Nairobi, Kenya ? Young, newly rich and restless, Ali Abdinur Samo wasn’t long for his dead-end homeland of Somalia. The 26-year-old recently decamped to Kenya, East Africa’s land of opportunity, to put his wealth to work.

“I’m looking around,” said Samo, whose close-cropped hair is already flecked with gray, an occupational hazard in his line of work. “I know people who are buying shops, hotels, properties. The economy is strong here, not like back home.”

Samo, if you hadn’t guessed, is a Somali pirate.

“Was a pirate,” he corrected. After earning about $116,000 in two heists, Samo bowed to his worried parents’ pleas and took early retirement in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, where the fast-growing yet shady economy has quickly become a favorite haven for pirates to spend their ransoms.

The pirates often describe themselves as saviors with AK-47s, an ad hoc coast guard that’s retaliating against foreign countries for fishing illegally off Somalia’s coast while civil war consumes the government. Follow the trail of their multimillion-dollar booty into neighboring Kenya, however, and you grasp the pirates’ capitalist ambitions.

Rather than investing in their wrecked homeland, pirates are laundering huge sums through property, hotels, shopping arcades and trucking companies in Kenya, according to family members, real estate brokers, money traders and pirates themselves.

They say that ransom money is being funneled to pirate custodians — often well-connected Somali businessmen or religious leaders — through the extensive and largely unregulated Islamic cash-transfer network known as hawala.

“Pirate money is definitely being reinvested in Kenya,” said Stig Jarle Hansen, a Somalia expert at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research. “There’s a boom among Somali businessmen in Kenya, and it’s easy to hide the money because there’s so much coming in. And I don’t think Kenyan authorities control or monitor this.”

Numerous interviews indicate that Kenya, which Johnnie Carson, the ranking U.S. diplomat for Africa, recently called East Africa’s “keystone state, economically, commercially and financially,” is awash in ransom money.

Experts think that the pirates, who have hijacked some three dozen ships in the Indian Ocean this year, have pocketed tens of millions of dollars.

There’s almost nothing worth buying in Somalia, however. Kenya, with its large Somali population and lax authorities — who often are more enthusiastic about taking part in illicit dealings than they are about stamping them out — is a better place to blow through cash.

The sums involved are impossible to pinpoint because little of the money will ever be deposited in savings accounts or recorded by a bank.

“To avoid the money trail, the ransoms are laundered in goods,” said Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the top United Nations diplomat for Somalia, who’s based in Nairobi. “In Kenya, it’s very easy for pirates. They can pay in cash everywhere.”