Banging up the Gypsy bandit queen
As one door slams, another creaks opens. Earlier this week, Romany activist Lavinia Olmazu was jailed for two and a half years for her role in 2.9 million pound benefit fraud. If you were to believe the tabloid press and the BBC, it was an open and shut case of a cunning Gypsy exploiting the British benefits system and her own people to profit to the tune of millions. But as her Holloway cell door slams behind her, the legal restrictions imposed on a journalist to examine her guilt are also lifted. Come take a peek behind the façade of the British justice to hear a side of a story that is unlikely to ever be heard in court or the mainstream media.
I first met Lavinia Olmazu 7 years ago. She was a well-educated Romanian Roma woman working for the Media Diversity Institute on a project to train Romany journalists across Eastern Europe. As time moved on, so did she, but she never lost the burning passion to help her people. She was from a well-integrated and musical Roma family from Bucharest. She’d had the benefit of a good education and felt compelled to use her relative advantage to help those less fortunate than herself.
Whether she was organizing Romany film festivals to challenge the myths that blight her community, or working as a Romany consultant in London Borough councils, her motivation was always one of getting justice for her people. If she lacked anything, it was perhaps the nerve and tirelessness to be the gutsy freedom fighter her conscience required. She hated public speaking and was terrified at the thought of live broadcasting. As a single mum, she was often torn between caring for her son and her people. Yet still she battled away. Like any Romany activist, she was driven more by faith than hope that her efforts might actually change anything.
In March this year she was arrested and remanded for her role in massive benefit fraud. I couldn’t believe it. With just one side of the story presented, I admit that I considered that maybe she could have done it. She wouldn’t have been the first high profile Gypsy activist to have personally profited from a niche she had carved out for herself. To my shame, I admit it took me four months to visit her in Holloway to hear her side of the story. What I found there, shames me, my community and the British justice system. Largely forgotten and unsupported by the hundreds of people she helped, she looked abandoned and alone. And then she told me her side of the story.
She and her boyfriend Alin Enache had been helping many new Roma migrants integrate into Britain. Like all Romanian and Bulgarian EU citizens, the Romanies she helped had the right to travel to Britain but not work or receive benefits here, unless they were self-employed. But unlike other Bulgarian and Romanian citizens, her Romany friends were escaping grinding poverty and intense persecution. As a result, they often didn’t have the education or skills required to find self-employment. By showing them how to produce invoices and get national insurance numbers, she was enabling many of them to leapfrog the impossibility of employment directly into the possibility self-employment.
Her intervention in their lives enabled the descendants of emancipated Romanian Romany slaves to escape grinding medieval poverty to have a chance of being equal citizens here in Britain. Or at least that’s what she thought.
In March it all came crashing down. London’s Metropolitan Police had kept her and Enachi under surveillance after the Department for Work and Pensions noticed an “unusually high” volume of National Insurance claims by Romanian Romanies at the Jobcentre in Tooting, south London. The Met say that Enachi acted as an interpreter on the majority of the applications. Computer files at their home in Woodford Green, Essex, showed templates for invoices and recommendation letters. Then there was the money. Tens of thousands of pounds in the accounts of Enachi and six other Romanian Roma suggested that while many of the people she helped were integrating well, others may indeed have been scamming the benefits system. She, Enachi and six other Roma were arrested and remanded.
When I met her in July 2010, she told me she had never had a chance to speak to her now former boyfriend or the six other people in the case, but swore that she had no part in the fraud. Having maintained her complete innocence for 4 months she was desperate to get out and see her son. She was put on the lifer’s wing of Holloway, a million miles away from her relatively privileged background.
She was on anti-depressants and like many people whose life has suddenly hit a brickwall, she was both angry and distressed. She was angry that very few of the many people she had helped and worked with had bothered to find out her side of the story. She was distressed at the choice she was about to make. Our wonderful British justice system had demanded that she make a choice between her freedom and her reputation.
Her legal aid lawyer advised her that if she pleaded guilty she’d be out by Christmas 2010 because she could strike a deal with the Crown Prosecution Service. If she maintained her innocence, they advised she’d be looking at a trial in the spring of 2011. They also advised that the charges she faced of conspiracy to defraud meant she had little chance of winning. She told me it was their belief that simply living with a man who had previously admitted the fraud would be enough to see her convicted.
Suffering from depression and anxiety on the lifer’s wing of Holloway prison, she chose what most of us would. She put her mental health and the remaining years of her son’s childhood before the truth and pleaded guilty. Like many of us she might have admired people like Nelson Mandela, who valued truth more highly than his liberty. Like most of us, she couldn't find his superhuman courage.
Earlier this week the final blow came as she was convicted of masterminding the fraud. Because she chose her family over truth, she was never tried and the Metropolitan police were never forced to reveal the evidence against her. She says she never received a penny for helping people, but will sadly never have the chance to prove that.
She says of the 378 people she helped, only 172 ever claimed benefits. Of those 172 people, the police only proved that 6 people had committed fraud. That hardly makes her the criminal mastermind she has been painted as. Yet every tabloid newspaper and even the BBC has branded her, and by extension the entire Romany community, as a nation of wicked child trafficking thieves. The old ones are the best eh?
But the final insult to justice, her and the Romany community is that having made that agonizing choice between liberty and truth, she lost both when she was sentenced to 2 and half years in prison.
In the eyes of the tabloids she’s a Gypsy bandit queen and the police have their scalp. But while robber baron bankers who plunged this country into recession still walk free, any banditry she may have been involved in is one from an older, more honourable tradition.
In my opinion Lavinia Olmazu may be no Nelson Mandela, but she is a modern Robin Hood. She helped the poor and persecuted get what they were morally entitled to - a new life and a real chance. Whether she actually broke the law in doing so, we may sadly never know.