’s husband left her a couple of months ago. She has no means of support. She has been ill but hasn’t seen a doctor, nor have her children. Her youngest boy, age six, is so malnourished he could pass for a three-year-old. The orphan boy sleeps on a scavenged mattress, filthy and stained.

“My daughter is at school,” she tells Yzeiraj in rudimentary English. “The French (aid workers from the Terre des Hommes relief organization) took her there this morning. She wants to keep going. ”  

Schenk gives her a small gift—a couple of photos of her daughter that he took the other day. Likewise, Yzeiraj gives her a lined exercise book that her daughter can use as a journal. Donika thanks them and tells them that she hopes that her daughter will be able to leave the shantytown someday.

She also tells them that a man came by the other day looking to buy her daughter, that he offered her 750,000 Albanian leke (about CDN $10,000).  

They can only stay briefly with Donika—they have to get the Land Cruiser back to the office for other appointments. Roma elders, old women dressed in back with their faces covered in veils, watch Schenk’s and Yzeiraj’s every step on their walk back to the vehicle. The two from World Vision avoid eye contact and do their best not to draw attention to themselves or let on that they’re being watched. “We’re trying to break down barriers,” Yzeiraj says. “Donika takes a risk talking to us, but once not that long ago, no one would speak to outsiders here. We hope and pray that’s changing.”  

Yzeiraj sees parallels between her work with the Roma and the civil rights movement in the U.S. in the 1960s, a moral cause and an unpopular one. She understands better than anyone from outside Albania the costs and risks of her own participation. It’s not just her role in a Christian affiliation in a nation with a Muslim majority of 70 percent.  “I can’t tell my parents about some of the work that I do,” she says. “The Roma are shunned and I would be too by most people here if they knew I worked with the Roma.”

On the way back to the office, Schenk tells Yzeiraj that he has set up another meeting with Bhadi. She can’t disguise her ambivalence at the bit of news. It’s not that she lacks a generous spirit; she gives every day. College-educated in the United States and married to an American, Yzeiraj is dedicated to the work here in the most poverty-stricken quarters of her struggling country. And she respects and appreciates the time Schenk spends with her, sharpening her skills as journalist. But she thinks her mentor is wrong about Bhadi.

“I believe that we all have goodness within us but I don’t think he can be redeemed,” she says. “There are some things that can’t be forgiven or forgotten. It’s a very difficult thing for me to say as a Christian.”

Maybe Bhadi’s about-face offends Yzeiraj’s sense of commitment. Or maybe she sees through street-smart strategizing—that it’s convenient for Bhadi to head for higher ground when his game is played out.

 

5: Sympathy for the Devil

John Schenk walks with Bhadi through Tirana. The streets are quiet, traffic down to just a few trucks. Then a chrome-laden Hummer fresh off a showroom floor rolls by, likely owned by someone Bhadi knows or at least someone whose business he knows. Bhadi says that he’s going to play basketball with his friends at the college but Schenk asks him for just a few minutes to get a photograph for a mixed-media presentation he’s going to produce for World Vision. Schenk wants viewers to put a face to human smuggling, to make the evil real.  

While Schenk looks for a location and sets up, Bhadi talks about how he started his life of crime. “Back in my village when I was a teenager I watched music videos, MTV, and I thought I wanted to be like that,” he says. “There was no money in our village, no opportunity, but the criminals had money and did exciting things. And when you are young you don’t think about decisions. You just do things and never think anything bad will happen.”

At Schenk’s request, he stands under a streetlight on a cul-de-sac lined with basement casinos and stores that sell airline tickets out of Albania. Schenk frames him in the viewfinder but through the first few flashes Bhadi isn’t engaged. He looks bored, put out.

Bhadi has been phlegmatic when describing his crimes but now lights up when talking about the great European cities that he has seen. “When I was in Dublin, I remember always it was Murphy’s and Guinness,” he says. “In London I know where to buy the best suits on Saville Row.”

And he lights up when talking about his performances impersonating foreign nationals. “As an Italian I had to, you know, to act out, to do everything big, whether it was laughing or complaining, use my whole body,” he says, gesticulating with his hands, launching into a monologue that could pass for Milanese. In a blink he reins it in and his face changes, wide-eyed, controlled, earnest. “And this,” he says, in an accent to suit it, “I would be from Stockholm, my hair dyed, of course.”  

When I ask him why he has given up a life of crime, Bhadi has a ready answer. “In jail I decided that I want to change,” he says. “I want to become a leader of my people, maybe to be a politician.” He says that he’s not afraid of the syndicate seeking revenge for his co-operating with law enforcement and with World Vision, even though henchmen took his niece hostage when he tried to break away a few years ago.

He has a pat answer, too, when I ask what he fears. He shrugs and smiles. “Nothing,” he says. “In jail I learned you can only die once.” It could be true or it could just be a line cribbed from a gangsta video.

It takes a leap of faith to believe that he is reformed, a generous spirit without a rear-view mirror to think he can be redeemed. John Schenk will say this session with Bhadi was no deal with the devil.

 “I’m not entirely repulsed by him,” he says. “I see denial. I see potential too. Bhadi can take power from his past and make a positive impact with it—sitting down with NGOs, helping with prevention programs, helping police and immigration. I hope he can have an empathetic response.”   

In Tirana it’s not déjà vu for John Schenk, just memories stirring, his work coming full circle. Bhadi was just a child when Schenk wrote the story of the death of a woman sold by one of the Outlaws for a Harley. It was a story that he told in the pages of the Sun, which was, he says, “like a graphic novel, like Sin City.” Too late to save her, too little to save others. Schenk has reason to hope that Bhadi can be saved and that Bhadi can help save others from suffering.  “I feel a connection with him, like I can be a role model,” he says. “Dealing with people who have been down at the bottom, I can offer him encouragement.”

Maybe it would be like fatherly advice. Schenk has been on the move all his life. His father was an insurance executive whose company transferred him from London Ont., Los Angeles and New Jersey. John Schenk is even more peripatetic, like he has never quite got over that wanderlust after walking out the doors of the Sun. He has lived in Cyprus for several years—it offers easy access to the regions he works—and, though he has had several relationships, he has never settled down, never married, never had children. “It was a disappointment for our parents that John never had kids but I know they could not have been prouder of his work,” his sister Susan Lofgren says.

An hour after John Schenk and Bhadi shake hands and go their separate ways in Skanderebeg Square, Schenk gets a text message: Bhadi says he’s on hard times and needs rent money. Once a most wanted criminal, Bhadi is now text begging.    

Schenk leaves a message at the World Vision office and suggests that one of the workers there help Bhadi out. It’s a pragmatic call, a hedged bet and maybe the price attached to developing sources of information and inspiration.