ZeroZeroZero

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Like something sacred, whose name cannot be uttered,

like a secret lover you hold close in your thoughts,

like an empty surface where every word can be written,

such is the one you seek, evoke, call out to in a thousand ways.

Her every name is a desire and a driving force,

a metaphor, an ironic illusion.

She’ll make you joyful and desperate, she’s the one you want

at all times, all places, all ways.

In America, you can call her 24/7,

like your neighborhood drugstore,

or Aspirin, like that effervescent

that makes you feel better, and in Italy Vitamin C

because it’s how you cure your cold.

C is her letter—

you can simply call her that—

or Charlie,

the C all pilots and radio operators know.

Or at the take-away of desires,

order Number 3, the third letter,

punch in C-game, C-dust, or call her Caine,

her second syllable, which sounds like Cain.

Choose any female name with C:

Corinne Connie Cora Cory or most common of all Carrie,

the girl who grabs you and carries you away.

She’s a Cadillac, a Viaje, a voyage.

In Turkish a line is Otoban, highway,

la Veloce, Svelta; uskoritel’, the accelerator,

, pure energy, Dynamite.

She loves B, explosive and sensual.

She’s Blast, Bomb, Boost,

she’s Bonza, Bubbazza, Binge, Bouncing Powder,

in Spanish you’ll Bailar till dawn.

And when you’re too paranoid to speak,

dial 256 on your cell—

it’s the same as BLO or Blow or snort.

She makes you feel good,

she’s Big Bloke, Big C, Big Flake, Big Rush.

She’ll make you feel like a god,

so Dios is what she’s called in Latin America,

but she’s also Diablo, Diablito too, Little Devil.

Devil’s Dandruff is cocaine powder,

while crack is Devil’s Drug, you smoke it

with the Devil’s Dick.

Regular coke can be Monster,

Cat Piss, A Visit to the House of Horrors,

but that’s not what you’re looking for,

what you want is the exact opposite:

Paradise, Alas de Angel, Polvere di Stelle,

Polvo Feliz, Polvo de Oro, Star-Spangled Powder,

Heaven Dust or Haven Dust, an inhalable oasis of peace.

Happy Powder, Happy Dust, Happy Trail.

She’s a Dream, a Beam, a ray of light.

She’s Aire, she’ll make you feel so light.

She’s Breath, Soffio, Soplo,

Or simply Sobre, with her you’re always on.

Call her Angie, your most angelic friend,

or Aunt Nora, your aunt who bakes cakes.

In Brazil she’s Gulosa,

so sweet, those sweets kids go crazy for:

Icing on the top of a cake,

Jelly and Jam, those secret jars of marmalade,

Candy and Candy C, Bubble Gum, Double Bubble,

— you can blow double with the best chewing gum—

Granita, Mandorlata, Cubaita, Dolcetto,

California Cornflakes, Bernie’s Cornflakes, or Cereal.

Cornflakes, snow Flakes,

Cocaine is always snow.

Snow

Sno

Schnee

CHez

Sne

Neige

Nieve

Wherever snow falls, coke is snow,

but you can also call it Florida Snow,

as miraculous as a Miami snowfall.

It’s —svezhij, fresh

but it can turn to Ice, and make your veins run cold.

She is Snow White, the fairest of them all—

but you don’t envy her because you lay her down

on the mirror of your desires.

Or simply Bianca

Blanca

Blanche,

Branca and Branquinha in Brazil

Beyaz Ten, white skin in Turkey

in Russia —Belaja loshadj, white horse

White Girl, White Tornado, White Lady,

White Dragon, White Ghost, White Boy, White Powder

Polvere Bianca, Polvo Blanca, Poudre, Pudra in Turkish

Whatever looks like Sugar

Azúcar, Toz seker, that powder Turkish Delight is coated in.

But she looks like flour too,

MуKа, Mukà, in Russian or —Bai fen in China.

And whatever sounds like her,

Cocco, Coconut, Coco in French, KOKOC — kokos

or KeKC — Keks, the Russian tea cake, but above all KOKC—

Koks in German and Swedish as well.

That ancient name means nothing now

though she’s still there to warm you,

those old coal stoves no longer exist

so now when you say Coke (in English or French)

you no longer think of fuel for the poor.

Now she’s Coke like Coca-Cola,

though it’s Coca-Cola that took her name.

So she adopted all sorts of ways of referring

to that famous pop: Cola in Danish,

Kola in Swedish and Turkish,

Кока in Serbia and Russia.

And then, sometimes, I don’t know why, she turns into an animal.

You can call her Coniglio, maybe because she’s magic

like the rabbit that gets pulled out of the hat, or Krava, cow, in Croatian,

in Spanish Perico or Perica, parrot,

maybe because she makes you more loquacious,

or the Gato who makes you purr.

Farlopa—her most common slang—

or Calcetin, sock, or Cama, bed,

because she makes you dream, or Tierra, the ground under your feet.

If you blow the cheapest stuff

she’ll be your old friend Paco, in Italy Fefè,

while in Russia you can call her , Kolja,

in the United States she’s Bernie, but also Cecil,

a more haughty name, or you can call her Henry VIII

the great English king.

You can make a fuss over her,

call her Baby or Bebé.

But more than any other drug,

it’s a Love Affair with a beautiful lady,

Fast White Lady, Lady, Lady C,

Lady Caine, Lady Snow, Peruvian Lady,

she’s the Dama Blanca, the Mujer,

the woman par excellence,

she’s Girl and Girlfriend,

your Novia, your fiancée.

There’s no one like her,

so you can even call her Mama Coca;

or simply say She or Her,

she’s pure, purely herself.

She consumes her names like she consumes her lovers

So this list is nothing but a taste,

so call her any way you want,

No matter what name you choose, she’ll come when you call.

7. THE PUSHER

“It’s bitter on the tongue, and you’ll feel like you’ve just been given novacaine.”

It’s the most common way of consuming coke in the Andes. Strip the central veins from a few leaves, put them in your mouth, and chew them slowly, wetting them with saliva and mashing them into a ball. Then add a pinch of ash — slightly alkaline — from the burned plants. It goes by various names, tocra and llipta being the most common.

“If you do basuco it means you’re really in a bad way, because basuco’s the waste product from the extraction process, and it’s made with harmful chemical substances.”

Basuco is what prison inmates use, because it’s really cheap. It often makes its way behind bars on the wings of a homing pigeon. Somebody on the outside paper clips a little bag under the bird’s wings and trains the bird to fly to a window, where a prisoner will be delighted to receive it, either for himself or to sell. Sometimes the pigeon’s wings are so loaded with the stuff that it crashes into the prison wall. Basuco is made with the worst quality ingredients: brick dust, acetone, insecticide, lead, amphetamine, and red gas. It’s an intermediate product. The leaves are cut, then the paste is extracted from them. Basuco’s the by-product of the second phase of production, the crude product, but some people don’t seem to mind.

“If you do snow, you have to add hydrochloric acid to the paste and treat it with acetone or ethanol.”

Snow is cocaine hydrochloride. Whitish, bitter-tasting flakes that are ground into white powder. You snort it, or at most shoot it up, usually twenty, thirty, even fifty milligrams, though regulars might get up to a hundred milligrams a hit.

“If you do crack you have to add to snow a watery solution, made up of ammonia and sodium hydroxide or sodium bicarbonate, basic substances in other words, and then you filter the whole thing.”

Crack is smoked in a special pipe, usually made of glass; it heats up and then you inhale the vapors. Or, more often, it’s smoked together with other substances, such as marijuana, tobacco, or phencyclidine — angel dust — but you have to mix it really well first. It works fast, in just a few seconds, and it’s highly addictive: The drug dealer’s dream and the drug addict’s nightmare, is what they say about crack.

“To freebase, you have to dissolve the mixture with ether or other volatile solvents, but then you have to wait till the solvent evaporates.”

As with crack, you need a special pipe, a water pipe or narguile (hookah). Freebase, which is also called “rock,” takes effect immediately; you start feeling euphoric as soon as it reaches your brain, but a little later you become irritable, partly because the effect wears off in a few minutes, making you want to get high again.

“Erythroxylaceae. That’s what the primary material is called. I’ll give you fifty euros if you can say it without stuttering.”

The unpronounceable Latin name of this family of plants is the common denominator for all forms of cocaine consumption. This plant family has more than 250 species, but two in particular interest me, because they’re where cocaine comes from: Erythroxylum coca and Erythroxylum novogranatense. The leaves of these plants contain from 0.3 percent to 1.4 percent alkaloids, including the tropane alkaloids that produce the effects of cocaine on your brain. Erythroxylum coca is native to the Peruvian Andes, but it now flourishes even in the tropical zones of eastern Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Its main variety — which is also the most common one — is Huánuco, Bolivian coca. It’s also the most prized: Its leaves are big and firm, dark green with yellowish tips. The second species, Erythroxylum novogranatense, comes from the mountainous regions of Colombia, the Caribbean, and northern Peru, areas that are drier, more arid. Erythroxylum novogranatense has two principal varieties: Colombian coca and Peruvian coca, the latter is called Truxillo; its leaves are smaller and more tapering than Huánuco’s, light green with grayish tips. But you don’t need fancy lab tests to identify these two species. Just put a bit in your mouth and chew: If you feel a slight numbing effect, you’ve got a good one, one that contains alkaloid. Huánuco and Truxillo, the protagonists of global commerce.

• • •

So many names to say the same thing: cocaine. Cocaine, which travels from producer to consumer, which goes from leaves to the white powder, which is passed deftly from hand to hand. From chemicals to street life. From the Andean farmer to a pusher who, once he’d explained his products, talked business to me:

“The target. Walk around Milan, Rome, New York, Sydney, and you have to slalom your way among men who are packaged in suits selected by fashion managers — that’s what people who know these things call them — they choose quality fabrics, how many stripes, how much space between them, their initials monogrammed on their fashionable business shirts. One hand in their pocket, the other clutching their iPhone, eyes focused six feet ahead so as not to trip, or step in dog shit. If you don’t get out of their way, they’ll run right into you, but they can’t say ‘excuse me’ or even gesture courteously, because then they’d lose the flow, and everything would go to hell. Eventually you learn to weave around them, like in those old video games where you swing your spaceship around with a touch of the joystick to avoid getting hit by the asteroids that are flying at you. Same thing: You rotate your chest and your shoulders follow, turning sideways, and you slip past, barely brushing the guy’s cashmere jacket, and your gaze lands on his sleeve; he’s missing a button, and he sees that you noticed it and thinks you think he forgot and that he’s not a true gentleman, but I know that an open buttonhole is one of the characteristics of custom-made menswear, the sign that you’re part of an elite. I dodge him and then lengthen my stride, and he keeps walking straight ahead, talking the whole time, and the word I keep hearing is ‘target.’ The target has to be identified, chosen, hit, bombarded, made to surface.”

That’s how the pusher talked to me. He’s sold a lot. And not on some street corner, either. A pusher’s almost never the way you imagine he’ll be. That’s what I keep saying, when I write or when I talk to someone about this stuff: It’s not the way you imagine. Pushers are seismographs of taste. They know how and where to sell. The better the pusher is, the easier he moves up and down the social ladder. There’s no such thing as a pusher for everyone. There’s the pusher who sells on the street, with a monthly paycheck and an assigned zone, who deals to strangers. There’s the pusher who delivers right to your door; all you have to do is text him. There are kid pushers. Nigerians, Slavs, Maghrebs, Latinos. Just as an aristocratic lady would never step foot in a discount store on the outskirts of town, there are pushers for every type of customer, pushers for gentlemen and pushers for down-and-outs, for rich students and day laborers, for wallflowers and extroverts, for space cadets and scaredy-cats.

There are pushers who get their goods from a “base,” which is usually made up of four or five people. Bases are independent cells with strong ties to organized crime, because that’s where the drugs come from. Bases are intermediaries between criminal organizations and street pushers; they’re the ones who supply the stuff already cut, ready for retail, and they’re an insurance of sorts for the organizations: If the base fails or its members get arrested, the next level up doesn’t feel the effects, because those down below don’t know enough about them. The bourgeois pusher, on the other hand, has a direct relationship with an organization affiliate, but he doesn’t get a regular paycheck. He has a sort of deposit account instead. The more he sells, the more he earns. And it’s rare that he ends up with any unsold goods. The bourgeois pusher’s strength lies in the fact that he can create his own personal workforce over time. He uses fake names with his clients, or if he’s already known, he’s selective about who he sells to. When he can he prefers to hire people who have their own circle. The circle is made up of people whose day jobs are something other than dealing: The pusher supplies them, and they use their own contacts to create a regular clientele, usually made up of friends, girlfriends, lovers. The bourgeois pusher’s workers never sell coke to someone new. It’s a layered organization in which the pusher knows only the people closest to him and can never grasp the whole chain. That way, if someone were to talk, only one person would pay. That’s the way it always is in the world of cocaine. You want to know as little as possible.

At the bottom distribution level is the retailer, the one at the train station or on the street corner. He’s like a gas station. He often keeps balls of coke in his mouth, wrapped in plastic or tinfoil. If the police arrive, he swallows them. Some dealers won’t risk having the plastic break and their stomachs becoming a painful sore, so they keep the balls in their pocket. Retailers make their fortunes on weekends, Valentine’s Day, or when the local team wins. The more there is to celebrate, the more they sell. Like wine bars and pubs.

The pusher who taught me how to choose a target thought of himself as a pharmacist rather than a cocaine dealer:

“Every business has its target; the formula for success is in finding the right one, and once you do, you have to unleash all your firepower on it, drop the napalm and swallow up needs and desires, that’s the goal of the modern man who dresses according to the canons of the fashion manager. It’s exhuasting dealing with a fragmented market, where the niches keep multiplying; they come and go in the space of a week, replaced by others that maybe last even less, and you have to anticipate them, prepare your weapons in time; if not, you risk firing your precious napalm on empty territory. I attract my target. Targets, rather — plural — because, even though there’s only one product, the needs are many. So a woman came to see me this morning, she was probably pretty cute years ago, but now she’s all skin and bones, she doesn’t look so healthy; I wouldn’t fuck her even if she paid me; the only signs of life on her are her veins, they bulge out all along her forearms, her calves, her neck, but underneath she’s all flabby; it’s like she has chicken skin. She told me her name is Laura, a fake name, obviously, but she’s got nice, high, round cheekbones that light up her face, I really like cheekbones; they’re the sentinels of the face; they either let you in or repel you, it depends. In the case of Laura, they invite familiarity, and in fact, she told me once that at her gym she heard there’s this quick, easy, and — all things considered — fairly risk-free way to lose weight. It’s true, I said; why go buying those sci-fi gadgets for your abs, or running in the evening, and then eating only protein because some French luminary decided that’s the way it has to be? Laura’s sentinel cheekbones relaxed and she smiled at me. I’ve seen her every week since then, and every time those beautiful cheekbones seem like they’ve been sanded, and now those sweet sentinels of her face are like menacing halberds.

“It was Laura who introduced me to the Connoisseur, one of those snobs with shabby clothes, his Moncler torn and full of burn marks, who when they greet you, even if it’s for the first time, they pull you close, press their right shoulder up against your left, like some kind of tribal salute of belonging, then they pat you on the back, all very cool. He never wanted to tell me his name, not even a fake one, call me ‘friend,’ he says, as if we were in some alleyway in the Bronx. I nearly laugh in his face, but I control myself, and I have to even more when he tells me he wants some Pearl. The Connoisseur’s referring to the most precious blow, 95 percent pure, maybe more: It’s silky to the touch, creamy almost, and so white it shines like a pearl. I’ve never even seen it, some people say it doesn’t exist, others that it’s super rare because it’s still made by hand by a small group of campesinos who use only two tools: time and patience. Time for the leaves to mature and patience to wait for the right moment to harvest them. But it doesn’t end there, because then you have to press everything by hand, package it in virgin oil, no impurities or noxious substances, work it with acetone, ether, and ethanol, never with hydrochloric acid or ammonia; you don’t want to risk damaging the active ingredient. If you do it right — ten days of work, sweat, and swearing — you get that pearly tone that’s so sought after. Of course I have it, I say to the Connoisseur; I don’t even try to steer him toward something more feasible, like Fish Scales; it’s not as pure as Pearl, but it has come my way, and I can say that its shine really does remind you of a freshly caught fish, and I don’t even dream of pushing him toward more crude varieties like Almond-flavored, or toward Stone — even though it is 80 percent pure — and I refuse even to take into consideration variants like Cat’s Piss or Mariposa. Guys like the Connoisseur have granite wills and — luckily — zero expertise; if not, he wouldn’t come back after I palm off some mediocre stuff cut with glass powder on him. It sparkled, he tells me every time, and I nod knowingly; I don’t even have to pretend anymore, it’s so natural now. Obviously I don’t always say yes; I can’t let word get around that you can always get everything from me. I’d risk inflation; I’d risk losing control of my targets, and then someone ends up having a heart attack.”

Cocaine can be altered — cut, or stepped — with various substances, which get added to the drug either during production or, more simply, mixed with the final product, with the white powder. There are three kinds of cut: active cuts, done with substances that produce the same psychoactive effects as cocaine; cosmetic cuts, with substances that reproduce some of cocaine’s collateral effects; and inert cuts, with products that increase volume without creating damaging effects. People may think they’re snorting good quality stuff, but they’re really paving their nostrils with concrete. Active cuts are made with amphetamines or other stimulants, such as caffeine, that enhance and prolong the effect of the drug, as in the case of Chalk — low quality cocaine that’s dressed up with amphetamines. Cosmetic cuts use pharmaceuticals and local anesthetics, such as lidocaine and ephedrine, that reproduce some of the same collateral effects as coke. When you just want to increase the volume to get more doses and make more money, you use innocuous substances, such as flour and lactose. The most commonly used substance for inert cuts is mannitol, a laxative gentle enough for children and the elderly that, other than in appearance, has nothing in common with cocaine.

“One of my most loyal customers just got back from the United States. He says blow there’s 30 percent.”

“Thirty percent?”

“Yeah, the active ingredient is 30 percent. But I say it’s a load of crock. I know places in Paris where it’s 5 percent. And in Italy some pushers sell balls of coke where the active ingredient’s practically nonexistent. But they’re real cheats.”

Over the years I’ve seen just about everything there is to see in drug distribution. In Europe the average ranges from 25 percent to 43 percent; some countries come in lower, Denmark at 18 percent and England and Wales at 20. But these figures could change at any time.

The cut is where the real money is made, because it’s the cut that makes a line of coke precious, and it’s the cut that ruins nostrils. In London some bourgeois pushers hide quality coke in garages to put on the market when drug seizures make for a shortage of goods and as a consequence everybody starts cutting it, lowering the quality. At that point you can sell the really good stuff for four times as much. In an economy in which supply and demand fluctuate so rapidly, the cut becomes the discriminating factor. The distributor can cut it, with the approval of the Mafia family. The base is allowed to cut only in extreme cases, and only with the authorization of the distributer. The pusher who cuts is a dead pusher.

• • •

“I took some courses; I crashed one of those clinics where people who want to quit are bullied with statistics, like 25 percent of heart attacks in people between the ages of eighteen and forty-five are caused by my product. If you ask me, these courses spew a lot of bullshit. But I did learn something. It acts on your neurons, makes your nervous system go haywire, and over time it damages it. In other words, it pisses your brain away. And that’s not all: It’s dangerous for your heart too; all it needs is an extra chaser to make it collapse, and if the product’s washed down with a Long Island or a Negroni or a Jack Daniel’s, or accompanied by little blue pills, well, then it’s like stepping on the gas on a curve. You also have to consider that cocaine is a vasoconstrictor; it constricts your blood vessels, anesthetizes you. All these effects happen pretty much right away, depending on how you do it: If you shoot up, it starts taking effect before you even realize it; if you smoke crack or freebase, it’s a little slower but still really fast; and if you snort, it hits you a second later.”

I ask him about the good moments.

“The good moments? It wakes you up right away, raises your attention level, gives you energy, you’re less tired, you don’t even feel the need to sleep, eat, or drink. But that’s not all: It improves your sense of self, you feel happy, you want to do things, you’re euphoric, and any pain you might have disappears. And you lose your inhibitions, so it ups your sex drive, makes you more daring. And what’s more, coke doesn’t make you feel like a drug addict. A cocaine addict’s nothing like a heroin addict. People who snort cocaine are users, not junkies. They satisfy a need and then get on with life.”

But then he starts right in on the bad moments.

“If you do it a lot, you heart goes crazy, you have panic attacks, it’s easy to get depressed, you become irascible for no reason, even paranoid at times. Since you don’t sleep or eat much, you tend to lose weight. If you snort a lot for several years, you risk fucking up your nostrils. I know people who had to get their nasal septum redone because they snorted so much. I also know people who died: One dose too many and you have a heart attack. It’s common knowledge, after all; it’s not like I discovered hot water or something, but when I heard them say that if you use my product you can’t get it up anymore, I was, I mean, it’s not like I have that sort of problem, but a good chunk of my customers come to me precisely for this reason, and they all keep coming back; they’re really charged up, they tell me they fuck for hours, they have orgasms that electrify them from their heads to their toes, they do things they’d only ever seen in porn movies, things they’d never even dreamed of doing — a whole tribe of horny customers who, before they met me, would come after two minutes, and now they’re really having a grand time. I had to understand, but it’s not like I could ask them flat out, guys don’t talk willingly about certain things, and so I asked a woman friend of mine, she’s real tough and asks me for a bit of blow every now and then, but only because she’s finishing up med school and has to study all night, because she works as a cashier during the day to pay the tuition. With me she calls herself Butterfly, because she has a butterfly tattoo on one cheek; I asked her to show it to me, because I didn’t believe her, but she always refused. The fact remains that we agree to meet at the usual place, and as usual, she’s all elusive because she has a million things to do, but I stop her, ask her how things are going with her boyfriend, and then I wink, I feel like an idiot, but I don’t know how else to broach the subject, and luckily she understands and asks me how come I want to know, what’s it to me? I tell her I’m just curious, that she’s important to me, her pleasure’s important, and I wink again when I say pleasure, but this time I feel less idiotic, like I’ve gotten her attention. What’s on your mind? she says, and at that point I tell her the situation, that I heard it said that my product isn’t so good for those kinds of things, and so I’m conducting a sort of market survey, that’s all. And she does something real strange: She takes my hand and drags me to a bar, orders a couple of beers, and lights a cigarette. The bartender sees her and tries to tell her she can’t smoke, but she tells him not to bust her balls, so he retreats behind the counter and goes back to serving cappuccino. And she tells me about her boyfriend: At first it was really fabulous, so good it was almost scary, he’d have these amazing erections, Guinness world book of records, sex that would make the Italian Stallion jealous — but then it was all over. His dick, she says, is as flaccid as a sausage left to boil too long; it takes hours for him to get hard, and if she tries to touch him, it’s like he doesn’t even feel it; it’s like the heat’s gone and his blood vessels are pumping ice water. He’s superdepressed about it; all he does is apologize; he can’t even masturbate when he’s alone. So now he’s taking Viagra, a small dose at first, just twenty-five milligrams, then he upped it to a hundred, but it’s no good; he still only gets half hard, and he can’t come. There’s just no way to make him come, and it’s painful, all that built-up energy that can’t explode, it hurts like hell, and fucking for hours, waiting for him to finally blow, isn’t exactly fun for her either. He’s being treated by an andrologist, he confessed to using my product, and the doctor didn’t bat an eye; he said lots of people come to him with the same problem, and the only solution is to ditch my product, but it’s not easy. Butterfly talks freely, and I start putting the pieces together, and I realize I’m raising an army of sexually depressed men who just keep upping their doses on the remote chance they’ll get hard. Fuck, I wanted to shout, if it weren’t such an inappropriate thing to say right then. And then Butterfly tells me that women use it too, for the same reason, because it gets you aroused, really revved up, but from the point of view of sex it’s a disaster, because one of the product’s side effects is that it’s also an excellent anesthetic; it’s one thing if you rub a bit on your wisdom tooth that’s coming in, but if you stop reaching orgasm, which is already difficult enough under normal circumstances, well, that’s a whole different story. Not to mention, Butterfly continues, the things you do and then regret, like that time her boyfriend confessed to her that he was a bit too high one evening and ended up with a trans, that he’d always fantasized about it but never had the courage to do it. The courage? I say, and Butterfly nods, then after a minute of silence I ask her if she’ll let me see her tattoo this time, and she smiles and stands between the tables, unbuttons her pants, and lowers her underwear. What can I say? She wasn’t lying.

“I didn’t stop walking, elbowing my way among those men dressed according to the latest dictates of business fashion, and I didn’t stop my targets from coming to see me, but I didn’t stop learning what’s behind my product either; I see new faces, and the old ones fade away and get lost, who knows where. It’s a shitty job.”

A shitty job that he knows how to do. He talks about it as if he has already weighed the pros and cons of his profession in his head and has decided to keep the cons to himself. Paranoia, for instance. There are pushers who change cell phones and SIM cards once a week. All it takes is one customer to be a little careless and you’re screwed. There are pushers who live like cloistered nuns: no contact with the outside world except when absolutely necessary, and a drastic reduction of one’s private life. Girlfriends are particularly dangerous; they can easily guess what your day job is and can easily take revenge by telling someone about it. Some pushers are even more angsted: They spend their free time erasing all traces of themselves — no credit cards or bank accounts, no ATM cards, and never a signature on a piece of paper. Angst and paranoia. Some pushers, in order to quell the anxiety, do the same blow they push, but only end up feeding their angst. And there are pushers, like the one I’m sitting with, who sound like stockbrokers: “I sell Ferraris, not economy cars. You crash sooner in an economy car; in a Ferrari you last a little longer.”

There are street pushers who can earn $5,000 a month, and even get a bonus if they sell well. But bourgeois pushers can earn up to $25,000, $40,000 a month.

“The problem’s not the amount of money you earn, though; it’s that any other job seems impossible, because it would feel like a waste of time. You earn more just by brushing someone’s hands than you would working for months and months, no matter what sort of job it is. And knowing that you’ll be arrested isn’t enough to make you change professions. Even if I were offered a job where I could earn as much as I do now, I don’t think I’d take it, because it would undoubtedly take up more of my time. The same is true for those poor souls who deal on the streets. They’d have to put in a lot more time to earn the same amount of money.”

I looked at him and asked if he could confirm a sensation I had while listening to his stories, which was that he despises his clients.

“Yes. I liked them at first, because they gave me what I needed. But over time you look at them and you begin to understand. You realize that you could be one of them. You see yourself from the outside, and you’re repulsed. I dislike my clients because they remind me too much of myself, or what I would become if I decided to enjoy myself more. And not only does the idea repulse me, it scares me.”

8. BEAUTY AND THE MONKEY

Evolutionary transformation is fueled by vacuums. The story of drug trafficking in Colombia is one of vacuums, transformations, and capitalism.

Today what was once a vacuum is swarming, like a plot of ground under the entomologist’s lens. Swarming with hundreds of microcartels. Armed organizations that give themselves names that sound like local sports teams. Communist guerrillas who increasingly play the paradoxical role of large landowners, of plantation and production managers. Each one develops his own specialty, carves out his own slice of the action: production, distribution, transportation. Each one defends his own little corner of jungle, mountain, coast, or border. It’s all disconnected, parceled out, ground up. Today the doses of territory, and the spread of power and alliances, for which blood still flows, seem infinitesimal compared to the heyday of the big cartels.

But if the Colombia of drug trafficking today seems like the land of the Lilliputians to Gulliver, the problem is partly in the eye of the beholder. Or in his mind, rather; in his memory. Eyes see what they expect to see, or they gather in the remains. What they see is based on what they no longer see. So if there aren’t any more big showdowns or massacres, if cartels no longer carry out attacks on presidential candidates or no longer finance presidential elections, if Colombia is no longer a narco-state, and if the big players are all dead or sentenced to life in the United States, you might think the war has been won. Well, maybe not completely won, but at least well on the way to victory.

Or your gaze might get stuck in the past: Since “cocaine” and “Colombia” are still synonymous — a denomination of origin as inherent as Scotch whiskey or Russian caviar — the imagination continues to picture Colombian drug lords as the most powerful, the richest, the most terrifying in the world. But no regular person knows the names of the big traffickers anymore, or of the major organizations operating in Colombia. And yet, despite decades spent battling the Colombian narcos, the market share the country has lost is much less than one might expect in this era of global commerce. This apparent paradox makes it extremely difficult to grasp the current reality, to see its actual dimensions.

The alleged Lilliputians are no longer the absolute lords of cocaine, but it’s calculated that Colombia continues to produce around 60 percent of the cocaine consumed worldwide. And coca plants continue to take root in every cultivatable clod of Colombian soil.

How can this be? What does it mean?

The first answer is elementary, the basic principle of capitalism. If demand holds, if, in fact, it continues to grow, it would be absurd to cut off the supply, or even to reduce it significantly.

The second answer is that the decline of the Colombian cartels corresponded to the rise of the Mexican cartels and of all the new, powerful players in the criminal economy. Today the Sinaloa cartel directs the cultivation and production of coca plants, cocaine paste, and cocaine in Colombia just as multinational corporations direct the cultivation and processing of fruit.

But all this does not fully explain what happened in Colombia. It’s important to understand, though. Important because Colombia represents a matrix of the criminal economy, and its transformations reveal the full adaptive capacity of a system that has one fixed constant: white powder. Men die, armies disintegrate, but coke remains. This, in short, is the story of Colombia.

• • •

In the beginning there was Pablo, Pablo Escobar. Before Pablo, the drug trade was on the rise in Colombia, with its ideal conditions for producing, storing, and transporting cocaine. But it was in the hands of “coke cowboys,” who were too weak to impose their own rules and too scattered geographically to impose the law of the strongest. There was a vacuum, and Pablo filled it right away. The first evolutionary step in Colombian drug trafficking began with this ambitious young man, who was determined to become so rich that he’d have more influence than the president. Starting from nothing he accumulated wealth, gained respect, and conceived of the first cocaine distribution network, using small boats and single-engine planes. To safeguard his operation he relied on an old Colombian saying: plata o plomo, money or lead. If you were a police officer or a politician, you either accepted his bribe or you were dead. For Pablo, who became Medellín’s godfather, the cocaine business was simple: All you had to do was take a walk in the poor barrios and enlist the kids, who were ready to do anything — bribe people here and there, or pay off a friendly banker to help you bring the money you laundered back in. He said as much himself: “Everybody has a price. The important thing is to figure out what it is.” The vacuum filled quickly, and the Colombian system became a monopoly, its distribution network extending to the most important points on the American continent. Everything was done in high style: intercontinental flights crammed with cocaine; affable customs officers who let in thousands of containers of flowers full of white powder; submarines for really big shipments; even an ultramodern tunnel that ran from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso, Texas, the private property of a millionaire who lived more than twenty-five hundred miles away. Colombia ruled; Pablo Escobar ruled. And the godfather of Medellín reached an agreement with the godfather of Guadalajara. Mexico looked, learned, pocketed its percentage, and waited its turn.

By the early 1980s Pablo was making half a million dollars a day; he had ten accountants. The Medellín cartel was spending twenty-five hundred dollars a month just on elastic bands to bundle its rolls of cash. This was capitalism at its beginning. Large concentrations of wealthy entrepreneurs were laying down the law and penetrating every fiber of society. It was a conservative capitalism, in which the captains of industry vied with one another in flaunting their power and their wealth, without skimping on gifts for the people. Pablo had four hundred public housing units built, and he opened a spectacular public zoo right on his estate, Hacienda Nápoles. Robin Hood capitalists — unscrupulous, bloodthirsty, ruthless spendthrifts. Capitalists in their infancy, though, at the top of rigid pyramidal structures. They felt like giants and considered themselves the incarnations of a sovereign power they’d earned with money and lead — the only legitimate form of power. Pablo even offered to eliminate all of Colombia’s public debt, because the country was already his, because the government of Medellín was stronger and wealthier than that of Bogotá. So if the government caused them any trouble they felt justified in waging a head-on war: car bombs, killings, attacks on enemy politicians and judges. A presidential candidate — the front-runner — was assassinated. But Escobar and his faithful failed to realize that the very thing they believed to be a show of strength was actually their weak spot. A body rots once its head is cut off. When Pablo fell, his organization died, creating another vacuum.

The vacuum Pablo’s death created was a warning sign: Colombian drug trafficking had to take another evolutionary step. Like capitalism itself, it had to adapt to changes, incorporate social and economic mutations, free itself of tradition, and cross the threshold of modernity. A new species of narco was ready; in fact, it had already begun to proliferate, colonizing more and more territory. Flanked by powerful natural allies, it didn’t have to bleed itself dry in its battle to gain control. Pablo had been a real macho, a striking symbol of untamed sexuality. But now that dominant stereotype was broken, thanks to Hélmer “Pacho” Herrera, one of the bosses of the neohegemonic Cali cartel. Openly gay, Pacho wouldn’t have been able to take two steps under Pablo. But for the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers who founded the Cali cartel, business is business, and if a homosexual can pave the way for Mexico, can plant distribution cells right in New York City, then who cares who he sleeps with. Even women were accepted. Medellín’s old sayings fell out of use: People stopped saying that all women did was spend money and spoil business. Women knew how to do everything, and they did — from money laundering to important negotiations. “Ambition” was no longer a dirty word.

Another difference: Some of Pablo’s associates were practically illiterate; they didn’t even know who Gabriel García Márquez was, Colombia’s greatest writer then living. They were proud that their power had been born of the people, and they needed to identify with them. Cali bosses, on the other hand, recited verses by Colombian poets and knew what an MBA was worth. The new narcos were capitalists just as Pablo’s were, but they were more sophisticated. They were at home among the elite of the New World. They played at being honest businessmen, wore elegant clothes, knew how to behave in high circles, and moved about freely. No more bunkers and deluxe homes hidden away somewhere. The new narcos loved the light of day, because that’s where they did their business.

The nature of trafficking changed too. Now you had to guarantee shipments, using fake companies or exploiting those legal channels in which it was easy to pass off illegal goods. And then there were the banks. First the Banco de los Trabajadores, then the First Interamericas Bank of Panama, prestigious and respected credit institutions that the new narcos used to launder money from the United States. The more territory they gained in the legal economy, the more maneuvering room they had to grow their cocaine business. Construction companies, factories, investment firms, radio stations, soccer teams, car dealerships, shopping centers. The symbol of this new mentality was a chain of American-style drugstores called Drogas la Rebaja, Discount Drugs.

Pablo’s pyramid structure — a dinosaur that had been limping along — had been surpassed. Narco-businesses now established “production objectives,” actual multiyear plans. The Cali cartel was divided into five strategic sectors: politics, security, finance, legal support, and drug trafficking.

Violence and terror were not done away with, though: Plata o plomo was still the order of the day, but while plata still flowed freely, plomo had to be weighed more carefully, applied more professionally and with more common sense. Before the hit men were youths yanked out of poverty; now they were former or corrupt soldiers. Well-trained mercenaries. Politics became one of the many sectors of society to finance. The money injected into the political system was like an anesthetic: It paralyzed Congress, making it incapable of mounting any threats while conditioning its actions. The last, weak link that tied drug traffickers to their lands was broken as well. To do business the country must be at peace, a fictitious, papier-mâché peace that needs shaking up every now and then — a warning to remind Colombians that those in charge are always there, even if they’re unseen. Henry Loaiza Ceballos, alias the Scorpion, was a real pro in this regard. One day in April 1990 he ordered hundreds of campesinos to be chopped to pieces with chain saws: Under the leadership of Father Tiberio de Jesús Fernández Mafla, the Trujillo parish priest, they had organized a march to protest the armed conflict and call for better living conditions in the countryside. Father Tiberio’s body was found — hacked to bits — in a bend in the River Cauca. Before death took him he was forced to witness the rape and murder of his niece. Then Scorpion Loaiza had the priest’s fingers cut off and forced him to eat them, along with his toes and his genitals. Father Tiberio is buried in a park honoring the Trujillo victims. The inscription on his tomb — something he’d said during his last Easter mass — is prophetic: “If my blood can help a much-needed peace to be born and blossom in Trujillo, I will spill it gladly.”

• • •

To their Italian partners, the use of violence in the New World still seemed excessive, but nonetheless, the Italians were quite happy to form a strong connection with Colombia, to get on well with their new suppliers. The Calabrese mafiosi were as tied to their land as the men of Medellín, yet they shared with the new men of Cali the most salient feature of their success: rule and prosper, without making too much noise. Don’t challenge official power, but rather use it, drain it, manipulate it. It was as if they’d been traveling the same road together for a while.

The narco-state expanded and flexed its muscles. Rather than kill a presidential candidate it didn’t like, it preferred to buy votes to elect one it did. It contaminated every corner of the country, infecting it like a cancer, mutating it in its own image. By now everybody, including the United States and the magistrates who had not been bribed, realized that Cali had become too bloated. Its fall seemed to obey a law of physics: When more growth was no longer possible, it didn’t take much to implode, and Mexico, Colombia’s North American cousin, started getting in on the action. The narco-state, presided over by the cartel, starts to vacillate, and then unravel.

The end of the Cali cartel was the last real revolution of Colombian drug lord capitalism. And with it went the whole colossal, systemically pervasive structure. It was like a beam of bright light penetrating the dark shadows for the first time, scattering cockroaches in all directions; friends became enemies, every man for himself. Some Cali cartel deserters joined the Norte del Valle cartel, which from the beginning was merely a pale imitation of the one that preceded it. Brutal without being charismatic, greedy without any particular business skills or inventiveness, incapable of keeping internal rivalries at bay, they were so scared of extradition and the betrayal of informers that they became paranoid. But times were different now. Times had changed because capitalism had changed, and the Colombians were the first to realize it.

The rest of the world was optimistic, euphoric even. It was heading toward the new millennium convinced that peace, democracy, and liberty were destined to conquer the globe. President Bill Clinton was reelected in November 1996, and a few months later Labour Party leader Tony Blair — who was convinced that a social democratic agenda must be coupled with greater free markets in order to keep step with modernity — was elected prime minister in the UK. On Wall Street, until early 1997, the Dow Jones Index climbed to levels never seen before, and the NASDAQ — the world’s first electronic stock market, which is dedicated to tech stocks such as Microsoft, Yahoo! Apple, and Google — was up big. What’s more, Steve Jobs had just returned to the helm at Apple, confident he would be able to lead the company out of crisis, and, as we all know, he succeeded brilliantly.

In keeping with the spirit of the times, the euphoric West asked for more and more cocaine. Coke was a white stain on all the optimism. And coke was identified with Colombia. It was unacceptable that in this era of creative capitalism and commerce without borders, a nation could be so rich in resources but so oppressed by a criminal monoculture. The Cali cartel had been taken down, the narco-state had been crushed. Marxist guerrillas holed up with their hostages in the jungle or mountains were an anachronism; they no longer had any reason to exist. The superpower that defeated the world communist bloc thought that all it would take to return Colombia to the free world was a concentrated effort.

The United States didn’t attach enough importance to what Mexico had become, right under their noses. Or rather, they realized it only in spurts, in individual daily reports that ended up on this or that desk, disjointed alarms about stability and public safety. Blinded by optimism, they couldn’t or didn’t want to see that what was emerging in Mexico was nothing other than the dark side of that same global capitalism they were proud to have opened every door to, to have loosened every restriction. Their gaze, also, was imprisoned in the past. Working off a borrowed plot, they wanted to write a happy ending for Colombia’s story.

• • •

Latin American stories are complicated. They’re not like those Hollywood tales where the good are good and the bad are bad. Where if you’re successful it’s because you deserve it, because you earned it with your talent and your skill that, in the end, are nothing more than the fruit of your moral virtue. So it’s easier to understand the transition that takes place in Colombia by tracing two success stories.

The first is the story of a woman. The prettiest and most popular girl in the whole country. The girl who all the men dream of having, the girl who all other girls dream of being. The exclusive model for a lingerie brand and for Colombia’s most popular beer. A line of beauty products known all over Latin America named after her. Natalia Paris. A sweet face, golden locks, honey-colored skin. Girlishly petite but with explosive breasts and glutes. Feminine perfection in miniature. Natalia is the one who created a new model of beauty, that same mix of playful naïveté and supersexy seduction that Shakira — also short, blond, and Colombian — established all around the world, thanks to her powerful voice and wild wiggles, but Natalia’s star rose first. The other story is about a man who as a boy was saddled with a nickname that doesn’t do him justice: El Mono, the Monkey. He doesn’t have the grotesque features of a howler or a spider monkey, the most common species in Colombia; at most, his slightly sunken eyes might make you think of a gorilla: There’s something frightening in his fixed gaze. His mother is Colombian, his father an Italian who left the town of Sapri to make a better life for himself in the New World. El Mono is named after his father, Salvatore Mancuso, and he fulfilled his father’s immigrant dream of integration and success, in his own way.

Both the Beauty and the Monkey were born in cities in the north, the most densely populated and developed part of the country, to families that work hard to achieve the relative ease of the middle class. Natalia’s father is a pilot who dies when she was only eight months old, but her mother is a woman of vigorous temperament and principles, and she’s a lawyer, a career that has given her financial autonomy. Salvatore is the second of six children, his father an electrician who, after years of hard work, manages to open first an appliance repair shop, and then an auto repair shop.

Their parents save in order to send them to good schools, which is also a way of keeping them, as much as possible, away from bad company and street violence. Natalia attends a Catholic boarding school, goes to Boston to study, and enrolls in college with the idea of becoming an advertising agent. But in the meantime, her modeling career takes off. While still a teenager she lands her first important contract: Her radiant smile promotes a toothpaste made in the United States. Then she becomes the poster girl for Cristal Oro beer, a sunny presence in a tiny bikini who winks from the walls of houses, in magazines passed from one person to the next at the hairdresser’s, on huge billboards along the highway. She is everywhere, admired and recognized in a way that had never happened to a Colombian model before. The most common dream of every attractive girl in Colombia was — and still is — to become a beauty queen. The long lead-up to the Miss Colombia pageant is sheer madness. A circus of glossy magazines lands on the Cartagena de Indias beach, and schoolchildren in Cartagena are given two weeks’ vacation. A 24-carat, gold-plated crown with an emerald — the national gem — in the center is placed on the winner’s head, and during her year as Miss Colombia she is received by the president of the republic.

But there are also hundreds of minor beauty pageants. Wherever they’re held, the aspiring beauty queens are eagerly awaited. The hearts of the people of Colombia swell with the desire to make up for their tough daily lives, to forget the violence, the injustice, and the political scandals that seem as if they will never end. Colombians are a happy people, that vibrant happiness that develops as an antidote to fatalism.

But that’s not enough to explain the proliferation of the phenomenon. In Latin America, and in particular in drug-trafficking countries, beauty pageants are also fairs where thoroughbreds already belonging to a particular stable are paraded. The contest is often fixed from the start: The girl who belongs to the most powerful owner wins. The best present you can give a woman is to buy her a beauty queen’s crown, a gift that also makes the prestige of the man who chose her shine. That’s how it went for Yovanna Guzmán, who was elected Chica Med when she was with Wílber “Soap” Varela, one of the leaders of the Norte del Valle cartel. But even when that’s how it goes, the less fortunate girls can still hope to be noticed by other drug lords who flock to the pageant to choose a new lover, or try their luck in the next pageant.

But Natalia, who did not have to go through anything of the sort in her rise to stardom, suddenly finds herself more envied than Miss Colombia. Her mother would never have allowed her to exhibit herself in a setting where every courteous display of attention is tantamount to a risk. The people who hang around a set are easier to keep an eye on. She goes with Natalia to every appointment, and is her manager and guardian. And she gives her a breast enlargement — two sizes — for her eighteenth birthday, though she never imagines that this further investment in her daughter’s already winning image will make her the forerunner of an epidemic that will soon become all the rage. Even girls from the poorest countryside and the most derelict barrios start prostituting themselves in order to scrape together enough money for breast implants — the prerequisite for getting into the good graces of some boss, which is the only chance they have to better themselves. This is the story the Colombian TV series Sin tetas no hay paraíso (Without Breasts There Is No Paradise) tells. Shown all over the world in toned-down versions, the original was based on Gustavo Bolívar Moreno’s rigorous reportage about the southwestern department of Putumayo, a traditional coca-growing area.

Lucia Gaviria — Natalia’s mother — is always on the lookout. The opportunity that fate has given her daughter must be cultivated fully for as long as it lasts, but it would be a grave error to depend on it. She too had posed for some fashion photo shoots in her youth, but without her law degree, who knows how she would have managed after she was widowed. You have to keep your head on your shoulders and your feet on the ground, aim for safe and solid goals. That beauty is an ephemeral asset, and that a Colombian woman must use other means to earn and to maintain control over her life, to be the author of her own destiny — of these lessons, Natalia’s mother is the best teacher, because she is the perfect model. She has a new partner now, and a second child: a normal family, one that is proud to know that’s what they are, especially in this time and place, which is overrun by such unbridled madness.

• • •

Colombia is the country of a thousand faces. One minute you’re blinded by the sun reflecting off white walls, and the next you’re hit with a sunset, the colors of which light the landscape on fire. If Colombia is disorienting, Montería is energized by its contradictions. A city on the banks of the Sinú River, it is the capital of the department of Córdoba. Simple cottages and skyscrapers burst through tropical trees, dozens of different ethnicities are jammed together in an often impossible cohabitation.

Montería is where Salvatore Mancuso Gómez is born and raised, in a house his father builds with his own hands. His sons, even as little boys, tag along when he goes hunting, fascinated by his treasure: a small arsenal they are never allowed to get near. Don Salvador — which, thanks to an error at immigration, is how he is known in the registrar’s office — raises his children with a firm hand. To maintain their relative social and economic tranquillity, he sets down strict rules that are beyond question.

But in the end his severity pays off. Monkey’s recklessness is limited to his youth, when he is the little boss of the neighborhood, and the other children, in homage to the fuzz that sprouts on his body before any does on theirs, give him that nickname. Or during motocross season in the 1980s, when he wins the national championship and turns the Bianchi brothers, his Italian compatriots who run a Yamaha dealership in Montería, into sales champions.

Like Natalia’s mother, Don Salvador knows that a boy needs gratification, needs such moments of fleeting glory, as long as they don’t risk derailing his life. Salvatore is a good son. He finishes high school and goes to study in the United States; if he fails to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh, it’s not because he lacks the will to study but because he’s too homesick. Especially for Martha, whom he married before he was even eighteen, and little Gianluigi, just a few months old. Don Salvador insists he really wants his tenacious son to build a life for himself in the United States, but he can’t help but yield to the reasoning of a young father. Salvatore returns to Colombia, and he and Martha move to Bogotá, so he can finish his studies there.

Once again the second-born son’s plans diverge from those of his father, and once again his father will not be able to stop him: Salvatore doesn’t want to become an engineer; he wants to become a farmer and animal breeder, a real old-fashioned Colombian. It also seems that he plans to avenge his father, who, after thirty years of sacrifice, had finally managed to buy some land but was forced to sell his beloved finca when he refused to give in to the guerrillas’ extortions. What can you say to a son who stubbornly wants to finish what you couldn’t? That it’s too dangerous, too hard? The Mancusos are proud people, and in the end Salvatore takes a degree in agrarian studies, returns to Montería, and settles with his family on the Campamento farm that Martha has just inherited from her father. The soil is rich, the farmhouse a jewel to be treasured. Don Salvador backs the loan his son needs to transform his business into a lucrative, exquisite dream. It means getting up at dawn and toiling as much as — even more than — the campesinos. Putting his father’s philosophy into practice is hard work. Two years go by, and the hacienda Campamento arouses the admiration not only of the other farmers but of the guerrilla fighters as well, whose appetites are ravenous.

In the early 1990s, the country where Salvatore is starting to make a name for himself is like a gangrenous Wild West. For years now it has been impossible to keep track of all the guerrilla violence in the department of Córdoba: extortions; executions; cattle rustling; kidnapping of innocent people, women and children included. The guerrillas take advantage of the lack of political leadership and the inability of the police to control the situation. A decade earlier the farmers and breeders of the department of Antioquia gathered for the first time, in Medellín, to try to find a solution to the problem. The Association of Middle Magdalena Ranchers and Farmers (ACDEGAM) was born. Nothing revolutionary, they were simply acting on a 1965 decree that gave farmers the right to take up arms in self-defense, with the help of the authorities. Soldiers and farmers arm in arm in an all-out war, where what counts is not the monopoly of force that characterizes every modern state but the identification of a common enemy to annihilate. Yet the situation for farmers in Antioquia and Córdoba remained alarming, the worth of their lands and livestock having fallen to one-fifth its previous value.

Salvatore Mancuso knows all this far too well, just as he knows of the acronyms, manpower, and locations of the insurgents. For years he has listened to the stories of oppression and assembled all the examples he could of people confronting those parasitic bandits who fatten on the fruits of honest people’s labor. He is ready. If an immigrant electrician, worn down by a lifetime of work, didn’t cave, then neither will his son, in the prime of his life and prepared to die for his land and his men. Let them try something, if they dare.

It’s just past dawn, the sun’s slanting rays speckle the ground ochre. Three shadows, lit from behind, approach Salvatore. Emerging into the light, they take on the appearance of guerrillas. Salvatore grabs his rifle and without thinking twice, points it at them. They tell him that their boss wants to see him, but Salvatore refuses to go with them.

Parrita works on Salvatore’s finca. He’s a sharp kid, barely twelve years old, not afraid of anything. The men tease him, tell him he’ll be afraid once he grows up, that Colombia teaches you respect for those who are stronger than you. But Parrita just shrugs his shoulders. He’s a cocky kid, and Salvatore likes him. Salvatore sends for him, gives him a two-way radio, and tells him to follow the three guerrillas, to find their base, and to lie in ambush, awaiting further orders. In the meantime, Salvatore starts organizing; he convinces the colonel of the Junín battalion of Montería to lend him some men and, following Parrita’s directions, he flushes out the three guerrillas and kills them.

Salvatore Mancuso has taken his destiny into his own hands. There’s no going back now unless he wants to lose everything he has built for himself. Word spreads from farm to farm about the young haciendero who defied the terrorist thugs in a way no one had ever dared to do before. Not even Pablo Escobar, who, when the daughter of Don Fabio Ochoa Restrepo, a big horse breeder and primogenitor of a high-ranking criminal family in the Medellín cartel, was kidnapped, founded a group called MAS, Muerte a Secuestradores (Death to Kidnappers) in keeping with his theatrical bent. The most powerful man in Colombia shouted threateningly and loaded the avengers with money and weapons. But an immigrant’s son, rather than sending others to do the job, silently took the law into his own hands. Salvatore himself, rather than his farm, became the example to follow. The Montería soldiers get him the permissions he needs to turn his estate into an armed fort and provide him with bodyguards. They’re galvanized as well, and start calling Salvatore cacique, because he’s a chief now, a leader, recognized by the local community. One man in particular bonds like a brother with Salvatore: Major Walter Fratini, vice commander of the battalion that came to his aid during his first retaliation against the guerrillas. They’re both of Italian descent, and they share a love of guns and good wine.

Together they devise a military plan. They divide up the region on a map, assigning surveillance and patrol duties for each area. The farmers communicate via radio, so they can report suspicious presences and have military escorts whenever they make a move. Their experiment in self-defense takes off, and Salvatore’s prestige grows even more.

But he never loses sight of the larger goal. His work follows him home every evening. And one evening he gets some bad news: While defending a group of contras under attack, Major Fratini’s helicopter was shot down, and Fratini was kidnapped by the EPL — the Popular Liberation Army — one of the many Colombian guerrilla groups. His body is found the next day: He’d been tortured to death. Unforgettable images. Images that deepen the ruts in Salvatore Mancuso’s path.

• • •

The very blond girl who appears on bars of soap and school notebooks all over Colombia has become, now more than ever, a friendly presence in her hometown, offering gaiety and comfort. To the rest of the world it seems that Medellín has lost the one person who had made it famous — Pablo Escobar. But for those who live there, Natalia’s shining star attests to all things good and beautiful and eases the anxiety created by the death of Colombia’s lord and master. Yes, because if on the one hand there’s a sense of relief, on the other there’s a sense of fear. Fear of a vacuum. Not of the vacuum itself, but rather of who and how many will step forward to fill it. Pablo Escobar was killed in the same year as Major Fratini, Monkey’s fraternal friend. Now that the king is dead, all those who were his enemy can try to elbow their way in. The guerrillas come forward, Cali gains ground, and a vigilante group calling itself Los Pepes, for Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, or People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar — which seems like a sarcastic response to MAS — puffs out its chest. The rival Cali cartel had bribed Los Pepes to get rid of Escobar, and Los Pepes’ members had sown terror primarily in his own fiefdom. Now what will they do, these men trained and equipped for killing? Will they leave? Will they want a slice of territory to manage? The only thing people know for sure is that there’s no hoping Los Pepes will simply fade away. Irregular armies don’t simply dismantle themselves.

The government shares the people’s concern. The state’s major antagonist is dead, but the breeding grounds of conflict are multiplying, which is a problem. A problem for the Colombian people, naturally, but also for a leadership hoping for an image boost after the demise of the country’s most famous antihero. Instead it looks as if civil war might break out again, worse than before. Colombia’s presidents, one after another, are aware of the limits of their own power. The best they can do is aim for a balance of forces. They need the counterrevolutionaries to check the guerrillas, but the vigilantes need to be curbed somehow as well. They think they’ve finally hit on the right strategy with Salvatore Mancuso’s approach, which a growing number of hacienderos are imitating. Self-defense needs to be legalized further so that even those groups born as armed wings of cartels — the most ferocious and best equipped formations — will be interested in banding together. So, in 1994, a decree is issued to regulate private vigilante groups and their collaboration with the army, extending the military’s exclusive use of certain weapons to groups that now call themselves CONVIVIR — Cooperativas de Vigilancia y Seguridad Privada, or Special Vigilance and Private Security Services. Mancuso is the head of the Convivir Horizonte, expanding the original cadre by ten or so men armed with pistols, rifles, and machine guns.

Now that he has the full right to do so, Salvatore wants to prove his worth and to avenge the friend who initiated him into the use of weapons. Accompanied by an army battalion he walks in the forest for thirty days, surviving on canned goods so as to avoid lighting a fire and alerting his enemies. In the tract of Cordillera that separates Córdoba from the northern tongue of Antioquia they come upon a mountain. The overhanging rock cliffs terrify the men, many of whom turn back. But, urged on by the Monkey, enough of them make it to the top to make a surprise attack on the region’s FARC stronghold. Shooting breaks out, but Salvatore and his men come out alive.

• • •

A private army is operating in the same area as Mancuso, the Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá, or the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá. The army renamed itself in light of the law on CONVIVIR forces, so as to legally provide armed protection to farmers and breeders. It belongs to the Castaño brothers, who have a long history of implacable hatred for guerrilla fighters and who were born into money. Wealth is what has defined their lives. The sons of Don Jesús, a breeder so highly regarded as a politician and so convinced of landowners’ rights to rule that he was one of the first men whom the FARC came after on his finca, in order to teach him a lesson. It seems like centuries have passed since that day thirteen years ago, since that interminable wait, till that moment when the brothers finally knew for sure that, despite the ransom they’d paid, their father would never come home again. The black hole of their existence. They’ve been at war ever since, a war that — on principle — takes no prisoners. They fought on their own, hiring a hundred or so men willing to do anything. They sent them into the area where Don Jesús had been held hostage and had them kill, impale, and chop to pieces every human being they could find there to teach the people who supported those villains a lesson. They developed a good relationship with Pablo Escobar, and had Carlos, the youngest Castaño brother, join MAS, which educated him in every conceivable method of dirty war.

But then the Castaño brothers broke with Escobar, who, in his megalomaniac paranoia, had had some of their friends killed. Realizing that he planned to have them killed as well, they accepted the invitation of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers of the Cali cartel and formed Los Pepes. They became the pack of dogs in the hunting party out to get their former ally, whose partners and relatives they murdered. So now they’re practically right back where they started: a vigilante group bigger and wealthier than the others.

In the last decade the Castaño brothers have grown even wealthier. The cocaine lords have paid them extremely well. They’ve also paid their enemies well. The Castaño brothers would have already crushed FARC and all the other communist bastards, would have already destroyed all their support networks, if the guerrillas’ anticapitalist insurrection had not been financed by cocaine money. But it costs money to maintain a permanent war, and that’s why the insurgents have entered the drug business as well.

When the Castaño brothers invite Salvatore to join forces, he takes his time in answering. He’d prefer to just carry on as before, knowing, perhaps, of their long-standing ties with drug trafficking. But then one day, on his way home with his wife, his first-born, Gianluigi, and his second son, who is barely two years old, he runs into a roadblock between Montería and his estate: a FARC ambush, a kidnapping attempt. He hides his agitation so as not to scare his children even more, but a few days later he tells Martha that he can’t keep going it alone. He agrees to merge with the Castaños. And then, when his first arrest warrant for murder arrives, he leaves Campamento for good. From that day in 1996 he stops being Salvatore Mancuso. Now he is only El Mono, the Monkey, El Cacique, Santander Lozada, Triple Cero, and all his other adopted battle names. He is no longer a rice grower and horse breeder but an underground warlord.

When the Monkey, now about thirty, is making the third decisive move of his life, beautiful Natalia is just over twenty. When her mother sees her in bed, in her knit pajamas and surrounded by her stuffed animals, when she wakes her up to get her ready for school or to take her to a morning meeting and watches her, still sleepy, stumble sulkily to the bathroom, she tells herself that she still seems like a little girl. Because Natalia will always be her little girl, just like for every mother. But also because nature has been kind to Natalia, passing on her mother’s genes, giving her a body that resists time. A lighthearted girl, naïve and happy. And this is because Lucia Gaviria knows how to protect her daughter’s other nature — her inner nature — from the fangs of time. The money she has earned has made her even more lighthearted, which is as it should be, even though it doesn’t always work that way. To the sea of stuffed animals has been added a closet, overflowing with shoes, clothes, creams, perfumes, and some jewelry.

By now Natalia Paris has gotten used to being a star as soon as she steps out her front door. Used to seeing an army of girls who could be her clones on the streets of Colombia. Used to the paparazzi’s flashbulbs around the corner, used to rebuffing advances with a no that is as sweet as it is firm. Not one of the boys she goes out with has ever made her lose her focus, let alone her head.

Lucia Gaviria’s fears begin to wane. You can breathe more easily in Medellín now than you could a few years ago. It no longer happens that she has to go to a funeral because her best friend’s daughter has been ripped apart by a car bomb and for a while afterward she can’t find the courage to call her because her own daughter is still alive. It no longer happens that Natalia asks to go to a disco with her school friends and comes home talking about how shooting broke out when they were on the dance floor. Natalia is still frightened, sure, but not nearly as much now. When you grow up in certain places, you end up adapting to the reality around you. Doña Lucia realizes that bell jars are pathetically fragile.

It’s also true that those early days, when sudden success threatened to upset an adolescent’s precarious balance, are gone. In fact, Natalia’s celebrity was precisely what helped her. A star enjoys less freedom of movement than a normal person. In order to make her life bearable she frequents the same places where, mainly, people learn to pretend not to notice her, to treat her normally.

And so, a gray area worms its way into Lucia Gaviria’s vigilance. The gym. Keeping in shape is a professional necessity for Natalia, and besides, she really loves physical activity. For the most part she takes classes for women: aerobics and Latin American dance, activities that take the place of evenings at the disco, which, with all the attention she received, had become too exhausting. But now she wants to learn how to scuba dive. Her gym offers a one-week class in Santa Marta, the famous Caribbean tourist city. It’s not the tropical fish that frighten Doña Lucia, or the breathing apparatus and tanks. Sea sharks are far less dangerous than land sharks.

It must have been an almost mystical experience to watch Natalia remove her mask and fins and peel off her wet suit with a decisive tug. And yet she seemed oblivious to the way everyone looked at her. There was a man in the group who had had the same effect on her, though, ever since their first dive. He took off his equipment, stowed it, and then dove off the edge of the dinghy. She wanted to dive in after him, but didn’t dare. She waited for him to make a move, even the smallest sign, some joke, or a plea for help. He was already an expert diver, already had his instructor’s license, in fact. He’d gotten it in California, where he’d lived for work. The class her gym offered was merely a way for him to get back into his favorite sport.

This is what he tells her a few evenings later when he takes her to a romantic bistro. Medellín is not like Los Angeles, where, to recharge your batteries, you can ride the waves on your surfboard, go running on the beach, or swim out to the horizon and back. “I’m really tied to my family and my city,” he says, “but I miss the ocean and being outside.”

Natalia is already deeply in love. But now she’s convinced that Julio is the most extraordinary man she’ll ever meet. She’s comfortable pressing against him in the boat, kissing him, or clinging to him in the water. Love is a triumph that must be flaunted.

At first Lucia merely thinks that the vacation did her daughter good. But she soon senses that Natalia’s irrepressible happiness can’t be simply the positive effect of the Caribbean sun. There’s clearly a budding romance. It must be a special sort of crush, though, because, oddly, her daughter doesn’t talk to her about it. She feels a pang of anxiety, but represses it immediately. Natalia has always been impulsive, enthusiastic. She’s a Leo, a passionate sign, but sooner or later the fire goes out. It’s better to wait, to trust her. Lucia thinks she knows her daughter well enough to know that she’ll be the one to talk about it first.

And, in fact, Natalia doesn’t keep quiet for long. When she tells her mother about Julio, how handsome he is, how athletic, how attentive and elegant, her face lights up so much that her mother has to take a deep breath before she can begin asking questions. She is truly sorry to tumble her off the cloud she’s floating on.

“How old is he?”

“I don’t know. Thirty, thirty-five…”

“Are you sure he’s not married?”

“What are you saying, Mami? He was in Los Angeles, he came back to help his family, I think.”

“And what exactly was he doing in Los Angeles?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“So you have no idea what it is he does, this Julio of yours?”

“Oh, business of some sort. But he’s rich, family money. He has a fabulous house and some other properties too, a hotel maybe, or a country estate.”

“Maybe. But you don’t know how he got rich. Or how his family got rich.”

“No, Mami, and I don’t care! You can’t always think like this, calculating everything all the time, planning. Those things don’t matter at all when you’re in love!”

Natalia starts to cry and locks herself in her room. Lucia Gaviria stays sitting in the kitchen, devastated. She has an awful feeling; she can barely breathe. To calm down she pours herself a glass of water and finishes up some mindless house chores.

The only question she dares ask the next day is the last name of Natalia’s beau. She tries to sound casual, but she knows Natalia’s not fooled. With that piece of information she heads to court, as she does every morning. Off to face her tragedy.

Julio César Correa. A drug trafficker. He got his start as a hit man at Pablo Escobar’s side. His new last name, which replaces his original one, reflects his status as a killer: Fierro, Julio Fierro. All over Latin America fierro—as in Italy,ferro—literally meaning “iron,” means “gun.” In this new era Julio established his independence as a professional killer and got involved directly in the cocaine business, becoming a traqueto, a trafficker. Doña Lucia wonders if he went to the United States because of Don Pablo’s death, to make himself scarce. But now he’s back. Back in time to make Natalia lose her head. She simply won’t listen to reason. She confesses that Julio carries a pistol around town, but then screams: “What’s wrong with that, everybody else does!”

Whenever she addresses her mother now, Natalia always shouts.

Doña Lucia establishes peremptory rules and strict curfews, much stricter than when Natalia was under age. But when she’s alone, waiting for her daughter to return, Lucia Gaviria takes to brooding and blaming herself. Why did she let her take that damned diving course?

The years pass. Natalia’s mother is done in by the war she is fighting in vain. More and more she has long crying fits that are only in part a way of emotionally blackmailing her daughter. Julio tries to soften her up whenever possible, reassure her how deeply in love he is, swears that he will always have the utmost respect for Natalia and those dear to her. And he does seem sincere and polite, quite different from the ugly, vulgar traquetos she comes across in court. But Doña Lucia remains coldly courteous. She must resist; she must break their bond.

But her daughter is still as crazy for Julio as she was that very first day. And everything Doña Lucia does — cry, threaten, argue furiously — merely pushes her daughter further away. Further into Julio’s arms.

One morning Natalia comes into the kitchen with a frighteningly serious look on her face, her eyes puffy and red. She’s been even more nervous lately, and has been sleeping poorly. She doesn’t open her mouth until her stepfather, Doña Lucia’s companion who has acted as Natalia’s father since she was little, arrives.

“Natalia wants to tell you something.”

“I’m pregnant, Mami. I’m in my fourth month.”

It’s a catastrophe, and Lucia Gaviria is the last in the family to know. She doesn’t speak to her daughter for a week.

But she doesn’t hold out for long. She senses that for the first time in all these years Natalia is frightened as well. She no longer lives in a fairyland. Fairy tales don’t exist in Medellín, and Doña Lucia can’t abandon her now. So one day she buys her a pair of sneakers, so she’ll be more comfortable in the months to come, when the baby in her womb starts to weigh on her. She leaves the box on Natalia’s bed with a note that says “God bless you.” They both weep that evening, Natalia in her bedroom, her mother in the living room. But the door is too thin for them not to hear each other’s sobs.

Natalia is under contract with Cristal Oro for their new ad campaign, but she’ll be in her seventh month by the time the shooting starts. Is Lucia Gaviria supposed to cancel? What excuse can she give them?

She is more furious with Julio than ever, even though he does everything one could expect from a Colombian man. He says he wants to marry Natalia, that having a baby with her is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to him, that everything will be fine. And her daughter goes along with everything he says. But at a certain point, Natalia’s happiness no longer seems like the other side of fear. She starts sleeping better, and gradually looks more radiant. Doña Lucia attributes the difference to hormonal changes related to her condition, until her daughter talks with her again.

“It’s all resolved, Mami. We’re going to go live in the United States soon; we’re going to start a new life there!”

A new life? In the United States?

The United States is every drug trafficker’s nightmare, so much so that in the 1980s a popular saying among the Colombian narcos was: “Better a tomb in Colombia than a prison cell in the United States.” What’s more, in 1997 Colombia, backed into a tight corner by the United States, altered its constitution so as to reintroduce extradition. Sometimes her daughter is so naïve she seems stupid.

And yet everything Natalia told her turns out to be true.

Not even a month goes by before Natalia leaves for Florida. All she had to do was pack her suitcase. Julio took care of everything else: the villa on the beach, their visas, all the other paperwork necessary for settling in the United States. Or rather, his new Yankee contacts took care of most of it. They’re not cocaine importers, though. In fact, they’re the cocaine importers’ antagonists par excellence: the Miami DEA.

Julio César Correa is one of the first Colombian narcos to negotiate something that officially never existed. Precisely because his case is intended to motivate others, he’s one of the luckiest ones: not a single day in jail; no more trials hanging over his head for having flooded the streets of North America with cocaine. In exchange for millions of narco-dollars deposited in U.S. coffers and — more important — precious information.

The Miami DEA’s undertaking seems like a wild shot. How can the “world’s policeman” allow someone guilty of serious crimes under its own jurisdiction have his sentence eliminated?

Beyond that, how would it make contact with a drug lord and propose something of the sort to him? He would be the first to suspect he was being screwed. The contact person might never come back. The DEA’s office needs a more sophisticated intermediary.

• • •

Baruch Vega is a Colombian fashion photographer living in Miami. He has worked for Armani, Gucci, Valentino, Chanel, Hermès, all the major fashion houses and cosmetics companies. The second of eleven children of a trumpet player from Bogotá who relocated to Bucaramanga, a plateau in the middle of the mountains in northeast Colombia, Baruch won a Kodak competition when he was fifteen. He immortalized a bird as it emerged from a lake with a fish in its beak. But his parents make him study engineering. At the University of Santander he is recruited by the CIA and sent to Chile: Salvador Allende’s government is about to fall.

Baruch Vega hates his job. To make his escape he dusts off his skill as a photographer. He arrives in New York in the 1970s and photographs the very first top models, the likes of Lauren Hutton and Christie Brinkley. He manages to get what matters most where he comes from: success, money, and women. Earning them in the United States increases his prestige. Every time Vega goes back to Colombia he shows up with a slew of cover girls. They’re his business card. And that’s how, in the course of his double career as photographer and undercover agent, he got to know many of the big Colombian cartel bosses and frequented the homes of important drug lords, such as the Ochoa brothers, Escobar’s associates in the Medellín cartel.

His first encounter with Julio Fierro is in a hotel in Cartagena, during the Miss Colombia pageant, not coincidentally. Vega plays his part. He says he knows some DEA agents you could make a deal with. All you have to do is pay: the gringo cops’ assistance, plus a percentage for his services.

For a drug lord, if you don’t have to pay, it’s not credible. The higher the price, the more trustworthy it seems. Baruch Vega is the best guarantee on the bargaining table. What could a man like him, who makes money in an enviable profession, want? More money. A man who risks his life for more money is a man who deserves respect. Respect and trust. As proof of his reliability, Vega organizes trips to Miami with his “private plane,” which will later turn out to be paid for by the DEA. The presence onboard of an antidrug agent guarantees that there will be other friendly cops at the airport ready to walk the drug traffickers — several of them on the top of the DEA’s most wanted list — through passport control without a visa. Just a little outing — to take their girlfriends to the hottest restaurants, shower them with gifts, and then back home. Next time, their farewell to Colombia and drug trafficking will be final.

Julio Fierro proves to be very useful to Vega and his friends at the DEA, whose initiative makes a qualitative leap. In Panama they organize the first of many big meetings between drug traffickers and antidrug agents. A summit of sorts, or a convention. In fact, that’s exactly what they call them. Julio arrives from Florida with Baruch Vega and the men from the DEA. Vega has taken care of everything, down to the last detail. He has filled the plane with the usual bevy of beauties, booked suites at the Intercontinental Hotel; he even makes sure that, after their trying day, they can catch some R&R at just the right club, with agents and drug traffickers emptying champagne bottles together, surrounded by willing women.

But Julio holds the trump card. He takes out a Colombian passport and passes it around to his former rivals and allies. The gringos have given him a new identity and a regular visa. Thanks to the United States, Julio Fierro no longer needs to hope for a tomb in Colombia. His gesture sets off a chain reaction that will change everything. But the big news in Natalia’s life is something else: Mariana, born in Miami, is a U.S. citizen.

• • •

These negotiations between the DEA and the drug lords — which sound like something right out of a novel — are less unbelievable than they first seem. The situation in Colombia is extremely complicated. The government’s credibility is lower than ever, incapable of holding any sway at home or of representing it abroad. In some respects, the United States takes advantage of this weakness. During the last year of President Ernesto Samper Pizano’s term, he was under investigation for having been elected through Cali cartel support, and Article 35 of the constitution is altered so as to reintroduce the long-awaited — or feared — policy of extradition. The Colombian president knows he has nothing more to lose.

For the moment, that’s all the United States can obtain through official channels. Unless they’re considered in this new juridical context the “under the counter” meetings the DEA promoted don’t make much sense. The concrete threat of extradition with no possible sentence reduction all of a sudden makes the alternative of near impunity in exchange for collaboration and the restitution of large sums of illegal money quite attractive. The DEA’s real objective is to corrode the trafficking organizations from within, to use the information obtained to prepare the decisive blow and to foster a climate of suspicion that generates exhausting internal feuds. Giovanni Falcone, the Italian judge killed by the Mafia in 1992, noted that pentiti, or criminals turned informers, were the legal weapon the Mafia feared most. In Italy it was possible, albeit with notable resistance, to strictly regulate the way criminals turned informers were handled. But for the United States the problems are many: Its widespread Law & Order culture; its international hegemony, which cannot be openly compromised; the very fact of approaching non-U.S. citizens; and finally, the urgent need to do something to reduce the power of cocaine, which, despite the dismemberment of Colombia’s drug-trafficking dinosaurs, continues to grow. The DEA targets every exponent of real power: bosses who still control the old cartels; high-ranking members of rising clans; and narcos for all seasons, such as Julio Fierro. But also members of Mancuso’s and the Castaño brothers’ Autodefensas, who are becoming an increasingly formidable threat.

After the Cali cartel’s fall, paramilitary groups started receiving many more requests for their protection services from emerging groups, such as the Norte del Valle cartel. But their own involvement in drug trafficking is reaching a level of systematic autonomy in direct relation to the increase in their territorial dominance. By now they manage every step, from cultivation to transportation routes to negotiations with buyers. Half the department of Córdoba cocaleros are under their control, half under the control of leftist guerrillas. They can now take each other on with the force of two opposing armies. In 1997 the self-defense groups formed a federation, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), or AUC, headed by Carlos Castaño. The Monkey was a cofounder, in command of AUC’s largest military formation, the Bloque Catatumbo, which would come to include forty-five hundred men.

The conflict is becoming less of an ideological clash and more of a full-blown war of conquest. Once the outer shells of extreme right nationalism and revolutionary Marxism are removed, events in Colombia prefigure the current postmodern barbarity in Mexico. The AUCs are the “founding fathers” of the Familia Michoacana and the Knights Templar, and they increasingly descend on villages in areas controlled by the guerrillas, wiping out the inhabitants. They use primitive tools, such as machetes and chain saws, to behead and chop peasants to pieces, but they plan their operations with cold military calculation, flying military planes hundreds of miles to the place of action and then flying out once the killing is done.

The situation has become intolerable. Public opinion no longer buys the rationalization for the killings, which merely repeats the same old story about the victims having supported the guerrillas. The strategy of balancing opposing forces has proven to be a disaster: Just over six months after the AUC is founded, the Colombian constitutional court declares the part of the decree that regulates surveillance and private safety co-ops illegal. Paramilitary groups are supposed to hand over the military weapons they’ve been issued and to respect human rights.

But it’s too late. Carlos Castaño has more than thirty thousand men under his command, and the income from cocaine trafficking is more than enough to supply them with all sorts of military equipment. Declaring them outlaws has only made them more ferocious. In old Hollywood westerns the pistol-carrying hero never turns into a ruthless outlaw. But in the land of coke, that and much worse happens. The Monkey has mutated into one of Colombia’s principal strategists of horror.

El Aro is a tiny village of sixty houses, which are more like shacks than homes, with zinc roofs and rotting doors. Compared to his fellow villagers, Marco Aurelio Areiza, who owns two grocer’s shops, is a rich man. But because El Aro is in FARC-controlled territory, he also risks his life every day. Because Marco Aurelio also sells food to the guerrillas. He’d be crazy to refuse: Who would ever dream of saying no to armed men who emerge from the forest? In the tormented land of Colombia there’s an unwritten law: Collaborate with whoever is holding a gun, regardless of what uniform they’re wearing. In fact, Marco Aurelio also collaborates with Salvatore Mancuso’s army, which comes and accuses him of supporting the guerrillas. It’s a bogus interrogation, because the village and its inhabitants had already been condemned to death days before. El Aro is like a bridgehead, an outpost that must be conquered in order to get to FARC-controlled areas. Its fate is also meant to serve as a warning to all the other villages.

The 150 men of Mancuso’s Bloque Catatumbo torture and kill 17 people, burn down forty-three houses, steal twelve hundred head of cattle, and force 702 villagers to leave their homes. Marco Aurelio is tortured, his body broken. When the police arrive they find his wife, Rosa María Posada, sitting vigil over her husband’s body. She doesn’t want their children to see his mangled flesh.

• • •

Everyone is convinced that drastic change is needed in Colombia. An election campaign is starting up, reigniting the hopes within the country as well as in the White House. One candidate’s résumé boasts not only of his defeat in the previous election because of the handful of votes the Cali cartel bought, but of his miraculous survival — he was kidnapped in the late 1980s while running for mayor of Bogotá, a post he held after his liberation. This politician, so unpopular with the drug lords, seems to be just the man to lead the country.

Andrés Pastrana promises pacification and tight collaboration with the United States. When he wins he opens the doors to the Great Alliance for Change, inviting congressmen from all parties to participate. The wave of optimism and grand negotiations has finally reached Colombia.

As promised, the new president negotiates simultaneously with FARC and the United States. That this does not generate immediate opposition in Washington is probably due not so much to the Democratic Clinton administration as to the global receptivity to negotiations. In war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina the 1995 Dayton Accords are put into effect. The peace process between Israel and Palestine is slowly picking up again, in the wake of the Oslo Accords. But the most encouraging example is probably that of the United Kingdom: Opposing governments are successfully negotiating a permanent truce and IRA disarmament. The end of the lengthy and devastating conflict in Northern Ireland is close at hand. “Peace” is a word that now flows freely from people’s lips.

And yet Colombia’s ambitious plans will all fail miserably. Because it’s not only a question of men with opposing political objectives ruling illegally; those men can be eliminated in various ways. But cocaine dies hard. Pastrana’s experiment to allow the guerrillas a demilitarized zone — the so-called distension zone — twice the size of New Jersey — turns out to be an ill-considered risk from the get-go. The FARC does as it pleases in its assigned territory and doesn’t even dream of entering upon serious negotiations: It grants no truce; in fact it intensifies its military activity. Kidnappings, whether politically or financially motivated; urban raids; control of cocaine: It’s all the same as before. Disappointment beats down the president’s popularity. When in 2002 the guerrillas go so far as to hijack a plane — a regularly scheduled flight — to kidnap a senator, Pastrana realizes that the moment has come to declare an end to the peace talks. War breaks out again: The distention zone must be reclaimed immediately. Three days later FARC forces abduct Ingrid Betancourt, a presidential candidate for the Partido Verde Oxígeno in the upcoming elections. Convinced that an armed conflict should not deprive citizens of their fundamental rights, Betancourt wanted to bring her platform to the Colombians in that area. But her captivity will last until July 2, 2008—2,321 days — when she is liberated by the Colombian armed forces.

According to the new president, Álvaro Uribe, the approach to take is that of an iron fist. The state must show its muscle and take back the country. Besides, the world is no longer what it once was. In one day the Twin Towers and the world’s optimism collapsed. The only possible response now is war, it seems. In Colombia the war on terror coincides with the war on drugs. There can be no victory without a victory over drug trafficking.

And so, despite their differences, Álvaro Uribe will maintain one of his predecessor’s key efforts: Plan Colombia, the major pact with the United States to end the production and sale of cocaine. Pastrana had announced emphatically, shortly after his election in 1998, that he was negotiating a Marshall Plan for Colombia with the United States. As in postwar Europe, billions of dollars were supposed to pour in to revive the country, help Colombians free it of cocaine, and support those campesinos who agreed to convert their fields back to far less profitable but legal crops. But the actual plan, signed by Bill Clinton in 2000 and reconfirmed by George W. Bush until the end of his term, takes a different direction. A slow and costly social and economic transformation suddenly seems like a utopia. There’s not enough money, trust, or consensus. There’s not enough time. Funding depends on being able to show results. So everything rests on the quickest option, that of force.

The use of force translates, first of all, into a war on cocaine. Victory will be declared only when not a single leaf of cocaine is left growing in Colombia. Plants are uprooted, fields carpet-bombed with fumigation planes, lands made barren with aggressive weed-killer treatments. From an environmental point of view, the cost is extremely high. The ecosystem of the country’s virgin forests is compromised; the ground and aquifers are filled with toxins; Colombia’s land is burned or polluted, incapable of producing anything of value in the short term. From a societal point of view, the consequences are equally grave. The peasants, lacking alternatives, abandon the devastated areas en masse and start growing coca in more inaccessible zones. The dispersed cultivation and the displaced campesinos’ vulnerability work in the drug lords’ favor. What’s more, the narcos invest in methods to make the fields more fertile, which allows them to double the number of annual harvests.

The result is that after years of a literal scorched-earth policy, Colombian cocaine still represents more than half of all the cocaine consumed worldwide.

The other part of Plan Colombia’s use of force is directed toward individual criminals. The U.S. military bolsters the Colombian army’s actions against drug lords and narco-terrorism: logistics, arms and equipment, special forces, intelligence, training. On the eve of the attack on the Twin Towers, AUCs were included on the White House’s blacklist of terrorist organizations, but that wasn’t enough to ruin long-standing good relations with the Colombian military machine, let alone with part of the political and economic establishment. President Uribe, who is respected by the paramilitaries, negotiates the demobilization and disarmament of the Autodefensas, but the success is merely superficial. Most groups have no intention of laying down their arms, or of renouncing drug trafficking, and they continue controlling the cocaine business and spreading terror under new names.

Even though it led to significant disarmament and killed off the primary FARC leaders, one after another, the brutal war against the guerrillas was not able to get to the root of the problem either. Today FARC still has nine thousand members and ELN — Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army), Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla army — three thousand, but more important, they still control a conspicuous part of the cocaine production, having become increasingly involved in processing in addition to cultivation. While it’s true that Plan Colombia, with its use of military force, helped to weaken FARC, paradoxically, precisely because of the fragmentation and dislocation of cocaine cultivation, their role as one of the major players in Colombian drug trafficking was confirmed.

In short, if Colombia today is no longer the extremely dangerous country it was ten or twenty years ago, international antidrug policies in South America can take the credit only if one also accepts that, in part thanks to those policies, the conflict was shifted farther north, to Mexico.

But to better understand what exactly went wrong, you have to go back to those confusing times of transition, torn between hope and uncertainty, times in which the fates of the Beauty and the Monkey collided.

• • •

Natalia is living happily in Miami, taking care of her newborn baby girl. Her only sadness is that her mother keeps trying to convince her to leave her husband. She takes little interest in what Julio does or why; every now and then he has to leave suddenly for some trip. Now he too deals with the big fish of the drug world who are floating to the surface, in order to negotiate a surrender with the United States, especially since a coordinated DEA and Colombian police investigation resulted in the biggest roundup since the days of the narco-state — thirty or so arrests, including that of Fabio Ochoa, an important, historic member of the Medellín cartel, who was trafficking in cocaine with his new partners. The investigation’s code name, Operation Millennium, says a lot about the exemplary value assigned to it. The United States is already looking to the future, to Plan Colombia’s ratification. Encouraged by the extradition agreement and the collaboration with the new Colombian presidential administration of Andrés Pastrana, they’ve sent a signal they want everyone to hear, even the Mexican traffickers, whom the antidrug agency has begun to recognize as a growing threat. In fact, the operation also involves Mexican authorities. And it is then that the arrest warrant for Armando Valencia, alias Maradona, is issued. Maradona, who, together with Alejandro Bernal, a Colombian from Medellín who had been like a brother to Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Lord of the Skies, was managing a new and important cocaine import alliance.

The evil must be eliminated at its source, in other words, in Colombia. This is the fundamental error at the base of the United States’ efforts. You can rip up a plant, but you can’t uproot the desire for well-being that leads to addiction, any more than you can eradicate greed. Cocaine is the fruit not of the earth but of man.

But the United States, convinced that the war on cocaine is the same as the war on Colombian cartels, waves an initial victory flag. Fabio Ochoa is the big trophy, flaunted on the front page, but there were other bosses in their sights too who’d escaped capture by a hair’s breadth. How was that possible? The DEA’s office that coordinated Operation Millennium is not in touch with the group in Miami. Nevertheless, Baruch Vega is contacted to find out if there are any moles working for the drug lords. The ubiquitous photographer sets up a meeting on neutral ground in Central America with his new informers: one is Julio Fierro and the other an AUC member who trafficked for Carlos Castaño.

The official policy of the stick is complemented by the unofficial policy of the carrot. There’s a line of people interested in understanding how the Narcotics Traffickers Rehabilitation Program, as the Miami DEA agents called it, not without some bureaucratic irony, works. At the same time, the certainty that more and more prominent figures are turning traitors sows discord among the traffickers, in particular within the Norte del Valle cartel and in the tight ranks of the Autodefensas.

Right at the peak of this feverish, underground agitation, Natalia Paris receives a fabulous offer. She’s invited to be a special guest on Colombiamoda, the most important fashion event in the country. She dons a little white number that could be a wedding dress if not for the enormous silk wings on the back. A crown of flowers graces her flowing hair. She’s twenty-eight and has a daughter who is learning to walk, but she still looks like a young girl. Her hazel eyes roam the audience as if to embrace these Colombians who had welcomed her back so warmly, but in truth she’s searching for one person in particular. Julio had promised to join her there so she wouldn’t have to endure other men’s longing gazes on her own. They also planned on taking advantage of his clandestine return to have Mariana baptized. But Julio Correa, aka Fierro, has vanished into thin air.

Natalia spends months at the public prosecutor’s, between interrogations and attempts to identify her husband in the photos of dead bodies, sometimes mere masses of butchered flesh, that they place before her. But in vain. Each time it’s not him she feels a moment of relief, an absurd, stabbing hope. It’s obvious by now that he’s been kidnapped, but he might still be alive. She has to keep hoping, praying, hugging her child, casting out every negative thought about what the child’s father may have suffered.

Julio César Correa’s properties in Colombia are sequestered. Natalia Paris’s U.S. visa is revoked. Her ad contracts are canceled. It’s the end. Her mother had warned her, she who knows all too well what it means to end up alone with an eight-month-old baby girl. Doña Lucia was right after all.

It’s at that point that Natalia discovers her own maternal instinct. She has to act; she can’t lose heart. Shortly before her world collapsed she had launched her own suntan lotion. Now she travels the country promoting it, signing autographs, making deals to get it on supermarket shelves. It’s the first step in her comeback. Little by little she reclaims her position, which she still holds to this day: an icon in Colombia and a sex symbol throughout Latin America. But starting with that moment, she also became her own person. A businesswoman who knows she must manage the passing of time. She has a fit if someone draws attention to her age, and the older she gets the younger she claims to be. Her body is her business, and she can’t risk obsolescence.

• • •

Julio Fierro’s body has never been found.

The mystery of his disappearance gave rise to a sea of inferences about who could have eliminated him. Suspicion fell primarily on the Norte del Valle cartel because it had a terrible reputation and because it was one of the United States’ main targets, with whom Julio was collaborating. Only very recently has the truth regarding his death surfaced.

According to the revelations of various AUC collaborators, once it was learned that Fierro was in Colombia, Carlos Castaño, El Mono, and a boss named Daniel Mejía, known as Danielito, decided to get together. At the end of their meeting Castaño gave orders to abduct the traitor from his hiding place near Medellín and take him by helicopter to somewhere in the department of Córdoba. There he was tortured, for various purposes, including to get him to hand over some of his property to his kidnappers. When he was finally killed (some say with a chain saw, after having been brought back to Medellín), Danielito had the job of dealing with the body. Danielito was not a casual choice.

Daniel Mejía belonged to the military bloc in the area. More important, however, he was also charged with putting into effect the Autodefensas’ new method of concealing the number of murders that could be ascribed to them. Despite the ceaseless killings, the AUCs still had a reputation as authentic Colombian patriots rather than simple criminals devoid of any scruples. The spokesman for the Autodefensas’ honor was Carlos Castaño. Every time someone branded his men narcos, he would fly into a rage and respond with indignant denials. Obviously he denied all the rest too. “We have never killed innocent people. We are only out to get the guerrillas, not people whose ideas are different than ours. We do not use chain saws.”

This was not just cynical hypocrisy. As often happens with authoritarian individuals, Carlos Castaño lived in a parallel universe manipulated to satisfy his whims, and he did his best to defend it from anything that contradicted it. What rankled him most was to be accused of conniving with narco-trafficking. That may seem strange, because his brothers had almost always rounded out their earnings with cocaine. But that was precisely what provided the foundation for his house of lies: Coke was merely the means, not the end — the same justification the insurgents used.

And yet the increasing force of his organization blew like a gale-force wind against that unrealistic construction. In some regions it was becoming impossible to distinguish between narcos and paramilitaries. The area around Medellín was one such region. Daniel Mejía was now the right-hand man of the bloodthirsty Don Berna, who, in grabbing up the remains of Escobar’s empire, had joined with the AUCs, to his clear advantage. Danielito was slotted to take over as boss of the new cartel Oficina de Envigado, or Office of Envigado. Together they killed, as in any drug war, in order to subjugate people by terror and to eliminate competition.

It was urgent that all be kept hidden, so a new method was devised. Danielito set to work building crematoriums. Up to twenty bodies a week would be burned in them. According to some former AUC soldiers, even Julio Fierro was incinerated in one of those ovens. And, a fitting twist, Daniel Mejía himself ended up in one, after being killed by the other ex-paramilitary with whom he had assumed command of the Office of Envigado.

At any rate, it’s around the time of Julio’s abduction and murder that Carlos Castaño’s unease begins to wear away at him. Without ever attending any of the meetings Baruch Vega organized, those circlings of the wagons, he contacted the Miami lawyer involved in the DEA negotiations, the same lawyer who later will defend El Mono. He too now has a young wife and a baby girl, born with a rare genetic disease. The only hope for treatment is in the United States.

Carlos Castaño wants to save his family, but at what cost? On September 10, 2001, he bore the shame of being identified as the head of a terroristic organization by a country he had always greatly admired. Terrorist and drug trafficker. He must remove that unbearable blot, from himself and his Autodefensas. So, in early 2002, he summons a hundred or so commanders from every corner of the country. He prepares his remarks carefully and is counting on his prestige and charisma. After what happened in New York and Washington, the Yankees will hunt us down like rats. We can’t keep on killing. We can’t keep on trafficking cocaine. It’s the only way to safeguard our association’s honor and survival.

The silence that greets his words is not that of dumbstruck approval. The commander in chief realizes that many of them have no intention of following his path. A defeat so humiliating that he steps down from running the AUCs. Carlos Castaño is like a wounded jaguar in the Colombian jungle now. He lashes out left, right, and center; he resorts to the Internet to expose his former underlings, giving first and last names and declaring that they are “irresponsibly involved in drug-trafficking activities” and adding that “the penetration of drug trafficking in some self-defense groups is unbearable and is known to the U.S. and Colombian intelligence agencies.”

A time bomb, a deadly threat.

He declares that from now on he wants to dedicate himself to his family, but he’s lying. Or rather, he’s telling only half the truth, for the great Carlos Castaño does not stoop to lying. The Miami lawyer comes to see him more often. He’s negotiating his surrender, his betrayal.

In April 2004 Carlos Castaño disappears. Legends circulate regarding his whereabouts, the foreign destination where he took refuge in order to make a new life for himself, as well as speculations about who could have wanted to eliminate him. His remains weren’t found until two and a half years later, in the most banal of places. He was buried on the Las Tangas finca where he and his brother Fidel had launched the first paramilitary counterrevolutionary group. That finca was the beginning and the end for Carlos Castaño. His death warrant had been issued by none other than his brother Vicente.

Carlos Castaño’s exit favors the further rise of El Mono. Not only is he second in command of the Autodefensas, he’s also the most clearheaded, the most capable. He doesn’t seem rattled in the least by the extradition request that now hangs over his head too. He doesn’t let himself be infected by the poisonous rage with which, after their commander’s resignation, many other bosses spit on the name of Carlos Castaño. It’s important to stay cool headed, to remember the larger picture, the organization and his men. This means not hiding problems but resolving them in other ways.

El Mono is the one who opens negotiations with the Uribe administration. He sends his spiritual adviser, the bishop of Montería, who has known him since he was a boy, to initiate contact and to serve as ambassador. The first agreement is reached in July 2003. The AUCs will demobilize completely, cease all hostilities, and cooperate with investigations. In return, the Colombian government will offer huge legal concessions. Many pending cases are dismissed, most of the investigations of AUC members are dropped, and sentences for crimes such as drug trafficking and human rights violations, for which one normally risks life in jail, are reduced to a mere few years.

El Mono is also an excellent press officer. A few days after the agreement is reached he grants Semana, Colombia’s most important weekly, an interview, during which he explains why the AUCs agreed to negotiate only now: “For the first time a government is trying to strengthen democracy and state institutions. We have always demanded the presence of the state, called it to responsibility. We have wielded guns because the state failed in its responsibility. It was up to us to step in, to take its place in the various regions we controlled and where we acted as the de facto authorities.”

He’s also astute in handling the delicate topic of drug trafficking. He doesn’t try to deny it but insists that his men do nothing more than collect protection money on cocaine, just like everyone else. In truth, even in this he’s a much more ambitious and able leader. His Italian origins, greatly looked down upon at first, turn out to be useful to him. Mancuso oversees negotiations with the Calabrians, the biggest and most trustworthy buyers on the Colombian market since the days of Don Pablo Escobar.

So for the moment everything seems the same as before. Better, in fact. After years of living in hiding Salvatore can now return to Martha and his children, the youngest of whom don’t even recognize him. But Salvatore has trouble recognizing Gianluigi, who is all grown up and soon to make him a grandfather. He’s even received in parliament, where, dressed in a dark suit and red tie with diagonal white stripes — the picture of Italian elegance — he pleads the historic role of the Autodefensas.

El Mono chooses a place under his control on the border of Venezuela for himself and the men under his direct command to turn over their weapons. It is a solemn, moving moment and sets the tone for his speech: “My soul awash with humility, I ask forgiveness of the people of Colombia, I ask forgiveness of the countries of this world, including the United States, if I have offended them by my actions or omissions. I ask forgiveness of every mother and of all those whom I have made suffer. I take responsibility for my role as leader, for what I could have done better, for what I could have done and did not do, errors surely caused by my limitations as a human being and by my lack of a calling for war.”

Then, nearly two years later, he has his bodyguards accompany him to the police station in Montería, to turn himself in. In the meantime, some of the legal benefits of negotiating with the government are declared unconstitutional, but El Mono is not afraid of Colombia’s law or its prisons. In fact, he still leads his troops and manages his affairs from within the maximum security prison in Itagüí, almost on a par with Escobar during his years of imprisonment.

Even so, the AUCs officially disband. Some — including mere narcos who pass themselves off as military bosses — turn themselves in, still hoping to benefit from the agreements. The others, the paramilitaries and narcos feeling orphaned by the big cartel, regroup into different organizations: Águilas Negras, or Black Eagles, headed by the fratricidal Vicente Castaño; Oficina de Envigado; Ejército Revolucionario Popular Antiterrorista de Colombia (ERPAC); Rastrojos; Urabeños; Paisas. They join forces and they break apart — the only element unifying them is cocaine. A new Colombia is being born, the ferocious land of Lilliput. The days of El Mono are coming to an end.

• • •

The defendant Salvatore Mancuso Gómez shows up clean-shaven and wearing a pinstripe suit fit for a wedding or business meeting. It’s January 15, 2007. Sitting in front of a prosecutor, with a microphone and tape recorder in front of him, he takes out a laptop, places it on the table, and turns it on. He starts to read. The room fills with names, rattled off one after another, with professional detachment. When he is done, he has listed at least three hundred names, in strict chronological order: the homicides for which he takes personal responsibility, either as killer or commander, some of which he’d already been absolved for.

Bewilderment in the courtroom. Why did he do it?

Why, after getting away with so much, reveal the massacres he ordered or helped plan?

La Granja: July 1996

Pichilín: December 1996

Mapiripán: July 1997

El Aro: October 1997

La Gabarra: three raids, May — August 1999

El Salado: February 2000

Tibú: April 2000

In all these attacks, the defendant Mancuso Gómez declares, we were not alone. High-ranking members of the military provided logistical support and entire units of soldiers. And there were political representatives — such as Senator Mario Uribe Escobar — whose support never wavered.

Why is he doing this? Why him, a man of his intelligence, with his leadership skills? That’s what many of the people he named are wondering. Then he is extradited to the United States, a move that weakens his voice in Colombia but that does not silence it completely.

From now on, no one is spared.

Colombia’s high circles did business and collaborated with the paramilitary organizations. Lawyers, politicians, police officers, army generals: some to profit from the cocaine market, some to insure votes and support. And that’s not all. According to Mancuso’s deposition, the oil business, the drinks industry, the wood industry, transportation companies, and multinational banana corporations also had ties to the Autodefensas. All — with no exceptions — paid huge sums of money to the paramilitaries in exchange for protection and the possibility of continuing to work in the area. For years the AUCs had a hand in every step of the process.

Mancuso appears on 60 Minutes. Then the spotlights are turned off and the prisoner is led back to his cell inside the maximum security prison in Warsaw, Virginia. Colombian as well as U.S. justice awaits him. It is highly likely that he will spend the rest of his life behind bars.

9. THE TREE IS THE WORLD

The tree is the world. The tree is the genealogy of families linked by dynastic relations and sealed in blood. The tree is knowledge.

But the tree is also real. In the story handed down in ’ndrangheta lore it is an oak tree on the island of Favignana, but the tree I encountered is in Calabria, a hearty chestnut with green leaves, though its massive gray trunk is as cracked and as concave as a grotto. At Christmastime that natural grotto often hosts a nativity scene, with the Three Kings who have arrived from the East and the Archangel Gabriel watching over all from above, perched on a surface root. For centuries, as storms raged in the mountains, this tree offered shelter to sheep and dogs and donkeys, who could at least stick their front paws and big heads in, and even to humans: shepherds, hunters, and brigands. That’s what I was thinking as I crouched in its hollow, breathing in the smell of musk and earth, of resin and stagnant water. This tree has always been here, in this gorge near the crest of Aspromonte. Men came later, and they took on the tree’s form and its meanings.

The ’ndrangheta tree covers nearly the whole world. Though not as mythologized as Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, in part because it is much more discreet, the Calabrian criminal tribe is arguably the most powerful organized crime group in the world; its estimated annual revenue, €53 billion, is over 3 percent of Italy’s GDP. We are in a new era of waxing ’ndrangheta power, invoked by three dates. In 2007: the August 15 massacre at Da Bruno restaurant in Duisburg, Germany, an extension of the feud that broke out in Calabria, among San Luca families, during Carnival celebrations in 1991. In 2008: the ’ndrangheta is added to the White House’s list of foreign narcotics kingpins, drug-trafficking organizations considered to be a threat to U.S. security and whose assets are immediately blocked. In 2010: Operation Crimine-Infinito, coordinated by the DDA (Antimafia District Directorate) of Milan and Reggio Calabria. Over three hundred arrests. Circulation of two videos: one, the meeting at the Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino Club in Paderno Dugnano, in the hinterlands of Milan, which documents Calabrian dominance in northern Italy; the second, the annual summit of the major ’ndrangheta bosses at the Polsi sanctuary, in Calabria, which reveals the rigid hierarchical structure of the entire organization.

But the truth is awkward for many Italians. One day, leafing through the papers, I let out a short, scornful laugh, as when you suddenly realize you’re the butt of some awful joke, even though it somehow doesn’t surprise you. “Add your signature against Saviano, who calls northerners mafiosi.” It was mid-November 2010. A week earlier I had spoken of ’ndrangheta transplants in northern Italy in comments on material that had already been in the public domain for four months. There’s none so deaf as one who won’t hear, I thought to myself. It occurred to me that the Calabrian bosses could have found reassurance in that proverb: Everything was still the same; no problem.

The ’ndrangheta owes as much to others’ shortcomings as to its own strengths for what it has become. One of its primary merits is the way it cloaked its expansion so that only the occasional growth spurt was noticed. Never the whole picture, never the full extension of the tree’s crown, even less its deep roots. For a good decade it disappeared from sight even in Italy. The state seemed to have won on all fronts: It had defeated terrorism, weakened the Sicilian Mafia after the season of bombs, occupied manu militari (with military aid) not only Sicily but Campania, Puglia, and Calabria, which was guilty of carrying out the killing of Judge Antonino Scopelliti, who was involved in the Palermo maxi-trial, the biggest trial ever against the Cosa Nostra, held in the second half of the eighties in Sicily. That “excellent cadaver” nevertheless fueled a dangerous misunderstanding: It appeared to be further proof of Calabrian subordination to the Sicilians, founders of the Mafia, the oldest and most notorious Italian criminal organization. What’s more, in the collective imagination the ’ndrangheta still had no face, or if it did, it was still thought of as a primitive rural outfit that relied on kidnappings as the primary source of its organization’s income, like the gangs of Anonymous Sardinian shepherds who dragged their hostages up onto the Gennargentu and treated them worse than their beasts, sending back severed ears in request for ransom money. They were beasts themselves, adding yet another element of terror to a country that in the 1970s was already far too bloody and unstable, but only by controlling areas that were totally backward. That was the idea that still stuck in people’s minds, and no new one arrived to correct it.

It was an idea that proved useful to the ’ndrangheta. With the new Italian law introduced in 1982 that allowed for the freezing of mafia assets, the Sardinians were done in, and it was thought that the Calabrians were too. The mafiosi had stopped killing each other even in Reggio Calabria — peace seemed to be the right answer everywhere. But in Calabria it was a pax mafiosa. A strategic shift, a tactical withdrawal. The ’ndrangheta had decided to give up kidnapping, to stop letting Cosa Nostra get it mixed up in ineffective strategies against the state, and to keep from bleeding to death in fratricidal wars. The tree flourished in silence: Its roots continued to extend deeper into Calabrian soil through public works projects, such as the Salerno-Reggio Calabria highway, and its crown to reach into global trafficking, which now meant primarily cocaine.

The tree, which had long represented both the individual ’ndrina and the Onorata Società (the Honored Society, as the ’ndrangheta is called), also contained the answer to the growing need for cohesion and coordination. For a century more or less its symbolism had been handed down from father to son, from elderly boss to new affiliate. According to a ’ndrangheta code that came to light at Gioiosa Jonica in 1927, “the trunk represents the head of the society; the narrower part of the trunk the accountant and master of ceremonies; the branches the camorristi of blood and by crime, the twigs the rank and file; the flowers the young men of honor; the leaves the bastards and traitors who end up falling and rotting at the foot of the tree of knowledge.” Oral transmission has generated many variants, but the substance is always the same. The bosses are the base of the trunk or the trunk itself, from which the other members of the hierarchy branch out, all the way out to the smallest and most fragile twigs.

The ’ndrangheta hierarchy was not an imitation of the Cosa Nostra’s high command, as erroneously has been said; the Sicilian structure is that of a pyramid, the Calabrian tree can be simplified geometrically into its inverse: a downward pointing triangle, or a V, the sides of which can be extended and expanded into infinity.

And that was more or less what was happening. In Italy the Socialist and the Christian Democratic parties had crumbled, new governments came and went, rightist and leftist governments, and emergency governments, awkward coalitions of the two. There was Berlusconi and the Olive Tree Party, which was much more fragile than the ’ndrangheta tree. In Colombia, in the meantime, Pablo Escobar had been killed, and the Calabrians had redirected their middlemen toward Cali. Then the Cali cartel crumbled as well, and the ’ndrangheta had to do business with whoever was left, or whoever was starting to step in, secure in the knowledge that nothing was as immutable as their honored society, their tree.

Italy was forced to remember the existence of the ’ndrangheta in 2005, when Francesco Fortugno, vice president of the regional council of Calabria, was killed in the Calabrian town of Locri, and for the first time the area youth let out a collective cry: “Kill us all!” The shock didn’t last long, though, as is always the case with news stories from southern Italy, which are considered manifestations of an endemic problem that is confined to those lands without hope and have nothing to do with the rest of the country.

The tree had become enormous. It wouldn’t have been hard to notice it. It would have been enough to follow the news more regularly. It would even have been enough simply to reflect on a single story that made the national headlines. A story in which the tree reveals itself in its entirety. A leaf of the tree had fallen off and was gathered up by investigators before it could reach the ground. In and of itself the fallen leaf would not have constituted any risk. To date, the ’ndranghetisti who have decided to turn informers number less than one hundred, and you can count the bosses on two hands. It’s tremendously difficult to turn your back on an organization that coincides with the family into which you were born or to which you’re joined through marriage or baptism, and which almost everyone you have spent time with since you were a child belongs to. It’s almost impossible to break away from a tree once you’ve become a branch. But this wasn’t a branch, or even a twig. It was just a leaf, never anything more, what in the more elaborate versions of the myth are “contrasti onorati,” those who support the organization without being members.

• • •

The leaf was named Bruno Fuduli.

Bruno was still a kid when he collected his inheritance and became the head of his family. The fate of the first born. In the ’ndrine dynastic succession based on seniority is one of those hard-and-fast laws that prevent a power struggle if a chief dies or ends up in jail. In a family business it’s a widespread practice, and not only in Calabria or the South. The oldest son is the first to be brought into the business, to help out and to learn, and often to introduce new ideas, which younger generations can grasp more easily.

Bruno was just over twenty when his father died, leaving him his stone masonry business, the Filiberto Fuduli company in Nicotera, an ancient village that looks over the Tyrrhenian Sea and a famous stretch of long, white beach that fills with tourists in the summer. He also inherited half a billion lire of debt, but he was sure he’d be able to manage things if he revitalized the company, made it competitive.

Marble, granite, and all the other stones that his craftsman father had worked with were coming back in style. There was a demand for large stone surfaces in private homes, in addition to their timeless use in cemeteries. So Bruno throws himself into the fray: He updates his range of products, changes the name of the company and the corporation, and then opens two more companies, in partnership with his brother-in-law. But there are other obstacles Bruno has to face. Along with his father’s debts, Bruno also inherited another aspect of his business: theft, vandalism, malice. An elastic response to such obstacles is usually what is expected in southern Italy, but Bruno stays true to the old Filiberto stubbornness. Instead of going to the right people to set things right, he goes to the police.

For the family who rules the entire province of Vibo Valentia, this sort of thing is a mild annoyance, like a fly that disturbs your postprandial nap on a muggy summer afternoon. The Mancuso family has been there forever. They can boast of a 1903 court sentence, when their great-grandfather Vincenzo was condemned for criminal conspiracy. By now they’ve got their hands in every sort of illegal activity and are on friendly terms with the ’ndrangheta families in the Gioia Tauro plain. The Piromalli family gang controls the territory where the port and the steel plant are being built, and the Mancuso family gang controls the quarries in Limbadi and environs, which supplied the building materials. The amount the young Fuduli refuses to cough up is nothing to them, small change. But he’s setting a bad example with his arrogance. It’s routine, standard practice, to repeat their requests for payment, something they do on principle, till the stubborn kid learns to lower his head. It’s merely a question of time. Time is not only the best healer, it’s also the best fee collector.

Debts. Bruno manages to keep them under control for years, even with all the expenses and additional losses inflicted on him by the forces he refuses to give in to. He practically works himself to death to pay the interest, but the sword of Damocles still hangs over his companies. It wouldn’t take much to upset his precarious balance. All it would take is one more problem, a few more customers whose checks bounce, or who don’t pay at all. Which is exactly what happens toward the end of the 1980s, a moment in which the entire country’s economy starts slowing down, nudging Italy toward the financial crisis that will explode in 1992. So one day the bank tells Fuduli that, for want of guaranties, it is forced to close his credit line. Either he declares bankruptcy, or he finds some other way to survive. Those are his only options.

The people he contacts don’t have a problem lending him money, but they charge 200 percent interest, even more. Loan sharks. The Mancuso family usurers are becoming more and more threatening. But suddenly a man with unlimited resources holds out a helping hand to him: Natale Scali, boss of the town of Marina di Gioiosa Jonica, an experienced drug trafficker. He needs a guy like Bruno: a young businessman toughened by years of training, during which he used every possible resource to defend his companies. Intelligent, dynamic, determined. Someone who knows how to behave, and who speaks Spanish well. His record is spotless; in fact, it’s even adorned with repeated reports of extortion threats. Scali tells him so, quite openly. He doesn’t push, doesn’t rush. He flatters him, telling him each time they meet that he needs someone like him, someone clean. And for a sum that no bank would ever lend him—1.7 billion lire — Scali asks him for a favor, in the form of a plane trip. An arrest warrant has forced Scali to hole up in his bunker house in his hometown, but before, when he used to go to Bogotá himself, to take care of business, he’d live like a fat cat, the guest of a governor’s brother. All Bruno has to do is go and renew Scali’s old contacts. He can think of it as a vacation.

Natale Scali was a far-sighted businessman with lots of experience. The Aquino-Scali-Ursino ’ndrangheta families, like the other ’ndrangheta families on the Ionian coast, had become so specialized in importing cocaine from Colombia that they were allowed to have their own representative in loco: a man named Santo Scipione, who goes by the name of Papi, and who was sent directly from the town of San Luca, the ’ndrangheta stronghold, known as mamma, from whom all things come. She’s the one who makes the rules, the one who slaps you, punishes you, caresses you, rewards you, the one with whom all problems must be discussed. If problems arise among ’ndrangheta sons anywhere in the world, mamma San Luca resolves them. Santo Scipione is in regular contact with Natale Scali, but his supply channel does not cover all of Scali’s demand. He has settled in Montería, appealing because of its sizable Italian community, and because Salvatore Mancuso, El Mono, is there. Even though Mancuso is now officially a commander in hiding, he is becoming more and more crucial for Italo-Colombian relations. For every fugitive, home is home: the place where your family is; your people; the place you belong to and that belongs to you. The Calabrians have worked with the AUC since they were founded. So their decision to settle their representative right in the middle of AUC territory is a much appreciated gesture of respect, and good for business.

When he returns from Bogotá Bruno discovers that Scali has charged him 600 million lire in interest, to be paid with another trip, and then another. It’s no longer a matter of calling on people on Scali’s behalf. Now Bruno has to contact new suppliers. The deals he helps launch result in tons of cocaine being shipped to Calabria. Natale Scali had been right about Bruno. So when he offers to put an end to Bruno’s debt problems by taking over his company and gets a “no, thank you” in response, each serenely goes his own way. It’s not a problem for Scali, but it is for Bruno. This boss from Marina di Gioiosa Jonica has now joined the Mancuso family orbit of usurers, and has taken a personal interest.

Towns in Calabria are small, and the ’ndrangheta’s branches are intertwined. There’s a small branch on the big tree that needs to be tended to. Mancuso narco Vincenzo Barbieri has just been released from prison and has to serve the rest of his time under house arrest. In order to leave the house he needs to find a job that the police will find credible. The solution is so simple, and so near at hand. Diego Mancuso, a Vibo Valentia ’ndrina boss, steps in. He merely asks a favor, that Barbieri be given a job — to help with his rehabilitation — at Fuduli’s company Lavormarmi. Maybe Bruno fools himself into thinking that he can keep up the facade with Barbieri and his partner, Francesco Ventrici, a guy with a clean record whom Barbieri brought along. Perhaps Bruno believes them when they insist they’d prefer not to have anything to do with the Mancuso family. Everything unfolds from there: Bruno ends up being outmaneuvered, and his companies, increasingly in the red, fall into the hands of the ’ndrangheta.

They make a strange couple, Vincenzo Barbieri and Francesco Ventrici, not exactly blood brothers loyal to the Onorata Società or ’ndrangheta, but something akin to that, anyway. Ventrici, the younger of the two, may not even be ritually affiliated with the organization but merely close to it, in part because he’s always close — very close — to Barbieri. They’re like one of those inseparable couples that sometimes form in small villages in southern Italy. Villages like San Calogero, buried in boredom, where all the men hang out at the bars, and where permission to enter them is already a rite of passage of sorts. Where certain kids cling to the most admired character, so that when they grow up, their untiring reverence and emulation is cemented into a real bond. Ventrici marries one of Barbieri’s cousins, and then they become family for real — they’re godfathers to each other’s children. Which is how Fuduli’s unrequested partners introduce themselves when they’re in San Calogero. Barbieri is the official owner of a company that makes living room furniture, and his well-kept, bourgeois look earns him the nickname U Ragioniere or Accountant. Ventrici is a big kid with narrow eyes and a double chin, whose usual nickname, El Gordo — Fatty — must have been pinned on him by one of Barbieri’s Colombian friends. The trafficking they engage in through Fuduli’s companies and the service their owner provides make theirs a most productive friendship.

Bruno is still the pivot on which everything turns. Bruno, who now finds himself the servant of two masters and prey to many more. Bruno, who continues to fly across the ocean, to negotiate or mediate for Scali and the Vibo Valentia ’ndrina, to consider new contacts, new routes, new transportation methods, all the while winning more of his South American interlocutors’ trust. He meets them in Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador, but also in Italy and Spain. He’s growing more sure of himself, more confident, precise, and organized. A friendly partner, a pleasure to work with. If they talk on the phone about parties and the number of guests as codes for shipments and quantities of cocaine, it doesn’t mean they don’t invite him to parties for real.

All those business trips are exhausting, though. If you are in a certain line of work, Colombia can be a deadly forest, even when you stay in the best hotels in the capital or are a guest in the most luxurious villas. And after the collapse of the Cali and Medellín cartels, those that offer the best prices are also the most dangerous: AUC, FARC. Bitter enemies united by the production and wholesale marketing of cocaine, but also by the fact that they can nab you and make you disappear whenever they feel like it. At that point the only thing you can do is pray to the Maronna ‘ra Muntagna — the Madonna of the Mountain — and ask her to make sure your guys over in Calabria get the overdue payments there in time. But Bruno learns on his own how proud his compatriots are to be the only customers the Colombians don’t ask a percentage from in advance. They are men of honor, men of their word. Their word, sure, but there has to be a down payment in flesh and blood, withheld until the last drug dollar is credited. His turn could be next.

Bruno has been living this life for years now. Negotiate, oversee the process by which the blocks of marble, of piedra muñeca, are turned into something that looks like Swiss cheese, except they’re square: pierced with cylindrical holes that are then filled with plastic tubes stuffed with cocaine and sealed with a paste made of marble dust. Then contact the Colombian exporters — front businesses — to pick up the goods, which are to be shipped to one of his companies. And finally, go back to Calabria, take delivery of the shipment once it has cleared customs at Gioia Tauro, and get it transported to a quarry near San Calogero. That’s probably the critical moment. The moment when he stands before those blocks of marble weighing twenty tons, which, had they been left untouched, once they’d been cut and polished, would have revealed all their splendor: golden in color, rich with veins, so similar to travertine. Instead, Bruno, the former owner of Lavormarmi and now the owner on paper of Marmo Imeffe, he who accepts delivery of those marble blocks, now must teach complicit workers how to remove the cylinders without even scratching them. Salvage the cocaine. Reuse merely the scraps of those earthly treasures that take geologic eras to form and now are worth the same as an empty tin can. He prefers it when the cocaine ends up in flowers, or stinking leather skins, or cans of tuna fish. But when that’s the case, the coke isn’t unloaded in Italy, not right before his eyes anyway.

When Barbieri or Ventrici tells him he can leave because nothing that happens afterward has anything to do with him, Bruno, driving home, tumbles into darkness. This is not the life he wants. Not the life he’s willing to land in jail or be killed for. He feels old. He’s almost forty and doesn’t feel all that different from those blocks of marble filled with holes: a failed marriage, one business already lost, and the others he can’t seem to salvage. If he thinks back on how he was able to stand his ground with the Mancuso family: he was just a kid with a small business then, his turnover ridiculously small. Yet he had resisted the Mancusos for years. Then they crushed him for no reason, just for the sake of trying to squeeze him like an orange picked on the Rosarno plain. And now he’s letting himself be squeezed, like the lowliest illegal immigrant.

But he’s not a lowly illegal immigrant. This is not who he is. If he wasn’t afraid as a kid, he shouldn’t be afraid now either, now that he has learned that everyone, whether in Calabria or Colombia, has a hand on his head that can crush him at any time, either in punishment, by mistake, of just for the heck of it. Who knows how long he would have harbored such thoughts, brooding over them ad nauseam. The fact is, one day Bruno makes up his mind. He goes to the Carabinieri again, this time not to report a threat but to turn himself in: his role, his trips, his marble shipments, and what they really contained. They’re incredulous at first. They need the assessment of a higher authority. But on the basis of investigations already under way, ROS, the Carabinieri’s Special Operations Group, realizes that Fuduli’s statements are true. For two years he acts as a confidential source. Then he takes a further leap: He becomes a government witness. A secret witness. An inconceivable figure in the heart of ’ndrangheta territory. An infiltrator.

• • •

The investigation Fuduli contributed to was called Operation Decollo (Takeoff), and to this day it is still considered the mother of all transnational drug-trafficking investigations of Calabrian families. The leaf has fallen, the tree is more visible now. Visible doesn’t mean uprooted, though. In terms of its economic and operational repurcussions, Operation Decollo, which involved police and investigators from Italy, Holland, Spain, Germany, and France, together with the DEA and Colombian, Venezuelan, and Australian magistrates, and which led to arrests in Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany, and Campania, as well as the seizure of five and a half tons of cocaine, was merely a scratch on the tree’s bark. The primary worth of the investigation was informational. Seizures are data points, proof that shipments left from one country and arrived in another, sometimes with stopovers and transfers along the way. They provide a reliable measurement of the tree, or at least of some of its main branches.

Early in 2000, three containers that left Barranquilla, Colombia, aboard ships owned by the Danish company Maersk Sealand pass through the port of Gioia Tauro. All on their way to Fuduli’s companies, all filled with marble blocks that contain 220, 434, and 870 kilos of cocaine, respectively. In March 2000 another container with 434 kilos of cocaine stashed in marble blocks is shipped from Barranquilla to Australia, to Nicola Ciconte, a man with Calabrian roots but born in Wonthaggi, a farming town southwest of Melbourne. It arrives in the port of Adelaide in August. The Australian police eventually track down about two thirds of it, which a Calabrian has already put in storage. Then they start to strike in Italy, but with strategic prudence. It’s not the amount of cocaine seized that matters but rather the fact that another mode of transport has been uncovered, and even more, that it leads directly to another branch of the tree, the Lombard branch. On January 23 and March 17, 2001, at Milan Malpensa Airport, 12.1 and 18.5 kilos of cocaine are seized on two different commercial flights from Caracas, Venezuela. A SEA employee, the company that manages the airport, is there to remove the bags in which the goods are stashed from the luggage carousel. He is from San Calogero. The Mancuso and Pesce of Rosarno clans are set up to speedily restock the Milan drug market, where the demand for coke is inexhaustible. Almost a whole year goes by before they touch another ship. January 10, 2002: At the port of Vigo in Galicia, a container from Ecuador is searched. Inside are found 1,698 kilos of cocaine, stashed in cans of tuna in olive oil and destined for the Conserva Nueva in Madrid. Bruno Fuduli, who negotiated the deal with the Colombians, the Vibo Valentians, and the Spanish, had kept the investigators informed.

April 3, 2002, is an important date. The first real big action in Italy. The shipment was supposed to arrive at Gioia Tauro, but it ends up by mistake at the port of Salerno, where it is seized. This time the container left from La Guaira, Venezuela, and the 541 kilos of cocaine are stuffed in the loading pallets for the granite blocks being sent to Fuduli’s Marmo Imeffe.

Another year of waiting, and of apparent calm. Then comes the most important blow, just beyond Europe’s main port of entry for cocaine. During the night of June 3–4, 2003, Spanish authorities intercept the trawler Alexandra off the Canary Islands, with 2,591 kilos of cocaine onboard. It was probably loaded off the coast of West Africa, in Togo or Benin perhaps, where the ’ndrine have storage and transportation facilities.

But it’s not over. The next action covers the entire Atlantic, right up to where it becomes the North Sea. On October 29, 2003, a shipment from Manaus, Brazil, that has come through Rijeka, Croatia, is stopped at the port of Hamburg: 255 kilos of cocaine are hidden in a load of plastic ceiling panels. Stopovers make drug trafficking easier, since the number of the container is changed every time. The one that arrived in Hamburg was supposed to be delivered to San Lazzaro di Savena, to a company called Ventrans, owned by Francesco Ventrici, which a road haulage portal elected “company of the month” in 2002 for its “seriousness, reliability, and precision.” Mancuso’s man was held up as a model businessman in the town near Bologna where he had taken up residence.

It’s not until January 28, 2004, three years later, that the port of Gioia Tauro is hit. A shipment of 242 kilos of cocaine hidden in blocks of piedra muñeca that sailed from Cartagena for Marmo Imeffe is seized. It’s the final act, the moment when the investigators remove their masks. Arrests are under way. Operation Decollo is over.

Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Croatia, Italy, Africa, Australia. The first points to mark for sure on the map. They’re not the only ones, though; they couldn’t be. When the investigators insist that they only manage to confiscate 10 percent of the cocaine destined for the European market, which amounts to a typical business risk — less than the percentage of goods stolen from a supermarket or checks bounced in a small business — they’re merely revealing publicly what they can of the bitter truth. It’s extremely difficult, of course, to find the eggs smuggled inside the body or the lots hidden with increasingly sophisticated methods, to intercept ships that sail the high seas and anchor for the night off the coast, wherever they choose. It’s difficult even when they’ve gathered detailed information. The narco-traffickers often manage to get away with it right under the noses of those trailing them. But there’s also another, more complicated aspect. The state not only needs to get cocaine off the streets; it also needs to block and possibly break up the organizations that sell it. But these two objectives conflict. If you keep hitting the same port, the traffickers will know for sure that you’ve got them in your sights, so they will alter their routes and cover-up cargo, dock in unpredictable places, in ports under less surveillance. In the case of Operation Decollo, the investigators had an extraordinary hidden card to play: an infiltrator who informed them in real time about new shipments and destinations. But this isn’t usually the case. They may resort to extensive wiretapping, but precautions on the other side make it extremely tricky to identify routes and unloading points. One risks losing the trail, and with it the entire investigation, which necessarily depends on such confirmations.

Even when, as in this case, the investigators know almost everything, every move has to be weighed carefully. Pretend. Pretend it was all just a lucky strike. It doesn’t mean your opponents won’t smell a rat. But what matters most in this secret poker game between cops and robbers is to not raise the level of alarm too high. Or for too long. The investigators can always be sure of one thing: Narco-traffickers may fold a hand, but they never cash in their chips. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Given the market needs, the calculation of risk becomes relative.

• • •

Who knows how much Bruno Fuduli pondered the choice he was about to make that day when he decided to walk into police headquarters in Vibo Valentia. Never enough. He thought he could escape the loan sharks who would have strangled him and the increasing probability of ending up in jail for a long time. Once he turned informer and eventually accomplice to the criminal investigation police, taking the code name Sandro, he knew he would receive protection and assistance in order to create a new life for himself, far from where people considered him a rat, a leaf destined to rot at the foot of a tree. One thing he knew for sure — if they discover that it’s me, they’ll kill me. If they only find out later — after I’ve made a new life for myself — who it was who betrayed them, they’ll never give up searching for me. Clear thinking, but too generic, too abstract. He simply couldn’t imagine in advance the anxiety that would assail him, day after day, as a leaf in the hands of those who were starting to interfere with the flow of sap. A choice always transcends the calculation behind it; it is made powerful and inescapable by its blind spot. You never know how much it will cost you. You don’t know how you will manage to hold to it, day after day. You really don’t understand what you’re doing, what you’ve already done. That’s the conclusion I came to as well, over almost nine years. It often wakes me up and crushes me, like a punch in the chest. Then I get up, try to breathe, and tell myself: In the end, this is the way it has to be.

In reality, Bruno already starts to realize the tribulations that await him the morning after the first shipment (the only one that comes off smoothly, even with an exchange of hostages between Calabria and Colombia) when his two bosses, Natale Scali and Vincenzo Barbieri, end up arguing over the price of the cocaine, and start threatening each other. The second shipment is a dud: cocaine that has already been cut, stuff no one in Calabria buys. The Australian shipment would have been the most profitable — the market price down under is pretty high — if most of it hadn’t been seized. At first the traffickers think they’ve been screwed. Then, when they learn more about the bust from the Internet, they insist that they were responsible for the goods only until they cleared customs in port, which they had done. Bruno scrambles, irons things out, negotiates discounts. But then, incredible as it may seem, debts start threatening the marble and cocaine imports as well. And since Fuduli is already in hock with the loan sharks, Barbieri and Ventrici send him to contract more loans, with people even closer to the Mancusos and their vassal families. The lords of the province, kept out of his company by the gates, now appear at the windows.

All it would have taken to set things right was for the 870 kilos that arrived in Gioia Tauro in May-June 2000 and sold in bulk to the powerful Platì boss Pasquale Marando not to cause any more problems. But instead the shipment causes a frenzy. A frenzy born in a mini Colombian cartel, which infects the one established by Ventrici and Barbieri. The coke for that shipment was supplied by a family business, three or four brothers. But two of them hate each other. Felipe, in charge of sales and transportation, harbors deep rancor toward Daniel, who runs the production side and can be considered the head of the company. Colombians have a saying: “More people die in Colombia of envy than of cancer,” Bruno will say when telling the magistrates the story, which leaves them dumbfounded. Envy pierces and devours them, but profit holds them together, like the most poisonous glue. Felipe is kept at a distance with tasks that let him vent and even put to good use his violent nature and restless swagger. But envy merely waits for a soft landing to climb out of the crevice where it is hiding. It comes in the form of the two men from Vibo Valentia, with their lack of experience and their unflinching desire to hang on to the billions they’ve already pocketed from selling the shipment to Pasquale Marando. Felipe demands a small share of the payment for himself, saying he intends to ruin his brother and promising that he’ll be the one to deal with him. Ventrici, who unlike Barbieri can travel to meetings, is the first to give in. “Let’s pay the six million and let them sort it out,” he says to his partner. But for Daniel things aren’t adding up. He wants his share, he doesn’t care in the least about the money his brother got. He wants his own.

Daniel finds a way to make himself heard even while staying “in the kitchens” hidden in Colombia. He sends armed ambassadors to Ventrici with an ultimatum. Even worse, he personally sends him a fax from Colombia with a photograph of Ventrici’s house, followed by a second fax in which he informs him that he’s going to give $2 million to his ETA (the armed Basque organization) friends to blow it up with him inside. Fatty Ventrici, who was insolent up to that moment, is now terrified. He asks Bruno to meet with the narco he’s on most familiar terms with in Cuba — a guy named Ramiro — who reassures him that while Daniel sells coke to the Basque terrorists, it’s out of the question that ETA would mobilize to collect the debt.

Things calm down. All this has probably had a strange effect on Bruno. He’s seen the man who took his company out from under him shit his pants — for reasons he knows all too well. And he’s gotten further confirmation that in the narcos’ hierarchies of respect, he’s on a higher rung than the two men who think they can control him like a puppet. Now Ventrici and Barbieri know it too, they know that Calabria, compared to Colombia, is like a kids’ playground. It’s easy to feel like a man when you have the organization backing you up. Easy when you’re grabbing on to the tree as if it were your mommy’s apron strings, or when you merely give them an adolescent tug. In the end it’s always the tree that controls each and every leaf that moves. But Bruno decided not to let the tree control him anymore.

In fact, hostilities only die down because the big branches intervene. Natale Scali and Pasquale Marando guarantee the Colombian brothers against insolvency. In other words, they take on Ventrici and Barbieri’s debt in Colombia. Holding them by the balls for a mere $6 million means the bosses can avoid a whole slew of hassles nobody really needs. They’ve got plenty of other more pressing matters to deal with. In Colombia, for example, Santo “Papi” Scipione is running into the usual snags when it comes to payments. The experience and authority he’s already acquired in the field aren’t enough to prevent the paramilitaries, who nabbed his most trusty narco the month before, from wanting to get even with him. There are enormous advantages to bargaining with AUC, but all it takes is one hitch, which for normal traffickers would become the object of a tranquil discussion, and you seriously risk ending up in a ditch. Santo Scipione waits for them to come get him. “Because I don’t have anywhere to flee to, nowhere,” he sighs anxiously to Natale Scali, whose phone has already been tapped. The boss of Gioiosa Jonica wants to save Scipione: “A Calabrian’s life is worth more than a debt with these people, who don’t even know how to keep their word. They ask you for two but then they expect to get four.” Even the paramilitaries trust Scali’s word and, above all, his solvency. The hostages return home. But this time the veteran Calabrian narco has had the living daylight scared out of him.

• • •

Relying too much on past experience can sometimes betray you. You lean too much on what worked well before and have trouble evaluating anything new. This may partly explain why, curiously, the Aquino and Coluccio families of Marina di Gioiosa Jonica went into business with the Gulf cartel — to be precise, with Los Zetas, which, when the Italians first started dealing with them, was still the military arm of Friend Killer Osiel Cárdenas. What’s more, they did it from New York, after the Mexican narcos had already become the United States’ Enemy Number 2, when even direct imports of Taliban heroin could get into Europe more easily than a small shipment of cocaine from the heart of North America. It’s not as if the Calabrians didn’t try to be prudent. They shipped only microscopic lots, small enough at times to be sent by priority mail, and they never set foot outside the Big Apple when negotiating. But they still ended up with the DEA hard on their heels. The arrests started in 2008, and the substance of the huge investigation called Operation Reckoning (which in Italy was coordinated by the DDA of Reggio Calabria and was called Operazione Solare) became public. The United States punished the ’ndrangheta immediately by putting it on its Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklist, as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker. A tough blow. Excessive, from the Calabrians’ point of view. Their prudence wasn’t merely aimed at avoiding trouble with the DEA but with their new partners as well. They weren’t looking for some big business opening but were merely testing a new, alternative supply channel that opened up, to supplement the Colombian one.

The Colombians have never been interested in or able to manage the European drug markets on their own, which is why the Calabrians preferred to cultivate their role as direct importers. But they find themselves in competition with the Mexicans. The strength of both lies in their handling the entire narco trafficking distribution chain, cocaine in primis. And both knew how to take advantage of Colombia’s growing weakness. But now the fragmentation of the Colombia cartels and their increasing subordination to the Mexicans was making ’ndrangheta business dealings more complicated and uncertain. Which is why it needed to find a way to adapt to the new economic reality but without running too many risks. What the Calabrians fear most is that the Mexicans will land in Europe and invade their markets. The apparent absurdity of importing through the United States seemed to reflect this fear. The ’ndragheta’s nightmare was not the Mexican cartels’ military but rather their commercial aggressiveness. Yet it wasn’t wholly indifferent to this other aspect either, perhaps because it believes itself to be an expression of a saner, more civilized Old World than the Mexicans, or because dealing with people capable of such incalculable ferocity increases the risks associated with their business. Yet the ’ndrangheta had worked with the Colombians, for whom mass killings were standard practice, and that collaboration had been successful for years. So it may be that, when the leaders in Marina di Gioiosa Jonica approved the New York experiment, the comparison between AUC and Zetas played a role, especially as Los Zetas had not yet become an independent and powerful cartel.

• • •

I look for the photos of the tree near the Polsi sanctuary. I’m sorry I didn’t study it longer, didn’t observe closely what the top was like, the tips of the branches. I was with my Carabinieri bodyguards and a Calabrian carabiniere who was acting as guide. “Special tour in the land of the ’ndrangheta” he said to me. I had time to take some pictures with my phone, step inside the tree trunk, and linger a while longer, but then we had to move on to our next stop. I was a specialist tourist, and my guide was someone who usually came to these places to arrest someone, carry out a search, or look for underground hideouts. I couldn’t wander off on my own and contemplate the tree like some crazy poet in search of inspiration. To tell the truth, it didn’t even occur to me. After years of spending entire days with my escort I don’t even realize anymore how much I adapt my behavior to conform to the rules of the group. But that’s only normal. All of us have our rules, not just the Carabinieri or the ’ndrangheta.

Looking at a photo of myself inside the tree, I’m reminded of Santo Scipione, who left Aspromonte in order to become the ’ndrine agent in Colombia. He’s in jail now, but there are plenty of others like him in Latin America, western Africa, and in who knows how many other parts of the world where illegal commerce hasn’t been put on the map yet. Dreadful, dangerous places where you go to live only for business. I suspect that Santo Scipione would tell me there’s no difference whatsoever between what he was doing for the Onorata Società and what the heads of multinational corporations were doing when they paid AUC so as to obtain the best working conditions, as his wholesaler Salvatore Mancuso confirmed from prison in Warsaw. The only risk you have to reduce is your business risk. Your personal risk is compensated for with money. If, alas, things go poorly for you, if, for example, you happen to be at the petrol plant that Islamic terrorists storm and you end up dead, the company will always find someone who will go and replace you for the right price. But it’s not like these poor people could pick up the phone and talk with their boss, I can imagine Papi saying. The ’ndrangheta isn’t just some company with a head office and various businesses scattered about. It is a tree where the outer branches communicate with the trunk, which is welcoming, protective.

• • •

Bruno Fuduli was becoming more and more indispensable for the tree he never wanted to be part of. That is what’s so absurd about his story. Even Natale Scali enlists his services again, because he realizes how good he is. And since he’s not concerned about his two accomplices, the last person he thinks he needs to fear is their puppet. So while investigations are under way, Bruno is leading not a double but in fact a triple life. In Calabria he’s nothing more than a useful cog in the wheel. But in Colombia his esteem continues to grow with the people who really count. He’s not dealing just with narcos anymore but directly with the upper ranks of AUC. He would be wise to take to heart the Colombian proverb about more people dying from envy than from cancer. He needs to be more careful, he realizes, about revealing his contacts in Colombia — so as not to make the Calabrians jealous — than about concealing his unspeakable secret. Only to the Carabinieri and the judges can and must he report everything, word for word. Fuduli is revealing a new world to them, in all its detail. He’s the first person in Italy, and most likely not just there, to put a face on the new world of drug trafficking. He tells of a FARC guerrilla who lives in the jungle on the border with Ecuador, and who comes to Bogotá exclusively to traffic cocaine and procure materials to make explosives. He describes a paramilitary who handles cocaine for AUC and calls himself Rambo. He talks about narcos not as Colombian drug lords but as small businessmen, coerced and consumed by subservient relationships far worse than the ones he himself is caught in. He remembers the stories his friend Ramiro confided in him, from fleeing Cali with all his family after the hegemony of the cartel ended, when his offering to the new arrivals wasn’t enough to placate them, to the last time he had to hightail it out of there because they hadn’t “set things right” with AUC for managing the “kitchens.” Cocinas, cocinero, negocio. Kitchens, cook, business. Bruno borrows from Spanish an untranslatable vocabulary, words that ooze toil and rivalry.

The Italian investigators are treading on virgin territory. They have trouble following Bruno into a reality so different from the one they know: the Medellín cartel, the Cali cartel. But it doesn’t mean a thing now if you come from Medellín or Cali: For the power system that orbits around cocaine, what matters most is if you’re a paramilitary or a guerrilla. Fuduli has been going to Colombia since 1996. His confidential relationship begins one year before the United States declares AUC a terrorist organization, whose ties to narco-trafficking are merely strongly suspected. FARC, though long a target of massive military aid, still passes for a subversive army funded by robbery and kidnappings.

It’s not surprising therefore, that the first time Fuduli names Castaño and Mancuso in his statements to the magistrates there’s a fair amount of confusion. In the end it is impossible to decide whether Fuduli, together with Ramiro and his brother, had been summoned “to the jungle” by the supreme commander and his number two or if the narcos negotiated the nulla osta for the shipment that was later stopped in Salerno with a lieutenant whose nom de guerre is Boyaco. Sure, the transcription is even more confusing than the recording of Fuduli’s interview with the magistrates, rambling on as he does about paramilitaries in general and about Carlos Castaño, who “by this point… has incriminated himself and has been completely condemned.” Yet the transcription does seem to preserve some trace of the kinds of misunderstandings that arise when one party alludes to information that the other party doesn’t know anything about. Fuduli probably expected to be asked more than merely “Mancuso who?” to which he responds with a laconic “Mancuso Colombian.” I certainly would have liked to delve deeper into his story, to know more about such an anomalous witness’s experience, even if it weren’t directly related to the investigation. The fact remains that Operation Decollo verified the connection between AUC and the ’ndrangheta, and was the first to do so. But Fuduli’s words have a different taste than the phone calls between Santo Scipione and Natale Scali. A strange, ancient taste. Not the taste of tales of those who went in search of treasure or explored uncharted lands but of one who has ended up there because someone else willed it. They often reminded me of the accounts of the first missionaries sent to the American continent.

There’s one point in particular the investigators linger over, circle back to, even though Fuduli can’t provide them with any other essential information. He alleges that Felipe, toward the end of 2000, proposed he meet a narco-trafficker who had access to ships that could deliver supplies right off the Ionian coast — huge shipments, from both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries. The idea even enticed Natale Scali, and he sent one of his men, along with Bruno and a cousin of Francesco Ventrici, to represent him. The meeting didn’t take place in Colombia, nor in the bordering countries of Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, or Panama. The Calabrians were instead taken by tourist charter to Cancún, from there to Mexico City, and finally to Guadalajara. They were met at the airport and taken by car to a finca in the countryside. There they awaited the arrival of someone whom Felipe introduced merely as “my godfather.”

Fuduli cannot tell the investigators the godfather’s name or nickname. He doesn’t know if he is Mexican or Colombian. He’s been told he is in hiding, but he doesn’t know the country he’s wanted in. Felipe is the unreliable type, with delusions of grandeur that will reveal themselves later. So when he passes his “godfather” off as “one of the biggest in Mexico,” there’s no reason to believe him. But Ramiro, who is much more trustworthy, confirms to Bruno that every fifteen days he prepares a shipment and readies the runway so that Felipe can fly 400 kilos of cocaine to a private landing strip in Mexico. He also tells him that the reason those low-flying flights are made only every two weeks is simply that all the Colombian family cartels together aren’t able to fill the plane every week.

• • •

The Italian magistrates must not have found sufficient proof of the deals with the “godfather living in Mexico,” even though a Mexican citizen figures among those condemned in the first round of the trial that followed the investigation. But in light of what has transpired in the more than ten years that have passed since these reports were transcribed, in light of the information that the Reckoning and Solare investigations provided, Fuduli’s story seems in fact to be the chronicle of the Calabrians’ first landing in Mexico.

When I think about Bruno, when I recall his words, I ask myself what it means to encounter your destiny by mistake rather than by chance. The difference between fate and accident depends on your point of view, on the stories you tell — or don’t tell — yourself about the meaning of your life. The error of accepting Natale Scali’s proposal. The error he decided to try and erase by collaborating with the law. But Bruno Fuduli continued to dwell in that error for nearly ten years. He wasn’t an independent broker, and he wasn’t affiliated with a clan. He’d get on planes and go to tropical borderlands, to no man’s lands brimming with mines, fear, and poverty. And right at the end he found himself locked up for two weeks in a hut in the Bogotá savannah, altitude 11,500 feet, guarded day and night by paramilitaries armed to the teeth. The problem, that time, was the Vibo Valentia guys’ shipment seized in Hamburg, valued at $3 million. The Colombians wanted to be paid, they wanted to collect on what they’d sent. The Calabrians didn’t want to hear it, though; they wanted to pay only for the goods they received. Natale Scali couldn’t step in anymore. He’d been arrested in Marina di Gioiosa Jonica. Pasquale Marando couldn’t either — he was killed, but there’s no trace of his body. Right before the end the double game was turning into Russian roulette, with more than one bullet in the barrel. Bruno lost twenty pounds; all they gave him was water. He got sick. They moved him to an apartment in the capital, fearing for the life of their hostage. From there, instead of calling his counterparts in Calabria, he came up with a way to alert the Carabinieri. The Special Operations Group (ROS) collaborated with the Colombian police, who on January 12, 2004, managed to rescue him without firing a single shot. Later the AUC came for Ramiro. They stuffed him in the same hole of a hut Bruno’d been in until Ventrici and Barbieri finally settled their bill. Bruno’s double life as an infiltrator was about to end.

• • •

Even the judicial inquiries draw on the tree metaphor, and they propagate like branches. After Operation Decollo will come Decollo bis, Decollo ter, and Decollo Money, each of which will become intertwined with still other investigations. Follow the money: That was Giovanni Falcone’s pioneering investigative strategy and his lesson to magistrates who came after him. Yet this remains the hardest thing for investigators to do. It’s the fault of inadequate laws and tools, widespread complicity, and a lack of awareness and therefore of public pressure about the matter. It’s the fruit of a certain media logic, in which a drug seizure is worth at least ten lines in the paper, while the seizure of a property or business barely gets a mention in the local news, even though the economic aspects of Mafia activities are getting more attention in Italy. The information arrives, but it isn’t seen. The money even less.

Money isn’t merely that abstract entity, almost mystical for its volatility, infinite quantities of which can be moved from one end of the planet to the other with a mere click of a keyboard. Invested in the most cryptic funds, in the most high-risk stocks. At least not for the ’ndrangheta, or for mafias in general. For them, money is money. Cash, wads of it, suitcases crammed full of it, secret stashes. Their money has substance, weight — you can count it on your fingers. And the moldy smell it has isn’t lost even when it lands in the most unreachable bank accounts. ’Ndrangheta money is the fruit of their labor, the fruit of the tree. Which is why the ’ndrangheta does not disdain any method of cleaning it, reinvesting it, making the fruit of their labor bear more fruit. So their grand laundering schemes through finance companies that fit together like Chinese nesting boxes sit alongside the simple purchase of some two-room apartment or plot of farmland.

Operation Decollo’s first money trail discovery was incredible, both because of the amount involved and for the sheer simplicity of the laundering method. The Vibonesi bought themselves a SuperEnalotto lottery ticket. In May 2003 there was a 5+1 jackpot. The winning ticket turned out to have been sold at the Poker bar in Locri, which belonged to the father-in-law of a young man named Nicola Lucà, who laundered money for the Mancuso family. He contacted the winner right away and offered him more than €8 million for the ticket. Then he opened new accounts at the UniCredit banks of Milan and Soverato, so that the National Lottery — the Italian state, that is — could credit him the money. For Nicola Lucà the easy money marked the moment of greatest media notoriety, whereas his ascent in the ’ndrangheta hierarchy passed unobserved. He moved to northern Italy, where he became the accountant for the “local”—a ’ndrangheta cell — of Cormano, near Milan, which elected him to represent it at the summit in Lombardy: The video recording of Lucà toasting along with the other heads of the Lombard locals at the Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Bordellino Club in Paderno Dugnano, ten miles outside of Milan, during an October 2009 meeting, became the most clicked-on report on the web about the Crimine-Infinito investigation. Not a summit among bosses in ’ndrangheta territory — in Platì, Rosarno, or Gioiosa Jonica, or some Calabrian forest. This summit took place twelve hundred kilometers away, in Lombardy, Italy’s wealthiest and most advanced region, which — despite a number of investigations that have proved otherwise — had always considered itself immune to the cancer of the ’ndrangheta and of organized crime in general.

Another way that the ’ndrangheta hides is through affiliation density, which in Calabria reaches about 30 percent — and more than double that in the heart of Aspromonte — and with a capillary diffusion beyond their home turf. For anyone who doesn’t deal with the ’ndrangheta professionally, there are simply far too many of them to memorize who and where they are, and what they do. The tree’s shape is covered by its lush foliage, the branches of which are too fine and intricate to trace.

We find Nicola Ciconte — the Australian-born affiliate with Calabrian roots involved in the Decollo investigation — ten thousand miles from the base of the tree. Italy has been asking for his extradition since 2004. The most recent request is from 2012, a sentence in which he was condemned to twenty-five years. For now he tranquilly makes the rounds of the bars on the Gold Coast, the world’s surfing paradise, where he settled after making his way up the east coast from Melbourne. Since shipping Fuduli’s marble to the port of Adelaide, Ciconte has served time in Australia for fraud, swindled an ex-girlfriend, and driven a real estate agency into bankruptcy. Compared to what he did for the country he is most deeply tied to, these are minor things.

Australia — like Canada— has become such a ’ndrangheta colony that an independent Crimine has been established there, divided into six mandamenti, or districts, that coordinate directly with the Polsi Crimine, taking part in their decisions. Even the codes for affiliation and promotion to higher ranks have made their way to Australia. The illegal activities it engages in change over time, but the codes remain the same, regardless of where they are. Its strength, which allows it to take full advantage of globalization, rests on a double tie: on the one hand blood and homeland, on the other disciplined by immaterial bonds of rules and rites.

The ’ndrine began arriving in Australia, along with honest immigrants, in the early 1900s, then in earnest after World War II. They set about reinvesting dirty money from Italy in legal activities, and began cultivating cannabis, for which there was an endless amount of space, fertile terrain, and favorable climactic conditions. Then cocaine arrived, and all the families there — originally from Platì, and as well as from Sinopoli and Siderno, which are tied to the powerful Canadian branch — got in on the business.

Nicola Ciconte kept up his close contact with Vincenzo Barbieri, who, according to investigations, sent him another 500 kilos of cocaine, this time from Italy. But mostly he laundered money. For most of his life his official job has been as a broker, a financial broker. So Barbieri turned to him not only to get cocaine into the Southern Hemisphere, but also — and more important — money. Ciconte, who was not always reliable, was another contact who often caused problems for U Ragioniere. But in the end he allegedly bounced the money through Hong Kong and some other offshore channels so as to launder and deposit it clean in Australian, and even New Zealand, banks. The Calabrian tree doesn’t seem to touch the minor Pacific islands. Maybe because there are so few banks there.

Vincenzo Barbieri was killed in March 2011, in a classic mafia ambush. A gray Audi A3 pulled up alongside him late one afternoon, right as he stepped out of a tobacco shop. Two killers, their faces covered, got out of the car and unloaded a 7.65 caliber and a sawed-off shotgun into him. The shotgun wasn’t to kill, but rather to tear the victim’s flesh apart in a sign of contempt. They shot him in the head and got back in the car, the motor still running. Panicked shopkeepers lowered their shutters; passersby ducked into coffee shops as much to avoid the danger of seeing too much as to escape the shooting. A well-oiled response, a primitive instinct, even though there hadn’t been any executions in San Calogero for quite a while. Barbieri hadn’t lived there for years, yet they killed him in the center of his hometown, right in those narrow, twisting alleyways, without worrying about the people on the street or the video cameras trained on them. The burned-out car was found four days later, a few miles away.

Who wanted Barbieri dead? Or who more than anybody else? Why right then? For the ’ndrangheta, U Ragioniere had committed plenty of errors. Cocaine importation, through Fuduli and his companies, had already been marred by fuckups and foul play. But whenever possible, “men of honor” prefer to solve conflicts with money, which is much quieter and more useful than lead. The answer lies in Barbieri’s expansion, with the help of his accomplice Francesco “Fatty” Ventrici, into another wealthy region in northern Italy, the Emilia Romagna.

Business deals are easier to negotiate there, and the lifestyle is much more free and relaxed. Nobody there objects if you build a big rustic villa for your family, hold meetings in your rec room, or enjoy the garish luxury of your living room, watched over and blessed by a huge oil painting of your father. When evening comes you drive the half hour from the new development in the countryside to the old town to satisfy the rules of your house arrest. Which is what Ventrici does. They don’t even scowl at you if you register your fleet of Porsches, Mercedeses, and Maseratis in someone else’s name, or if you prefer to live right in the center of Bologna, in a fancy penthouse on Via Saffi. Which is what Barbieri does. When the place is searched in June 2009 and he’s found with €118,295 in cash, he is arrested for illegal financial transactions. It’s the first stumbling block in many years. It reminds the Bologna magistrates of Barbieri’s first arrest in Emilia. While under judicial supervision he had spent several months in room 115 of the Grand Hotel Baglioni, the only five-star hotel in the capital of Emilia Romagna.

Barbieri played the wealthy southern Italian gentleman, taking advantage of the trust he inspired, while Ventrici played the complementary figure of the nouveau riche who is still a hard worker, a simple man at heart. Neither one fit the stereotype of the mafioso. Besides, it’s not all that remarkable, even in Emilia, that all sorts of people turn out to be loaded. So the two of them went on buying, buying, buying, hatching ever more ambitious expansion projects. Ventrici controled the Futur Program, a real estate agency in San Lazzaro di Savena affiliated with Gabetti (a major real estate chain). Barbieri, without even talking price, invested in the King Rose Hotel in Granarolo, a three-star hotel with fifty-five rooms conveniently located near the Bologna convention center. Then shares in the clothing company Cherri Fashion, the Montecarlo café in Via Ugo Bassi, real estate, land.

Even though they were much better off far from Calabria and its rules, above all that unspoken rule that — as in Colombia — envy is more deadly than cancer, they always maintained their ties to the homeland. It wasn’t a question of nostalgia but of business. Francesco Ventrici controlled M5, a construction company he employed in Emilia as well, the Union Frigo Transport Logistic, and the VM Trans (which had replaced Ventrans after it was confiscated thanks to Operation Decollo). All registered in Calabria, even though the road haulage company had a branch in Castel San Pietro, in the province of Bologna. His trucks meant he was still a force to contend with. Ventrans had an exclusive deal with Lidl, a multinational deep-discount supermarket company in Calabria. The confiscation of the company did not prevent VM Trans from taking over that contract. But in 2009 a problem arose. Lidl decided to use other carriers as well — a question of costs. “It’s either us or them,” Ventrici screamed, and halted pickups and deliveries. Police reports started piling up, fast and furious. Drivers beaten up, verbal abuse that went from broken legs to death threats. “You’re not unloading this truck, your boss has to come do it, that way we’ll burn him alive… your coworkers have already been warned…”

The first company turned down the job. Lidl tried again with an Umbrian company, paying armed guards to accompany the drivers to Calabria. But the violence didn’t stop. In the end, as Decollo ter revealed, the Lidl managers met with the owner of VM Trans in Massa Lombarda, in the province of Ravenna. Ventrici, playing the part of the big boss, declared, “You want a war, but in Calabria not even the pope would win a war.” And in case his words weren’t enough, that same day the drivers supplying a supermarket in Taurianova were attacked by armed assailants. The two pistol-wielding ambassadors fled as soon as they saw security guards arrive. But Lidl Italia had had enough. Too many complications, too many losses. So they reestablished an exclusive relationship with Ventrici until he was indicted for this story as well. According to the magistrates, the criminal businessman was able to break Lidl, forcing it, through the use of the violent behavior and threats described above, “to reconsider its organizational strategies, and to renounce the assured economic advantages, including those of competitive prices, that would have resulted from using multiple carriers to transport goods to Calabria.”

Fatty enjoyed making sensational, exaggerated statements during more important negotiations as well. He works with a family, he’s not a gypsy, and in twenty years of trafficking cocaine, he’s never once paid €30,000 a kilo. This is the substance of his retort to the Colombians who came to see him in his rustic villa in Emilia Romagna to talk about the differences of opinion blocking 1,500 kilos of cocaine in Ecuador. The German pilot, Michael Kramer, who had already pocketed a €100,000 advance, refused at the last minute to take the load to Lubiana, Slovenia. Ventrici shit his pants again, fearing that his about-face was a sign that he’d somehow hired a DEA infiltrator. Then Barbieri was killed, and Ventrici decided to interrupt his first big drug deal organized without U Ragioniere. The magistrature took care of the rest: From January to August 2011 it bombarded him with arrest warrants and seizure orders, from Catanzaro to Bologna.

Vincenzo Barbieri, like his accomplice or ex-accomplice, had organized an import circuit with close relatives and personally recruited accomplices. He wanted to do things in style, and even got himself an agent in Colombia, a young man who’d already started a family and had opened a restaurant. In the department of Meta, where many cocaine fields and “kitchens” had moved, the restaurant’s name — La Calabrisella — which evokes not only a popular folk song but also the marijuana grown in Calabria — has a bitter, sarcastic taste. But things didn’t go smoothly for him this time either. In September 2010 a load of 400 kilos was seized in Colombia, and in November the same thing happened to an entire ton that had landed in Gioia Tauro, inside agricultural trailer frames. Barbieri, who was varying the cover-up methods he’d tried out with Fuduli, had another 1,200 kilos of pure cocaine sent from Brazil in cans of palm hearts. The container was seized at the port of Livorno on April 8, 2011, by which date the buyer was already dead.

U Ragioniere managed to set off a scandal of unprecedented proportions even from the grave. It was the first time his name echoed all over the media without disappearing quickly into the burial mound of mafia news. The DDA of Catanzaro opened a new line of inquiry within the mother investigation, Decollo Money. The public learned about it on July 29, 2011. In December 2010, Vincenzo Barbieri allegedly summoned the manager of a San Marino bank to the King Rose Hotel in Granarolo and gave him two suitcases filled with cash: €1.3 million ended up in an account in his name at the Credito Sammarinese bank, and a comparable amount was subsequently deposited in an account in the name of one of Barbieri’s relatives, transferred thanks to the mediation of some notable individuals in the Calabrian town of Nicotera. But that’s not all. Thanks to the economic crisis the bank was facing serious liquidity problems, and so was up for sale for the sum of €15 million. Credito Sammarinese was already negotiating with a Brazilian bank, but U Ragioniere allegedly promised to put up the same amount, thus raising the prospect of a ’ndrangheta takeover. The public prosecutor, assisted in his investigation by San Marino magistrates, asked for the indictment of former manager Valter Vendemini, the president and founder Lucio Amati, as well as the Calabrian middlemen and the holders of the still active accounts. In the end, Credito Sammarinese was forced into receivership.

A suspicious activity report, or SAR, was sent, but too late: on January 31, 2011, five days after the Catanzaro magistrates had Barbieri arrested again in the context of Decollo ter.

Barbieri was ambushed just before he was able to return to Bologna. It’s thought that they feared he would expose the whole tree, in particular the Mancuso ’ndrina, that all the newspapers and TV news dragged in every time there was a story that had to do with him. The sensational seizure in Gioia Tauro in November 2010, which could not fail to trigger inquiries, severely shook the entire organization’s business serenity. Moreover, it is not unlikely that in Calabria they knew about his San Marino bank plot and thought it a huge mistake to open an account in one’s own name in an offshore paradise just sixty miles from home.

The press painted Vincenzo Barbieri and Francesco Ventrici in increasingly superlative terms: superpowerful bosses, top narco-trafficking brokers, incredibly dangerous criminals. Sure, they imported tons of drugs. But from close up they look pretty insignificant. Greedy bunglers with only average intelligence. Duped by their own victim. It was merely the use of violence that gave them strength. That and — much more important — cocaine. Cocaine money. Cocaine money ready to buy up failing banks. Cocaine money transformed into trucks, ready to supply an entire supermarket chain, and thus be turned into millions more in profit. With money laundering you keep on earning. It’s not that complicated.

• • •

What hurts me the most, though, is knowing that their mediocre affairs found more space, filled more pages, than other stories. Extraordinary stories like Bruno Fuduli’s. When Operation Decollo went public there were only a few passing mentions in the Italian press of an unnamed infiltrator. Then, years later, a few more lines when El Mono made news with his disclosures from a United States prison. Nothing more. Invisible. Invisible, like almost everyone who pays with silence for words offered in the name of justice. Who pays for the affront they caused that tree watered by fear and fed by business deals? Them. Not the others. Not men like Ventrici and Barbieri, who move in and out of prison as if playing a real-life game of Snakes and Ladders. And who then serve most of their time in their own homes, in the place where they chose to live, surrounded by their loved ones, integrated into society. With the chance to cultivate their interests, legal and illegal, with oodles of money to invest or spend for whatever they desire or need. Only killers and those bosses condemned to a special regime or forced to reconcile commanding and living in hiding are worse off than those who helped to denounce them.

But they have respect.

Respect. A word tainted by the use mafias all around the world make of it. Aped by the most disastrous, ferocious youth gangs. Respecto. The maras in Central America shout it when they beat a new affiliate bloody. Respect. Fat gansta rappers loaded with gold chains and surrounded by girls wiggling their hips utter it. Respect, brother. Yet this desecrated and ridiculed word continues to mean something essential. The certainty of possessing — by right — a place in the world, a place among other people, wherever you are. Even in the void of an underground hole or the vacuum of solitary confinement.

Yet those who choose to side with the law often lose even that certainty. And then what’s left? Can the decision to choose liberty turn into the most radical solitude? Can an act of justice be repaid with unhappiness? Informers become invisible. Like ghosts. Like the shades of Lake Averno, the mythical entrance to the underworld. I think about it a lot when I try to come to terms with those in Italy who accuse me of having received too much public attention. Nothing replaces the friends lost along the way, the cities left behind, the colors, tastes, voices, the use of a body that can move freely, walk, sit on a wall and stare at the sea, feel the wind through its clothes. Public attention can weigh on you like a prison. But it is also related to respect. Attention lets you know that your existence counts for other people. It tells you you exist.

Bruno Fuduli testifies at the trial. He shows his face to his loan sharks and the business partners imposed on him, but also to the Colombian narcos with whom he had become friends. Then he returns to the shadows. He is invited to appear on an investigative TV program on the port of Gioia Tauro. The appointment is at the Salerno train station, chosen at random because they can’t reveal where he lives or film his face. They stop to do the interview along the waterfront. Bruno is wearing pants and a white, raw linen shirt. He looks like a burly giant compared to the reporter and the girl in sneakers who accompanies him. He has a deep voice, like a baritone, and he appears calm the whole time. He doesn’t lose his composure when he reveals he’s afraid and suffers from insomnia. He doesn’t betray the least emotion as he talks about the ten men armed with pistols and machine guns who watched over him when he was held hostage in Colombia. Finally, as if mentioning an inescapable fact, he says that something will happen to him someday. They will look for him, if they aren’t doing so already, and sooner or later, they’ll kill him. The ’ndrangheta may wait fifteen or even twenty years, but it doesn’t forget. Just a few minutes to sum up a life. A body without a face on the screen. And then, once again, nothing. Until two years later.

In early December 2010, the DDA of Catanzaro launched Operation Overloading, which would have brought to an end a drug-trafficking investigation like so many others were it not for the fact that it happened to involve some anomalous figures: a Carabinieri colonel in service in Bolzano and a young, very wealthy real estate agent in Rome who is called Pupone, or Big Baby, like Totti, in the wiretappings. The first was involved in picking up some suitcases at Fiumicino Airport and then delivering them to their addressees in Rome. The second, of helping to finance loads of cocaine, thanks to his friendship with Antonio Pelle, nephew of the recently deceased boss ’Ntoni Gambazza.

The first customers for that round of imports were two allied ’ndrine on the Tyrrhenian side of the province of Cosenza — minor families, despite how formidable they were. Their initial objective was to supply their own zones and still have enough of a surplus to sell in the north. But they wanted to do things right. So they hired Bruno Pizzata, the best narco in San Luca. Pizzata, a real pro, insisted that for the moment it was too slow, too complicated, and too inefficient to send the lots by ship. So he decided on air delivery from Venezuela and Brazil to Amsterdam, Rome, or Spain, making use of “mules” who swallow drug-filled pellets or carry false-bottomed suitcases. Pizzata was constantly traveling between South America, Spain, Holland, and Germany. He’d spent a good part of his life in Germany, and that was where he took refuge after having escaped arrest during Overloading; until February 2011, when they found him eating in the pizzeria La Cucina in Oberhausen, a city very close to Duisburg, the 2007 site of the ’ndrangheta massacre.

Pizzata was too busy, his life too complicated, for him to take care of everything. So he delegated the bulk of the coordination in Italy to Francesco Strangio. Then he found out that the Bellocco family of Rosarno were allegedly about to meet with a Colombian agent in Italy who could get his hands on enormous quantities of “material,” as cocaine is called over the phone. So toward the end of 2008 the two groups decided to form a business alliance. The man who provided that precious contact for the San Luca and Rosarno families was none other than Bruno Fuduli.

Bruno was arrested for drug trafficking and condemned to eighteen years of imprisonment on May 16, 2012. How was that possible? How was it possible that the leaf destined to rot on the ground found its way back onto the branches of the tree? How was it possible that in late October 2008, he declared on a TV program that they would track him down and kill him, and then, not long after, he got in contact with his old Colombian acquaintances and ’ndrangheta clients again? Despite Bruno’s previous collaboration, the judges did not grant him a sentence reduction.

To try and understand it I consulted the court records. They reconstruct the facts, the dates, and the evidence; they trace in great detail the events as they unfold, but they can’t reveal a person’s soul — even less that of a person so apt at hiding his intentions without even lying. The records say that Bruno managed again to make fun of the state. He met with the narcos’ middleman, even put him up in his home in Calabria, accompanied him to near where his appointments with Pizzata or Francesco Strangio were, almost always near the Central Station in Milan. When he was placed under police protection they made him live in Fiorenzuola d’Arda near Piacenza, not far away from Milan. But the San Luca and Rosarno men never saw him. He became a director and secret organizer. He evaluated costs and routes, came up with transportation systems, ironed out problems, calmed people down. All he needed was one person willing to act as an interface with the buyers. Probably an old acquaintance in this case as well: Joseph Bruzzese, a marble cutter by trade but whose résumé qualifies him for the Calabrian families. He was the one who proposed the new route to a Bellocco lieutenant. So the mechanism Fuduli thought up was set in motion.

No one, other than a few Calabrian newspapers, even noticed the incredible evolution of Bruno Fuduli’s story. They talk about a “return to his old love, crime,” and “to his first passion, cocaine.” They’re loaded with quotation marks for words like “infiltrator,” “songbird,” “deep throat,” “rat.” They all use the same vocabulary, full of ambiguous ironies, and they ooze contentment because the “supercollaborator is still in jail. In solitary confinement.” They even feign indignation at the infidelity of a man who had turned himself in, so as to water down the real reason for the scandal: The infiltrator had succeeded in insinuating himself with the upper echelon of the ’ndrangheta. Yet these are the same papers that had dedicated a lot of attention to another episode, the only documentable one in the period of Fuduli’s life between the end of the trial and the beginning of his return to drug trafficking.

The morning of May 21, 2007, an antimafia demonstration marched through the center of Vibo Valentia. That day was chosen because it coincided with the opening of the new eyewear store of Nello Ruello, the shopkeeper who, after enduring ten years of extortion and usury, decided to report his oppressors and turned government witness. Onstage, along with the other authorities, were the mayor and the prefect, an undersecretary of the interior, the president of the Antimafia Commission, Francesco Forgione, and Don Luigi Ciotti, the founder of Libera, an association on the front line in the battle against the mafia. Before them were gathered a hundred or so students, union and antimafia association militants, a few townspeople, and even fewer shopkeepers. A typical demonstration in mafia territories, unfortunately. Yet during the closing rally a small incident occurred. A man climbed onto the barriers enclosing Piazza Municipio and started shouting. “Where’s my money? Where’s my 5,000 kilos of cocaine?” The local papers took photos, and they printed the image of Bruno shouting and raising his left arm defiantly while being restrained by the police. He was wearing a new, light-colored linen suit, this time with a jacket, only his eyes are hidden behind a pair of sunglasses. Later on he was interviewed.

Fuduli said that he’d applied for the financial assistance provided to victims of rackets and usury, which he needed to start a new enterprise, two years before, but he still hadn’t seen a cent. He explained that he came to Vibo Valentia with his mother and brother because he’d decided to leave the protection program. One interview in particular is chilling, starting with the title: “Don’t collaborate with the law, they’ll screw you.” It opens with a statement Fuduli made: “Thanks to me, 140 people went to jail, I uncovered five tons of cocaine and the trafficking between Calabria and Colombia, but now I told them all to go to hell….”

The rest of what he says is just as unequivocal. The state ruined his life, Fuduli claims. It gives him less than €1,000 a month. He’s starving, he’s being evicted from his apartment, he has a sister who suffers seriously from stress, an elderly mother. He’s so desperate he decided to expose himself right in the center of Vibo Valentia. When asked if he ever thought about going to the other side, he replies: “Yes, I’ve thought about it, and I regret not having done it, given what my collaboration with the law has brought me.” In the space of ten days he is granted the economic assistance he’d requested as well as a mortgage to start a new commercial enterprise. But perhaps it’s already too late. The former double agent had announced in no uncertain terms his intention to betray the state. Bruno Fuduli never lacked determination or courage. It’s only fair that he pay for his choice.

In a conversation the DDA of Milan intercepted in the context of its next inquiry, Pizzata remembers an episode from his trips to Colombia. He tells of a narco nicknamed Lo Zio, or Uncle, who allegedly cut off the hands of someone who had stolen material. “Mamma mia,” his brother-in-law Francesco Strangio responds. “We’re more flexible about those sorts of things. When has anything like that happened in our territory? Never. A shooting maybe, but not that sort of torture.”

Maybe Bruno Fuduli gambled on the range of possibility that could open up between that hoped-for flexibility and the bullet he was already expecting. Maybe he wasn’t going merely for narco dollars but for something much higher: to prove himself in the long run as able and trustworthy as he used to be at high-level trafficking. Perhaps he might even have risked coming out into the open at that point. Maybe Fuduli was trying to ransom his own life with cocaine. We’ll never know if he succeeded.