ZeroZeroZero

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It’s the most vexing mathematical equation you’ll ever have to solve. More difficult than the twin prime conjecture or Landau’s Problems. And more mysterious than crop circles. All things considered, you’re really only being asked a simple question: the ratio of cocaine seized to cocaine produced. A fraction. Grammar school stuff. Well, let’s collect the data, you might say. Okay. Where do we start? With the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s “World Drug Report”? Okay, take a look at the graph. The difference between the amount of cocaine seized in 2010 and 2009 is 38 tons: 694 as opposed to 732. A mountain of cocaine but substantially irrelevant in the ocean of world drug trade. So you might deduce that cocaine seizures in recent years have not varied significantly. Go back a bit further. Look at the stats for 2001 to 2005. Do you see how seizures are on a rise then, reaching a peak in 2005? Interesting, isn’t it? Maybe something happened after 2005. Maybe the drug traffickers wised up, maybe they came up with new ways of exporting cocaine. Maybe. But there’s another variable: In recent years cocaine’s purity has decreased. Again according to the “World Drug Report”: The purity rate of cocaine seized in the United States over the four-year period 2006 to 2010 dropped from 85 percent to 73 percent. People are snorting tons of shit. But this consideration doesn’t throw off your calculations. Newly produced cocaine is 100 percent pure, but the stuff that ends up on the street outside your house is far less so. How do you compare the two? How can you have a fraction where the numerator refers to one thing and the denominator another? Can’t you just hear your teacher saying: “You can’t compare apples to oranges”? In other words, “You can’t compare pure coke with coke that’s been cut.” And besides, how much cocaine is actually being produced annually? Keep reading the report. The range varies from 788 tons to 1,060 tons. A pretty sizable difference, don’t you think? The difference corresponds to the total production of an entire country. And the purity percentage of seized cocaine isn’t always declared. I could also mention that some figures may in fact be doubled, the result of more than one police force being involved in an operation leading to the seizure’s being counted twice. If you’re okay with ignoring these last variables and do your own calculation, by using 694 tons of cocaine seized (knowing nothing about its purity) as your numerator and a figure that oscillates between 788 tons and 1,060 tons as your denominator, you’ll come up with between 65 percent and 88 percent. Isn’t a 23-point difference a bit too high to be reliable? I agree. Not that you’re the first to try such a calculation. The “World Drug Report” tried it in 2011. The result? From 46 percent to 60 percent. “Only” 14 points of uncertainty! But go back two more years and the percentage finally has a leg to stand on, and the number is 41.5 percent. How did they come up with that? you ask. By inventing an average purity index for street cocaine of 58 percent. Is it reliable? Maybe. Or maybe not, as many, including the antimafia organization Libera, maintain. They focused on a year—2004—and did some calculations not unlike the ones you’re doing right now. World cocaine production that year came to 937 tons. Subtract from that the tons seized (490) and consumed (450) in the Americas. Then subtract the 99 tons of cocaine seized in the rest of the world. The result? A negative number: -102 tons. But Europeans snort cocaine too, lots of it, about 300 tons in fact. After some quick arithmetic it turns out that in 2004 a little over 400 tons are somehow missing, at least according to the data. Disappeared without a trace. One of the world’s many mysteries, along with the Loch Ness monster.

Now you know what you need to know. Now it’s up to you. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.

10. THE WEIGHT OF MONEY

There are two kinds of wealthy people: those who count their money and those who weigh it. If you don’t belong to the latter category, you don’t really know what power is. I learned that from the narco-traffickers. I also learned that narcos are turning into citizens of the world, but no matter where they are, their gestures, their moves, their thoughts are the same as if they’d never left home. Live wherever you want, even in the middle of Wall Street, but don’t abandon the rules of your hometown. Old-fashioned rules that help you survive in today’s world without getting lost. It’s sticking to those rules that gives Italian organizations the upper hand when dealing with South American narcos and Mexican cartels, that lets them purchase tons of drugs with just a promise.

Calabrian drug traffickers may have shed the look of shepherds from Aspromonte, but Aspromonte’s rules, the rules of blood and earth, still provide their moral coordinates, still guide their actions. Except that now they also know the rules of economics and know how to move in the world so as to guarantee an annual turnover of billions of euros. Which is why it’s hard to describe the men who govern the world’s narco-traffic. If you handed the material to a screenwriter, you’d get characters who go from bespoke pinstriped suits to gutter street dialect, from marble palaces to stinking streets, characters whose ambiguity is charming, whose paradoxes are worrisome. But all that’s fiction. In reality the drug-trafficking bourgeoisie is on the whole more solid and serene than the average industrial bourgeois family. Mafia families are used to closing ranks, to suffering and responding to setbacks — for them absence and distance are the norm. To cover or conceal things that shouldn’t be known isn’t tantamount to a fragile respectability but rather a fundamental necessity. They’re prepared for pain, loss, and betrayal, and it makes them stronger. They don’t deny the savagery of living in this world.

When I ask myself who the archetypical cocaine manager would be, two names emerge, like opposing poles of a magnetic field. North and South. The man from the North is the prototype of a self-made entrepreneur, trusting only in his own strengths and business sense. The man from the South is a bourgeois from the capital who had a taste of what it would be like to go beyond the secure existence of a government employee and went for it. Neither feels beholden to any political or moral position. If they need to be democratic and transgressive, they know how to do that. And if it’s better to seem like strict conservatives, they’re fine with that too. Businessmen capable of tempting upright, moral individuals by taking advantage of microscopic fissures, imperceptible weaknesses. They corrupt without ever letting the corrupted one feel as if he’s sinning, and pass off corruption as normal, a swift and weightless procedure, something that everybody does, after all.

The man from the North conveys first of all solidity and determination; the man from the South seems more vivacious and worldly, but both come across as middle-aged and middle-class gentlemen. This is clear even from their nicknames, which are banal, even slightly ridiculous. Who would ever suspect Bebè and Mario?

The younger one was born sixty-three years ago, in Almenno San Bartolomeo, a village in Lombardy. Bergamo’s not too far away, but it takes even less time to cross the Brembo River and head into the Val Brembana, the valley that even for Lombards is the epitomy of provincial backwardness. He’s named Pasquale — probably in memory of his grandfather from Brindisi — Claudio, so he has a more modern name too. His last name is Locatelli, like just about everyone else around there. He becomes Mario later, again like everyone else.

Pasquale Claudio Locatelli is twenty when he starts making forays into the wealthy part of Lombardy, between Milan and Verona, to steal cars with powerful engines. He works with guys from Milan who grew up in the ligéra, the old criminal underworld still celebrated in popular songs in the local dialect, although the Bar del Giambellino and the Palo della Banda dell’Ortica described in those ballads now belong to a more innocent past. Milan has become a war zone: Political subversion is mistaken for and at times intertwined with common criminality, and the number of armed robberies and kidnappings is rising precipitously. Homicides average a 150 a year. Those criminals who don’t become stars, such as Renato Vallanzasca, Francis “Angel Face” Turatello, and his former second in command, Angelo Epaminonda, those who aren’t serving a life sentence for murder or other serious crimes, can carry on tranquilly.

Locatelli understands this; he understands that the crime that pays is not that of the fanatics of the 1970s. He goes from car theft to supplying all the services that a seller of stolen cars needs; he forms a network of contacts from Austria to France, studies foreign languages, eventually mastering four of them. He’s already thinking like an international-level entrepreneur. Illegal business is a business just like any other: What matters are reliability and foresight. A deceptive peace is settling over Milan, something that is both bubbly and creamy, like the food and drink that are so in fashion. The man who goes by the name of Mario but will also be called “Diabolik” understands that wherever there’s more money and a desire to have fun, that’s where new markets spring up. Fashion and design, private TV channels, young entrepreneurs, and lots of daddy’s boys and girls walking around, swinging their hips. Here in Italy’s richest city and region more people can indulge in the vice of cocaine than elsewhere. Locatelli throws himself decisively into the business. He’s under house arrest for a past offense, and it’s this restriction on his movements that leads him to go into hiding. He tries to better his luck in a place where he knows he can easily find new clients, the Côte d’Azur. He moves into a villa in Saint-Raphaël, which is more sedate than nearby Saint-Tropez. People there, who know him as Italo Salomone, mind their own business, as wealthy homeowners usually do. They don’t know that the French police have been hunting him ever since they seized a false-bottomed suitcase from Colombia stuffed with cocaine at the Nice airport. Pasquale Locatelli has already been convicted twice for drug trafficking, in two French courts, and has been sentenced to twenty and ten years in absentia. Italo Salomone seems to be an ordinary Italian, enjoying the mild climate and carefree life. Till the day when, after three years of searching, the flics arrest him in his villa, where they find a stash of Colombian cocaine—41 kilos.

It’s 1989.

During this same period Bebè is restoring an old farmhouse in Valsecca, at the foot of the Bergamo Alps, half an hour from Brembate di Sopra, Locatelli’s last Italian residence. Bebè didn’t choose that spot for the peacefulness or the mountain air. He chose it in order to turn it into a refinery for white heroin — the rarest, most prized kind — for which there is still a niche market in the United States, so as to be able to trade it with the Colombian drug lords. According to police informer Saverio Morabito, the notorious former boss of the Milan ’ndrangheta, at the end of the 1980s the Colombians were trading 25 kilos of the purest Colombian cocaine for 1 kilo of white Bergamo heroin.

Bebè is Roberto Pannunzi, a Roman with a Calabrian mother, a former Alitalia employee now past sixty-five who emigrated to Canada when he was young, as many southerners did back then. The Calabrians there worked hard: construction, transportation, trash removal, restaurants. But the massive presence of Italian immigrants was exploited, not just by Canadian employers, but by the lords of Siderno. U Zi, or “Uncle” Antonio Macrì, had quickly gained control of drug trafficking in Canada and also established excellent relations with the American Cosa Nostra. His murder in Calabria in 1975 set off the first ’ndrangheta war, but the entrepreneurial empire he’d constructed overseas remained untouched. Macrì had created or bought all sorts of commercial activities, in particular export-import businesses, which helped him establish excellent contacts in the most important ports. In the 1980s the Canadian police considered the organization he left his heirs to be the most powerful ’ndrangheta presence in all of Canada. In Toronto, Roberto Pannunzi rediscovers his maternal roots, thanks to Antonio Macrì. Zi’ ’Ntoni likes this kid with thick black hair, a round face, and a proud gaze. Roberto is respectful, and — more important — he’s loyal. Roberto sticks close to Macrì and learns. He’s ambitious and obedient — not like a servant, but because he’s convinced he can learn by obeying. He keeps his mouth shut and his head down, because when he grows up he wants to command. About the same time he meets Salvatore Miceli in Toronto: a Sicilian, and the point man for Cosa Nostra’s drug trade. The two become friends, and then accomplices.

Through Miceli, Pannunzi receives from Cosa Nostra heroin refined in Palermo; he has it transported to Siderno, where it is then shipped to Toronto, hidden among ceramic tiles, and picked up by Vincenzo and Salvatore Macrì, Zi’ ’Ntoni’s nephews.

Pannunzi is getting good. He’s not happy with the stuff his first contacts pass off on him. He wants the best price-quality ratio, and he gets it, that’s why people like him. Through Macrì’s friends he meets the major suppliers, who trust him precisely because of his connection with Macrì. By himself he never would have been able to get anywhere near the leading figures of the heroin trade, but he learns how to use Macrì’s contacts in ports around the globe. If a group can’t find a contact, Roberto comes up with one. He makes himself available to everyone, organizes shipments, even to parts of the world where heroin had never reached before. And when groups ask him for better quality stuff at a lower price, he gets in touch with specialists who know how to solve the problem. He’s the one who arranges a meeting between the Sicilian Alberti and the Marseilles clans, who send one of their chemists to Palermo to set up a heroin lab.

And when Platì boss Pasquale Marando, in charge of drug trafficking in northern Italy, has to go into hiding, Pannunzi offers to mediate between the families of Marina di Gioiosa Jonica and Platì, in the heart of the ’ndrangheta region in the Aspromonte. Pannunzi unites rather than divides. That is his aim.

To bond even more with his financiers, when Bebè returns to Italy he marries Adriana Diano, who belongs to one of the most prominent families in Siderno. Even though they separate soon afterward, marriage and the mingling of blood are always more binding than a mere contract. Officially Roberto manages a clothing store in Rome. He also has a sense of irony and calls the shop Il Papavero or Poppy, in homage to his collaboration with the most important traffickers of Turkish heroin. In reality, he’s at the Calabrian clans’ disposal. The money the ’ndrangheta used to make from kidnappings must now be raised through drug trafficking. Roberto is ready. He knows where it’s best to invest.

The man from the South and the man from the North travel on parallel lines without seemingly ever intersecting in time or space. Locatelli is slightly ahead of Pannunzi, not so much because he started his career closer to Milan, which is still the best cocaine market in Italy. A minor geographical advantage doesn’t matter much when you’re playing on a global chessboard. No, Locatelli’s better sense of timing is more likely due to the fact that he is his own boss, is free to make new investments, is the only one to shoulder the risk. Pannunzi, on the other hand, is more like a top manager for a big holding company. New markets have to be conquered prudently, without letting the old, dependable ones lag behind, without risking a penny of their vast holdings. The idea of applying Calabrian expertise in heroin to cocaine production, thus increasing potential gains, is the typical stroke of inspiration any good manager would come up with to impress his superiors. Pannunzi then puts his idea into practice: in order to find a farmhouse, he contacts Morabito as well as a ’ndrina ensconced in Lombardy, the Sergi of Platì. Then he brings in the best chemists from France, two men of the Marseilles clan who’ve already worked for Cosa Nostra and can guarantee excellent results.

While Pannunzi is laying the groundwork for a joint cocaine venture, Locatelli is on trial for international drug trafficking, and is sentenced to ten years’ prison in Grasse, the world capital of perfume. All he can see from jail is a scrap of that pleasing landscape which extends below the old town; the sea at Cannes is something he can only sense. But he doesn’t need the sea view: Diabolik/Locatelli is swift in thought and deed. He breaks his arm. He needs to be hospitalized, but the French are not so naïve; they suspect that it might not have been an accident. As a safeguard, they send him not to Nice but to Lyon, far — more than three hundred miles — from the coast he knows every inch of. The prisoner gets out of the police van and heads toward the hospital. After only a few steps, three masked and armed men appear, disarm his police escort, and vanish with the prisoner. It’s the end of an era. Locatelli crosses the border into Spain. He becomes Mario, Mario from Madrid: the point man for Colombian traffickers in Europe, the owner of a fleet of ships for international cocaine traffic.

• • •

The entrepreneur and the manager converge in the figure of the broker. They’re pioneers, the men who create out of nothing this figure who hadn’t existed previously in the drug-trafficking economy. They connect all the corners of the world. Istanbul, Athens, Málaga, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zagreb, Cyprus, the United States, Canada, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Australia, Africa, Milan, Rome, Sicily, Puglia, Calabria. They create perpetual motion within a tight, intricate net that reveals the motion of their merchandise only to the attentive eye. They become fabulously rich, and make those who turn to them rich as well. Always on the go, they need to find new channels all the time. Their lives come to resemble ever more closely the game of connect the dots, which we played as kids in those rare moments when our parents put down their crossword puzzles and let us have the pen: You could only appreciate the image at the end, once you’d connected all the dots. The same is true with Pasquale Locatelli and Roberto Pannunzi. The picture of their trafficking only becomes clear when we connect all the dots that they have drawn.

No one deliberately designed an innovation that, had it been proposed in abstract terms, would have been rejected. No criminal organization would have said it was willing to share a significant part of its profits with someone outside the organization. It happens gradually; the qualitative leap is made simply because it happens at a certain point.

Mario from Madrid gains the Colombians’ trust when they are still at the height of their power. He travels with a bodyguard and a personal secretary, has learned from Pablo Escobar never to stay more than two nights in the same place, and changes cell phones as frequently as anyone else changes socks. But he’s not part of the Medellín or Cali cartels. And this turns out to be an advantage not only for himself, but also for the cocaine monopolists in Colombia, who start warring ruthlessly among themselves, a sign of their slow decline.

Bebè Pannunzi is tied to the Siderno and Platì families, linked by blood and lineage, but he never affiliates himself with any clan. He’s not an ’ndranghetista, a camorrista, or a mafioso. He unites different groups into a single investment company: Calabrians, Sicilians, groups based in the Salento, along with others. He creates a joint venture for drugs, capable of increasing contacts and contractual power beyond what any one clan could do: a stratified organization with strong membership bonds and a clear division between commanders and subordinates. Pannunzi is a skillful broker who constructs enormous financial operations with ease and moves quantities of drugs that would prove unmanageable for a single clan. Without this new figure, a broker, cocaine acquisition would have kept on functioning the old way: The mafia family sends a representative to South America, pays for part of the load in advance, leaves its trusted man — who risks getting killed if anything goes wrong or if the final payment is delayed — in the narcos’ hands as a guarantee, and then contacts an intermediary to arrange for shipment.

Pannunzi reshuffles the cards. He moves to Colombia. He’s learned what there is to learn through close contact with the ’ndrine, and knows the time has come to pass on his example and teachings. He brings his son, Alessandro, into the business, who marries the daughter of a Medellín boss. On the telephone he speaks Spanish and calls him “Miguel,” to throw off any unwelcome listeners. His daughter, Simona, gets engaged to Francesco Bumbaca, who becomes his father-in-law’s right-hand man. They nickname Francesco Joe Pesci and Il Finocchietto (“Little Faggot”). In the early 1990s, Pannunzi takes advantage of the power of the Colombian cartels, who have punctuated the jungle with private airports. The ’ndrangheta could use a cargo plane for intercontinental trips, so Bebè gets them one.

He can afford a whole fleet of planes for moving the white merchandise. He collects millions and millions of euros from the various organizations. He acts as his own guarantor with the cartels in order to obtain enormous discounts for bulk purchases. He guarantees the transport and arrival of shipments to the ports. He also knows who will handle the cocaine once it reaches its destination. The more investors he has, the lower the price per kilo. He spreads out the losses caused by raids. He monitors the quality. He travels, creates contacts, meets clients. He seeks out financial backers and capital, but he’s the one to decide where and how to purchase. He looks for good carriers, safe coastlines, storage towns.

Locatelli’s actions mirror Pannunzi’s. He’s closer to his suppliers, so he keeps his base in Europe in order to maintain more dynamic relationship with his clients. He deals with everyone: the Bagheria and Gela families, the San Luca and Platì ’ndrine, the most powerful clans from the area north of Naples. And, true to his entrepreneurial instinct, he deals in everything: cocaine and — increasingly — recycling are his core businesses, but it would be stupid not to take advantage of the nearness of North Africa, transporting hashish across the Strait of Gibraltar, which is one of his naval strongholds. Drawing on old relationships and past experience, he also sets up an international sales network for stolen cars. But events in a country farther from the Iberian Peninsula are what allow Mario to make yet another leap. He is one of the first to grasp the immense potential that the tensions and then the war in the former Yugoslavia present. Drugs, weapons, money — he creates a business triangulation based on these three elements, bouncing them from Spain to America, from America to the Balkans.

The man from Bergamo structures his business like a family firm, allowing himself only a few trusted collaborators. Close relations and people in his pay who are kept constantly under pressure and controlled, rigid hierarchies, a conspiracy of silence. Despite not having any historical ties to the mafia, the Bergamo enterprise absorbs more and more of its characteristics, thereby acquiring its winning impermeability as well. But the mafias’ operational model is nothing other than a distinctive inflection of Italy’s dominant business model. The intertwining of affection and business risks becoming an Achilles’s heel, just as it does for real mafiosi. In 1991 the Carabinieri discover that when Locatelli is in Italy, he lives with his girlfriend, Loredana Ferraro, in Nigoline di Corte Franca, a village near Brescia. They’re just about to spring the trap when Diabolik gets in a car and speeds away, eluding capture and turning the Franciacorta vineyards into a new version of a Hollywood high-speed chase scene. He and Loredana stay together and she, like their two sons, shares his interests and his fate: Ten years later she too will be arrested in Spain, the last of Mario’s network to be brought to justice.

Men like Bebè and Mario, but also those bosses who drank the ancestral family rules with their mothers’ milk, often turn out to be vulnerable because of a relationship with a woman. It’s not the ones they buy for a night who put them at risk, women who to them are no different from other expensive luxury goods. It’s the women they bond with, with whom they form a relationship of trust. The pawn who seems at one point to point to Pannunzi is named Caterina. She’s not just any girl, susceptible to the charms and power of an older businessman, nor would Bebè have wanted to really share the actual substance of his life had she not been able to offer all the necessary guarantees to become his true accomplice. Caterina Palermo has a reassuring pedigree: She’s the sister of a mafioso from the same clan as Miceli. The investigators find out that she has booked a flight from Madrid to Caracas, so they trail her. After landing in the Venezuelan capital Caterina heads to a town on the Colombian border, where her companion is then living. They’d agreed to an amorous appointment there, but Pannunzi, tipped off by some unknown informer, doesn’t show. The woman and the policemen return to Italy, for once sharing the same feeling: disappointment.

• • •

The broker from the North and the broker from the South are the Copernicus and Galileo of the cocaine business. With them the model changes. Before it was cocaine that rotated around money. Now it’s money that has entered cocaine’s orbit, sucked into its gravitational field. When I follow their trails I feel as though I’m leafing through a textbook on how to be a successful broker: First of all, vast available funds — the prerequisite for being able to dictate the terms of a deal. Formidable organizational skills. A broad vision combined with precision in defining every detail. They excel at mediation and have learned how to solve problems. They guarantee provisions to anyone who gets in their good graces and can pay. They know it’s better to keep their distance from politics, and from violence. All they want to do is move the white stuff, and to do that, all they need is money and good connections. Criminal groups, even rivals, allow them this freedom, because thanks to Mario and Bebè, they make money.

Last, they have intuition, a quality you can’t buy and can’t learn; it is priceless. It’s something you’re born with, and they were both born with far greater than average doses. Intuition is above all empathy, knowing how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, sniffing out his habits, his weak points, his resistance. For Bebè and Mario, a client is an open book. They know how to get to him, how to convince him. They know that if he hesitates, that’s the moment to insist; if he seems too sure of himself, that’s the time to make him understand who holds the purse strings. They switch easily from one language to another, from one culture to another; they know how to be sponges, how to transform themselves, to belong to whatever part of the world they happen to be in. They know how to appear as humble intermediaries and when to unleash their authority, sympathy, charm. That’s what intuition is: knowing human nature and knowing how to manipulate it.

But intuition is also foresight. If financial brokers had learned from cocaine brokers, they probably wouldn’t have crashed into the cement wall of economic crises. Pannunzi and Locatelli intuited that the mass market for heroin was coming to an end. They understood this even while the world continued to consume heroin by the ton and while the Italian mafias were still investing everything in it. Cocaine was about to invade the world, and it would prove more pervasive, and more difficult to check. And Pannunzi and Locatelli were there early.

The police nab them a couple of times, but the two brokers always find a way to resolve the problem. They don’t order any killings. They have a lot of money; they know how to defend themselves, how not to leave clues. They don’t draw media attention; very few journalists have heard of them; only a tight group of people in the know are aware of how important they are. When they get out of jail, there’s no public uproar.

The year 1994 might have been their annus horribilis, but the cyclone that strikes them isn’t strong enough to uproot them. In January Pannunzi is arrested in Medellín, where he’s been living for four years. And the million dollars he offers the police to let him go isn’t enough. Shockingly, they won’t play along. Pannunzi remains locked in a Colombian prison, awaiting extradition to Italy, where he’s transferred in December.

Meanwhile, the final phase of a maxi-operation, subtly named Operation Dinero, which international police forces and the DEA and FBI have coordinated, is coming to a head. According to the DEA, the two-year investigation led to 116 arrests in Italy, Spain, the United States, and Canada. All in all, including two continents, around $90 million in cash and a huge quantity of cocaine — nine tons — were seized. On September 6, 1994, Locatelli is having dinner at Adriano, a well-known restaurant in Madrid, surrounded by his inner circle: his Swiss secretary, Heidi, who, like him, travels with fake documents; and his right-hand man in Italy, the Pugliese lawyer Pasquale Ciola. Domenico Catenacci, the deputy public prosecutor of Brindisi, is also there. Recently he’d thought of running for public office, but at the last minute he changed his mind and moved to Como. Later Catenacci is accused of having ties to organized crime and is suspended, but when put on trial he is able prove that he had no idea who Pasquale Locatelli was, and is acquitted. Mario is arrested and sent to jail in Madrid. He loses four of his ships in addition to his liberty, which were already loaded with drugs and weapons and ready to sail for Croatia, as well as many other pieces of his empire.

Operation Dinero is a huge success, and the head of the DEA and the Italian interior minister boast about it in press conferences on their respective sides of the ocean. Two years of investigations and top-secret operations. Infiltrators on two continents, and then the big bait: a bank opened in Anguilla for laundering narco-dollars. A real bank, duly registered, with elegant offices and highly qualified and extremely competent employees who welcome clients in various languages. Yet the whole thing is controlled by the DEA. The RHM Trust Bank offers dream interest rates, especially to wealthy clients. The Colombians grow greedy. One of the DEA’s financial consultants manages to establish a rapport with Carlos Alberto Mejía, alias Pipe, a narco-trafficker linked to the Cali cartel who organizes shipments to the United States and Europe, by showing him the RHM Trust Bank’s credentials. The bank is located in a British fiscal paradise and guarantees seriousness, ease of access, and extremely advantageous rates. The narcos are used to a life of luxury and money that comes and goes like a tropical rainstorm. Mejía loves to spend money on one of his country’s abiding passions: horses. Paso Fino horses are native to Colombia, dating back to the arrival of Spanish conquistadores astride mysterious, gigantic beasts that the terrified indios thought were gods. During the era of the cocaine kings the handsomest and most famous horse is Terremoto de Manizales, a sorrel belonging to Pablo Escobar’s brother. But just at the time that the DEA infiltrator was getting close to Carlos Alberto Mejía an enemy group kidnapped Terremoto, killing his jockey. They abandoned the horse a few days later on a Medellín street, castrated. They knew that this mutilation would hurt more than killing many men and would be a serious blow to the Escobar family’s image. There’s a legend in Colombia that Terremoto was used to produce an identical horse sixteen years after his castration, cloned by a specialist firm in the United States.

Mejía too owns a stable of prized Paso Fino horses, as well as an art collection, which he seems less attached to. He decides to entrust the bank’s intermediaries with three paintings: a Picasso, a Rubens, and a Reynolds. Experts estimated their value at $15 million. But money laundering is the real business for the bank. Mejía starts with almost $2.5 million, from narco-trafficking in Italy, to be reinvested, money that arrives through a trusted colleague of Mejía’s Italian partner who operates in Spain and Italy.

Which is how the DEA agents suddenly and unexpectedly find themselves on the trail of Pasquale Locatelli. Their plan had been to hit the strongest narco-trafficking organization in the world at that time, the Cali cartel. Mario from Madrid appears practically out of nowhere. He and his organization turn out to be incredibly difficult to get their hooks into. Never a call from a traceable phone. Money-laundering schemes so swift that no one can keep up with the transfers. Precisely because of the Italian partner, the investigation comes to a dead end. The team decides to put an undercover agent on him, a very special agent. An inspector in the anti-crime unit of the Italian police whose financial expertise has been honed by years of investigations but who has never done an undercover mission. Young, not even twenty-seven years old, but very presentable, an impeccable presence. Fluent in several languages and familiar with sophisticated money-laundering methods. And a woman.

It seems like another plot twist in a Hollywood action movie. Out there in the real world beautiful young women who are also capable of taking on a new identity without the least slipup rarely exist. The Americans are skeptical, and even the Italians have their doubts, but in the end everyone is convinced of the advantages she offers as an undercover agent. And so, after some accelerated personalized training by the DEA, Maria Monti is born: an expert in international finance who exudes a vivacious femininity and an ambition as ravenous as it is innocent. Like many young women, she’s more talented than the men and extremely eager to prove herself. Everyone who comes in contact with her finds that working with her is a pleasure.

Maria is catapulted into a whirlwind of business-class flights, taxis and limousines, hotels and restaurants for the happy few. The unreality of it all calms her anxiety. There’s the risk of enjoying it too much, of letting her guard down, of growing distracted by all the novelty and luxury. But that doesn’t happen. She handles it all as if she is used to such things. The infiltrator doesn’t forget for a second that she’s merely the vanguard of a team following her signal via the GPS hidden in her overnight bag, standing by and ready to come to her rescue if necessary. The risk she’s taking is quite real, however. The first people she has to establish contact with are the narcos.

Miami’s port is immense; it’s called the cruise capital of the world. Moored in the shadow of Carnival and Royal Caribbean ships seven stories high are yachts that only seem small compared to the vast tonnage of those floating monsters. Maria was supposed to wrap up the deal in a more crowded place, but her South American clients don’t show. So someone takes her to the port, has her board a yacht, and hoists anchor. She ends up in the middle of the ocean. The agent waiting for her on the wharf can’t help her now; she has only herself to rely on. Well, this is all fantastic, she says, but I came here for business, not for fun; apologies if I’m not in the mood.

Mario from Madrid also brings Maria aboard a yacht the first time he meets her, off the Costa del Sol near Marbella, where he was living with Loredana. Locatelli wants to carefully study this girl who has made her way into his Colombian partners’ good graces. Maria realizes what he’s up to, and for a moment she feels naked, but then she summons up all her coolness. She talks about taxes and interest rates, stocks, investment funds. She discusses the risks and potential of betting on the new economy and suggests a couple of profitable transactions involving currency exchange. It works. The boss believes she’s the real thing; the flow of money to the Antilles bank can continue.

And yet the moments of terror are hardly over. The day Maria receives a briefcase containing $2 million she realizes that she’s being followed. She can’t run the risk of being robbed, or — worse yet — recognized, as she gets into her colleague’s car, as planned. She has no idea if the man behind her is some mysterious mugger or a shadow sent to check on her. She flags down a taxi and drives around the city for hours, from one end to the other.

Paradoxically, it’s in Italy that she’s most afraid. In Rome the meetings are always arranged in busy places: the Jolly Hotel, the Palombini Bar in the EUR neighborhood. What if someone recognizes her, calls out to her, uses her real name? They’d trained her for that too: act as if it’s a mistake. A quick hard look, a second of perplexity, nothing more. But Maria isn’t sure she can keep her cool. At times a more subtle anxiety writhes inside her: She can’t rule out the possibility that one of her contacts might leak some information about her. She has to negotiate with Roberto Severa, Locatelli’s right-hand man in Rome, a prominent figure in the criminal organization known as the Banda della Magliana, to whom Locatelli has entrusted massive reinvestments in a supermarket chain and other activities in the capital city. He’s the one who floods Maria with money to be laundered as quickly as possible in the Caribbean: £671.8 million plus $50,000, and then another two chunks of £398.350 million and £369.450 million lire, all within a month and a half.

Yet the really pivotal figure in Locatelli’s business in Italy is Pasquale Ciola, who has the reassuring look of a country lawyer. Like Bebè Pannunzi, Mario from Madrid at some point also rediscovers his maternal roots and their advantages. Thanks to Ciola, who is on the board of directors, he can make use of an entire bank, the Cassa Rurale e Artigiana in Ostuni. And given his growing interest in the Balkans, he’s also finalizing the purchase of a bank in Zagreb, the ACP, through his Brindisi lawyer. Puglia is the region of Italy closest to the other shore of the Adriatic. Pasquale Ciola has learned to do everything with utmost prudence. To get to Spain to see Locatelli, he turns the trip into an innocent family vacation. He piles his son and ex-wife into his Mercedes, and staying in the best hotels along the way, they cross the Iberian Peninsula hitting one tourist spot after another: Málaga, the Costa del Sol, Alicante. Only after four days of touring does he take the highway for Madrid, arriving in time for dinner at the Adriano restaurant.

This is where Maria’s mission ends. This is the moment they’ve been waiting for after trailing him for so long. Locatelli himself arrives, carrying a suitcase containing £130 million in cash. The bust goes down, but once the day they’re all hailed as heroes on every newscast has past, as soon as their adrenaline rush yields to exhaustion and they return to normal, the Italian police officers begin asking themselves just how decisive a blow they’ve really dealt Locatelli. They know he still owns at least five large ships in Croatia, Gibraltar, and Cyprus, property that turned out to be untouchable. His total wealth remains incalculable. From prison in Madrid he continues to telephone right and left, quietly managing his business affairs and exemplifying what Camorra boss Maurizio Prestieri quipped about another Spanish jail: “It was like a Valtur vacation village” (Valtur is a chain of Italian vacation resorts). The only thing that might cause his empire to crumble is an imprisonment system where he would truly be cut off from the world.

• • •

Once again, Locatelli’s and Pannunzi’s lives mirror each other’s. By a strange twist of fate, both men manage to elude Italian jail, the most rigorous penal system in all of Europe for mafiosi and drug dealers. Bebè, after being transferred to Italy, ends up being released: The legal limit for the duration of his pretrial custody had expired. In 1999 he’s arrested again for “mafia association,” and while under house arrest, granted for health reasons, he does what Diabolik did ten years earlier: He escapes from a Roman clinic without even the help of an armed commando unit. Like Mario, he chooses Spain for his hiding place: Spain, which at the time is in the midst of a huge real estate boom, the ideal place for drug traffickers to gather, and to buy.

In Italy Bebè maintains a tight network that in Rome centers around Stefano De Pascale, who in the past was linked to the Banda della Magliana, as was Locatelli’s Roman contact. I think of him every time I’m on Via Nazionale, because right here, at the Top Rate Change agency, an accomplice would exchange into dollars and other currencies the hundreds of millions of lire that De Pascale managed for Pannunzi. As Pannunzi’s consigliere, De Pascale didn’t simply carry out orders, he also offered suggestions and opinions, in addition to keeping accounts and handling relations between clients and suppliers. The man I knew primarily as Spaghetto was Bebè’s longa manus in Rome, the one to whom the Calabrian clans doing business with Pannunzi could always turn.

In January 2001, Bebè, hounded by an international arrest warrant, returns to Colombia, where he buys a grand villa. He contacts some narco-traffickers and ventures out into the countryside where coca grows, to visit the refineries. He never lets his guard down and selects his collaborators with utmost care. He knows from experience that it’s a small world, and there’s nowhere left where he can allow himself even the slightest imprudence.

Pannunzi’s strength lies in the absolute impenetrability of his system. His entire criminal network maintains a level of stealth that make investigators bang their heads against the wall. As one official Italian inquest put it, Bebè “never makes a mistake, never a ‘wrong move,’ never a real name, an address, a meeting place in any comprehensible way over the course of countless conversations; it’s all wordplay, metaphors, similes, and code names to refer to friends, times, meetings. The utmost prudence and attention, above all in the back and forth of phone numbers that are essential for maintaining contact: Those under investigation thought up secret codes with private keys — never a cell phone number stated openly, always a string of apparently meaningless ciphers.”

In order to get to know who Roberto Pannunzi is you first have to immerse yourself in the inextricable tangle of his language. His men’s names are always fake nicknames: the Youngster, the Blond, the Bookkeeper, the Nephew, Lupin, Longlegs, the Clockmaker, the Little Old Man, the Puppydog, the Dyer, Big Hat, the Mouse, Uncle, Uncle’s Relative, the Parent’s Brother, Auntie, the Halfwit, the Godfather, Blood, Alberto Sordi, the Girl, the Roly-poly Brothers, the Kid, Miguel, Pal, Throat, the Gentleman, Shorty, the Surveyor. Small mirrors that reflect slices of a distorted reality. He knows his phone is tapped, so he gives names, addresses, and phone numbers in the most cryptic way possible.

“21.14—8.22.81.33–73.7.15. They’re initials, three initials, got it?”

“New line, dash: 18.11.33.—K 8.22.22.16—7.22.42.81.22. K.11.9.14.22.23.—: 18.81.33.9.22.8.23.25,14.11.11.25—(+6) (+6) is the number.”

“Then 11.21.23.25.22.14.9.11.21.11 again. That’s the city.”

“New line, the office number: +1, -2 (I don’t know if you need the zero or not) -3, -7, =, -7, +6, -3, +5, +3, +4.”

Such extreme prudence makes it difficult at times for even his associates to understand the messages. But it’s a necessary precaution. A total of six fugitives are part of the network: Roberto Pannunzi; his son, Alessandro; Pasquale Marando; Stefano “lo Spaghetto” De Pascale; Tonino Montalto, and Salvatore Miceli, the Trapani accomplice.

Phone numbers are communicated through prearranged alphanumeric sequences, and calls are made from phone booths or with a different phone card every time. They never go to a meeting in a car that’s registered in their name. Cocaine is referred to as “bank documents,” “checks,” “invoices,” “loans,” “furniture,” “the lion in the cage.” And to find out how many kilos were ordered? Just talk about the “hours of work.” Pannunzi’s secret, shadowy world is boundless. A whirlpool it’s easy to get sucked into. There’s nothing to grab on to, and the few handholds that do seem to surface crumble immediately, replaced by even more cryptic ones. Only some anomalous disturbance can give shape to the shapeless, some error that lets you dispel the fog just long enough to glimpse a handhold. Once you’ve grabbed it, cling to it, don’t let go.

The disturbance that arrives is named Shorty: His real name is Paolo Sergi, a prominent figure in the Platì ’ndrine. Shorty makes a thoughtless mistake: He uses his own cell phone, which the investigators intercept. A fatal carelessness, because it’s what allows the Counter-Narcotics Group of the Catanzaro Finance Guard to break into the network. Paolo Sergi becomes the skeleton key, and he’s the one who gives the Italian antimafia investigation its name: “Igres” is simply “Sergi” spelled backward.

Thanks to Shorty’s carelessness the fog lifts to reveal a logical system. The blind alleyways and smoke screens the investigators had stumbled through could now be seen for what they were: smoke in their eyes. Distorted fragments begin to recompose into coherent images. What emerges is a gigantic economic force. From the wiretappings, investigators can trace the entire picture: a complex organization divided into two main branches, one in Calabria, the other in Sicily. Pannunzi, whom the investigators characterize as “charismatic and never to be contradicted,” takes care of everything from acquisition to distribution, and he procures enormous quantities of cocaine for Italy. His principal supplier in Colombia is the narco-trafficker known as Barba, or Beard. Beard and Pannunzi have a gentlemen’s agreement, which seems incredible given that it’s standard practice to ask for flesh and blood as well as financial guarantees. But Pannunzi is admired and respected in Bogotá, and the ’ndrina he works for is itelf a guarantee: The Marando-Trimboli families’ resources are so huge that at times Pannunzi himself is amazed at the sums the Calabrian bosses keep coming up with to finance their business.

Roberto gives orders to his son, Alessandro, from Colombia. Salvatore Miceli and the Mariano Agate clan organize transport from South America and the transfer of goods off the coast of the Aegadian Islands, where boats from the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo, which have the advantage of being able to blend in with the rest of the fishing fleet, are ready to take delivery. The Sicilians’ presence means there will be local mafia backing when the drugs are unloaded along the Trapani coast, which they control.

Rosario Marando and Rocco Trimboli handle distribution to the Rome and Milan drug markets. They call the buyers and establish the terms of purchase using a language rich in soccer metaphors. On the phone the two Platì bosses ask their interlocutors if they want to “reserve a field for the game.” Sometimes the buyer says he’d like to “play,” but “the rest of the team is away from Rome,” meaning that his usual purchasing partners are out of town at the moment. So he asks if they can move the “soccer game” to the following Monday.

Every ten days Rocco Trimboli organizes a car trip to his sales point, a “home delivery” of sorts. The cocaine, usually about 10 kilos each time, is divided into blocks and hidden in the false bottom of his car. Francesco and Giuseppe Piromalli, the so-called Roly-poly brothers who act as representatives in Rome, are so powerful that they’re allowed to return the merchandise if it doesn’t meet their expectations. One time Francesco Piromalli complained to Rosario Marando that “there was too much sauce on the pasta,” “too much oil in the pickles”—in other words, the coke had been cut too much. When Piromalli returned the merchandise he couldn’t refrain from remarking scornfully: “If I’d wanted Neapolitan crap, I could have bought it right next door, instead of going all the way to Calabria.” Neapolitan crap is what you find in the area known as Scampia, the coke the Camorra cartels import to the biggest open-air drug market in Europe. But it’s inferior to what the Calabrians sell. In Scampia they cut it with the idea of selling wholesale amounts; it’s the only place where this happens without needing a go-between. You show up and place your order, and you can come away with even a kilo of reasonable quality coke at a good price. Direct sale. Anywhere else, for anything over single doses, or maybe a bit more, you need a contact high up in the trafficking structure, if not in the criminal leadership itself.

Aside from these minor drawbacks, the organization for acquiring, transporting, repackaging, and distributing coke is a well-oiled machine, rigid in its hierarchy but flexible when it comes to adapting to the unexpected.

Like in the adventure of Mirage II. A ship is needed to carry a load of Colombian cocaine across the ocean. A ship owner is needed. They find one, a Greek master mariner named Antonios Gofas, nicknamed the Gentleman. Back in the 1980s he transported heroin to Sicily to be refined, but the Gentleman has now switched to cocaine. He owns a merchant vessel, the Muzak. It costs too much for the Sicilians, but the Calabrians don’t think twice about shelling out £2.5 billion. Now they have the vessel they need. But they change its name: The Muzak becomes Mirage II, which sounds more melodious to Italian ears. Gofas is good, and he has a reliable crew.

The Mirage II has to drop anchor in Colombia, take on the cocaine, circumnavigate the South American continent so as to avoid rigorous inspections at the Panama Canal, and then set sail for Sicily, where the shipment would then be loaded onto fishing boats off the coast of Trapani. A huge vessel that plows the ocean waves, ports that await containers: It was all decided on March 2, 2001, in a hotel in Fiumicino, near Rome, the Hotel Roma. Details are worked out: the route to take from Colombia; the precise strip of sea where the merchandise will be picked up; the modes of transfer from the mother ship to the Mazara fishing boats; the code names and the radio frequencies to be used. After almost a year and a half of negotiations and preparations, the Mirage II can finally hoist anchor.

Before it gets to Colombia, however, the ship has engine trouble and goes down off the coast of Peru, near Paita. The captain describes the tragedy, goes crazy over the engine failure, doesn’t know what to do. Pannunzi, who has been following the whole operation from afar, immediately smells a rat: Did the Greek Gentleman deliberately sink the ship? Pannunzi doesn’t believe in fate. For him chance can’t do much when there’s commitment and money involved. Chance is something you confront.

The problem is that the Gentleman, true to his nickname, sent the suppliers one of his own men as a guarantee. Now he’s the drug traffickers’ hostage. What’s more, the ship sank before its precious cargo was loaded into the hold. These factors, which would seem to suggest a blameless accident, only increase Pannunzi’s doubts. He suspects that the captain calculated with cynical cunning the risk of cheating his fearsome associates in order to pocket the insurance on the Mirage II. For the money he would make, the hostage in Colombia could be sacrificed. If that’s the case, Pannunzi is sure he’ll be able to verify it. Which, for a shipowner in the cocaine business, would mean the end of his career and probable death.

But for the moment he has to put a good face on things so that he can get the insurance money to his investors while simultaneously arranging another voyage. The Sicilians, represented by Miceli, hire the Turkish Paul Eduard Waridel, known as the Turk, who had a history of getting Turkish heroin into Sicily. Waridel has good contacts in Greece too, and knows who can arrange sea transport for any kind of merchandise. Now, as gangsters say, “It’s a three-way job”: Three containers set out from Barranquilla to Athens, with a port of call in Venezuela. About 900 kilos are concealed among the cover cargo of sacks of rice: enough to amortize the loss of the Mirage II and guarantee a considerable profit.

But the Greek police intercept one of the three containers as soon as it arrives in Piraeus and seize 220 kilos of pure cocaine hidden among the rice. Mysteriously, they don’t notice the other two containers, which remain in port, waiting to clear customs. The Colombian suppliers once again find themselves without a cent, because the drugs are usually paid for when they’re delivered to the Calabrians. Holding Gofas’s right-hand man hostage isn’t enough; they realize his life might not be worth anything. So they kidnap Salvatore Miceli, the Cosa Nostra representative responsible for the transport and final distribution to the ’ndrine.

Cosa Nostra is in trouble. The most watched criminal organization in the world, the one most talked about, seems incapable of handling the situation. The Trapani clan doesn’t have the money. The Turkish wheeler-dealer had let them know it would take four hundred thousand dollars to get the two containers through customs and the goods to Italy. Pannunzi intervenes. He moves swiftly to save his accomplice and get the ball rolling again. He sends two representatives from his group to Lugano to hand deliver the money to Waridel, who in turn is supposed to take it to Athens. But the Turk, like the Greek shipowner before him, is playing dirty. Maybe he wants to get his hands on the cocaine as well, or maybe he just wants to keep the money that’s supposed to be for getting the container through customs. After pocketing the cash he says that the remaining cocaine has disappeared from Piraeus and is now in an unspecified location in Africa, where a trustworthy fellow countryman is holding it. On the phone he uses an unintentionally poetic expression to refer to Africa: “on the other side of the bulls”; in other words, facing Spain.

The Calabrians and the Sicilians realize that Waridel is swindling them. But revenge has to wait — business first. They organize yet another trip, this time from Namibia to Sicily. In late September 2002, the ship carrying the cocaine is off the coast of the Aegadian Islands, but there’s no sign of the Sicilian fishing boats that are supposed to do the pickup. A whole day goes by without the commander getting a reply signal. A second night, but all’s still quiet. The commander waits until the third night. He tries to make contact, following the established procedures, but still nothing. In the end it turns out that the fishing boats from Trapani were using a different radio frequency. Incredible. They had misunderstood. Pannunzi can’t check on every step. He’s merely a broker, not a mafia boss: And when he makes a mistake, it’s because someone else made a mistake in carrying out his orders.

Salavatore Miceli is scared. The Colombians no longer trust him. The excuses the Italians offer are worth less than nothing. When Pannunzi says he’ll vouch for the deal, Miceli is finally freed. But Bebè is disappointed in his friend, who risked his reputation too. The ’ndrangheta bosses are even more furious. They hold the Sicilian partly responsible for the mess that threatens to blow the entire operation sky-high, the mess they’ve had to pay millions of dollars to extricate him from. At this point the Sicilians are excluded. Cosa Nostra is out. Pannunzi takes full control of the situation and decides that the shipment should be delivered to Spain. No problem: He’s got connections there; for example Massimiliano Avesani, known as the Prince. The Prince is a wealthy Roman with ties to Pannunzi and the Calabrian ’ndrine. For several years he’s been the respected owner of a shipyard in Málaga. Pannunzi knows that police forces around the world have managed to identify his shipment and are trying to trace its route. But this time the Calabrians and their accomplices don’t make mistakes: They use extremely cryptic language and change phone numbers frequently. The investigators lose the scent. On October 15, 2002, the ship arrives in Spain and the cocaine’s troubled voyage ends in Avesani’s sure hands.

Meanwhile, the Catanzaro Finance Guard agents have discovered another possible pretext. Although phone communication between Italy and Colombia has been maniacally prudent, they’ve traced a number of calls to one particular landline. But it’s a Holland number. It turns out to belong to an Amsterdam law firm, that of Leon Van Kleef. He and his partners are so well known, they were featured in the popular weekly magazine Nieuwe Revu. As usual, the link is Pannunzi, who builds his credibility through mutual acquaintances, not to mention his own savoir faire as a successful and worldly businessman. And so, in an elegant quarter of Amsterdam, in offices lined with contemporary art, a bunch of mafiosi, ’ndranghetas, and Colombian narcos come together to talk serenely about their business. In the investigation, reference is made to a shipment of 600 kilos or so of cocaine, which, according to Pannunzi is of a quality that’s “never been seen before, something you dream about.” They dub the enterprise the Flower Deal in homage to Holland’s most famous export. If Bebè was the one to make up the name, he might have chosen it for the added pleasure of alluding to the tulip fever that swept across Holland in the seventeenth century, the first speculative bubble in history. Cocaine had become the same sort of exponential money multiplier that tulip bulbs had been back then, and it seems fitting that the place of negotiation is the same. Paolo Sergi and the Sicilian Giuseppe Palermo commute between Italy and Amsterdam to carry on the increasingly difficult negotiations. The lot is reduced to 200 kilos, but Alessandro Pannunzi phones his father, worried that they may not be able to cover the entire purchase with the cash they have on hand, and so may need to reduce the lot again by half. In the end, the Flower Deal crumbles, thanks to a banal hitch. Even though they have the money, the Marandos can’t change it into dollars quickly enough. The Dutch won’t accept any other currency, and since there’s no shortage of interested buyers for such high-quality merchandise, they sell it to someone else.

The Italian antimafia unit investigated Leon Van Kleef but to no avail; he insisted that a lawyer with an international clientele can’t be expected to know what the people waiting outside his office might be discussing. He has his name to defend, as well as the twenty-year reputation of a law firm that the Dutch magazine describes as “the choice of many leading criminals.” On their elegant Web site the firm’s lawyers let it be known that they specialize in homicide, manslaughter, extortion, fraud, and money laundering, and that they are not prepared to represent informers or whistle-blowers. Van Kleef, who specializes in Spanish speakers, decided to stand by his client to the end. And Dutch law has no provisions for such crimes as external support of a criminal organization. Even the DDA of Reggio Calabria finally decided not to press charges against him.

• • •

After the unfortunate dinner at the Adriano Restaurant in Madrid, Pasquale Ciola continued to live peacefully in his house in Ostuni for seventeen years, contesting sentence after sentence and trusting in the slowness of the Italian judicial machine. The Supreme Court doesn’t hand down a definitive sentence until February 2011: seven years and two months. Ciola, who was then nearly eighty years old, packed his suitcase and was escorted to the regional jail.

Mario from Madrid, on the other hand, survives for years behind bars, like an old-school mafia boss. From Spain he goes to Grasse, to the same prison he’d escaped from almost a decade earlier. The French are far more attentive this time, but in 2004 they have to extradite him to Naples for one of his many trials. And in Italy the Supreme Court orders him to be released. Mario doesn’t waste a minute before disappearing again into the “land of bulls.” He’s arrested in Spain in 2006 with a passport and credit card belonging to a Slovenian citizen and €77,000 in cash. The Spanish judges decide to release him on a technicality. Two months later he is arrested again, this time while passing himself off as a Bulgarian, but once again he is released on a technicality.

Locatelli always seems to find a way to pick himself up when he stumbles. His two sons, who stayed in Italy, are grown men now, capable of running a sizable, dynamic enterprise. The best thing for them to do — their best cover — is to keep making dirty money, lots of it, while officially making clean money. The Locatelli family owns LOPAV S.p.A., a flooring company in Ponte San Pietro, a few miles from Brembate di Sopra. Their company has excellent credentials and has expanded significantly, thanks to its competitiveness and competence, and it contributes notably to the wealth of the territory. It’s not their fault if their father, who left when they were young, turned out to be a rogue; they rolled up their sleeves and provided honest jobs to lots of people. That’s how the locals, both ordinary and important folks, think of them. They don’t ask where the financing came from to build the business to the point of dominating the industry nationally in less than ten years. Those Locatelli boys are enterprising; they’re good, that’s all. Everybody’s good opinion of them is confirmed when LOPAV is awarded a five hundred thousand euro contract to build the undercoating and exterior floors for earthquake-proof housing in L’Aquila, as well as the flooring for a new shopping center in Mapello. Brembate and Ponte San Pietro have reason to be proud when the company’s official Web site boasts that “the earthquake victims of L’Aquila will walk on ‘Bergamasque ground.’”

But just as work in Abruzzo is about to begin, the Naples DDA issues an international arrest warrant for Pasquale Locatelli, once again accused of association with international drug trafficking. The link this time is the Mazzarella clan, Locatelli’s clients in Campania, who get their cocaine and hashish through him. A joint operation coordinated by the Naples Finance Guard and involving Interpol and the Spanish police leads to his arrest at the Madrid airport in May 2010, after authorities trailed his son, who was on his way to Spain to see him. But people are even more bewildered when Patrizio and Massimiliano are also jailed five months later; wiretaps led to their being accused of playing a very active role in both money-laundering activities and the astronomical fees paid to drug traffickers. Pasquale Locatelli had built a mechanism that worked perfectly, even when he was in hiding or in prison. As much as they can try to stop him, he is the Galileo of cocaine. They can condemn him — and yet cocaine moves.

• • •

It seems impossible by this point, but on April 5, 2004, the Italian police flush out Roberto Pannunzi in an elegant Madrid neighborhood, along with his son Alessandro and his son-in-law Francesco Bumbaca. Once again he is sent to jail in Italy. And here he pulls off one of his typical magic tricks. For health reasons, on February 21, 2009, he’s transferred to the Parma prison clinic, where he’s kept under special surveillance. Then a heart ailment gets him house arrest for a year. The court indicates the Tor Vergata General Hospital for his treatment. But Pannunzi, after spending a few months at a clinic in Nemi, in the province of Rome, chooses Villa Sandra, a private clinic in the city. The media doesn’t have its eye on him, public opinion doesn’t know about him, so he’s not considered a threat. Italian politics is distracted by completely different concerns. And thus, a couple of months before his house arrest is to end, Pannunzi escapes from a clinic a second time, leaving no trace. But what’s even more incredible is that they only notice by chance that he’s gone. On March 15, 2010, the Carabinieri make their usual rounds: Pannunzi’s not there. His room wasn’t guarded, and no one is sure exactly when he made his excape: He was supposed to be serving a sixteen-and-a-half-year sentence, and a first-level court had already sentenced him to an additional eighteen years. A man condemned to hard time but who wasn’t even being guarded, who escapes easily, who buys himself silence and intercontinental plane tickets. The Italian state should not allow men with the unlimited financial resources of a Pannunzi to convalesce in private clinics. As Nicola Gratteri, the magistrate who has been following him for years, says: Roberto Pannunzi “is part of that class of people who don’t count their money; they weigh it.”

This is something drug traffickers know.

But Bebè’s freedom doesn’t last long. On July 5, 2013, he is arrested in a shopping center in Bogotá. In his pocket is a fake Venezuelan ID card, with the name Silvano Martino, which he shows to the police, denying that he is the narco-trafficker they’re looking for. But the mug shots from the Italian authorities don’t leave room for doubt. On the Colombian news that evening his face appears behind the journalists, who announce the arrest of “one of the most wanted drug lords in Europe.” He had four arrest orders for drug trafficking and “mafia association” hanging over his head. Interpol had classified him as a “red alert.” After the ritual photos, in which the Colombian agents show him off like a trophy, Pannunzi is put on a plane for Rome, via Madrid. He’s not the only VIP on board: Raffaella Carrà is on the flight too, Italian television’s most famous showgirl, who, like all the other passengers, is oblivious to the boss’s presence. The photos of his arrival at Fiumicino airport show him wearing the same long-sleeved white polo shirt he’d had on in the video of his arrest in Colombia, the last shirt he put on as a free man. Pannunzi now has to serve twelve years, five months, and twenty-six days in jail. During his criminal career various epithets have been pinned on him— “prince of drug trafficking”; “the most wanted broker in Europe”; “the Italian Pablo Escobar”; “king of evasions”—but I prefer to call him “the Copernicus of cocaine,” because he was the first to understand that it’s not the world of cocaine that must orbit around the markets but the markets that must rotate around cocaine.

His arrest required the collaboration of the Italian security forces, the American DEA, and the Colombian police, as well as about two years of investigations coordinated by the public prosecutor’s office in Reggio Calabria. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that only two days before his arrest, “il Principe,” Prince Massimiliano Avesani, Bebè’s contact in Spain, was arrested in Rome. He too had a fake ID in his pocket, a driver’s license registered to a Giovanni Battista — who had a clean record — but after he was taken to police headquarters he had to admit his real identity. Avesani, who was considered the pivot between the Calabrian clans and the Roman criminal organizations, had been arrested in Montecarlo in 2011, but he went into hiding in order to avoid a fifteen-year sentence for international drug trafficking. He didn’t go very far though: His hideout was an elegant apartment in the Torrino neighborhood in the south of Rome, where the police found other blank IDs that would have come in handy for his life as a fugitive. Apparently he congratulated the police officers who arrested him: “Bingo” he allegedly said. In truth, they were still one number shy of bingo, but it arrives two days later with the arrest of Bebè Pannunzi on the other side of the planet. Who knows, maybe it was Avesani himself who extracted the winning number from the tumbler. Pannunzi may have lost his protection once Avesani fell.

Some day I’d like to meet Roberto Pannunzi. To look him in the eye, but without asking him anything, because he wouldn’t tell me anything other than empty chatter fit for a journalist who writes insubstantial fluff. There’s something I’d really like to know, though: Where does he get his inner serenity? You can see he doesn’t look tormented. He doesn’t kill. He doesn’t destroy people’s lives. Like a good drug broker, all he does is move capital and cocaine around, without ever touching the latter. Just as others do with oil or plastic. Don’t they cause car accidents, irreversible pollution all around the world, even wars that go on for decades? Do oil companyexecutives lose sleep over such things? Do plastic manufacturers? Or the heads of multinational IT companies, who surely know how their products are built, or that cornering the coltan market is the root of ongoing massacres in the Congo? I’m sure that’s how Pannunzi rationalizes things. But I’d like to hear what sort of justifications he’d offer, one by one. What does he tell himself in order to say: “I’m just a broker. You give me the money and I’ll give you the goods. Like everyone else.” That’s all. No better or worse.

11. OPERATION MONEY LAUNDERING

How do you feel when, to enter your bank, you have to go through a security door that only lets one person in at a time? What runs through your head while you’re waiting in line to make a money transfer, deposit a check, get some coins and small bills so you can make change for your customers at your bar or shop? When your father, who has a regular salary, has to sign in order for you to get a mortgage on a house, because both you and your wife make do with temp work? What concepts have you learned to associate with words like spread or rating, liquidity or deficit crises? Which of these terms are you familiar with: hedge fund, subprime, credit crunch, swap, blind trust? Can you explain what they mean? Are you too convinced that you belong to the 99 percent whose combined wealth does not even match that of the remaining 1 percent? That financial capitalism is primarily to blame for your increasingly difficult struggle to make ends meet? And do you too believe that the banks, which manage to get billions from the state — from you, in other words — and yet won’t renew your credit, are a giant Moloch controlled by an invisible and untouchable clique of speculators and high-level executives? You’re wrong, at least in part. There’s no secret power trying to crush you, no specter with degrees from the best universities, dressed in expensive but understated outfits, and displaying calm, sober manners.

Banks and banking power are made up of people, just like everything else. If that power has proved to be deeply destructive, the fault lies not just with greedy cokehead brokers or that one corruptible employee, but with everyone: from the trader licensed to make high-risk deals, to the team of specialists that buys stocks on the global market that will flow into funds offered by the same bank, to the employee who suggests someone to manage your savings, right down to the teller at the window. All together they carry out the bank’s directives, and almost all of them are honest. Honest not merely as in not doing anything illegal, but also in believing they’re acting for the good of the bank without, however, acting for the ill of its clientele. Maybe a little less honest at times, but not because they decide on their own to look after their interests, but because they’re doing what they’ve always done: carrying out tacit directives that are always in the bank’s best interest. And this happens at all levels, high and low, and it forms a system. Which is how we arrive at that global mechanism that might seem to you like some kind of conspiracy but that really works much more along the lines of what has been called “the banality of evil.”

But if the mechanism is made up of many loyal and banal individuals, a little grit can cause the gears to jam. For example, the man who, if it hadn’t been for September 11, would have been kept waiting forever in a damp room at a London police station. The Twin Towers have just fallen and the United States is starting to recover. George W. Bush has introduced the PATRIOT Act, which among other things is supposed to identify and pursue international money laundering and funding for terrorism. The law establishes a series of special measures that U.S. banks are required to adopt when dealing with jurisdictions, institutions, or accounts they suspect are laundering dirty money; it provides greater transparency in financial activities and accountability, limitations on interbank operations, and tougher penalties for transgressors.

Four years later an Englishman with impertinent blond hair crosses the threshold of Wachovia Bank, one of the giants of the American credit system: a man named Martin Woods. He’s just been hired as a senior money-laundering reporting officer in the bank’s London office. Punctilious and precise, maniacal about order. Just the right person for a bank aiming to adhere scrupulously to the new money-laundering protocols. But Martin isn’t merely a zealous employee who is good with numbers and loves double-entry bookkeeping. He is a former agent of the National Crime Squad. This gives him a huge advantage over his banking peers around the world: Martin understands people. He knows how to talk with them, how to read their gestures, how to weigh the nuances of their moods. Money is just one of the many variables, just one of the many color gradations, on his personal grid for evaluating people.

There are already three actors onstage in this drama: a wounded country that’s reacting to attack; a measure that aims to stifle threats by fighting them on the financial front; and a man who wants to do his job. What’s needed now is a fourth, a key character: a DC-9. The airplane lands in Ciudad del Carmen, in the state of Campeche; awaiting it are Mexican soldiers, who find onboard 128 black suitcases containing 5.5 tons of cocaine, worth about a $100 million. A phenomenal bust, a punch in the face of the narcotics trade. But the investigators’ jaws really drop when they discover that the DC-9, which belongs to the Sinaloa cartel, was purchased with money laundered through one of the largest banks in the United States: Wachovia.

While investigators dig through the past of the DC-9 that landed in Mexico, Martin is already picking scrupulously through Wachovia’s clients’ records. That’s what investigators and money-laundering reporting officers do. Stick their noses into piles of papers, poison themselves with numbers and dates, then put it all together and see if there are any discrepancies. Martin discovers that there’s something not quite right about a bunch of traveler’s checks issued in Mexico. A tourist couldn’t possibly need that much money. Then his eyes fall on the numbers, which are strangely sequential. And the various signatures, why do they all look so much alike? He reports his suspicions to his superiors; many of the checks involve casas de cambio, Mexican currency exchange agencies. Martin spends hours on the phone, he sends e-mails, requests meetings to discuss the reports he keeps sending with stubborn determination. He smells a rat, and the news from Mexico and the United States only confirms his suspicion. The American authorities’ constant scrutiny of the bank’s activity pushes Wachovia to sever relations with some casas de cambio, and the ones that survive the cut decide to take a step back. Under fire from the outside, the banking giant vacillates at first, but then responds with a cleanup operation. Inside the bank, however, all is quiet. Silence and isolation are the most effective forms of “mobbing” (workplace bullying). Martin goes on writing new suspicious activity reports. When people point out that he’ll never get a reply, and that he’ll get himself in trouble if he keeps it up, he responds in his usual manner: He lowers his eyes and smiles. After his umpteenth report falls on deaf ears he receives an office communication: His most recent write-up was irregular, because his authorized range of action does not extend as far as the United States and Mexico. It’s the beginning of the end for Martin’s work: The spokes in his wheels multiply, office life is awful, he no longer has access to important files. The silent treatment his coworkers give him isn’t enough: Wachovia is staging a counterattack; it has to do something to shut up this incorrigible busybody.

On the other side of the Atlantic the investigators looking into the DC-9 discover that since 2004 several billion dollars have moved from the Sinaloa cartel “cash box” to Wachovia bank accounts. It emerges that for three years the bank did not respect money-laundering protocols when transferring $378.4 billion. Of this at least $110 million were from drug trafficking, which had entered international banking circuits in this way. That’s how it worked. The money entered through the casas de cambio. The world’s richest cartel was sending money as if it were an army of mamacitas with their savings stitched into the lining of their clothes or of old men selling off a plot of land to help out their grandchildren in the United States. Those same exchange agencies then opened accounts at a Miami branch of Wachovia Bank. Millions of dollars in cash were deposited in Mexico and then wired to Wachovia accounts in the United States to buy stocks or property. On numerous occasions the drug cartels themselves were the ones making the deposits. For example, about $13 million were deposited and transferred to Wachovia accounts to purchase airplanes for drug trafficking. More than twenty tons of cocaine were seized from these planes.

In English there’s a lovely word for denouncing or exposing wrongdoing: whistle-blowing. Martin blew his whistle with all his might, and at a certain point Wachovia realized that if they wanted to silence the piper they’d have to muzzle him. The freeze-out at the office intensifies. Martin, close to a nervous breakdown, goes to see a psychiatrist. He’s out of the game, but with his remaining strength he makes one last attempt. He finds out that there will be a meeting at Scotland Yard, where he hopes to find some colleagues open-minded enough to listen to him. He’s sat at the same table with a representative from the American DEA, a jovial type with a curious gaze. Martin doesn’t think twice before pouring out his story to him. Putting all his trust in a total stranger, he pushes a rock down the escarpment in hopes of starting an avalanche. And the rock rolls. It rolls until March 16, 2010, when the vice president of Wachovia Bank signs a plea bargain in which the bank admits it provided banking services to twenty-two casas de cambio in Mexico, from which it accepted money in the form of wire transfers and traveler’s checks.

More or less what Martin Woods had reported four years earlier, much to his detriment. Woods filed suit against the bank for retaliating against a whistle-blower. That lawsuit was finally settled by Woods’ leaving the bank in exchange for an undisclosed sum and an agreement to keep the terms of the settlement confidential.A sad epilogue, at least until March 2010, a few days after Wachovia signed the plea bargain, when Martin at last gets some recognition. He receives a letter from John Dugan, comptroller of the currency of the United States, who handles bank monitoring for the U.S. Treasury Department: “Not only did the information that you provided facilitate our investigation, but you demonstrated great personal courage and integrity by speaking up. Without the efforts of individuals like you, actions such as the ones taken against Wachovia would not be possible.”

The authorities grant Wachovia Bank a deferred prosecution; that is, the charge is delayed till the end of a probation period: If the bank adheres to the law for a year and meets all its plea bargain obligations, the charges will be dropped. The authorities probably think they are acting responsibly. In such a delicate moment, with the country struggling to recover from the most serious financial crisis since 1929, they can’t risk another big bank collapsing and disaster striking again. The probation period ends in March 2011: From that moment Wachovia is clean, everything’s okay. They had to pay the government a $110 million forfeiture for accepting transactions linked to drug trafficking, and thus violating anti-money-laundering norms, plus a $50 million fine. An enormous sum but ridiculous compared to the earnings of a bank like Wachovia, which in 2009 were about $12.3 billion. Money laundering pays. Not one bank employee or director had to see the inside of a jail cell, even for a single day. No one is guilty; no one is responsible. Merely a scandal, which quickly sinks into oblivion.

We need to read between the lines, however, and go back to the story of Martin, who with his courageous stubbornness managed to obtain much more than what the sentence contains. The reticence of the authorities shows that there is a very tight link between the banks and the tens of thousands of deaths in the Mexican drug war. But that’s not all. Martin stirred up troubled waters, he dirtied his hands with numbers in order to reactivate the American banking system’s protections. A single lightning bolt in a cloudless sky. But there are thunder and lightning on the horizon. Controls grew very rigid after September 11, but with the financial crisis that exploded in the midst of Martin’s investigation, the climate changed. Hence the verdicts that send the megaswindler Bernie Madoff to prison for 150 years, and the French trader Jérôme Kerviel for 5, along with repaying Société Générale nearly €5 billion, the amount he’d burned through. These men, who often describe themselves as sacrificial lambs of the system, nevertheless caused enormous harm to individuals, companies, and society as a whole. But the narco-dollars that flow into coffers don’t seem to cause any damage; in fact, they provide that life-giving oxygen known as liquidity. So much so that in December 2009 Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, made a shocking statement: He had been able to ascertain that criminal organizations’ earnings were the only liquid investment capital some banks had to keep from failing. The International Monetary Fund’s data is grim: From January 2007 to September 2009 the total of toxic stocks and bad loans in the United States and Europe reached $1 trillion. And alongside these losses were the failures and temporary receiverships of credit institutions. By the second half of 2008 cash flow had become the banking system’s principal problem. As Antonio Maria Costa emphasized, “That was the moment when the system was basically paralyzed because of the unwillingness of banks to lend money to one another.” Only criminal organizations seemed to have enormous quantities of cash to invest, to launder.

No doubt by this point some of you are starting to think that I’m obsessed. The problem, you might say, isn’t so much mafia money as it is the financial system. Money expands like gas. If that bubble bursts, the nebula will vanish so quickly that incoming narco-dollars will pale in comparison. Which is what happened on September 15, 2008, with the avalanche the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy set in motion, an avalanche that only billions in public funds managed to stop. But the mess I’m talking about — born amid the skyscrapers of Wall Street, and thus, to all appearances, far from simple Calabrian villages, the Colombian jungle, and even the perennially crumbling, blood-soaked towns along the Mexican border — in truth isn’t a mess at all. It is well known that Lehman Brothers had invested vast sums in subprime mortgages, which were nothing other than a stroke of genius, a way of reselling mortgages that many signers could not possibly pay, as profitable investments. Profit derived from debt. When the rope snapped and the game ended, lots of people who bought homes this way ended up in the street. And above all, that time, it was decided that the bank bloated with hot air could fail too. No sooner were the catastrophic consequences of this decision unleashed than all the other banks and insurance companies that had more or less behaved like Lehman Brothers had to be saved. Yet U.S. government aid was only an emergency stopgap for a system based on those dynamics. The crux of the matter is that banks need to ingest a sufficient amount of solid food in order to produce the immense wealth that swells their bellies, which they have to be able to rid themselves of as soon as someone asks them for money, in whatever form. That is the problem with liquidity. The alchemy of contemporary finance is based on the transubstantiation of money from a solid to a liquid and gaseous state. But that solid/liquid mix proves systematically never to be enough. In the advanced West they’ve closed the factories, and consumption is nourished through forms of debt such as credit cards, leasing, installment payments, and financing. Who, on the other hand, earns the biggest profits from merchandise that must be paid for in full right away? Narco-traffickers. Real mafia money can make the difference to the survival of the financial system. That’s the danger.

A recent study by Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía, two economists at the University of Bogotá, revealed that 97.4 percent of the revenue from narco-trafficking in Colombia is regularly laundered through banking circuits in the United States and Europe by means of a complex series of financial operations. Hundreds of billions of dollars. The laundering occurs through a shareholding system, like Chinese nesting boxes, in which cash is transformed into electronic stocks and transferred from one country to another. When it arrives on another continent the money’s practically clean and — best of all — untraceable. So interbank loans have been systematically financed with funds from drug trafficking and other illicit activities. Some banks survived only because of this money. A huge portion of the estimated 352 billion narco-dollars was absorbed by the legal economic system, successfully recycled.

Three hundred and fifty-two billion dollars: narco-trafficking profits equal more than a third of the entire banking system’s losses in 2009, according to the International Monetary Fund, and that’s only the deducible tip of the iceberg we’re sailing toward. The banks, which now own many people’s existences and are capable of influencing the governments of even the richest and most democratic states, now find that they too risk being held ransom. Once again, the problem is no longer far away, in wretched countries such as Mexico and Colombia, or down in Sicily, Campania, and Calabria, a southern Italy that is both accomplice and victim of its ruin. I want to scream this loud enough so that people will know, so that they prepare themselves for the consequences.

As Martin, the Wachovia whistle-blower, did, even though the praise he earned from the American authorities did not simplify his life in the financial world. He had to go into business for himself, opening two consulting companies specializing in anti-money laundering: Woods M5 Associates, and then Hermes Forensic Solutions. But he wanted to work for an important credit institution again. He contacted the Royal Bank of Scotland, one of the ten largest banks in the world and the second in the UK — until the financial crisis of 2008, that is, when it became one of those banks to be saved at any cost. The British government temporarily held almost 70 percent, so the Scottish bank needed to do everything possible to regain investor confidence. Even, one might think, hiring a man like Martin Woods to show their intention to rigorously respect all the rules of fair play. And yet in July 2012 the Royal Bank of Scotland suddenly broke the contract they had entered into with him. No explanation. Had they learned of Martin’s accusations against Wachovia? And just a few days later the LIBOR scandal broke, revealing that some leading banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, had for years been manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, the European reference rate for interbank loans.

Martin refused to give up; he sued them. He lost. The British judge agreed with the bank that an employer-employee relationship had not yet been established, and therefore Woods had no right to demand redress to an employment tribunal. In the meantime Martin began consulting about financial crime for the information giant Thomson Reuters. As of yet, no bank has been willing to hire him.

Today New York and London are the world’s largest laundries for dirty money. No longer those fiscal paradises of the Cayman Islands or the Isle of Man, now it’s Wall Street and the City of London. In the words of Jennifer Shasky Calvery, at that time chief of the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section of the Department of Justice, during a testimony before the American Congress on February 8, 2012: “Disguised in the trillions of dollars that is transferred between banks each day, banks in the U.S. are used to funnel massive amounts of illicit funds.” The centers of world financial power have stayed afloat thanks to cocaine money. Calvery also noted, “As evidence of transnational organized crime’s (TOC) global economic might, one need only consider the most recent estimates of the amount of money laundered in the global financial system—$1.6 trillion, of which an estimated $580 billion is related to drug trafficking and other TOC activities, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s Research Report published in 2011. These staggering amounts of money in the hands of the worst criminal elements create a terrifyingly vicious cycle — money enables TOC to corrupt the economic and political systems in which they operate, thereby allowing them to consolidate and expand their power and influence, which gives rise to more opportunity to commit crime and generate revenue.”

• • •

Lucy Edwards is a brilliant career woman. She is vice president of London’s Bank of New York and is married to Peter Berlin, director of the British company Benex Worldwide. Lucy is invited to a two-day conference on financial services for Scandinavian, Eastern European, and Russian clients. She’s perfect, because she, like her husband, was born in the former Soviet Union before becoming a naturalized Brit. She has no doubts about her speech, which she calls “Money Laundering: Latest Developments and Regulations.” While Lucy is speaking to a rapt audience, the English authorities, who have been investigating Russian crime organizations for years, are informing their American cohorts that Benex is using a Bank of New York account to channel enormous sums of money. And Benex is linked to YBM Magnex, a front company belonging to one of the most powerful Russian mafia bosses, Semën Mogilevic.

The FBI discovers that Mogilevic washes billions of dirty dollars through the Bank of New York. A constant, quick flow of money in and out. This doesn’t seem to trouble the bank much; it merely files a suspicious activity report. A river of money that also comes in handy to water some political campaigns in Russia. The New York district attorney’s office realizes that the money-laundering operation involved the illicit transfer of $7 billion from Russia to American bank accounts and then to other accounts around the globe, through a series of cover companies.

In the Bank of New York case the only person who ends up in jail — for two weeks — is Svetlana Kudriavceva, a bank employee who lied to an FBI agent about being paid five hundred dollars a month by Peter Berlin and his wife. The bank gets off with a $38 million fine and a promise to respect money-laundering laws in the future.

The technique Mogilevic and his associates use is easily replicated in other contexts: Italy, for example. It’s 1999, and the public prosecutor’s office in Rimini is monitoring the accounts of two Ukrainians and a Russian who were, as the investigation records state, at the head of “a criminal organization that works to guarantee its control of the Emilia Romagna and Marche territories.” Benex International — Bank of New York — Banca di Roma — Banca di credito cooperativo di Ospedaletto in Emilia Romagna. More than a million dollars pass through these accounts. A million crisp dollar bills, ready to be used by the Russian mafia in Italy.

Lucy Edwards knows how to make even a boring topic like anti — money-laundering techniques fascinating. She’s an excellent speaker, conveying just the right combination of confidence and seriousness. She even gets a laugh from her audience on more than one occasion. Lucy has just finished speaking. After the applause, lots of people, including the Bank of New York’s most important clients, wait for her to step off the stage. They want to shake her hand and compliment her. She’d given a great talk.

Lucy Edwards had two months left before her bank has to fire her. She and her husband, Peter Berlin, helped recycle tons of money. She too would get off with a simple fine of $20,000 and six months of house arrest after being found guilty of money laundering, fraud, and other grave federal crimes. The woman who traveled the world explaining how to thwart money laundering had been doing it herself. I’ve often asked myself how she must have felt at the end of every speech she gave, and, once she’d been found out, if she tried to justify herself, to find some sense to her double game.

Who knows if Lucy still lectures on how to prevent money laundering, because she’d have lots of stories to tell. The control systems are leaking all over the place. In the distracted summer of 2012, when the Bank of Scotland slammed its doors in Martin’s face, several leading American and European banks in the United States were being targeted, and one in particular, Bank of America, which, according to the FBI, the Zetas were using to launder their narco-dollars. On June 12, 2012, federal agents arrest seven people, including the big shot José Treviño Morales, the brother of Miguel, at that time the most prominent boss of Mexico’s fiercest cartel. But in the United States he’s known as a businessman devoted to an activity dear to the American South: He breeds winning racehorses. That’s how he hides and reinvests dirty money. In order to arrive at such a remunerative and gratifying form of recycling, estimated to have been at a level of around $1 million a month, he first needs to get the money into an American bank account. Bank of America is willing to cooperate with the investigators and is not accused of any illegal activity. Up until now nothing has happened to it.

It’s extremely difficult to expose money-laundering cases, or even to ascertain the scale and the degree of negligence. It’s almost always like trying to squeeze sand in your fist: The grains just slip through your fingers. And if a few stay in your hand, it’s more chance than will. Which is how it went for one shortsighted swindler, Barton Adams, officially a West Virginia doctor who specialized in pain therapy. He is found out while shifting hundreds of thousands of dollars — from systematic health-care fraud and tax evasion — between HSBC accounts in the United States and its branches in Canada, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. HSBC is a colossus: the fifth largest bank in the world in terms of market value, with branches in every village in the UK, and present in eighty-five foreign countries. Like Martin in the Wachovia affair, Barton rolls a stone downhill. But he does it unintentionally. On July 16, 2012, the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations confirms rumors that had been circulating for months: HSBC and its American branch, HBUS, have exposed the American financial system to a wide range of risks of money laundering, drug trade financing, and terrorism. According to the subcommittee’s report, HSBC used HBUS to link its branches around the world to the United States, thereby providing its clients services in dollars, movement of capital, currency exchange, and other monetary tools without fully respecting U.S. banking laws. Because of insufficient controls, HBUS allegedly allowed terrorist and Mexican drug money into American territory. Considering that HBUS provides twelve hundred accounts to other banks, including more than eighty HSBC branches, it’s easy to see that without adequate anti — money-laundering policies, these services can become a superhighway for illegal capital to enter the United States.

The Senate subcommittee’s investigation revealed that HBUS had offered correspondent banking services to HSBC Mexico, treating it as a low-risk client despite its being in a country with huge money-laundering and drug-trafficking problems. Between 2007 and 2008 the Mexican branch transferred $7 billion in cash to HBUS, exceeding all other Mexican banks and sparking suspicions that part of this money might be from drug sales in the United States. At the end of 2012, HBUS declared that it was very sorry for what had happened and agreed to pay a fine of almost $2 billion — less than a third of what they’d taken in from Mexico alone.

It’s not just the banks on Wall Street or in the City of London that maintain privileged relations with drug lords. Banks that launder money are scattered all across the globe, sometimes in rather disquieting places. Lebanon, for example, through which, according to the Catanzaro magistrates, the Australian Nicola Ciconte allegedly transferred Vibo Valentia clan money. One of the biggest banks is the Lebanese Canadian Bank of Beirut: branches spread throughout Lebanon; a liaison office in Montreal; more than six hundred employees. It offers a wide range of financial services and correspondent accounts in banks all over the world. On February 17, 2011, the U.S. Treasury Department declared that it had valid reason to consider the Lebanese Canadian Bank involved in money-laundering activities on behalf of the Shiite group Hezbollah, and therefore subject to restrictive measures prescribed by the PATRIOT Act. According to the Treasury Department the Lebanese bank, through insufficient controls and institutional complicity, allegedly facilitated the money laundering of a criminal network trafficking drugs from South America through West Africa to Europe and the Middle East, recycling $200 million a month through Lebanese Canadian Bank accounts. Several conniving managers who carried out the operations were identified. According to the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the DEA, the Lebanese Canadian Bank allegedly took part in a scheme that transferred at least $248 million to the United States between January 2007 and the beginning of 2011. The money came from the drug trafficking and other criminal activities of the Lebanon-based group led by the drug kingpin Ayman Joumaa and was used to purchase used cars in America. The cars were subsequently sold in western Africa, the declared revenue from which was greatly inflated so as to mask the amount of dirty money from Colombian and Mexican cartels that was added to the proceeds from the car sales. All this money was channeled toward exchange offices in Beirut, and from there to Lebanese Canadian Bank accounts, and also in part to accounts belonging to Hezbollah, which the United States considers a terrorist organization, one with increasing involvement in the drug trade.

• • •

Income from drugs and money laundering has not only sealed increasingly close alliances between terrorist and criminal organizations; it represents a more complex, pervasive, and even more dangerous connection to widespread corruption, making it one of the most elusive links to track. One case in particular illustrates quite sensationally the difficulties that beset financial investigations; the fact that it’s dragged on for more than a decade only makes the point more clearly. On November 15, 1995, an elegant Mexican lady, Paulina Castañon, requests access to her safety deposit box at one of the oldest private banks in Geneva, Pictet Cie. Unfortunately there’s a problem with the vault’s security system, the highly presentable employees tell her. It’s a way to gain time so that the Swiss police, tipped off by the DEA, can arrive with an arrest warrant. The client is the wife of Raúl Salinas de Gortari, brother of the former Mexican president, whose false passport is in her safety-deposit box. There are persistent rumors in Mexico that Raúl has maintained his contacts with all the leading figures of the Mexican and Colombian drug trade. First the DEA and then the Swiss attorney general, Carla Del Ponte, launch inquiries. Years earlier Del Ponte risked being killed along with Giovanni Falcone, with whom she was collaborating on the famous Pizza Connection investigation. Raúl Salinas is accused of having pocketed heavy transit taxes on cocaine shipments from just about everyone: the Medellín and Cali cartels; the Mexican cartels that emerged out of the territorial divisions decided on by El Padrino; and perhaps the Gulf cartel in particular. It’s estimated that a total of $300 million ended up in overseas accounts, with about $90 million to $100 million going to Swiss accounts between 1992 and 1994. More specifically, funds were transferred through Citibank Mexico to private bank accounts in their London and Zurich branches, as well as the most prestigious Swiss banks, such as SBC, UBS, Banque Privée Edmond de Rothschild, Credit Suisse, and Julius Baer. The American giant allegedly helped Salinas with these transactions by making the money hard to trace. How? First of all by setting up an account in Salinas’s name at its New York branch. Through Cititrust, an affiliate of Citicorp registered in the Cayman Islands, Citibank set up Trocca, an investment company also based in that fiscal paradise, where Salinas’s patrimony could be kept. To further conceal Salinas’s name, Citibank established another company, Tyler, which became Trocca’s principal shareholder. Then it opened two investment accounts in Trocca’s name, one at Citibank London and the other at Citibank Switzerland. What’s more, Citibank not only allegedly neglected to obtain the client’s bank references and compile a “know your customer” profile, it even let Raúl Salinas use another name when making transfers. No U.S. document names him as an owner or beneficiary of Trocca, nor does anything link him with the Trocca money that moved from Mexico to New York and on to London and Switzerland.

It was his wife, Paulina, who periodically made transfers from Mexico, and whom the vice president of Citibank’s Mexico division had introduced to his Mexican colleagues as Patricia Ríos. Under that false name, Señora Salinas deposited checks drawn on at least five Mexican banks into her account, so they could be converted into American dollars and transferred to New York. There the money ended up in a so-called concentration account — a deposit account into which capital from various clients and bank branches flows before being sent on to numerous final destinations.

It seems rather ironic that the blow landed in Switzerland, the country most famous for its long tradition of banking secrecy, and where judicial proceedings against Salinas have been in progress for many years. They continued even after Carla Del Ponte became prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague, where she investigated the crimes of Slobodan Milošević, and ended in a trial in which the Swiss judge ruled that the Mexican government structures were protecting drug trafficking and that the money could not have originated legally. In fact, it remained frozen in Swiss banks, waiting for the Mexican courts to issue a verdict on the connections between Salinas and the cartels. But there was insufficient proof on that crucial point, and the case was closed. And so, in 2008, Switzerland decided to hand over $74 million of it to the Mexican government, a sum that had grown to $130 million, and to return an additional percentage to third parties who had entrusted their money to Raúl Salinas. And it’s not over yet, because on July 19, 2013, a Mexican federal judge absolved Salinas of the crime of illegal accumulation of wealth. The evidence was insufficient to prove that Salinas’s fortune had been generated through illegal activities.

The problem that emerges from this interminable saga is the frequent lack both of tools of legal recourse and often of interest in going after dirty money, even when the accused is not a notorious member of some criminal organization but an exponent of that elite and that institutional apparatus that is needed to keep the machine of white profit running. Cocaine money first buys politicians and officials, and then, through them, the shelter of the banks.

12. THE CZARS CONQUER THE WORLD

“The Amalfi Coast, Sardinia, the Costa del Sol, Tuscany, Malta, Ibiza. It’s all Russia!” The man who is speaking knows well the difference between Moscow’s penetrating chill and Italy’s refreshing warmth. A Russian like so many others who invade Italy when summer calls for bathing suits and sunscreen. The Russians are everywhere; you see them and automatically you think: Russians, Russian mafiosi…. As if all rich Russians were criminals. But the presence of the Russian mafia — the Mafija with a j—is as powerful as it is complex, difficult to understand and to learn about. We know it through clichés, through tales of jailbirds covered in barbaric tattoos, ex-boxers with broken noses, brutal ex-specnaz, hooligan pushers with eyes shot through with vodka and low-grade drugs. But the Mafija is something completely different. To get your bearings you have to look at the powerful families, observe their strength. Families bound not by blood but by the organization’s common interests. And like all families, they have a photo album. Everything’s in there: the color of the past; faces of distant relatives; snapshots of important moments; places of the heart.

It is not easy to leaf through a Russian Mafija family album, but I’ve tried to do that with the life of one quick-thinking boss, who is known as the Brainy Don. He’s a way for me to understand how big business is linked to big crime. I imagine I saw him countless times in bars along the Italian coast, or drunk at dinner, with other mobsters. Hallucinations? Sometimes you have to go with your hallucinations, so I immerse myself in the story. I have a collection of the protagonists’ photographs with me, a sort of album I’ve put together these past years; I need to start from something I can touch. The Brainy Don. He doesn’t look like a mafioso. Like a Russian, yes, but he could also pass for American, German, Spanish, or Hungarian. At first glance he’s just another elderly, obese gentleman. We tend to think that people who are that slow in their bodies must be so in their minds as well. Harmless. Innocuous. But that’s not true; you have to take a closer look. In the most famous photograph of him he’s holding a cigarette, caressing it with his chubby fingers. He’s not looking at the camera but at some point above the photographer’s head. His shirt and finely tailored vest barely contain his 290 pounds, which press against the fabric, creating pleats and wrinkles. Behind him, a fireplace framed in marble tiles; before him, a laptop and a pair of elegant reading glasses. To complete the picture, an office chair and a transparent ashtray, which suggests that the cigarette he’s holding is not the first of the day. A businessman, rich and powerful, the head of numerous companies that operate in a wide range of sectors. Sure of himself, authoritarian, devoted to his work. With thousands of employees to oversee, budgets to review and approve, important decisions to make. The Brainy Don’s name is Semën Judkovic Mogilevic. On January 20, 2011, Time magazine put him first on its list of Top 10 Real-Life Mob Bosses of all time, followed by Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Pablo Escobar, and Totò Riina. American and European security agencies consider him one of the key Mafija leaders, the head of the Russian octopus, with tentacles all over the world.

Reconstructing his life story is a way to understand how the most violent crimes — extortion, murder, arms and drug trafficking, and prostitution rackets relate to the crimes committed by businessmen, politicians, and financiers. Tracing the rise of Don Semën, or Don Seva, as he’s also known, lets me photograph a world in which borders have fallen and criminal energies are interwoven, converging on a goal of maximum profit.

Mogilevic was born in Kiev on June 30, 1946, to a Jewish Ukrainian family that was probably quite typical for the Soviet era: not religious, broadly speaking middle-class. He got a degree in economics at Lviv University, one of the oldest in Eastern Europe, then moved from Ukraine to Moscow, where he arranged funerals. Funerals are a winning business. People never stop dying, and mafias worldwide have their hands in the funeral trade. They’re an excellent money-laundering tool and a fine cornerstone for building a fortune. Mafias never renounce concreteness. Tangible things. Earth, water, cement, hospitals, the dead. In the 1970s, Mogilevic joins a criminal group that deals in counterfeiting, petty fraud, and minor thefts. Small-time stuff compared to what he’ll do later, but the street provides essential training in how to command, survive, build self-confidence. He spends his time in airports and train stations, exchanging rubles for dollars, hustling perfume and handbags to ladies who want to look Western, and selling “black” vodka to their husbands, who remain true to Russian traditions. Shortly thereafter he’s arrested for one of the most common crimes: illegal currency exchange. He ends up in jail twice, for a total of seven years. Which turns out to be his lucky break. In prison he befriends some powerful Russian criminals, friendships that will last his whole life. The turning point in his criminal career comes when the Soviet government allows more than 150,000 Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. It’s a race against the clock for these families. They can leave, but they have to go right away: Their precious relics, their earrings and necklaces passed down from generation to generation, have to be left behind. Mogilevic realizes that an occasion like this won’t come around again. He’ll take care of selling the emigrating Jews’ possessions, then send the cash to them at their new address. Many believe him and entrust their possessions to him. But the money never reaches the legitimate owners: The fortune he accumulates will form the financial base of his criminal career.

Second page of the photo album, another famous photo. A man in three-quarter pose stares defiantly at the camera. He’s bare-chested and looks surprised: his mouth slightly open; his nearly invisible eyebrows raised; his eyes like two crushed almonds. Vaguely Asiatic features; deep furrows across his forehead, from one temple to the other. But what’s most striking are two identical tattoos at his collarbones. Two eight-pointed stars, with an eye at the center. The symbol of authority, of power. The photo is of Vjaceslav Kirillovic Ivan’kov, also known as Japoncik, or Little Jap. He was born in Georgia in 1940, but his Russian parents soon decide to move to Moscow. In 1982 he’s arrested for illegal firearms possession, robbery, and drug trafficking and is condemned to fourteen years imprisonment in Siberia. Years in which he rises to the rank of vor, just as the regime that marked their beginning is about to collapse. Vor is short for vor v zakone, literally “thief in law,” in other words, a criminal who has earned himself the right to command according to the rules. He was supposed to remain behind bars until 1995, but the tentacles of the Mafija are long and reach everywhere, from politics to sports, from institutions to entertainment. In 1990 two popular figures, one a singer — the Russian Frank Sinatra, and with a similar collection of dangerous acquaintances — the other a former Greco-Roman wrestling champion who is using an association of retired athletes as a screen for Mafija interests, mount a campaign supported by numerous political, cultural, and sports celebrities: Ivan’kov has sufficiently expiated his guilt; it’s time he is freed. Eventually even Semën Mogilevic offers a heavy helping hand: He generously pays off the judge on the case and involves a high-ranking Soviet functionary. The Little Jap goes free in 1991.

The Iron Curtain has fallen. The Soviet Union is crumbling. Russia is changing, its capital city is changing too. Feuds break out: Russians against Chechens. There’s no end to the blood, but it flows more from business interests than ethnic hatred. Ivan’kov is an old-fashioned vor—he doesn’t delegate, nor does he shy away from getting his own hands dirty. He starts eliminating Chechens and their business friends one by one. But it’s an elementary rule that the more people you kill, the more likely it is that someone will return the favor. And that’s not all. All that death and tumult leading up to it are starting to annoy the Mafija higher-ups, who decide to send Ivan’kov to the United States. Two birds with one stone: relative tranquillity at home and a business to build in the States. It’s easy now that the borders are open. All you have to do is ask the American embassy in Moscow for a two-week visa. Vjaceslav Ivan’kov travels as a cinematographic consultant for a movie company headed by a Russian magnate who’s lived in New York for years. Ivan’kov uses his real passport — just over a year after being released from jail in the USSR, which has only recently officially become part of the free world again. The Soviet Union had dissolved barely two and a half months earlier.

Ivan’kov arrives in New York, where everything’s already been set up for him. Starting with money, which the Little Jap immediately invests to begin his new life. For a mere fifteen thousand dollars Ivan’kov buys a fake marriage with a Russian singer who is a U.S. resident. He settles in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, where so many Soviet Jews had been coming since the 1970s that it’s nicknamed Little Odessa. There’s the ocean and beaches, but if you’re thinking melting pot with fiddles and balalaikas, you’ve got the wrong idea. The most typical thing these immigrants brought with them to the trash-strewn brick tenements is the mafia, the Mafija with a j.

The third photo in the family album is of another neighborhood. Whoever snapped it was really good; he managed to soften the squalor with a play of chromatic reflections between the incendiary sunset and the chilly lake that laps at its shore. But not even the most gifted artist could do anything about the violent eruption of barracklike structures on the horizon. They pop up unexpectedly along Moscow’s western periphery, in the middle of an immense park sliced brutally in half by four lanes of traffic. Seen from a distance they look like a bunch of rabbit hutches for giants, anonymous, stained by smog, and pathetic in their attempt to seem like a business district. This is Solncevo, a working-class neighborhood the Soviet authorities built in 1938. They had a sense of humor, those authorities. Solnce in Russian means “sun,” but in Solncevo whatever light there is crashes into the buildings, so shadows reign unopposed. This is where Solncevskaja Bratva, the Solncevo Brotherhood, was born.

Sweat, bodies colliding: the very lymphatic fluid of Solncevskaja Bratva. The founder, Sergej Michajlov, also known as Michas, was born there. His youth was spent between odd jobs and petty swindles, for which he had a brush with jail. In the 1980s Michas makes the most of his love of fighting and gathers together all those who share this passion. Is this the beginning of a sports club? Or the nucleus of what will become an army?

Michas is arrested twice: once for extortion and once for murdering a casino owner. But he is never sentenced: insufficient proof. Meanwhile, the Solncevskaja Bratva, as Michas’s handful of followers is now called, is expanding. Sweat and struggle. Violence and strength. The organization attracts other like-minded individuals: street fighters, hooligans, men ready for anything. They need to unite to defend themselves against other gangs, to pump up their muscles if they want to survive. They merge with other organizations, such as the Orechovskaja group, and within a few years Solncevskaja Bratva is powerful enough to extend its influence beyond the neighborhood, and to get involved in finance and business.

But their core business is protection, which in the 1990s takes on proportions that are nothing like Italy’s idea of payoffs. According to the FBI, the Austrian shopping chain Julius Meinl has to pay fifty thousand dollars a month in order to manage its supermarkets in Russia. Coca-Cola announces that it is not its policy to give in to blackmail, and the next day its new factory near Moscow gets a visit from a machine gun and a grenade launcher — two security guards are seriously wounded. The company reported the assault to the Russian authorities, but the case remains unsolved. According to Interpol, other multinationals targeted are IBM, Philip Morris, and, curiously, Cadbury, Mars, and Hershey, as if there were some special sweetness in earnings extorted from chocolate factories.

The Russian Mafija came into being thanks to men who knew how to exploit new opportunities, but also because it draws on a history of structures and rules for how to dominate amid the great disorder. In my years of navigating the world’s criminal sewers I’ve noted that mafias always flourish under such circumstances: a power void, weakness, something rotten in the state in comparison to an organization that offers and represents order. The resemblances between the most far-flung mafias are often striking. The Russian organizations were toughened up by Stalinist repression, which amassed thousands of delinquents and political dissidents in the gulags. That’s where the Vory v zakone group was born, a society that within a few years was running every gulag in the USSR. An origin, therefore, that has nothing in common with Italian organizations, yet the principal characteristic that has allowed them to survive and prosper is the same: rules. Rules have many shades; they are made explicit through rituals and myths and made concrete through precepts that one must follow to the letter in order to be considered a worthy affiliate, that establish how to join and become part of the organization. Everything is codified and everything lives within the rules. What unites the camorrista and the vor are honor and loyalty, as well as the sacredness of certain gestures and the meting out of justice within the group. Even their rituals are similar. What grounds the ritual — the passage from one state to another — is common to both, since both share the desire to create an alternate reality, with different codes but equally coherent: Camorrista and vor are both baptized, punished if they step out of line, and rewarded if they obtain results. If in the past a vor was an ascetic who was averse to all earthly pleasure and every imposition, to the point of having his knees tattooed to signify that he would never bow down before authority, today luxury and ostentation are allowed. It’s no longer a sin to live on the Côte d’Azur.

Russian bosses are swathed in designer gear, from their underwear to their luggage; they have political protection, control who gets appointed to public office, and throw megaparties without any police interference. The groups are becoming more and more organized: Every clan has an obšcak, a kitty where a percentage of profits from crimes such as extortion and robbery are deposited, in order to cover the expenses of vory who end up in jail, or to pay off police and politicians. Soldiers, armies of lawyers, and highly skilled brokers are all on their payroll.

During the communist era the vory worked side by side with the Soviet elite, influencing every corner of the state apparatus. Under Brežnev they took advantage of the heavy stagnation of the communist economy and created an impressive black market: the Mafija could satisfy any desire as long as you could afford it. Shop and restaurants managers, heads of state agencies, government functionaries and politicians: They were all dealing in something. Every imaginable good was traded on the black market, from food to medicine. The vory tracked down whatever filthy capitalist goods the populace was forbidden in the name of socialism and introduced them into the homes of Party officials, thus forging an alliance between the nomenklatura and crime that was to have enormous consequences.

The fall of communism created an economic, moral, and social abyss that the Mafija was ready to fill. Generations of people out of work, penniless, often quite literally starving: The Russian organizations enrolled legions of unskilled workers. Police, soldiers, Afghan war veterans offered their services unreservedly. Former KGB members and Soviet officials placed their bank accounts and contacts in the service of organized criminal activities, including drug and arms trafficking. The transition to capitalism was armed with neither laws nor adequate infrastructure. The brotherhoods, on the other hand, had money, predatory swiftness, and intimidation tactics: Who could possibly oppose them? The so-called new Russians — those who were getting rich at dizzying speeds with the new market openings — found it was convenient to pay a “tax” that guaranteed protection from other groups as well as helped resolve problems with slow-paying customers or competitors. The small fish had no choice but to bow their heads: There was one extortionist who went around with a pair of scissors and a severed finger: “Pay up, or I’ll cut yours off too.” The West only caught the occasional echo of exaggerated violence; for the most part it was distracted and deluded. Even the funds the United States and European countries donated to reinforce post-Soviet civil society contributed indirectly to fattening the Mafija. NGOs were the preferred recipients, for fear that the money would be pocketed by ex-communists and used to reanimate the old regime and its old bureaucrats. But much of the aid was intercepted by criminal groups and never reached its destination.

With the intoduction of new banking laws, banks began to sprout up like mushrooms. Mafiosi no longer needed to corrupt the old institutions’ executives. With their abundant cash flow and a few straw men, they could open a bank and staff it with friends and relatives, including some freshly out of jail. Then came the great plan for privatization, which was supposed to give all citizens a stake in Soviet enterprises, from colossal new energy companies to Moscow hotels. The value of the distributed stocks was low for those who already had money and power but huge for those who had trouble making ends meet. Poor people sold their shares, even below face value, to those who had the means to stockpile them, thus reinforcing the elite ranks of former Soviet managers and bureaucrats and mafiosi. The relationship between the Mafija and the government was symbiotic and long lasting, and it worked: Those envelopes stuffed with cash were handy for everyone, because everyone needed money to survive. The Mafija was everywhere. The Mafija had become the state.

In 1993, in Moscow alone there were fourteen hundred homicides linked to organized crime, as well as a shocking rise in kidnappings and explosions. Moscow was compared to Chicago in the 1920s. Businessmen, journalists, gang family members — no one was safe. People fought over the control of factories, mines, territory. Businesses and corporations were forced either to reach an agreement with the gangs or be eliminated. According to former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who also dealt with Italian American, Sicilian, and Colombian mafias, the Russian mafia is the most violent he’s ever known. But there’s something new here: Often the Russians have college degrees, speak several languages, and introduce themselves as engineers, economists, scientists, white-collar workers. When people abroad finally begin to realize that they’re educated barbarians, it’s too late. The Mafija didn’t simply fill the power void in Russia. Its most formidable members are already operating far beyond Russia’s borders, fashioning a new world according to their own ideas.

• • •

“Death is always after you,” Sergej, one of Mogilevic’s closest associates, loves to say. Sergej is an insignificant little man in rumpled clothes, and therefore very good at making himself invisible. Don Semën despises him but finds him useful: To be untouchable you can’t be vulnerable to threats. And Sergej isn’t. Everyone in Moscow knows he always carries a briefcase around with him. But only a few know what’s inside. Mogilevic never talks about it, not even with his wife. Once Sergej was kidnapped by one of Mogilevic’s rivals, a builder in the running for a public works contract from the city of Moscow. Sergej didn’t put up any resistance; he let himself be dragged into the dark basement of some anonymous high-rise on the outskirts of Moscow: no pleas; no prayers to be let go; no hint of retaliation from his powerful boss. He simply opened his briefcase, and the next day — still in his threadbare suit, looking dazed and indifferent — he knocked at Mogilevic’s door. “How did you do it?” his boss asked, actually glancing up from his laptop for once. Sergej went over to the desk and set his briefcase on it. Click, click, and with a swift move of the wrist he turned it 180 degrees. Mogilevic didn’t bat an eye when he saw himself with Sergej on one of his rare vacations at the Black Sea. He hadn’t remembered that Sergej had snapped that seemingly innocuous beach scene, which guarantees him that no one will dare touch a hair on his head. He smiled, closed the briefcase, and turned it another 180 degrees.

Perhaps it was Sergej’s kidnapping, or the dangers of Moscow, now gripped by fear of gang warfare, that make Mogilevic think it might be better to get out of town. Money’s not a problem; he’s already accumulated several million dollars, which he’s made in large part thanks to his most dangerous weapon: his acumen for financial affairs. As soon as perestroika opened the doors to private enterprise he quickly set up several companies, officially for fuel import-export, and registered far from the spires of Red Square, on one of the offshore islands in the English Channel. One company is called Arigon Ltd., the other, Arbat International, of which Mogilevic controls half the stock, the other half being divided between the Little Jap and the Solncevo bosses, Michajlov and Averin. With such good friendships now signed in ink, all Mogilevic has to do is pack his bags. In 1990 he decides to move to Israel, along with his most trusted men. They’re the vanguard of the second wave of Soviet Jewish immigration, which is also the second wave of mafia importation, following that of the 1970s, which Mogilevic was so deft at exploiting. It wasn’t only innocent victims of discrimination who emigrated but thousands of criminals whom the KGB was thrilled to be rid of. Many of them landed in the United States, colonizing Little Odessa, where Ivan’kov would settle in 1992; others ended up in different parts of the world. But they stayed on good terms, as part of a global network in which Don Semën and the Little Jap merely had to insert themselves, without ever losing touch with the Russian brotherhoods.

Mogilevic becomes an Israeli citizen and establishes ties with emerging Russian and Israeli groups who sense his talent for managing the complex workings of international finance. His empire expands, thanks to the money he makes from illegal activities — drugs, arms, prostitution. But it also grows through his reinvesting dirty money in legal enterprises, such as discothèques, art galleries, factories, and all sorts of businesses, including an international kosher catering service. According to an FBI document, he owns an Israeli bank with branches in Tel Aviv, Moscow, and Cyprus, which recycles money for Colombian and Russian criminal groups.

Yet the Promised Land is a tight fit for Don Semën: After one year there he marries a Hungarian woman, Katalin Papp, thus adding a Hungarian passport to his Ukrainian, Russian, and Israeli ones, and moves to Budapest. Officially he works as a wheat and grain dealer, but in reality he sets up a criminal organization that bears his name, with about 250 members and a hierarchical structure modeled on Italian mafias, to the point that many members are relatives of his. Budapest turns out to be a safe haven, and with the protection of corrupt politicians and policemen, his affairs prosper without too much interference. Mogilevic knows that tranquillity has a price, a price that money can’t always pay.

In 1995 two colonels from the Russian Presidential Security Service pay him an undercover visit in Hungary, where, out of prudence, only one of Mogilevic’s Israeli associates furnishes them with what they’ve come looking for: classified information to use in the Russian electoral campaign. The FBI’s words are more eloquent than any image: “‘He also ingratiates himself with the police by providing information on other groups’ activities, thus appearing to be a cooperative good citizen.”

Don Semën has a few other tricks to help keep problems away; He never takes part in his group’s day-to-day operations, never gets his own hands dirty, thereby making the work of the forces of order and justice trying to nail him extremely difficult. What’s more, he pays Hungarian ex-cops to keep him informed of any police investigations involving him. Thanks to his managerial skills, his financial savvy, and his extremely talented staff, who are experts in cutting-edge computer technology, Mogilevic becomes one of the world’s most powerful bosses. He creates his own private army, largely composed of specnaz and Afghan war veterans, who are famous for their brutality. To cover his prostitution business, he uses a chain of nightclubs, the Black and White Clubs, which he operates in partnership with Solncevskaja and Uralmaševskaja, another Russian crime group. In 1992 Mogilevic organizes a strategic meeting with the leading Russian prostitution bosses at Budapest’s Atrium Hotel. He makes them a proposal: Invest $4 million of prostitution profits to open more Black and White Clubs in Eastern Europe. Don Semën recruits young women from the former Soviet Union, gets them legitimate cover jobs, and puts them to work in the new clubs. He even hires bodyguards to protect them. Business thrives: The girls are beautiful and make tons of money. During the same period Mogilevic contacts some Latin American organizations: His girls are perfect for drug dealing. They’re the ones who caress rich gentlemen from East and West, who undress them and give them pleasure. And Don Semën, whom the girls call Pàpa, really does feel like a father. From his viewpoint prostitution is a kind of welfare: His girls don’t fall into the hands of drunken brutes, and some of them even manage to put something aside for the future.

But Pàpa has to get angry sometimes. There’s another Russian, Nikolaj Širokov, who’s trying to move in on the Budapest prostitution racket, and who goes about the city protected by his goons. He has a weakness, though. Women aren’t merely a business for him; he can never get enough of them. Our brainy Don needs to find a woman with real class, irresistibly gorgeous, wave her under Širokov’s nose like a jewel too precious to pass off to clients, and then wait for the right moment. At the end of 1993 Mogilevic strikes. Širokov is eliminated in Budapest, along with two of his bodyguards. End of competition in the capital city on the Danube.

Mogilevic doesn’t enjoy using such brutal means, however, and is always quite happy to leave the job to one of the groups he’s associated with. The Brainy Don prefers to speculate. As soon as the Berlin Wall shows signs of crumbling, he starts changing rubles into hard currency, into German marks.

In 1994 Mogilevic manages to infiltrate Inkombank, a Russian banking colossus with a network of accounts in the biggest banks in the world (Bank of New York, Bank of China, UBS, and Deutsche Bank), and to take control of it: This allows him to have direct access to the world financial system and to recycle proceeds from his illegal businesses easily. In 1998 Inkombank is dismantled for improper conduct on the part of its directors, violation of banking laws, and failure to honor its obligations toward its creditors. His business is booming, and Mogilevic becomes the object of several worldwide investigations, from Russia to Canada. But the vor recycles his identity just as he does his money: Seva Moguilevich, Semon Yudkovich Palagnyuk, Semen Yukovich Telesh, Simeon Mogilevitch, Semjon Mogilevcs, Shimon Makelwitsh, Shimon Makhelwitsch, Sergei Yurevich Schnaider, or simply “Don Seva.” A ghost with the gift of ubiquity and a sense of irony.

As in the case of the Fabergé egg scam.

At the beginning of 1995, again in partnership with Solncevo, he acquires jewelry stores in Moscow and Budapest to cover his traffic in precious stones, antiquities, and artworks stolen from Russian churches and museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. But his project is far more ambitious and sophisticated, to the point of using the world’s most prestigious auction house: Sotheby’s. Mogilevic and his associates purchase a shed just outside Budapest and stock it with the most up-to-date equipment for restoring antique jewels and setting precious stones. Mogilevic watches the preparations from outside the building, arms crossed over his prominent paunch. Now he needs to find talented artists capable of replicating the most famous golden eggs of all time, Fabergé eggs. Don Semën activates his network of contacts and within a week he hires two internationally noted Russian sculptors. He promises them a lot of money and steady work. Sure, they’ll have to remain in a shed on the outskirts of Budapest for the next few months, but it’s still better than what they can find back home. Original Fabergé eggs in need of restoration arrive at the Budapest factory from collectors and museums all over the former Soviet zone. The two sculptors produce perfect copies, which are sent back to Russia. Meanwhile, the real eggs find their way to London and are sold by Sotheby’s auctioneers, who unwittingly constitute the final link in the chain.

Mogilevic has always had a talent for swindles, and he’s pulled off a few of gigantic proportions, such as the one where he stole billions of dollars from the public treasuries of three Central European states — the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia — by selling them gasoline disguised as heating oil, thus avoiding those states’ extremely high taxes on auto fuel. Instead of being paid into those countries’ coffers, the monies filled Don Seva’s and his organization’s pockets. When a Hungarian gangster involved in the deal started collaborating with investigators and named Don Seva, the response was unequivocal. A car bomb exploded in downtown Budapest, killing the canary, his lawyer, and two passersby, wounding another twenty-odd people, and reducing that popular tourist street to a scene of wartime devastation.

Mogilevic decides to stay in Budapest even after his wife’s death in 1994. As for all the Mafija, one of the pillars of his fortune is arms trafficking. But now he makes an astonishing leap forward. He obtains a license to legally buy and sell arms, and thanks to his controlling a Hungarian weapons factory, Army Co-op, he manages to buy two more factories: Magnex 2000, which produces magnets, and Digep General Machine Works, a former state-owned factory, now privatized, that makes projectiles, mortars, and firearms. He is now in de facto control of the Hungarian military weapons industry. He sells arms to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. He supplies Iran with material purloined from East German warehouses for several millions of dollars. Mogilevic is now the lord of war.

• • •

Another photo from the Russian album. Ivan’kov, the Little Jap, looks older now. Receding hairline, gray hair and beard, a little stoop shouldered even. He’s put on a few pounds and looks tired. But his eyes, those two slits that earned him his nickname, are still the same. And his blue-tinted glasses can’t hide their fury. Mogilevic has been busy, but Ivan’kov hasn’t been wasting his time either. He’s used his connections, reputation, and experience to set up international arms trafficking, gambling, prostitution, extortion, and fraud and money-laundering operations, with more sophisticated and modern methods than what the New York Russians were used to. He’s established links to the Italian Mafia and the Colombian drug cartels. And to make sure he’s protected, can fight, and intimidate, he formed an army of almost three hundred men, most of whom served in the Afghan war. He quickly gained control of the Russian Jewish mafia in New York, transforming it from a bunch of neighborhood shakedown artists into a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. And the old-school gangsters, frightened of him and his reputation, have to accept him. According to the American authorities he’s the most powerful Russian mafioso in the United States. He’s the one who expands Mafija business in Miami, where he supplies the Cali cartel with heroin and money-laundering services in exchange for cocaine, which he then sends to Russia. The former Soviet Union starts hungering after white powder, and the Little Jap wants to corner the market. And he doesn’t hesitate to use whatever arms are necessary. Up till then Russia’s cocaine trade was run by two criminals from the former Soviet Union: the Georgian vor Valeri “Globus” Glugec and Sergej “Sylvester” Timofeev. The first was a pioneer drug importer in Moscow; the second, after a brief interlude with Solncevo, began collaborating with Ivan’kov. The Little Jap wanted their slices of the market. He kept trying to convince Globus and Sylvester that from then on he, the Little Jap, was the one in charge of the cocaine business. But in the end he was forced to kill them both: Globus was shot dead near one of his Moscow clubs, while Sylvester was blown to bits when he started his car.

The competition is over; Ivan’kov has won. His activities soon attract the attention of the FBI, who till then had mostly been used to dealing with the Italo American mafia and weren’t really equipped to deal with the Russians yet. In 1995 Ivan’kov has an extortion on his hands, or rather “a debt collection” of $3.5 million. Aleksandr Volkov and Vladimir Vološin, two Russian businessmen with mysterious pasts working on Wall Street, founded Summit International, an investment company in New York in which the Chara Bank of Moscow invested, $3.5 million. But Volkov and Vološin’s company is nothing but a gigantic Ponzi scheme: The two of them promise creditors, for the most part Russian immigrants, a 120 percent annual interest rate. But in truth they don’t invest anything, spending the money instead on women, travel, and gambling. When the president of Chara Bank asks them to return the money they had “invested,” the two managers refuse. So the Moscow bank asks Ivan’kov for help, and he takes it upon himself to get the money back. In June Ivan’kov and two of his thugs nab the two traders at the New York Hilton bar and take them to Troika, a Russian restaurant in New Jersey. They threaten them — if they don’t agree to sign papers promising to give back the $3.5 million, they won’t leave the restaurant alive. The traders agree — what else can they do? — and so they save their skins. The Little Jap has won again, or so he thinks; he doesn’t yet know that the two kidnapped traders, once they are released, alert the FBI. A few days later, at dawn on June 8, 1995, they arrest Ivan’kov at Brighton Beach while he’s asleep with his girlfriend. That same day several members of his organization are picked up, including his right-hand man. Even in handcuffs, even surrounded by FBI agents, the Little Jap is arrogant and cocky. He screams, curses, kicks.

He’s found guilty of extortion and sentenced to nine years and eight months in the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Four years go by, by which point it’s clear that the Lewisburg jail isn’t enough for someone like the Little Jap, who has no problem getting drugs delivered to him, and according to the FBI, sending orders to his men on the outside. The bars of the maximum security penitentiary in Allenwood await him.

• • •

At about the same time as Ivan’kov’s arrest in the United States the forces of order in the Old World start getting serious about stifling the exuberance of certain Russian expatriates. On the evening of May 31, 1995, an endless stream of customers enters the U Holubů restaurant in Prague, for a special evening. No one notices the two big refrigerator trucks parked outside. They’re all white, no signage, and anyone who looked at them more closely would have noticed that the tires show no trace of wear. But maybe the guests are in a hurry to get inside. It’s a dinner in honor of a friend, and the Russian cabaret performer is supposed to be really hilarious. A few hours earlier, at the Czech Republic’s organized crime squad headquarters, a diligent employee made a rather extravagant request: “I’m going to need a couple of refrigerated trucks, and I need them fast.”

“May I ask what for?”

“Clean up. Very discreet.”

Despite the fact that the squad is navigating in stormy financial waters, the request is granted. The operative gets on it and phones a cousin who owns a trucking company. Inside the restaurant the show was under way. Two hundred people guffaw at the cabaret performer’s jokes, and he exits the stage to wild applause. Now it’s time for the Russian chanteuse. While they wait, the customers chat merrily and clink glasses in endless toasts. The lights are dimmed, silence falls. Spotlights illuminate ropes being lowered from above, and some audience members rub their hands in anticipation of some seductive acrobatics. The first one to land on the stage is a brawny special forces agent. His machine gun pointed, his jaw drops when he manages to look around and realizes how many Mafija big shots are in the room. He quickly collects himself, and as soon as his partners arrive, he shouts at the top of his lungs — nobody move! They expect the restaurant to become a slaughterhouse any second, but no one opens fire, no one says a word or bats an eye. Those under arrest march silently out of the restaurant in an orderly and composed fashion. Among them are the girls from the Black and White. Only then does anyone notice the two big refrigerator trucks, even more resplendent and white under the full Moon. The special agents inside breathe a sigh of relief. They’ve got the Solncevo heads as well as other leading Mafija figures, who will have to be released the next day, since they’re not carrying weapons. But Mogilevic’s not there. “My plane was late,” he says during an interview, as impassive as a walrus. The interviewer isn’t intimidated and asks if the girls at his clubs went to bed with the clients. Mogilevic stares at him as if he were addressing an idiot child: “There weren’t any beds there. It was a standing bar, with tables.”

• • •

By now the Brainy Don operates unopposed in Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Israel, Russia, Europe, and the United States, and he maintains relations with organizations in New Zealand, Japan, South America, and Pakistan. He has total control of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. From an FBI report it appears that one of his lieutenants, who is stationed in Los Angeles, met with two New York Russians linked to the Genovese crime family to develop a plan for shipping toxic American medical waste to Ukraine, to the area of Chernobyl, probably with kickbacks to local decontamination authorities. The Don’s imagination knows no limits. It’s 1997, and Mogilevic has several tons of enriched uranium on hand, apparently one of many gifts from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Warehouses are full of weapons; he just has to figure out how to be the first to claim them. The Brainy Don arranges a meeting at the Karlovy Vary spa; he loves that place. The buyers are seated across the table from him, distinguished Middle Eastern men. Everything seems to be going smoothly, but the Czech authorities blow the deal.

In 1998 an FBI report identifies money laundering as Don Semën’s principal activity in the United States, and reveals both his and Solncevo’s interest in YBM Magnex International, a Pennsylvania-based company with branches in Hungary and Great Britain, which officially produces industrial magnets. Valued at close to a billion dollars and quoted on the Toronto stock exchange, the company’s principal stockholders include two women named Ljudmila: the wives of Sergej Michajlov and Viktor Averin, the two leaders of the Moscow brotherhood. Mogilevic and his associates had noticed that the Canadian Stock Exchange is poorly regulated, so a company listed on the Toronto exchange would be a perfect cover for getting in and concealing illegal Mafija capital in their North American markets. In the space of just two years the value of YBM Magnex stock rose from a few cents to more than twenty dollars a share. On paper it seemed as if the investors were making vast sums, and the company was even listed among the three hundred most important securities on the Toronto Exchange. But in May 1998 the FBI pays a visit to the YBM offices in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and seizes everything: hard drives, faxes, invoices, shipping receipts. The stock price plummets in just a few hours, and Mogilevic is accused of defrauding American and Canadian investors. In practice the company conducted business through a series of front companies — boxes within boxes — empty containers that served only for moving money around. FBI suspicions were confirmed by the Newtown YBM office itself: A company that allegedly invoiced $20 million and had more than 150 employees couldn’t possibly be headquartered in a small wing of a former schoolhouse. This gigantic fraud cost investors more than a $150 million.

YBM Magnex had received several million dollars from Arigon Ltd., which among its various activities sold fuel to the Ukrainian national railway system. Mogilevic is on very good terms with the Ukrainian minister of energy and the energy companies in his native country. Among other things, it was Arigon that owned Mogilevic’s Black and White nightclub in Prague. Through Operation Sword, launched by Great Britain’s National Criminal Intelligence Service, it emerges that Arigon Ltd. is actually an offshore company registered on one of the Channel Islands, as well as the pivot of Mogilevic’s financial operations. According to investigators, it works like this: The dirty money that he and other Russian bosses make through their illegal activities in Eastern Europe flows into companies such as Arbat International (owned by the Little Jap, Solncevo, and Mogilevic) and from there is transferred to Arigon, at times passing through Mogilevic’s companies in Budapest. In turn, Arigon uses a number of checking accounts in Stockholm, London, New York, and Geneva to transfer funds to front companies around the globe, even in Los Angeles and San Diego, which are registered to Mogilevic’s associates. The money is officially laundered through Arigon, and so it can enter the legal marketplace, flowing into other projects. Thanks to Operation Sword we know that of the more than £30 million that watered the London banks, £2 million were deposited with the Royal Bank of Scotland. The money, identified merely as having an unspecified origin in Russia, was destined for Arigon. Yet in the end Operation Sword came up empty-handed, because the Russian police either could not or would not furnish Scotland Yard with evidence that the money was the fruit of criminal activity. The accusations of money laundering were dropped. But there was still some backlash. I can only imagine Mogilevic’s surprise when, a short while later, he opened a letter from the Bureau of Internal Affairs and read that he was no longer welcome in the United Kingdom.

Yet as Mogilevic’s business gradually expanded, Arigon opened new branches and offices around the world. Prague, Budapest, the United States, Canada: extremely efficient launderers of dirty money.

“Why did you set up companies in the Channel Islands?” an interviewer asked Mogilevic.

“The problem was that I didn’t know any other islands. When they taught us geography at school, I was sick that day.”

• • •

Russia’s story is one of men who knew how to profit from the transition after the fall of communism. Men who navigated without instruments during the 1990s. Men like Tarzan. Long hair, a fierce gaze, robust. Energy bursts from every pore in the photo I have in front of me and shows how apt his nickname is, even if it refers to something that happened years before it was taken. As a boy, to get attention, he jumped from the fourth story of the apartment building where he was living with his parents. They’d moved from Ukraine to Israel in the 1970s. He survived, but on that day Ludwig Fainberg became Tarzan.

He did his military service in the Israeli navy, but his height — six feet three inches — and pumped-up muscles weren’t enough for him to pass the test and fulfill his big dream of becoming an officer.

In the early 1980s he moves to East Berlin. A contact of his offers to provide him with a diploma in medicine that would fool everybody. Tarzan ends up instead with a humble dental technician degree, but it takes more than a piece of paper to make dentures and braces, as many unlucky German dentists quickly discover. At that point all he can do is to join his fellow mafiosi, and he specializes in fraud and forgery. Then he moves to Brooklyn and opens a video rental store in Brighton Beach. He marries a “pure-blooded mafia girl,” as they say in Russia: Her grandfather was a mafioso in Russia, and so was her first husband. In the United States Tarzan helps his childhood friend Griša “the Cannibal” Roizis, boss of a group of Russians in Brooklyn, to run some furniture stores that are really a front for international heroin trafficking, which also involves the Gambino and Genovese families. He also becomes friends with some higher-ups in the Colombo family. But when things in Brighton Beach start getting too shaky and several of his friends are killed, Tarzan decides to leave. In 1990 he moves to Miami, which has the second biggest group of Russian mafiosi in America. Since the 1970s many Russian immigrants there have been involved in extortion, drugs, gambling, prostitution, gem trading, and bank fraud. Tarzan starts several businesses in Florida, including Porky’s, a strip club whose slogan is “Get lost in the land of love.” In reality there’s not much love going on there: The FBI, which was keeping a watch on Tarzan from a rooftop across the street, immortalize him on video while he beats up some of his dancers outside the club.

The dancers don’t get a regular paycheck; they live on tips and percentages on drink orders, which are constantly being lowered. Tarzan boasts that all he has to do is point at a woman in any adult magazine for his agent to call her and bring her to the club, where Tarzan fucks her till she drops.

Porky’s becomes the place where — between slugs of vodka and a striptease — Russians and Colombian narcos or their go-betweens gather for meetings. Among Tarzan’s many friends are guys like Fernando Birbragher, a Colombian on excellent terms with both the Cali cartel, for which he recycled more than $50 million in the early 1980s, and Pablo Escobar, for whom he purchased yachts and sports cars. Then there’s Juan Almeida, one of the biggest traffickers of Colombian cocaine in Florida, who keeps in contact with the Colombian cartels through a luxury car rental agency in Miami and other cover businesses. Almeida and Tarzan live the good life aboard their yachts, and every now and then they decide out of the blue to take a helicopter to Cancún for lunch, to eat a plate of mariscos.

Women, success, money. Tarzan has them, but the sea still calls to him, the sea that since his childhood in Odessa has meant space, possibility. It still rankles him that he wasn’t accepted into the naval academy. Well, if the sea doesn’t want him, he’ll conquer the sea. His plan: procure a Soviet Tango class submarine for the Colombian narcos. Tarzan is a huge admirer of old Tango submarines. He’s followed the history of their construction from afar and knows they’ve made some really amazing improvements: increased firepower and open ocean operation capacity. Sure, with time, even these supermodern subs were surpassed. But Tarzan fell in love with them, and there’s no ruling the heart. The problem is that Tarzan is a boastful blabbermouth. One day at the Babushka, another one of his restaurants in Miami, his friend Griša Roizis introduces him to Aleksandr Jasevic, an arms dealer and heroin trafficker who is actually an undercover DEA agent. Tarzan doesn’t know that his friend is also collaborating with the DEA. A couple of courses and a few vodkas into their meal, he’s already told them about his ties to the Colombian narcos and the deals he’s doing for them, including the submarine.

Cannibal Roizis would later become a reference point for penniless young Italian couples. Near Naples, where he moves following his collaboration with the DEA, he opens a furniture store whose selling point is super low prices: full kitchens and living rooms within everyone’s means. There’s a line outside his store: engaged couples ready to make the big leap who unknowingly help launder the Cannibal’s dirty money while furnishing their future love nests. He’s making deals with the Italian Mafia with one hand while he’s still collaborating with the DEA with the other. Cannibal has always liked the smell of sawdust, so much so that he sets up his own office just a few yards from the loading dock where the Russians he’d brought with him unload furniture and appliances day and night. He’s even had a desk made for himself out of simple plywood. Everyone who deals with him is fascinated by his tic: He rubs his palm voluptuously across the wooden surface and then holds his fingers to his nose. He tells his most loyal men that the intoxicating aroma reminds him of his childhood. Another thing he really enjoys is screwing over honest Russians working in Italy. He’ll shake down plenty of Russian entrepreneurs until the Italian police manage to reconstruct his movements and nab him in Bologna, charging him with mafia association.

But to get back to the submarine deal: Tarzan’s lawyer insists that his client is simply a braggart, someone who loves boasting about things that he couldn’t possibly really do or provide. For the investigators, however, it was further proof of an alliance between criminal organizations of the former Soviet Union and the Colombian narcos: The narcos would supply the Russians with cocaine to transport to and distribute in Europe while the Russians would guarantee the Colombians arms and launder narco-dollars for them, especially in Miami, New York, and Puerto Rico. Tarzan’s businesses were decisive in creating a link between the Mafija and the Colombian cartels. Though the submarine deal was never finalized, others during that same time were. Deals like the 100 kilos of cocaine hidden in crates of freeze-dried shrimp from Ecuador and destined for St. Petersburg, or the fleet of MI-8 Soviet army helicopters that Juan Almeida wanted so badly: Tarzan helped him acquire them for the modest price of $1 million each. “Escobar’s men are going to fly these,” Tarzan would apparently say. “So we had to gut the whole interior, get rid of the seats, find a thousand ways to stuff in as much coke as possible.”

His criminal activities in Florida didn’t show a lack of ambition. He owned immense cannabis fields in the Everglades, with an airstrip in the middle for landing loads of Jamaican marijuana.

Tarzan was charged with thirty counts, including criminal association, arms trafficking, and fraudulent data transmission. He risked spending the rest of his life behind bars but decided to negotiate with the American justice system. In exchange for testifying against Almeida and providing information about some Mafija big shots, all charges against him were dropped except for extortion. In the end he was only sentenced to thirty-three months in prison, after which he was extradited to Israel. All he had left was a few hundred dollars, a pale mirage of the vast fortune he had built in nearly two decades of life in America.

• • •

Tarzan’s tale is the tip of the iceberg that is the story of the Mafija’s growing interest in drug trafficking. Before the fall of communism the Soviet Union played only a marginal role in the distribution chain and in consumption. But in the years following it the demand for drugs in Russia grew consistently. What’s so amazing is the speed with which it has grown, especially among the young. Because heroin is relatively affordable, consumption in Western Europe had always been associated with conditions of marginalization. But in Russia young people of all social classes began using it, not just the poor or down-and-out. It became an unstoppable wave that expanded the market to the most remote parts of the country. The variety of drugs expanded as well: to get high or to forget their problems, Russian users now had access to any and every substance, just like any American or European kid.

During the Soviet era, most of the drugs in Russia were locally produced cannabis or opium derivatives, products diverted from pharmaceutical factories and offered on the illegal drug market. In some parts of the country you couldn’t even get a buzz except by sniffing toxic substances such as glue, acetone, or gas, or by using powerful anesthetics with hallucinogenic effects. When the Soviet regime collapsed, imports proliferated, prices dropped, and the drugs of the West — cocaine and ecstasy — finally made their way onto the market. At first cocaine use was limited to those Russians who could afford to spend the equivalent of three months’ average salary. There was an invasion of substances that found fertile ground in part because of the breakup of neighboring states: wars, open borders, and an army of illegal immigrants unable to find work in the legal economy. For many of them — as in the rest of the world — drug dealing was the only way to earn a living. But the decisive step came with the opening toward the Western Hemisphere, first the United States and Canada, then Latin America and the Caribbean. That part of the world had a high demand for arms, and Russia a notable supply of Soviet military weapons. That part of the world had a massive supply of drugs and a need for money laundering, and Russia, a sizable demand for drugs and a significant supply of outlets for dirty capital. It’s a done deal. At first it was merely a convergence, a symmetrical exchange between two sides of the ocean: Soviet arsenals were making organized crime in the former Soviet empire richer and more powerful, just as the white powder was doing for the Central and South American cartels. But business contacts with the narcos and the exponential growth of profits, combined with the shared necessity to reinvest and launder money, strengthened their bonds. In Latin America and the Caribbean especially, the Russians found the same conditions of governmental weakness that had favored the Mafija’s growth: corruption, widespread illegality, porous banking systems, accommodating judges. Added to this was the ease with which Russian bosses could obtain citizenship, thanks to obliging governments.

The Russian organizations proved useful to the narcos looking for less risky money-laundering networks and methods — services for which they kept up to 30 percent of the earnings. The Russian mafiosi’s other privileged activities in Latin America were prostitution, extortion, usury, kidnapping, fraud of every kind, counterfeiting, child pornography, and car theft. Solncevskaja, Izamailovskaja, Poldolskaja, Tambovskaja and Mazukinskaja are at home in Mexico, as are mafia cells from former Soviet bloc countries.

The multibillionaire Mogilevic was declared persona non grata in Hungary, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, and other Western countries. But their decisions could not undo what he and his associates had managed to create in those few decisive years of undisturbed freedom. It doesn’t matter much that he returned to Russia, as did the Little Jap, who, after being released from a U.S. penitentiary, was extradited to stand trial for the murder of two Turks on the eve of his departure for America. After the trial, in which he was exonerated for lack of evidence, Ivan’kov was free to dive back into the streets of Moscow: All the witnesses swore they’d never seen his slanted eyes. He lived quietly, without drawing attention to himself, until July 2009, when a killer gunned him down in front of a Thai restaurant. A new feud had broken out, he’d chosen the wrong side, and this time he didn’t get away with it. A thousand or so people joined in Orthodox chants and prayers at a cemetery, which was guarded on the outside by armed police fearing reprisal by the rival group. Brotherhoods from all over the former Soviet Union, from Georgia to Kazakhstan, laid wreaths, and vory from the entire country came to pay their final respects to one of their own, one of the last leaders of the old guard. But Mogilevic was missing. He’d only recently been released from jail and may have preferred to keep his distance from his old friends.

The fact that Mogilevic, after years of living so undisturbed that he even agreed to be interviewed by the BBC, was arrested in 2008 for tax fraud perpetrated through a chain of beauty supply shops, almost seems like a joke. If so, the one doing the laughing was the “world’s policeman”—the Americans. In 2009 the FBI add Mogilevic to their ten most wanted list, alongside Mexican cartel killers, pedophiles, people who exterminated entire families. There are much more serious charges, such as criminal association, but the one given the most play is the YBM Magnex scam. It doesn’t much matter what they use to nail him as long as the charge will hold up in court. It’s the same technique that’s been used since Al Capone’s Chicago days; it works because the implacable U.S. prison regime is often more feared than the chance of death: The Colombian cartels started crumbling when narcos began being extradited to the United States. Mogilevic has already been jailed in Russia, but Russia and the United States do not have an extradition treaty. He’s eventually released on bail, for once paying openly and legally. The spokesperson for the ministry of the interior declares that the accusation is not serious enough to prolong his arrest. About two years later the judges decide to drop all charges. Why was Semën Mogilevic held in a Moscow jail for a year and a half? There are lots of theories. The most delicate one has to do with the dispute over gas supplies between Russia and Ukraine, where in addition to Gazprom and Naftogaz Ukrainy — the energy giants controlled by their respective states — there’s a third company, registered in Switzerland: RosUkrEnergo, 50 percent of which belongs to Gazprom while the other half can be traced to a Ukrainian oligarch, Dmitro Firtaš. RosUkrEnergo is the joker, in fact, the card that puts an end to the hostilities that in 2006 produced a brief shutdown in the flow of gas from Russia to Ukraine, which caused huge damages throughout Europe, since their energy supplies have to go through Ukraine’s conduits. RosUkrEnergo meets Gazprom’s price and then resells for a third of that in Ukraine. It manages to maintain this imbalance by buying Turkmen gas, which is cheaper, but also because it is licensed to sell on the world market without a fixed price. In 2008 Julija Timošenko, whose rise to prime minister is linked to her role in the Orange Revolution, adopts a tough stance with Vladimir Putin. One of her most stubbornly held objectives is the exclusion of RosUkrEnergo, since there is no need of an intermediary between Gazprom and Naftogaz. But the crisis hasn’t yet reached its peak. In early January 2009, due to the Ukrainian energy company’s debts to Gazprom and RosUkrEnergo, once again Russia stops the flow of gas to Ukraine and drastically reduces supplies to the rest of Europe, threatening to bring the economy of the entire continent to its knees and to let its people freeze in the dead of winter. Slovakia declares a state of emergency. The crisis lasts for over two weeks and starts to become worrisome even for those countries able to plug the leak through other channels. On January 17, after increasingly feverish discussions in Moscow involving leaders of the European Union, the Russian and Ukrainian prime ministers finally reach a ten-year agreement that, among other things, stipulates the exclusion of RosUkrEnergo. Yet it is precisely because of that agreement, which she fought for with such determination, that Julija Timošenko will stand trial in 2011 and be condemned to seven years imprisonment for abuse of office, an offense that the Ukrainian parliament decriminalizes in February 2014. Ex-president Viktor Janukovic, who was deposed during the popular revolt known as Euromaidan, and who had defeated Timošenko in the 2010 elections, would see that RosUkrEnergo received billions of dollars in compensation for supplies lost because of the Timošenko agreement.

Don Semën was in prison for nearly all of the most dramatic phase of the Russian-Ukrainian gas war. But what has he got to do with it? In 2006 Julija Timošenko had already told the BBC: “We have no doubt that Mogilevic is the person behind the entire RosUkrEnergo operation.” Hers is one of the loudest among the many accusing voices that fell on deaf ears for years, until a document surfaced and caught the notice of public opinion in the West. It’s one of the secret files published by WikiLeaks: a cable from Kiev dated December 10, 2008, from the American ambassador William Taylor. It refers to a meeting with Dmitro Firtaš, the Ukrainian oligarch behind RosUkrEnergo, in which he warned Taylor that Timošenko planned to eliminate his company both for personal interests and internal political conflicts, for which she was willing to make concessions to Putin, thus strengthening his influence in Europe. But then, as if to preemptively remove any weapon his opponent might have to discredit him, according to Taylor, the gas magnate goes on: “He [Firtaš] acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Semën Mogilevic, stating he needed Mogilevic’s approval to get into business in the first place. He was adamant that he had not committed a single crime when building his business empire and argued that outsiders still failed to understand the period of lawlessness that reigned in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Another cable, which predates their meeting, talks of potential ties between Firtaš and Mogilevic, suggested by their shared investment in certain offshore companies and the fact that they have the same lawyer. These ties had already been noted in a previous intermediary gas company, Eural Trans Gas. But that same lawyer sues the Guardian for publishing documents circulated by WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange in an article by Luke Harding titled “WikiLeaks Cables Link Russian Mafia Boss to EU Gas Supplies.” In the correction that the London paper was forced to print on December 9, 2010, “to clear up any subsequent mistranslation or misunderstanding of their meeting,” Firtaš denies having any connection to Mogilevic other than a simple acquaintance.

The gas affair affects the vital interests of an entire continent. RosUkrEnergo’s profits just from 2005 to 2006 came to almost $1.6 billion, little less than half of which ended up in the pockets of Firtaš and whoever else shared in his earnings. What does natural gas have to do with cocaine? At first glance, nothing. Except for one essential factor: dependency. Cocaine creates addiction, while there’s no need to create an addiction for the gas to heat our homes. The business that those who’ve made real money bet on — money you can weigh, leaf through, smell — always originates from some irresistible need. And the Brainy Don, the specialist in scams and financial Chinese nesting boxes, knows this perfectly well.

Peter Kowenhoven, an FBI supervisory special agent, was asked to explain why they had put Mogilevic on their ten most dangerous criminals list, since he’s not a violent criminal or psychopathic serial killer. “He has access to so much,” he replied succinctly, “… that he can, with a telephone call and order, affect the global economy.”

13. SEA ROUTES

I miss the sea. The overly crowded and dirty beaches where I spent my summers, echoing with shouts of vendors offering coconut slices, taralli, mozzarella, drinks, granite. Mothers shrieking for their children, wind-up radios broadcasting the soccer game and neomelodic Neapolitan songs, beach balls that either landed on my towel, spattering it with sand, or hit the wrong person on the head. Floating in the murky water, warm as a bath by this point, soaking myself for ages. I even miss the sunburn on my skin, the feel of the sheets, my shivers, which I tried to ignore, unable to fall asleep till very late. Nostalgia plays these sorts of tricks; it makes you yearn for things you’d really never want to experience again.

I miss even more the sea I’d later venture out on in a tiny fishing boat. I liked earning a little money that way, exhaling every time I saw the coast recede, nothing left but the expanse of azure, the smell of salt, the stink of nets and diesel. If the sea started to swell, I’d feel sick, and often vomited. But now even that is a precious memory, the proof that I really did travel by sea, proof I still carry in my gut.

I grew up on seafaring books. The catalog of ships in the Iliad fascinated me, and even as a boy I instinctively perceived that the Odyssey was about exploring the limits of human knowledge. A cunning and courageous man had circumscribed it in the beginning. I discovered and never stopped loving the typhoons and dead calms that put Joseph Conrad’s captains to the test; I got lost in the obsessive hunt for Moby Dick, demon of the human soul incarnated in a sperm whale. At the time I sided with the great cetacean and identified with Ishmael, lone survivor of the wreck of the Pequod, saved to tell her tale. Now I know I have the same obsession as Captain Ahab. My White Whale is cocaine. It too is maddeningly elusive; it too sails every sea.

Sixty percent of the cocaine seized in the last ten years was confiscated on the high seas or in port. Sixty percent is a lot. Because all the other transportation routes are busy too, all the time. The Mexican border is a sieve through which cocaine flows constantly into the world’s biggest consumer, the United States. Not one second passes without someone crossing over with coke stashed in the baby’s diaper or in the cake Grandma baked for the kids. About twenty million people cross the U.S.-Mexican border every year, more than at any border on the planet. The United States manages to monitor at most a third of the more than nineteen hundred miles, even with three hundred miles of fencing, helicopters, and infrared vision systems. None of which can stop the flow of illegal aliens who risk dying in the desert, and who fatten up the coyotes—cartel-controlled human traffickers. In fact, it has created a double source of income for the coyote: If you don’t have the fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars he demands, you can pay off your debt by carrying cocaine in your bag.

It’s impossible to search every person, car, motorcycle, truck, and tour bus lined up at the forty-five official checkpoints; vehicles are prepared in the most sophisticated manner, as well as cans of coffee and jars of chili peppers, whose odors are strong enough to fool the sniffer dogs. Convinced that the best courier is the one who doesn’t even know that’s what he is, narcos use magnets to attach cocaine to the underside of cars with permits to cross the border in the fast lane. Once the cars cross the border they find a way to retrieve the stuff. Or they catapult it over the fence from the Sonora Desert into the Arizona desert, using modified Leonardo da Vinci machines. They fly it in at night on hang gliders painted black, like nightmarish bats or Batmobiles: two thousand dollars and possible death to the pilot if the cargo to be dropped across the border releases poorly and throws off the balance of his glider. A man was found, broken to bits, in a lettuce field near Yuma, Arizona. Half the cocaine he’d been carrying was still in the metal cage under one of the wings, so it was clear it wasn’t some extreme sport accident.

The same is true with airplane transport. All over the world, every minute, some drug mule is boarding a commercial plane. And at that same moment dozens and dozens of containers purportedly filled with other merchandise are being loaded into the belly of a cargo plane.

Yet all this perpetual motion, all this ubiquitous, dusty frenzy, can’t even begin to equal the amount of cocaine carried by sea. The percentage is even higher in Europe: 77 percent between 2008 and 2010. And the European market has almost reached U.S. levels. The sea is the sea. Oceans cover more than half the earth’s surface: another world. If you want to work at sea, you have to accept its rules and those of seafaring men. “There’s no bar in the middle of the sea,” as they say where I come from. And no working cell phones, police stations, or emergency rooms. Nor are there jealous wives, anxious parents, girlfriends whose hopes you don’t want to dash. Nobody. If you want to avoid becoming an accomplice, you learn to look the other way.

These are things that people who organize maritime drug transport know well. They know that there are seamen who are well paid yet eager to earn more, as well as a growing number who work under the table and are underpaid. But that’s not the main reason that cocaine continues to travel primarily across the Atlantic. In order to move enormous quantities, up to ten or more tons in a single shipment, you need a huge ship. This makes it more affordable and lowers transportation costs by amortizing them, just as with any other export-import business, even though it increases the risks. Move the merchandise across the ocean in the safest way possible: that’s the only rule of narco-trafficking by sea. Such a simple axiom in theory, yet in practice it sparks an incessant search for new means, new routes, new methods of unloading the goods, new cover merchandise.

The world is like a single body that needs to be bathed constantly in cocaine. If one channel becomes obstructed by stricter controls, another must be found right away. So while cocaine used to be shipped mostly from Colombia, in recent years more than half the ships bound for Europe have sailed from Venezuela, and then from the Caribbean, West Africa, and Brazil. The country that used to hold the monopoly on drugs has slipped to fifth place.

Spain is still the point of entry par excellence: Nearly half of all cocaine seized in 2009 was headed there. France has just barely surpassed Holland. Yet that statistic seems odd when you look at a map. It’s based on seizures that for the most part occurred at sea, off the French Antilles or at some port of call along the African coast. In any case, once the routes toward the traditional northern European stronghold began to be controlled more rigorously, drug traffickers reacted immediately. They diverted traffic from the port of Rotterdam to that of Antwerp, which led to twice as many seizures in Belgium. In Italy, when the Gioia Tauro port came under tighter control, they fell back on Vado Ligure, Genoa, and Livorno, or rerouted shipments from Naples to Salerno. Transporting cocaine is like playing dominoes. If you move one tile, you have to rearrange all the others too.

The story of cocaine’s journey starts at the end. It’s the destination that determines both details and design. It’s one thing if the cocaine lands on the continent after being transferred from the mother ship onto smaller, more agile craft that can dock anywhere, another if the ship has to unload its secret fruit in port, after going through customs controls. In the latter it’s essential to hide it perfectly inside some other goods, whereas in the former you can choose some less sophisticated cargo as cover, or even do without. Mother ship: Drug trafficking revives the metaphorical force of maritime language. This is also true for the Spanish term, tripulantes, which means “crew” but which is derived from the verb tripular, which originally meant “to lead,” or “to guide.” Cocaine’s tripulantes are men who guide it to a safe haven. At times they’re corrupt sailors or crew members, at others they’re cartel men who board an uncompromised ship in order to guard the hidden cargo.

Sometimes the traffickers purchase the mother ship outright, as in the case of the Mirage II; other times they simply lease it, purchasing only the complicity of the tripulantes. They also use cargo ships, as Fuduli did with the Maersk Sealand vessels, and cruise ships, whose owners, together with legal export companies — often big multinationals — are totally unaware of the precious parasite they’re harboring inside the containers in the hold. In that case the shipments are called “blind loads.”

A transfer at sea offers several advantages: greater flexibility; and less complex and often less expensive planning, which therefore is quicker to organize. The sooner the coke is put on the market, the quicker the investment starts turning a profit. This still seems to be the most widely used method of getting cocaine into Europe, judging by the drugs seized on their way to Spain or off the coast of West Africa. But keep in mind that, in general, these shipments are hidden less hermetically, and thus easier to intercept.

The Mexican cartels have come up with a transshipment variation that mirrors their baroque taste for destructive waste, but that’s also an astute, effective tactic. Narco sea landings are, for a start, a speedy way to load cocaine without having to pass through heavily controlled ports. They take a car, stuff it full of coke, and take it for one last spin, to the top of a cliff, open the windows, and push it over the edge, into the sea. It could be a pickup or a jeep, one of their favorite makes, a Grand Marquis or a Cherokee. Both stay afloat just long enough for the cargo inside to be salvaged. Most of the packets, sealed in plastic, float to the surface, where they’re easily collected by men who arrive on a rubber raft or motorboat. They either deliver the coke directly to its destination or transfer it to a larger vessel. But all this has to come off without a hitch. So the narcos resort to various roadblock techniques to prevent access to the area where it’s happening. A narcobloqueo is often an act of spectacular violence that usually relates to a form of retaliation, ambush, or some other act of war. Armed commandos station themselves at various points along a road, or even a whole network of roads, where they hijack trailer trucks or force passengers off a bus. Then they position the vehicles sideways across the road, shoot out the tires, water them with gasoline, and set them on fire. This serves two purposes: They can get to the crash site without police or rival groups’ interference, and they sow terror.

It usually takes far less effort to recover the crashed cargo, though. A moving roadblock is often enough, with cars speeding in the wrong direction, causing accidents or traffic jams on streets near the transfer point — the same tactic is used to cover a boss’s escape route. In both cases the narcobloqueo creates a diversion, because the police have to try and reach the roadblock. In the meantime, the last packets of cocaine come floating to the surface undisturbed, and are scooped aboard.

• • •

The Mexican and Colombian cartels demonstrate their power through a mother ship that only they now use in any systematic way: the submarine. Every aspect of their power is summed up and symbolized by these vessels: economic and military power, as well as geopolitical control. It’s difficult to imagine the number of submarines and semisubmersible vessels — drug subs — stuffed with tons of cocaine that are moving through the water of the Pacific Ocean, between Colombia and Mexico, as well as along the more frequented Caribbean routes off the coast of Florida. Semisubmersibles move through the water with only twenty-eight inches, or ten square feet, of hull exposed, and take in air for the diesel engine through a so-called snorkel pipe. They can travel up to three thousand miles. Actual submarines can travel the entire route at a depth of one hundred feet, surfacing only at night to recharge the engine. It takes from two to a dozen crew to operate a drug sub, but the job demands more than just specialized training. These vessels are called “coffins,” after all. They’re so low and narrow inside that they have to be steered lying down, and so hot that other nicknames come to mind, such as “nonstop tanning bed.” But in truth, it’s not unlikely that they turn into actual rather than merely metaphorical coffins. No one knows how many of them have sunk into the abyss along with their cargo and a handful of men mourned only by some South American sailors’ women. On the other hand, they can carry up to ten tons of cocaine. Which is why American authorities are increasingly anxious. Submarines leave hardly a trace, other than perhaps a wake on the radar screen, which can never be attributed with certainty to an underwater vessel. What’s more, the narcos’ traditional means of transport — motorboats, fishing craft, fast ships — have only a tenth of a submarine’s cargo capacity.

Intelligence and antidrug services fear that what’s happening is something similar to when major airline companies renounced their old smaller planes for the new jumbo jets; the money and the need are both there. Submarines are becoming affordable enough for cartels, enough to form a fleet. Between 2005 and 2007 the Colombian navy confiscated eighteen of them off the Pacific coast, identified nearly thirty more, and estimated the existence of about a hundred. But their widespread use can’t be reduced to simply a question of cost. It is a technological progress story whose pioneer was none other than Pablo Escobar, who boasted having two submarines in his immense naval fleet. Innovation is driven in part by the irrational desire to emulate some legendary figure, to prove that you’re just as good because you can match or surpass him in power and riches. But the real tangible opportunities arrived when the Russian mafiosi began settling in Florida and offering to sell Soviet arsenals’ pièces de résistance to the Colombians.

For nearly a decade it seemed to the Americans engaged in the war on drugs that the narcos’ drug subs were like the Flying Dutchman: ghost ships, whose evanescent wake they could trail but which they could never capture, to the point of suspecting that they were nothing but legends, sailors’ superstitions, marine myths. But in 2004 the Americans dealt a decisive blow to the Norte del Valle cartel, the organization that took over in Colombia after the decline of the Medellín and Cali cartels. They arrested about a hundred members and extradited the real big shots to the United States, starting with the godfather, Diego Montoya, known as the Cyclist. Agents confiscated millions of dollars in cash, gold ingots, luxury goods, and properties worth $100 million. And they finally get their hands on an actual submarine: a handmade, fiberglass drug sub capable of reaching the California coast. It’s not clear whether the cartel men avoided interception by decrypting U.S. naval codes or if — more likely — they were tipped off by a Colombian admiral in their service.

Even today drug subs are being built in shipyards hidden in the South American jungle. No one knows how many the narcos have had made, or who and how many people it takes to assemble and test them, or which tributaries — or tributaries of tributaries — of the Amazon are used to get them to the ocean, or how many have been lost at sea along with their crews. No one knows how many have been sunk to avoid being confiscated, or how many managed to complete their voyage. But there’s another incredible aspect to consider. All this expenditure of strength, means, and money is poured into the construction of something that’s often treated as a maneuverable disposable. Or maybe it’s better to say that the more modest drug subs are like those animal species whose lives span only a few reproductive cycles. After they’ve been lightened of their load a few times, they’re left to sink. The crew flies back home by plane. Millions and millions of dollars, literally dumped into the sea.

The semisubmersible the Mexican navy recovered in the summer of 2008, in the waters of the Pacific near Salina Cruz in the state of Oaxaca, was worth about $2 million. The strange green splotch they’d sighted turned out to be a slender craft thirty-two feet long, loaded with nearly six tons of cocaine. The goods onboard were Colombian, as were the four crew members who came ashore without any resistance. But the consignee was Mexican. Alberto Sánchez Hinojosa, known as El Tony, one of the Gulf cartel lieutenants after Osiel Cárdenas Guillén’s capture, was arrested about two months later in the southern state of Tabasco.

More recent, sophisticated models are regular submarines, slightly larger and capable of reaching California from Central America with ease. So far only three have been captured, but the fact that all three were intercepted within a short space of time suggests that many more are being used.

The only known attempt so far to export the idea to the Mediterranean had a tragicomic ending. Two shady Spanish operators put up the money, and an “engineer” sets up a workshop where he can build a semisubmersible — nothing fancy, thirty feet long, needing only one person to navigate. All this in Galicia in 2006, the most popular place in Europe for cocaine transfers. The three manage to contact the right people, for whom they have a reverential fear: the Colombians. They sell their homemade creation for the modest sum of €100,000. The Colombians plan on using it for unloading a mother ship, so the engineer needs to deliver his jewel right after the trial run. But the sub starts yawing strangely and the sorcerer’s apprentice panics. He’s as terrified of suffocating to death in the Atlantic as he is of the clients to whom he’s just sold a lemon. He figures that the only way to get off and to save his skin is to deliver the sub into the hands of the enemy — that way he can tell the Colombians that the police intercepted it. But the police don’t play along. The investigators wait for the engineer and his associates to take delivery of some hashish to pay off their debt to the Colombians and then they arrest them. It turned out not to be so easy to imitate the pros, and the three Spaniards who tried it had to face the fact that they’re inferior to the inhabitants of their former colony.

But Europe has already produced a new species of seafarers who are nothing like those pilots in the 1980s and 1990s, whose motorboats were loaded with cigarettes, hired hands of the Camorra or the United Sacred Crown. In recent years the most common type of vessel on which cocaine has been found isn’t the old merchant ship, container ship, fishing boat, or motorboat. It’s a sailing vessel. Big catamarans, wooden yachts, sailboats that could compete with Giovanni Soldini’s. Dream boats, anchored in the Caribbean, ready to take you island hopping, from one white beach to another, but more appropriate for those who really love the sea, who want the adventure of an ocean crossing. But those who pay the most for letting the skippers pursue their true vocation, displaying their ancient knowledge of currents and favorable winds, aren’t interested in coming onboard. They’re narco-traffic brokers and emissaries of organized crime. But not only: They’re also friends of the summer, the privileged bourgeoisie who want to try going from easy use to easy money, squeezing cash, coke, and adrenaline out of the same exciting enterprise.

Today the Blaus VII is a school ship for the Portuguese military marines. A splendid, seventy-five-foot sailing vessel with two masts made entirely of wood, painted an elegant deep blue. It was intercepted in February 2007 a hundred miles northwest of the Madeira islands, which belong to Portugal but are closer to the coast of North Africa. The Portuguese navy and judicial police found two tons of cocaine that embarked in Venezuela, ready for delivery to Europe. They arrested the tripulantes, who this time were the entire crew: all Greeks except for the skipper, Mattia Voltan, from Padua. He wasn’t yet twenty-eight years old, but the Blaus VII, worth about €850,000, was registered in his name. He’d been driven to Venice by Andrea, a guy his same age, where he caught a flight to Barcelona to join the ship and its crew, which were waiting for him in Portugal. Before they left Andrea’s father showered them with advice: “Take a good look before you start wandering around,” he admonished them on the phone from Dubrovnik, where he lives with his youngest son, Alessandro, and manages two companies he opened in Croatia. An Italian entrepreneur who, like so many others, migrated east. He also wanted to know if Mattia looked presentable, and Andrea, with that typical impatience kids show overanxious parents, reassured him: “Yes, he shaved, and I cut his hair. I went to the house myself to get the rasp.”

The concerns that Andrea’s father — Antonio Melato — has about the young skipper he’d hired are understandable, but it’s not Mattia’s fault that the Blaus VII is intercepted. After his release he goes back to Padua and tries to pick up his carefree existence. Andrea tells his father he’s seen their friend Mattia around, and that he’s an idiot. “You must be joking!” his father barks, getting right to the point: “That guy can’t be trusted.” But it’s pointless for him to get so upset about somebody else, because the telephone being tapped is his own.

Melato is just one of the pieces in an investigation the ROS (the Special Operations Group of the Carabinieri) is carrying out in cooperation with the Milan DDA, which involves half of Europe, the Caribbean, and Georgia. He’s arrested in June 2012, along with his sons and the other components of a network spread across Bulgaria, Spain, Holland, Slovenia, Romania, Croatia, Finland, and, in Italy, the Veneto, Piedmont, and Lombardy. About thirty people are taken into custody, six tons of cocaine seized, seven years of work. The name of the operation, Magna Charta, implies a good dose of irony. The archaic spelling of that document signed by King John Lackland now alludes to the fleet of chartered ships engaged in drug running.

But it all started far from the sea, with more ordinary questions regarding fighting the mafia. In 2005 the Turin Carabinieri discovered that the Bellocco ’ndrina and the other Rosarno families were supplying Piedmont through an unusual Bulgarian channel. The Bulgarians, headed by Evelin Banev — Brendo to his friends — an upstart forty-year-old biznesman who became a millionaire through financial speculation, set themselves up as brokers. But they’d entrusted the task of locating skippers and false-bottomed boats to ferry the cocaine from the Caribbean or to pick it up somewhere between Africa and Spain to various Italians: Antonio Melato and his sons and even more to Fabio and Lucio Cattelan, also originally from Padua but now living between Turin and Milan. They’re the ones who hired the crew of the Oct Challenger, the cargo ship sequestered by Spanish customs officials on the same day as the Blaus VII, with another three tons of coke onboard. And it was also the Cattelan brothers who contacted two expert skippers, Guido Massolino and Antonio D’Ercole, who set out from Turin for a Croatian port where the sailboat they were to bring back full of cocaine was waiting. Following the same route as Mattia, the two first made port in the Balearic Isles, then at Madeira. From there they were supposed to reach the mother ship. But she waited in vain in the middle of the ocean. Guido and Antonio vanished. Probably swept away by a storm, devoured by the waves along with their fragile boat. They may have decided not to send an SOS, not wanting to be discovered in some improbable spot in the Atlantic, or maybe they thought they’d manage somehow and waited until it was too late.

The two men from Turin, shipwrecked without a trace, were both over sixty.

Cocaine skippers usually aren’t novices. For brokers, experience offers more of a guarantee, but even men who have lived their lives at sea seem to become more approachable as they grow older: the need to put aside some money so as to retire in style whenever they feel like it; the desire to live like the wealthy people they spend time with; a taste for adventure, for becoming importers of the same goods they — like everyone else — are already using. Where’s the harm in that?

There’s an ever-increasing number of sail and motorboat skippers whom narcos can turn to, and whoever hires them knows how to weigh the pros and cons. A small crew that can steer boats that are above suspicion, and that can slip into any little tourist port, is a profitable resource, even if it has to be paid well, and even if the skipper turns out to be more vulnerable than the more modest and less demanding tripulantes.

The Mariposa, the Linnet, and the Kololo II—these last two captured off the coast of Sardinia and escorted to port at Alghero — were carrying more than a ton of cocaine in total. The skipper and owner of the Kololo II, a forty-year-old Roman who’d set sail from the French Antilles and was heading straight for the ports nearest Rome, collapses under the weight of the nearly 300 kilos found in his boat. He collaborates in exchange for a reduction in his sentence. On the basis of his confessions, in July 2012 the Roman DDA calls for the arrest of another five accomplices, all of them residing in the Rome area. Some have police records, but none are mafiosi.

They sprout up in every corner of the continent, above all in areas without their own crime organizations. All of them are useful covers or sometimes just unsuspecting scapegoats, according to the investigators. Like the Italians — two from Bologna and the one from Livorno — who were arrested in 1995 because they were using the Sirio, the Más que nada, and a sailboat with the sarcastic name of Overdose to import cocaine from Brazil via Guadeloupe and the Canaries for a group of rich kids from good Bologna families. Or like the pilot of the Falcon Sheldan, a seventy-five-foot luxury yacht intercepted in September 2012 at the port of Imperia with three and a half tons of hashish. Or like the Croatian skipper living in Civitanova Marche, whom the DEA and the French, Croatian, and Italian police stop off the coast of Martinique in May 2012 with 200 kilos of cocaine on another sailboat. Or the Breton skipper Stéphane Colas, who was released in 2011 after being held for two years in Spain because the tanks for storing the drinking water for the voyage from Venezuela contained 400 liters of liquid cocaine. According to the investigations, all of them have highly useful covers. Their nationality doesn’t matter, but it’s best if their résumé, social class, and place of birth suggest a passion for sailing, so they can convince their eventual judges that they merely stumbled into being drug couriers by mistake. The accumulated evidence is often too weak to be upheld in legal battles devoid of specific legislation, and public opinion in the defendant’s home country — as in the case of the Breton captain — accepts his professions of innocence. The secret register of tripulantes is spreading more rapidly than their sails in Atlantic winds.

• • •

And yet when I think about cocaine, the first thing I see isn’t a swift boat wandering the oceans. It’s something more compact, more omnipresent, more elementary. It’s the merchandise, merchandise par excellence, which like a magnet attracts all the rest. Fruit of other fruits, the only parasite that multiplies a thousand fold the value of the flesh it burrows into, a protean vector of profit of every form of commerce. I can still see the expanse of containers in the port of Naples, yellow for MSC, gray for Cosco, Maersk’s blue logo, green for Evergreen, red for the “K” Line, and all those other giant Lego blocks being stacked and restacked by the crane operators’ claws into movable architecture. The pure geometry, the elementary chromatism that encloses and hides everything that can be bought, sold, or consumed. And everything, or almost everything, can become an involuntary or willing host to the white stuff.

It seems paradoxical but not even the most well-concealed merchandise can do without its own logo. Branding originated with heads of cattle being seared with symbols so as to distinguish them from other herds. In the same way, each block of cocaine is marked to certify its origin, as well as to direct each load to the right buyer when the big brokers organize megashipments headed to different customers. A cocaine logo is above all a symbol of quality. It’s not some empty advertising slogan but serves a fundamental purpose: The brand ensures the integrity of every single block, how the narcos guarantee that the products they export are pure. The cartel’s good name is important. More important, apparently, than the risk of being easily tracked down if a shipment were to fall into the wrong hands. A business risk, just like in any other. Nor is it by chance that the traffickers often decide to adopt the symbols of the most sought after, popular brands. Their anonymous merchandise is, after all, the product of voluptuary consumerism par excellence, and it’s worth as much as all the other brands put together.

The blocks of cocaine La Spezia Finance Guard extracted from the false bottoms of ten cars in the village of Aulla, in the province of Massa Carrara, were stamped with either a scorpion or a checkerboard. The biggest drug bust ever in Italy, the fourth in all of Europe. The financial police started getting suspicious while inspecting several containers from Santo Domingo that had arrived at the port of La Spezia. In a single container they found a false wall that concealed 750 blocks. But they decided to close it up again and let the container pass through customs as bait. The identifying symbols are what tell them that this is only a small portion of a much larger shipment: The scorpion indicates the part bound for northern Europe, the checkerboard guides others toward central Europe. Because of this, or rather, because the scorpion symbol doesn’t indicate the sender’s signature but serves instead as sort of the buyer’s zip code, it is one of the most common symbols found on blocks of cocaine today. Not only is this a huge deal, but it will turn out to have been arranged through one of the oldest and most tested partnerships: the Colombian cartel from Norte del Valle and the Gioia Tauro crime families. The Calabrians can’t accept the loss of such a vast shipment, so they find out where it’s being held in custody. The Finance Guard agents are tipped off. The coke can’t stay where it is much longer. Fifteen patrols from La Spezia, bearing the yellow flames of the Finance Guard and the green berets of the Counterterrorism Rapid Response unit escort it to Ospedaletto, in the province of Pisa, where the nearest incinerator is. The plant is kept under surveillance night and day, until the last checker and scorpion dissolve in the flames.

Logos started being used in the 1970s, introduced by a major Peruvian trafficker, and spread in the ensuing decade, thanks to the Colombian and Mexican cartels. And then they kept on spreading, multiplying endlessly, along with the demand for white powder. A recent computation, commissioned by the European Union in 2005, counted twenty-two hundred different ones: Some make do with a sober company monogram or pay tribute to a favorite soccer team; others prefer animals or flowers; still others love esoteric or geometric symbols or a luxury car trademark; while others play on a favorite animated cartoon character. It’s impossible to list them all. But it’s worth collecting a small sample, arranged by type and theme.

TATTOOS: a scorpion, a checkerboard, a dolphin, an anchor, a unicorn, a serpent, a horse, a rose, a man on horseback, and other such motifs, similar to the most popular or traditional tattoos, are pressed into the bricks with a metal mold. Along with simple geometric shapes, they are the most common designs and can indicate either the sender or the recipient of the merchandise.

FLAGS: the French tricolor, the British Union Jack, even the Nazi swastika. Rather than being pressed into the blocks, these designs are color printed on cards that are slipped under their plastic wrapping. The first two probably indicate the destination, while the last one, found on a load of cocaine paste sent to a Bolivian refinery on the border with Brazil, perhaps conveys the ideological affinity of the parties involved.

SUPERHEROES (AND RELATED THEMES): Superman’s trademark S, Captain America’s portrait, James Bond’s special wristwatch, all embossed or printed on cards. Narcos like to appropriate iconic Hollywood fantasies, either as an act of defiance or as a joke.

CARTOONS: What do narco-traffickers watch on TV? It’s surprising enough to find Homer Simpson wrapped atop every block of coke, or classic Walt Disney characters. But it’s really astounding to see Teletubbies or Hello Kitty, the Japanese kitten every little girl in the world adores.

IDEOGRAMS: On July 6, 2012, in Hong Kong, more than 600 kilos of cocaine were seized from a container from Ecuador and destined for the emerging market in Southeast Asia or mainland China. All the blocks were adorned with the Chinese ideogram , or Ping, which together with another ideogram forms the word “peace,” but it may also mean “smooth” or “flat.” A good wishes offering to the customer.

BRANDS: the Playboy bunny, Nike’s wings, Puma’s pouncing feline, Lacoste’s crocodile, Porsche’s lettering, and the Formula 1 and Ducati logos are among the best-known marks, along with the traditional tattoo motifs.

But in the end almost all the symbols drug traffickers choose, from Chinese ideograms to cartoon characters, today are found carved on people’s skin. The narcos choose to communicate through the universal language of pop culture, which their merchandise plays as much a part in as do the trademarks they appropriate. Yet they avoid using their most typical symbols, such as the skulls, crossbones, or Santa Muerte with which members of the Mexican cartels and, more often, the Central American maras, get tattooed. Their cult is an internal thing, whereas a brand is something else. These same cartels also use famous logos internally, for marking members’ cars, T-shirts, caps, and key rings. Today Los Zetas have adopted the Ferrari pony; the Gulf cartel likes the deer of John Deere, the biggest tractor manufacturer in the world. Stickers and gadgets that are easy to find, and not too flashy. The best-known brands are thus transformed into secret military badges.

The endless forest of symbols the cocaine trade has turned into recalls the ever-changing tangle of routes and handoffs and all the networks that need to be stabilized before a load can depart. The forest’s origins can be found in the constant search for boats large and small; crews; the containers that need to be able to be recognized among hundreds of others that all look the same, all stowed in the same mother ship; the legions of people who need to be corrupted in shipping and navigation companies, at customs offices and in ports, in the police forces and military, in local and national politics. All the coca plantations scattered throughout Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia; all the hundreds of thousands of farmers who harvest the coca in the forests of the Andes; all the laborers and chemists involved in the chain of production, turning leaves into blocks or liquid cocaine, are only a marginal part of the whole business. The rest is transportation.

Transportation is what has allowed the Mexican cartels to become more powerful than the Colombian ones. The availability of the port at Gioia Tauro has provided the basis of the ’ndrangheta’s strength and transnational prestige, in particular of the Piromalli family and its allies, which, according to the DIA (Anti-Mafia Investigations Directorate) has become the largest clan in all of western Europe. Since most narco-trafficking investments and profits are gambled on sea transportation, it has become such a complex problem that it has given rise to a new and specialized professional figure, who is paid handsomely: the logistics manager, also known as a systematist or Doctor Travel. He may be more important and earn more than a broker, especially if the broker doesn’t have the economic and organizational powers of a Pannunzi or a Locatelli but is one of the many smaller intermediaries who first contract supplies and then monitor their movement through the principal phases of embarkation, major stopovers, and arrival at destination.

The logistical manager — the systematist — has to take care of everything else. Of every leg of the journey, every intermediate transshipment, of every formality, every customs inspection, every kind of cover shipment. He must also develop strategies for solving or staunching problems and figure out how to minimize the damage in case something goes wrong. He has to plan every detail, keep every step in his head, and review in advance all the channels the cocaine takes in the course of its journey. He has to make transit not a fluid flow but a project that is as differentiated as it is stable: a system.

It requires months of work to develop a transportation system for a huge shipment of cocaine. And once it has been worked out, tested, and utilized a few times, it’s already time to modify it or think up a new one. Systematists work across the entire surface of the planet, but they’re always working against time. They are forever racing against the investigators’ skills of intuiting cocaine’s movements. Which is why their services are so expensive, affordable only to the major narcotics organizations and the biggest brokers. The richest and most powerful cartels try out new routes by first dispatching “clean loads,” with no drugs, as part of a test run for every system.

That’s exactly what the Sinaloa cartel did without knowing it was already under scrutiny by the Boston FBI and the Spanish police, who were united in Operation Dark Waters, a key inquest in the history of drug trafficking because it revealed the Mexican cartels’ interest in supplying cocaine directly to the European market, which until that point had been dominated by the Colombians. On August 10, 2012, Spanish police arrested four members of the Mexican organization in the center of Madrid, including the cousin of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, at the time the most wanted and powerful boss in the world, the legendary Chapo. Manolo Gutiérrez Guzmán had moved there with a legal adviser and two other of his right-hand men, to lay the foundation for new projects that included regular, easy entry of shipments through the Spanish port.

It all started years earlier, when the FBI came across something more precious than a submarine stuffed with tons of cocaine: a source with access to the upper echelons of the Sinaloa cartel. They decided to investigate the information they received further through a big undercover operation. Starting in early 2010, the infiltrators approached Chapo’s cousin and other influential men pretending to be affiliated with an Italian organization already well established in the United States and Europe. They claimed they were looking for new suppliers and had excellent contacts at the Andalusian port of Algeciras. The Mexicans were excited by the idea and began negotiating: They would furnish a ton of cocaine a month, sent by container ship from South America. The “Italian partners” would get 20 percent of each shipment as a reward for getting the cocaine through the port of Algeciras, while the Mexicans would sell off the rest directly, all over Europe, through their new network of operational cells. By August 2011, everything was ready. But before risking such a large quantity of cocaine, the Sinaloa cartel decided to test the safety of the route: Four times in a row they sent containers filled only with fruit through some Ecuadorian companies under their control. Once they’d tested the system the Mexicans let it be known that they were ready to send the first shipment, hidden in a container leaving from the Brazilian port of Santos: 303 kilos, intended for various points of the European market. A rather meager load that was prudently meant to break the ice — a good business practice even for the biggest holding. But not prudent enough this time. On July 28, 2012, the authorities intercepted the shipment in the port of Algeciras, and almost simultaneously, they detained the Mexicans who arrived at the appointment with their fake partners in order to discuss new shipments. The greatest damage to the Sinaloa cartel was that its expansionist aims for Europe had been revealed and temporarily checked. The rest — the seizure of a few shipments, even the arrest of some important men such as the boss’s own cousin — are inevitable losses, which such a strong and deeply rooted organization must take into account.

Those who toil in vain, however, even in less dramatic circumstances, are the specialists who plan the whole enterprise. The Doctor Travel systematists get paid just as many other freelancers do. An advance to cover system start-up and development expenses, the rest when the shipment reaches its destination. Payment may also come in the form of a percentage of the merchandise, from 20 percent to 50 percent of the total, after transportation costs. Everything — even transportation costs and the systematist’s pay — is calculated on the basis of the end point of the journey. The riskier the final destination, the more perfectly planned the system must be. It’s far less expensive to come through the Iberian Peninsula than into Italy, which has become one of the most difficult and thus exorbitant points of entry in all of Europe.

There is an entity that establishes every quotation at stake in the cocaine market, including transportation costs. Much like the diamond exchange, formerly in Antwerp and now in New York, the world cocaine exchange takes place in the major import centers: in the past Amsterdam, and now Madrid. The average costs and prices used to be set in Holland, but ever since the Iberian Peninsula became the privileged delivery point and the place where the principal buyers gather — first among them, the Italian mafias — the bargaining has moved to Spain.

There’s no way to explain the systematist’s job and the hefty sums the narco-traffickers are willing to pay him unless you look more closely at two crucial problems he has to deal with: ports and cover goods. Big ports — like big airports — most at risk are now equipped with gamma ray or heat-sensitive machines capable of detecting undesirable substances such as drugs or explosives inside containers. A container passes through these immense “metal detectors,” where, basically, it is scanned. The various materials inside it show up in the monitor in different colors. Cocaine is yellow. But just as in the Amsterdam airport, a “100 percent security screening” is applied only on planes coming from certain countries, such as the Dutch Antilles, Surinam, and Venezuela; it is impossible for big European ports to fully monitor all incoming shipments. The port of Rotterdam, for example, is not only the largest in Europe but also one of the best equipped in terms of control instruments. Nonetheless, with storage capacity for eleven million containers, the best they can do is to expand as much as possible targeted as well as random screening procedures. And screening takes time, as anyone who has had to endure the endless security lines snaking through the airport on a peak travel day and risked missing his flight knows. No one compensates the unfortunate passenger, but for goods, time is money, money that a company can demand back if a shipment is slowed by customs officials. If a perishable shipment is held up too long, one that, once it’s checked, turns out to be just fruit or flowers or frozen fish, the company it is being shipped to — a big supermarket chain, for example — can demand to be reimbursed for the loss. Which means that either they’re checked quickly, or they are more likely to pass through customs without undergoing any screening.

So what Doctor Travel does is study security systems and their flaws in order to take advantage of them. State-of-the-art detection system? Just get yourself some carbon paper. Place it in front of your load, and it disappears from the monitor.

A systematist’s work includes evaluating a high quantity of complex variables. Let’s take, for example, the convenience of concealing cocaine in some kind of perishable merchandise. And let’s remember the basic rule that the cover merchandise must be a typical export product of the area where the shipment originates: So, for shipments coming from South America, why not always slip the blocks of cocaine in among cases of bananas? Bananas are, in fact, often used as cover for the very reasons listed above, to which can be added the fact that they have a vast and steady yearlong market. Yet this is exactly why banana shipments may attract more attention. Besides — and this is more complicated — the destination port may be experiencing a drop in deliveries that really has nothing to do with bananas but rather with other kinds of products, which is what seems to be happening with the economic crisis. If customs is less backed up, the chance that the bananas will be waved through diminishes. So you have to modify your plan, betting not on speedy transit through customs but rather on the persnickety perfection and originality of the camouflage. The systematist has to keep constantly abreast of the situation in every port and the success of all the goods being used as cover. A dizzying job, as if he were working simultaneously for every export-import company on an entire continent — two continents, in fact, given that shipments are coming not only from South America but from West Africa as well. The catalog of cover merchandise, like that of the symbols for stamping blocks of cocaine, must be impressive in its variety. It’s impossible to list all the cover goods used for transporting cocaine. And even more impossible to know about those where cocaine has never been discovered.

• • •

Tom Thumb: This tiny hero has to manage without helpers or magic, no resources other than his own vigilant mind. He is the figure who best symbolizes the disparity of forces of those leading the fight against the global cocaine traffic. I’ve felt like him for years, and I steadfastly follow his example. I try to gather up every bread crumb scattered in the dense forest, to pick up every scrap of knowledge that can help me to get through it. Yet the more I try to look closely at narco-trafficking, bordering on the edge of obsession and exhaustion, the more I sense that something is escaping me, or rather that something keeps getting ahead of my imagination. It’s not enough to know, to understand. I need to grasp a more profound dimension, imprint every organ with it, metabolize the mass of notions until they become a mode of natural perception, a second sight. How is it possible otherwise to comprehend that they ship eight tons of cocaine in a single container of bananas, and at the same time have special suitcases made out of fiberglass, resin, and cocaine, which they then treat so as to extract a mere 15 kilos? The first answer is that whoever lost that stratospheric load must have successfully concluded the same operation other times. There’s a good chance that they’re the same ones who developed new suitcases that look like Samsonites for quick restocking via air, and as a future research investment. Because behind all this there is a logic, just one: sell, sell, sell. Sell any way you can, with whatever system, better to sell a lot than a little. But even if it’s less, much less, you can’t do without it. It’s still business, and it can’t be lost. No business in the world is so dynamic, so relentlessly innovative, so loyal to the pure free market spirit as the global cocaine business.

This is the reason cocaine became the merchandise par excellence at a time when markets began being dominated by stocks that were inflated with empty numbers, or securities as intangible as those driven by the new economy, which sold communication and make-believe. But cocaine is tangible. It uses the imaginary, bends it, invades it, fills it with itself. Every seemingly insurmountable limit is about to fall. The new mutation has already arrived, and it’s called liquid cocaine. Liquid cocaine can make its way inside any hollow object, can impregnate any saturatable material, can dissolve in any drink, any creamy or liquid product, practically without adding any telltale weight. Half a kilo of cocaine can be dissolved in a liter of water. It’s been found in shampoo and body lotion, in shaving cream, glass cleaner, and spray starch, in pesticides, contact lens solution, and cough medicine. It has traveled together with canned pineapple, in containers of coconut milk, in nearly five tons of oil barrels, and in two tons of frozen fruit pulp; it has permeated clothing, upholstery fabric, loads of jeans, canvases, diplomas for deep-sea diving. It’s been sent through the mail as bathroom sets and as pacifiers. It has crossed borders in bottles of wine, beer, and other drinks, from Mexican tequila for margaritas to Brazilian cachaça for caipirinha, but mostly in bottles of rum, like the Colombian brand confiscated in the same month in Bologna and Milan: the Medellín brand, aged three years. And as if rum and Coke, which contains much more coke than alcohol, weren’t enough, they’ve also found it in bottles of Coca-Cola. Cocaine can turn into anything at all, yet it always remains the same.

14. AFRICA IS WHITE

The island of Curaçao, part of the former Dutch Antilles, now a constituent country of the Netherlands, is perfect for tourism. Along with the pristine beaches and emerald waters typical of the Caribbean, it can count on many months of good weather annually, because it is outside the path of hurricanes. A paradise, in other words. The Donald Duck Snackbar, in the suburbs of Fuik, in the southern part of the island, is a paradise as well — for narco-traffickers. Between a sandwich and a caipirinha, they talk business. Lately the conversation’s mostly about ways to transport cocaine. Controls have grown tighter, so they need new methods.

When you spend years tracking drug traffickers you come to see things not for what they are but for what the traffickers can do with them. I can’t look at a world map anymore without seeing transportation routes, distribution strategies. I can’t see the beauty of a city piazza anymore without asking myself if it would be a good base for pushers. I can’t see the fine, golden sand of a beach anymore without wondering if it would make a good landing spot for an important shipment. I can’t fly anymore without looking around the plane and calculating how many mules might be onboard, their stomachs full of cocaine capsules.

It even happens with diapers. What’s more innocent than a baby’s diapers? They make me think of the woman from the Antilles who was detained at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in 2009, after police found a kilo of cocaine hidden in her two-year-old daughter’s diaper. There are highly organized gangs that use their own children for trafficking, sticking balls of liquid cocaine inside their diapers. Easy to transport, difficult to pick up on X-rays. But there’s a down side: While it’s true that coke dissolves easily, it’s also true that the crystallization process to render it salable adds not insignificantly to the cost. Even the physically disabled are welcome. Who would ever dream of searching a man with no legs in a wheelchair? No one, as long as the sniffer dog doesn’t discover cocaine in the chair’s frame, as happened to a young Dominican guy in September 2011. There’s no end to it. Cocaine under the cassock of a fake priest. Cocaine in the stomachs of two Labradors. Cocaine in a shipment of two hundred boxes of red roses. Cocaine hidden inside cigars. Candies and cookies filled with cocaine. Loose cocaine inside bags of foodstuffs. Liquid cocaine in condoms tied with elaborate knots.

There’s a school in Curaçao. Aspiring mules come from all over the world. Narcos teach them how to package and ingest the capsules without hurting themselves, because they’ll use their stomachs as storage during flights. During the first phase of their training the mules swallow big grapes, chunks of bananas or carrots, then condoms filled with confectionary sugar. Two weeks before departure the mule goes on a diet to regularize his digestive cycle. The mule has to eat light: to keep down the capsules, which are the size of those containers inside a Kinder Surprise Egg, you have to stick with fruits and vegetables. It takes a mule two hours to swallow the capsules and settle them in the bottom of his stomach. It hurts; it hurts a lot. So the mule paces, palpitates his stomach to make them go down, helps them along with a little Vaseline, or at most some yogurt. The stomach is a container that needs to be optimized, and even half a glass of water takes up space. A beginner manages to ingest thirty to forty capsules, while a well-traveled professional can get up to 120. The record seems to be held by a man detained in the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in 2009 with 218 capsules, amounting to 2.2 kilos of cocaine.

Each capsule contains 5 to 10 grams of cocaine. If even one of them breaks during the flight, the mule will die an atrocious death from an overdose. But if it makes it to its destination that cocaine, bought for about €3,000 a kilo in the Antilles, in Europe will go for €40,000 to €60,000 a kilo, depending on which country it’s sold in. On the street it can go for as much as €130 a gram. Which is why the couriers have to follow very strict rules: Before they ingest the capsules they take medicine such as antiemetics, anticholinergics, and antidiarrhetics. The in-flight menu is rigorous too: milk, juice, rice. From the moment he swallows the capsules, the mule has thirty-six hours max before expelling them and, finally, as the Colombians say, coronar—mission accomplished, in other words. The word coronar comes from the game of checkers, when a pawn reaches his opponent’s baseline and is “crowned.”

Europe needs cocaine, lots of it. There’s never enough. The Old Continent has become the narcos’ new frontier: 20 percent to 30 percent of cocaine production worldwide ends up here. Cocaine has attracted a new clientele. If until 2000 it was used almost exclusively by the privileged strata of society, now it’s more democratic. Adolescents, who never used to get near this sort of product, are today the most attractive slice of the market. It was enough for the narcos simply to diversify the offer and flood the European market with cocaine, lowering the price. Today a gram of cocaine costs around €60 on the streets of Paris, compared to €100 about fifteen years ago. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, about 13 million Europeans have sniffed cocaine at least once in their lives; 7.5 million of them are between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. The number of cocaine users in the UK has quadrupled in ten years. The Central Office for the Suppression of Illicit Drugs Trafficking in France estimates that the number of consumers doubled between 2002 and 2006. By now the market has stabilized; it has its consumers and its habits. The soul of commerce is not publicity but habit. It is the creation of needs, which become so instilled in the user’s consciousness that they are no longer considered a need. In Europe, together with the cocaine habit, a silent army has been born, one that marches in close rank, heedless and resigned, with an addiction that has become a custom, practically a tradition. Europe wants cocaine, and so the narcos find ways to get it there.

• • •

I’m sitting with Mamadu, a young African man with a sweet but determined face. He tells me he was supposed to be named Hope, but then his parents discovered that in other parts of the world it was a girl’s name. He was born at the time that his country, Guinea-Bissau, was experimenting for the first time with multiparty elections. On the horizon loomed an uncertain future but one full of expectation after all the wounds of civil war and repeated coups. His family was originally from the town of Bissorã, but they moved to the capital, Bissau. History repeats itself. People sacrifice their roots for the hope of progress; the city becomes the Eden everyone dreams of. But the hope with which Mamadu’s parents wanted to bless the birth of their son is betrayed once again: civil war, coups, and endemic poverty bog the country down in a deadly immobility. Mamadu learns the art of getting by — the profession that, since the beginning of time, employs the most people — and starts to develop the characteristic that many international bureaucrats associate with people from his country: resignation.

But something has changed recently. His continent has become white. It has become an important landing base for narco-traffickers.

“Your country’s the center of the world now,” I say to him.

Mamadu laughs and shakes his head with symmetrical slowness.

“I’m serious,” I insist. “Your country deals in one of the most sought after products there is.”

“Why are you making fun of me, my friend?” Mamadu says, serious now. “What resources? Cashews, maybe? Locusts?”

The truth is, Guinea-Bissau, like the countries that border it, is exactly what the narco-traffickers are looking for. Africa is fragile. Africa is the absence of rules. The narcos work their way into these enormous vacuums by taking advantage of tottering institutions and ineffective border controls. It’s easy to give birth to a parallel economy, to transform a poor country into an immense warehouse. A warehouse for a Europe increasingly dependent on white powder. If you add the fact that the citizens of Guinea-Bissau, by virtue of their colonial past, are allowed to enter Portuguese territory without a visa, then Mamadu’s country really is the center of the world.

Mamadu tells me about the day in 2009 when he happened to pass by the residence of the president of the republic, João Bernardo Vieira. At first he mistook the shots for firecrackers, which he’d always been afraid of, and he turned in the direction of the noise in order to look the little dynamiters in the face. But there was only a throng of people that drew aside in a disorderly fashion as two cars, tires squealing, slalomed their way through the terrified passersby. On the ground the crumpled body of some man he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t until the next day that Mamadu, glancing at the headlines, learned that it was the president of the republic. Many people saw his execution as a form of revenge at the hands of the military for the killing the day before of the army chief of staff, Batista Tagme Na Waie. Others read the assassination as retaliation on the part of Colombian drug traffickers in Guinea-Bissau for the dismissal of Rear Admiral Bubo Na Tchuto, chief of staff of the navy, on suspicion of conspiring with the drug cartels (a charge to which he would plead guilty in a U.S. court in May 2014). For Mamadu it was simply another wound.

In 2007 Time magazine defined Guinea-Bissau as a paradise for traffickers, a state that welcomes drug traffickers and distributes their goods. It helps if you have an archipelago off your coast, eighty-eight islands where small aircraft laden with drugs can land. An open zone for the cartels’ personal use. An earthly Eden, practically uninhabited and covered in lush vegetation, bordered by pure white beaches and sliced through by improvised landing strips. It is on one of these strips that the Cessna that changed Mamadu’s life landed. Cessnas are perfect for this sort of job: They’re nimble and fly at a maximum altitude of sixty-five hundred feet, thus avoiding being picked up by radar. The drugs are crammed inside, in fruit crates stacked one atop another and stashed between the metal panels of the plane. The goods are unloaded and taken to the mainland, and from there they take off for Europe, following three major routes: land, which passes through the Atlantic coast of Mauritania and through Morocco, or over tracks in the Sahara before heading up through Turkey and arriving in the Balkans; sea, the most popular route, where commercial fleets of private container ships carry huge amounts of cocaine; and finally air, where couriers or mules usually ingest capsules filled with cocaine.

“A mule?” Mamadu had asked Johnny.

“A mule, Mamadu. You’ll take a little trip to Lisbon and then you’ll come back. Aren’t you happy?’

The person talking, Mamadu recalls, is a buff Nigerian who has shuttled between Abuja, Nigeria, and Bissau for twenty-five years. He goes by the name of Johnny and is an old friend of Mamadu’s father. He says he can give him a hand. Mamadu’s parents have gone back to their village: If you have to die of hunger, you might as well do it close to your own family, in the place where you were born. Johnny stands there in his fake Alexander McQueen suit, and as he talks he keeps touching Mamadu on his shoulder, arm, chest. He’s a salesman, and he knows that to place his goods, it’s not enough to be convincing; he has to establish a contact. Mamadu is hypnotized.

“Lisbon?”

“Lisbon, Mamadu. A few hours’ flight, then you take a walk around the old city, pick up a tourist or two, and catch the plane home.”

Getting drugs to Europe is easier than you’d think. All you need is a commercial flight, a passenger, and an indefinite amount of cocaine safely stored in special wrapping in the bottom of his stomach. Sure, it’s happened that the wrapping breaks during the flight and the mule spends hours in excruciating pain before landing in Lisbon as a cadaver. But most shipments are successful, in part because modern wrapping materials are resistant to gastric acid, to the point that you need to cut them with a knife to open them after they’ve been expelled, They used to use condoms, but that’s prehistory.

“I have to fly?”

“How else are you going to get to Europe, Mamadu? Swim?”

Solving transportation problems is the narco-trafficker’s most pressing business challenge. To get the cocaine to the west coast of Africa they invested several million dollars constructing a veritable highway, the A10, so called because the ocean route travels right along the 10th parallel. Traffic is always heavy on the A10—there’s a constant coming and going — but only the tip of the iceberg is visible, thanks to the most spectacular seizures. Like the one on the South Sea, a cargo ship intercepted by the Spanish navy with 7.5 tons of cocaine onboard. Or the Master Endeavour, the huge merchant ship intercepted by the French navy with 1.8 tons of cocaine: The traffickers had drained the well deck in the stern of the ship normally used for drinking water so as to hide the precious cargo. Sometimes the big cargo or fishing ships moor off the African coast and wait for smaller craft — sailboats, dugouts, or coasting vessels — to shuttle the cocaine ashore. Commercial routes are busy day and night but the increased maritime surveillance and the numerous record confiscations have thrown them into crisis, to the point of forcing the narco-traffickers to aim higher, to opt for those agile airplanes. The most extraordinary example is that of the Boeing 727–200 that landed on a makeshift runway smack in the middle of the Mali desert and was burned on-site so as not to leave any trace. Investigations following the discovery of the fuselage gave rise to the hypothesis that the traffickers were transporting cocaine and arms and that Islamic radicals had let them use their secret runways to reach Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt, as well as provided them with jeeps and trucks. From there the drugs were supposed to make their way up to Greece and the Balkans, eventually arriving at the heart of Europe. This hypothesis was bolstered by discoveries made a few months later: The Boeing 727–200 was registered in Guinea-Bissau, had taken off from Tocumen International Airport in Panama, and was supposed to stop for refueling in Mali. It did not have authorization to fly, and its crew members were carrying fake documents, possibly from Saudi Arabia. Faced with a burning plane carcass, all the investigators were thinking the same thing: If the narcos can afford to get rid of a vehicle estimated to be worth between $500,000 and $1 million, how much cocaine did they manage to get in? A plane of that size can carry up to 10 tons of cocaine.

It takes preparation and mental strength to become a mule. You have to respect the rules and put your body through harsh training. Mamadu learns the secrets of the profession one suffocating afternoon, inside an abandoned shed on the outskirts of Bissau. Johnny told him to show up with an empty suitcase. “Why empty?” Mamadu had asked, but didn’t get an answer. In the middle of the shed is a long, low table on which is a row of capsules only slightly bigger than aspirin. Johnny, like a chef showing off his creations, gestures to Mamadu to come closer. He tells him to sit in the plastic chair in front of him, with the suitcase on his knees.

“Open it. Tell me what’s inside.”

Mamadu looks at him wide-eyed, he doesn’t know what to say.

“Don’t be afraid. Open it and tell me what’s inside,” he insists.

“It’s empty, sir.”

Johnny shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “It’s full. You are a tourist, you have some clothes with you, bathing suits. If someone like me wants to know what’s inside your suitcase, that’s how you have to answer. That’s the first lesson, the most important one.

Rules. In order to become a mule, above all you have to be a good actor. A tourist is perfect. But not too overweight. Too many capsules make your belly swell, and the customs officers have a sharp eye: The first ones they stop are fat men traveling alone with just a carry-on. Then there’s the payment. On delivery only. Too many mules in the past decided to live the good life in Europe for a few days with the narcos’ money and their drugs. And finally there’s the physical training.

“I like you, Mamadu. For you, only top of the line products. We care about our employees’ health,” Johnny says to him.

Mamadu is naïve but he’s not stupid. He sighs with relief when he discovers that his mouth is the only orifice of his body he has to open.

“I like you, Mamadu,” Johnny repeats. “Let’s go just with the main entrance this time.”

The training is very simple: You start with one capsule, fighting the instinct to spit it up. The operation is repeated a number of times, until the mule is able to swallow several dozen of them and then walk around like a young African tourist dazzled by Old Europe. Mamadu is ready.

Africa is to Mexico like a giant supermarket is to a food wholesaler. Cocaine is like one of the epidemics that have spread with alarming speed all over the African continent.

Africa is white. The dark continent is buried under a blanket of white snow.

Senegal is white, and so is the Léopold Sédar Senghor airport in Dakar. From a strategic point of view, it’s perfect: not far from Europe; not far from the world, thanks to connecting flights to capitals around the globe. Coke has to move quickly, and here, in white Senegal, it finds the energy to do so. Spanish, Portuguese, South African: only three of the nationalities of the most recent mules arrested aboard planes either arriving at or departing from Senghor airport. When the load is much larger, boats are needed. The Opnor, for example, which carried in its iron belly almost 4,000 kilos of cocaine destined for European markets before it was intercepted by the authorities in 2007 off the coast of Senegal. Senegal is a turntable, capable of taking in tons of coca to be treated, stockpiled, and then sent on.

Liberia is white. And Fumbah Sirleaf, son of the Liberian president, dirtied his hands white. It is he who works for the DEA, and who contributes to the fall of an organization whose ranks include African bosses and Colombian narcos. In 2010, thanks to a DEA operation, a network of South American, East European, and African drug traffickers was arrested. The associates had been in contact with this Liberian big shot, Sirleaf, for a long time, but they didn’t know that in fact he was a DEA informer. Sirleaf discovered that the network could count on high Liberian state officials for their traffic and gave precious information and tape recordings to the DEA.

Cape Verde, a turntable per excellence, is white. The ten islands that make up the archipelago hold out their hands to Latin America while remaining firmly anchored off the coast of Senegal. A drug traffickers’ paradise.

Mali is white. And white are the projects of Mohamed Ould Awainatt, a businessman arrested in 2011, the head of an organization that treated the desert as a highway heading north. Jeeps and cocaine.

Guinea is white. White are the affairs of Ousmane Conté, son of the president who governed Guinea for twenty-four years, arrested in 2009 for international drug trafficking. In an interview on national TV, Conté admits between the lines to being implicated in drug trafficking but denies being the head of Guinean narco-trafficking. His brother Moussa is arrested as well, and two years later a huge trial begins, involving dozens of big shots. But nearly all the accused, including Ousmane Conté, will be exonerated. Corruption and precarious institutions: the holes the traffickers slip through.

Sierra Leone is white. Fragile, poor, wounded by civil war right up until the advent of democracy in 2002. And white is the Cessna that in 2008 was supposed to be carrying medical supplies and instead concealed more than half a ton of cocaine.

South Africa is white, and white are her coasts, white her ports, where ships from Latin America arrive. White are the customs of this country. As its wealth has increased, so has its consumption of cocaine.

Mauritania is white. White are the dusty runways where small planes land, jammed full of cocaine. It is the zipper between the Atlantic Ocean and the Maghreb.

Angola is white, because its ties with Brazil are white. Former Portuguese colonies that become brothers through transoceanic coke shipments. Here, as in southern Africa, a good part of the cocaine market is run by Nigerians, who boast of their important criminal history and one of the most organized structures in the world.

Africa is white.

• • •

I look at Mamadu and think about how individual stories can reflect the destiny of an entire continent. The hardest part was learning to deal with the stress, he says. To invent another self, as similar as possible to the few tourists he’s seen in his short life. Awareness has to be crystallized into habit, routine gestures must supplant instinct’s automatic response when faced with danger. Johnny tells him to meet him in front of the Bissau police station. He doesn’t tell him to bring a suitcase, because this time Johnny arrives with an elegant overnight bag. When Mamadu is a few steps away he hands it to him and tells him there’s five thousand dollars inside.

“You could be anybody. You’re a young man with a shiny overnight bag loaded with cash. Go into the police station, chat a bit with the police officers, and then come back out, as if it were nothing.”

“I was sure he was joking,” Mamadu tells me. “If the police officers caught me with a suitcase full of money, how would I explain?”

But Johnny’s not joking in the least. He’s deadly serious; even that conciliatory smile he usually wears is hidden between tightly closed lips.

“I plucked up my courage,” Mamadu tells me. “I prayed that this was the last test I had to face before starting my new job. Then I went into the police station.”

Johnny is the perfect exponent of the most effective and reliable criminal organization on the African continent: the Nigerian underworld.

The Nigerian underworld is an international force that has grown out from its roots to the four corners of the earth. They are small- to medium-size groups with a familial, tribal basis, and the branches of their interests extend to many important open-air drug markets. It’s a mix of tradition and modernity, which has allowed the Nigerians to get a foot in all the African capitals north to south, and to spread beyond the continent, thanks in part to the experience they gained selling heroin in the 1980s — international flights loaded with mules, and when those weren’t enough, Nigerian traffickers recruited the flight crew. Then cocaine arrives, and the Nigerians throw themselves into the new business. Europe’s needs have to be met, and the Africans are ready. So ready that they start obtaining coke directly from the producing countries. Today their presence in Europe is huge, and they’re in great demand by the Colombian and Mexican narcos, as well as by the Italian mafias. One of the progenitors is Peter Christopher Onwumere. Before he was arrested in Brazil in 1997, Onwumere proved he was a real international narco. He negotiated, bought, organized transports, and raked in the cash. The Nigerians are phenomenal subcontractors, and they know where to find cannon fodder, like Mamadu.

“I’ll never forget my first takeoff,” Mamadu tells me. “My stomach sank; it took my breath away. The passenger sitting next to me gives me a paternal smile when he sees me join my hands in prayer; he doesnn’t know I’m just begging God not to let one of the sixty capsules inside me explode. It’s a Royal Air Maroc flight, with a stopover in Casablanca, then from there to Lisbon. I tell myself that it will all be over in a few hours. I can’t help but think how excruciating it will be to expel the capsules, or how I’ll survive a whole day in some unknown European capital. I look anxiously at the tourists who’ve boarded in Casablanca. If I had a sign on my chest that said ‘I’m a drug runner’ I probably would have been less conspicuous amid all these smiling, carefree men and women in shorts and flip-flops, cameras dangling around their necks. Then, like a lightning bolt, a thought comes to me and suddenly chases away my fear. Are these the people who use the stuff inside of me? Are they my clients? So I start looking at them differently, at the stranger in the center row, this really fat guy who’s resting his crossed arms on his belly. The woman next to him, she’s big too, is assailing him with words that have got to be important, but he acts like nothing’s wrong, or maybe he’s fallen asleep. Then I remember what Johnny said about the effects of cocaine, and I think these must be the two principal states: euphoria and oblivion.”

I’m struck by Mamadu’s wisdom, by his ability to see.

“I’ve done nineteen trips from Bissau to Lisbon, Madrid, Amsterdam. You could say I have a job with an ongoing contract, at least until I’m caught or a capsule opens inside of me. I’ve realized by now that I’m a resource that can be sacrificed. Which is why the bosses turn to people like me, even if the amount of merchandise I can carry is small. Because the risk is small too. If I’m arrested, somebody else will be ready to take my place the very next day.”

Mamadu didn’t start to see any money until after he’d done three trips. Johnny would always drag things out, say he didn’t have any cash on him; if Mamadu kept doing such a good job, the small change he had coming to him would soon become a distant memory. But every now and then Johnny would offer him a line, just one, because you have to be familiar with the product you’re selling, he’d say. A bit of white powder revs you up to face customs and the cunning gazes of those European women. Not that Mamadu needs the cocaine. He’s refined his disguise: Now he’s an African until he gets to Casablanca, and then a tourist for the rest of the trip. Tourists have no nationality; being a tourist is an attitude, and at that point the color of your skin, your bloodshot eyes, and your crumpled clothes don’t matter. The fear he felt on his first trip has dissolved into routine. Word that controls are being tightened or news of the mounting tide of seizures don’t bother him at all. European countries have been flexing their muscles for years now, trying to stop the relentless flood of cocaine. Governments have decided to strike at the heart of illegal trafficking, and the list of detainments and seizures grows longer every day. But those names and facts have nothing to do with Mamadu, nor does the new transportation method some mules thought up: They impregnate their clothes with liquid cocaine. At this point he can toss down capsules as if they were cookies. And besides, he can’t stop now. Johnny has told him that there’ll be a stewardess on his next flight who is part of the organization, who facilitates the mules’ work.

“She’s cute,” Johnny added, “and it seems she just broke up with her boyfriend. You could ask her out.”

“I did the math,” Mamadu says to me. “By my thirtieth delivery I should have enough money to treat her to dinner in a fancy restaurant in Lisbon.”