By: CHRIS GRAEME
OVER FIFTY per cent of security guards doing night shifts in Lisbon are not qualified or licensed to do so according to the police.
Many so-called security guards guarding the entrances of nightclubs, restaurants, discos and other establishments are little more than bouncers employed for their brawn rather than their professional ability to deal with trouble.
The PJ (Polícia Judiciária), PSP and GNR (Guarda Nacional de Republica) say that the control and distribution of security guards at night is a lucrative business, frequently associated with other illegal commerce linked to bars and clubs such as drugs, loan sharks, extortion, sale of arms, prostitution and illegal immigration, among others.
“It is an activity where the main bosses controlling the security bouncers are almost always working in illegal activities, have criminal records and have been in prison,” said a PSP source.
Mafia
The PSP admit that in Lisbon and the outskirts of Amadora and Sul do Tejo there are at least four main mafia groups that supply security guards.
“Normally, in each case, only one or two individuals are in possession of the required licenses.
The others, who are frequently employed within establishments to control insolent, rowdy behaviour and disturbances.
Often these untrained bouncers are fitness fanatics who frequent gyms and also practice one of more martial arts.
Sometimes they end up beating up clients who are perceived to cause trouble outside their own houses, far from the establishments involved and out of the view of CCTV cameras.
These illegal unqualified and unregistered security guards are also used by rival gangs and bosses to settle scores as vigilantes with security guards controlled by other rival bosses from another turf.
Police believe that the shooting of two security guards in the early hours of Sunday morning was not a casual and arbitrary act of violence aimed at Nell’s club, in Campo Grande itself.
“It was rather a strong warning of the kind which sends out the message ‘don’t interfere with things that are nothing to do with you,’” the PSP source told daily Lisbon newspaper Público.
Pyramid hierarchy
According to the police, the groups which run Lisbon’s nightlife are usually well organised and structured into a rigid pyramid hierarchy.
At the top is a mafia style boss who receives reports and funds directly from a group of lieutenants, each controlling a different criminal activity, to who the boss gives orders.
At the bottom of these organisations, apart from prostitutes, are the unlicensed security guards that can obtain anything from 35 to 70 euros a day, the vast majority of which is handed over to their sector controllers or lieutenants.
These non-registered security guards are also used to coerce money from creditors, acting as loan sharks, threatening those that refuse to pay up, as well as acting as intermediaries in the sale of drugs and firearms.
The PJ inspector interviewed said that the dimension of such illegal activities using ‘security guards’ was so high that there are groups that even buy up guest houses or pensões normally frequented by prostitutes.
Coerced
This case scenario happened in Lisbon three years ago when a criminal organisation bought two neighbouring ‘guest houses’, hiked up the rents and prevented the group of prostitutes living there and working for a rival gang from leaving or working for that gang. Instead they were coerced into working for their new bosses.
The shootings in both Lisbon and Porto, for the time being, do not appear connected but in Lisbon all the evidence points to a settling up of accounts and scores between rival security guard groups and the bosses that control them.
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