ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano
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Relying too much on past experience can sometimes betray you. You lean too much on what worked well before and have trouble evaluating anything new. This may partly explain why, curiously, the Aquino and Coluccio families of Marina di Gioiosa Jonica went into business with the Gulf cartel—to be precise, with Los Zetas, which, when the Italians first started dealing with them, was still the military arm of Friend Killer Osiel Cárdenas. What’s more, they did it from New York, after the Mexican narcos had already become the United States’ Enemy Number 2, when even direct imports of Taliban heroin could get into Europe more easily than a small shipment of cocaine from the heart of North America. It’s not as if the Calabrians didn’t try to be prudent. They shipped only microscopic lots, small enough at times to be sent by priority mail, and they never set foot outside the Big Apple when negotiating. But they still ended up with the DEA hard on their heels. The arrests started in 2008, and the substance of the huge investigation called Operation Reckoning (which in Italy was coordinated by the DDA of Reggio Calabria and was called Operazione Solare) became public. The United States punished the ’ndrangheta immediately by putting it on its Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklist, as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker. A tough blow. Excessive, from the Calabrians’ point of view. Their prudence wasn’t merely aimed at avoiding trouble with the DEA but with their new partners as well. They weren’t looking for some big business opening but were merely testing a new, alternative supply channel that opened up, to supplement the Colombian one.
The Colombians have never been interested in or able to manage the European drug markets on their own, which is why the Calabrians preferred to cultivate their role as direct importers. But they find themselves in competition with the Mexicans. The strength of both lies in their handling the entire narco trafficking distribution chain, cocaine in primis. And both knew how to take advantage of Colombia’s growing weakness. But now the fragmentation of the Colombia cartels and their increasing subordination to the Mexicans was making ’ndrangheta business dealings more complicated and uncertain. Which is why it needed to find a way to adapt to the new economic reality but without running too many risks. What the Calabrians fear most is that the Mexicans will land in Europe and invade their markets. The apparent absurdity of importing through the United States seemed to reflect this fear. The ’ndragheta’s nightmare was not the Mexican cartels’ military but rather their commercial aggressiveness. Yet it wasn’t wholly indifferent to this other aspect either, perhaps because it believes itself to be an expression of a saner, more civilized Old World than the Mexicans, or because dealing with people capable of such incalculable ferocity increases the risks associated with their business. Yet the ’ndrangheta had worked with the Colombians, for whom mass killings were standard practice, and that collaboration had been successful for years. So it may be that, when the leaders in Marina di Gioiosa Jonica approved the New York experiment, the comparison between AUC and Zetas played a role, especially as Los Zetas had not yet become an independent and powerful cartel.
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I look for the photos of the tree near the Polsi sanctuary. I’m sorry I didn’t study it longer, didn’t observe closely what the top was like, the tips of the branches. I was with my Carabinieri bodyguards and a Calabrian carabiniere who was acting as guide. “Special tour in the land of the ’ndrangheta” he said to me. I had time to take some pictures with my phone, step inside the tree trunk, and linger a while longer, but then we had to move on to our next stop. I was a specialist tourist, and my guide was someone who usually came to these places to arrest someone, carry out a search, or look for underground hideouts. I couldn’t wander off on my own and contemplate the tree like some crazy poet in search of inspiration. To tell the truth, it didn’t even occur to me. After years of spending entire days with my escort I don’t even realize anymore how much I adapt my behavior to conform to the rules of the group. But that’s only normal. All of us have our rules, not just the Carabinieri or the ’ndrangheta.
Looking at a photo of myself inside the tree, I’m reminded of Santo Scipione, who left Aspromonte in order to become the ’ndrine agent in Colombia. He’s in jail now, but there are plenty of others like him in Latin America, western Africa, and in who knows how many other parts of the world where illegal commerce hasn’t been put on the map yet. Dreadful, dangerous places where you go to live only for business. I suspect that Santo Scipione would tell me there’s no difference whatsoever between what he was doing for the Onorata Società and what the heads of multinational corporations were doing when they paid AUC so as to obtain the best working conditions, as his wholesaler Salvatore Mancuso confirmed from prison in Warsaw. The only risk you have to reduce is your business risk. Your personal risk is compensated for with money. If, alas, things go poorly for you, if, for example, you happen to be at the petrol plant that Islamic terrorists storm and you end up dead, the company will always find someone who will go and replace you for the right price. But it’s not like these poor people could pick up the phone and talk with their boss, I can imagine Papi saying. The ’ndrangheta isn’t just some company with a head office and various businesses scattered about. It is a tree where the outer branches communicate with the trunk, which is welcoming, protective.
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Bruno Fuduli was becoming more and more indispensable for the tree he never wanted to be part of. That is what’s so absurd about his story. Even Natale Scali enlists his services again, because he realizes how good he is. And since he’s not concerned about his two accomplices, the last person he thinks he needs to fear is their puppet. So while investigations are under way, Bruno is leading not a double but in fact a triple life. In Calabria he’s nothing more than a useful cog in the wheel. But in Colombia his esteem continues to grow with the people who really count. He’s not dealing just with narcos anymore but directly with the upper ranks of AUC. He would be wise to take to heart the Colombian proverb about more people dying from envy than from cancer. He needs to be more careful, he realizes, about revealing his contacts in Colombia—so as not to make the Calabrians jealous—than about concealing his unspeakable secret. Only to the Carabinieri and the judges can and must he report everything, word for word. Fuduli is revealing a new world to them, in all its detail. He’s the first person in Italy, and most likely not just there, to put a face on the new world of drug trafficking. He tells of a FARC guerrilla who lives in the jungle on the border with Ecuador, and who comes to Bogotá exclusively to traffic cocaine and procure materials to make explosives. He describes a paramilitary who handles cocaine for AUC and calls himself Rambo. He talks about narcos not as Colombian drug lords but as small businessmen, coerced and consumed by subservient relationships far worse than the ones he himself is caught in. He remembers the stories his friend Ramiro confided in him, from fleeing Cali with all his family after the hegemony of the cartel ended, when his offering to the new arrivals wasn’t enough to placate them, to the last time he had to hightail it out of there because they hadn’t “set things right” with AUC for managing the “kitchens.” Cocinas, cocinero, negocio. Kitchens, cook, business. Bruno borrows from Spanish an untranslatable vocabulary, words that ooze toil and rivalry.
The Italian investigators are treading on virgin territory. They have trouble following Bruno into a reality so different from the one they know: the Medellín cartel, the Cali cartel. But it doesn’t mean a thing now if you come from Medellín or Cali: For the power system that orbits around cocaine, what matters most is if you’re a paramilitary or a guerrilla. Fuduli has been going to Colombia since 1996. His confidential relationship begins one year before the United States declares AUC a terrorist organization, whose ties to narco-trafficking are merely strongly suspected. FARC, though long a target of massive military aid, still passes for a subversive army funded by robbery and kidnappings.
It’s not surprising therefore, that the first time Fuduli names Castaño and
There’s one point in particular the investigators linger over, circle back to, even though Fuduli can’t provide them with any other essential information. He alleges that Felipe, toward the end of 2000, proposed he meet a narco-trafficker who had access to ships that could deliver supplies right off the Ionian coast—huge shipments, from both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries. The idea even enticed Natale Scali, and he sent one of his men, along with Bruno and a cousin of Francesco Ventrici, to represent him. The meeting didn’t take place in Colombia, nor in the bordering countries of Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, or Panama. The Calabrians were instead taken by tourist charter to Cancún, from there to Mexico City, and finally to Guadalajara. They were met at the airport and taken by car to a finca in the countryside. There they awaited the arrival of someone whom Felipe introduced merely as “my godfather.”
Fuduli cannot tell the investigators the godfather’s name or nickname. He doesn’t know if he is Mexican or Colombian. He’s been told he is in hiding, but he doesn’t know the country he’s wanted in. Felipe is the unreliable type, with delusions of grandeur that will reveal themselves later. So when he passes his “godfather” off as “one of the biggest in Mexico,” there’s no reason to believe him. But Ramiro, who is much more trustworthy, confirms to Bruno that every fifteen days he prepares a shipment and readies the runway so that Felipe can fly 400 kilos of cocaine to a private landing strip in Mexico. He also tells him that the reason those low-flying flights are made only every two weeks is simply that all the Colombian family cartels together aren’t able to fill the plane every week.
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The Italian magistrates must not have found sufficient proof of the deals with the “godfather living in Mexico,” even though a Mexican citizen figures among those condemned in the first round of the trial that followed the investigation. But in light of what has transpired in the more than ten years that have passed since these reports were transcribed, in light of the information that the Reckoning and Solare investigations provided, Fuduli’s story seems in fact to be the chronicle of the Calabrians’ first landing in Mexico.
When I think about Bruno, when I recall his words, I ask myself what it means to encounter your destiny by mistake rather than by chance. The difference between fate and accident depends on your point of view, on the stories you tell—or don’t tell—yourself about the meaning of your life. The error of accepting Natale Scali’s proposal. The error he decided to try and erase by collaborating with the law. But Bruno Fuduli continued to dwell in that error for nearly ten years. He wasn’t an independent broker, and he wasn’t affiliated with a clan. He’d get on planes and go to tropical borderlands, to no man’s lands brimming with mines, fear, and poverty. And right at the end he found himself locked up for two weeks in a hut in the Bogotá savannah, altitude 11,500 feet, guarded day and night by paramilitaries armed to the teeth. The problem, that time, was the Vibo Valentia guys’ shipment seized in Hamburg, valued at $3 million. The Colombians wanted to be paid, they wanted to collect on what they’d sent. The Calabrians didn’t want to hear it, though; they wanted to pay only for the goods they received. Natale Scali couldn’t step in anymore. He’d been arrested in Marina di Gioiosa Jonica. Pasquale Marando couldn’t either—he was killed, but there’s no trace of his body. Right before the end the double game was turning into Russian roulette, with more than one bullet in the barrel. Bruno lost twenty pounds; all they gave him was water. He got sick. They moved him to an apartment in the capital, fearing for the life of their hostage. From there, instead of calling his counterparts in Calabria, he came up with a way to alert the Carabinieri. The Special Operations Group (ROS) collaborated with the Colombian police, who on January 12, 2004, managed to rescue him without firing a single shot. Later the AUC came for Ramiro. They stuffed him in the same hole of a hut Bruno’d been in until Ventrici and Barbieri finally settled their bill. Bruno’s double life as an infiltrator was about to end.
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Even the judicial inquiries draw on the tree metaphor, and they propagate like branches. After Operation Decollo will come Decollo bis, Decollo ter, and Decollo Money, each of which will become intertwined with still other investigations. Follow the money: That was Giovanni Falcone’s pioneering investigative strategy and his lesson to magistrates who came after him. Yet this remains the hardest thing for investigators to do. It’s the fault of inadequate laws and tools, widespread complicity, and a lack of awareness and therefore of public pressure about the matter. It’s the fruit of a certain media logic, in which a drug seizure is worth at least ten lines in the paper, while the seizure of a property or business barely gets a mention in the local news, even though the economic aspects of Mafia activities are getting more attention in Italy. The information arrives, but it isn’t seen. The money even less.
Money isn’t merely that abstract entity, almost mystical for its volatility, infinite quantities of which can be moved from one end of the planet to the other with a mere click of a keyboard. Invested in the most cryptic funds, in the most high-risk stocks. At least not for the ’ndrangheta, or for mafias in general. For them, money is money. Cash, wads of it, suitcases crammed full of it, secret stashes. Their money has substance, weight—you can count it on your fingers. And the moldy smell it has isn’t lost even when it lands in the most unreachable bank accounts. ’Ndrangheta money is the fruit of their labor, the fruit of the tree. Which is why the ’ndrangheta does not disdain any method of cleaning it, reinvesting it, making the fruit of their labor bear more fruit. So their grand laundering schemes through finance companies that fit together like Chinese nesting boxes sit alongside the simple purchase of some two-room apartment or plot of farmland.
Operation Decollo’s first money trail discovery was incredible, both because of the amount involved and for the sheer simplicity of the laundering method. The Vibonesi bought themselves a SuperEnalotto lottery ticket. In May 2003 there was a 5+1 jackpot. The winning ticket turned out to have been sold at the Poker bar in Locri, which belonged to the father-in-law of a young man named Nicola Lucà, who laundered money for the Mancuso family. He contacted the winner right away and offered him more than €8 million for the ticket. Then he opened new accounts at the UniCredit banks of Milan and Soverato, so that the National Lottery—the Italian state, that is—could credit him the money. For Nicola Lucà the easy money marked the moment of greatest media notoriety, whereas his ascent in the ’ndrangheta hierarchy
Another way that the ’ndrangheta hides is through affiliation density, which in Calabria reaches about 30 percent—and more than double that in the heart of Aspromonte—and with a capillary diffusion beyond their home turf. For anyone who doesn’t deal with the ’ndrangheta professionally, there are simply far too many of them to memorize who and where they are, and what they do. The tree’s shape is covered by its lush foliage, the branches of which are too fine and intricate to trace.
We find Nicola Ciconte—the Australian-born affiliate with Calabrian roots involved in the Decollo investigation—ten thousand miles from the base of the tree. Italy has been asking for his extradition since 2004. The most recent request is from 2012, a sentence in which he was condemned to twenty-five years. For now he tranquilly makes the rounds of the bars on the Gold Coast, the world’s surfing paradise, where he settled after making his way up the east coast from Melbourne. Since shipping Fuduli’s marble to the port of Adelaide, Ciconte has served time in Australia for fraud, swindled an ex-girlfriend, and driven a real estate agency into bankruptcy. Compared to what he did for the country he is most deeply tied to, these are minor things.