ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano
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, n
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.
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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
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.