Do you ever get the feeling that men caught up in gangland activities are starring in an action crime film that spools through their own minds? It’s almost as though they enjoy the trappings and subterfuge more than they enjoy the proceeds

I thought about this the other day as I read news reports of those men staking out a village garage on some drugs revenge mission, wearing gloves and sitting on a gun in a van, and ending up dead. That’s probably about as glamorous as it gets.

I thought about it again yesterday morning, when I heard about the Maltese lorry-driver who’s been busted by Sicilian police for trucking illegal drugs down to Malta for the Mazzaro del Valle Mafia. The code name they used when talking about cocaine 368 times over the telephone – you know, just in case the police were listening in, which they were – was ‘white tuna’. Given that we’re talking about a part of Sicily that grew mainly on the strength of its tuna-fishing for the last couple of thousand years at least, I think we can take it as read that we’re also dealing with people who know that there’s no such thing. But it’s the white stuff they’re dealing with, so obviously, they’re going to have to insert the word ‘white’ into the disguise to make it more... ’disguisey’, like a fake moustache and a wig.

A gang of sensible women criminals would have called their illegal goods ‘quilt covers’. Or fabric conditioner. Or even Fairy Liquid or sgrassatore pavimenti. The phone-tappers would have yawned themselves into a delirium of tedium. But our heroes, starring in their very own mental B movie, are damned if they are going to do anything quite like that. People might laugh, and call them skirts. OK, so nobody would know – but they would. And imagine if the police swept in and the story broke in the news: code word Mastro Lindo. The embarrassment. The shame. How could they ever hold up their heads in gangland again? So ‘white tuna’ it is, then, even if it makes them look like idiots.

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Yesterday morning I heard a radio news broadcast in which the number one headline item was that the parish priest of St Julian’s had had his email account hacked and emails sent out in his name to his email contacts list, begging for money. The second headline item was the death of the man who, a few days ago, had been found with severe skull injuries in a Paceville street.

I’m trying to work out the news editor’s priorities here. “Maltese parish priest has email hacked/Sudanese man dies after Paceville assault – hmmmm, a really tough choice for the top news item. Let’s run with the parish priest.”

It was bound to happen, though, wasn’t it? When that jury a couple of weeks ago found the nightclub bouncer not guilty of killing a Somalian who died in practically identical circumstances – head injuries after being pushed to the ground – a tacit message went out. The strongest message, actually, came through during the trial proceedings, with all that dismissive talk of “the black man”, and testimony by shady witnesses like nightclub dancers and a nightclub owner who had killed another man in a Paceville shoot-out and got away with it. Today’s black Africans in Malta are like yesterday’s women murder victims: “She was a whore. She deserved it. She drove her husband wild with anger by taunting him and being unfaithful, so he stabbed her 50 times and poured acid over her. It was her fault he killed her. If she were still alive, we would jail her, not him.”

“He was a black man trying to pick up girls in my bar, and he’d had a few drinks. We can’t have that, so we picked him up and flung him out. But you can’t prove that this is when he got that fatal knock. Either way, it was his fault because you can’t be black, drunk and trying to chat up girls. That’s just asking for it. If he were still alive, we would jail him.”

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The real news angle to that St Julian’s parish priest story is that people believed the fake email messages were genuine. Forty of them rang him to offer help, ‘businessmen’ rushed to give him money and an order of nuns got into gear with their fund-raising. Isn’t this incredible?

I’d like a peek at the alternative world in which grown men who are mugged in Madrid, and who have their cards and wallet stolen, go to a public library and email their entire contacts list for money to help pay the hotel bill, instead of ringing the bank to stop the cards and make arrangements for a direct transfer of funds, even assuming that there would be any need to do so given that hotels take an imprint of your card as soon as you check in. If the situation is so perplexing that you need help from home, in the real world you ring a friend or relative, and if you’re a priest you ring your priest-boss. You certainly don’t email somebody you met at a prayer meeting five years ago.

I’ve just got a text message from a British number, telling me that I’ve won a quarter of a million pounds in the latest Blackberry promotion, and that I should call the Cash Office in England to collect my prize. Entirely free! But just as I pressed 1021 for a cheaper overseas call and made plans for a series of round-the-world trips, I remembered just in time that I do not own a Blackberry. Thank heavens I am more cunning than they are.