Bruno is still the pivot on which everything turns. Bruno, who now finds himself the servant of two masters and prey to many more. Bruno, who continues to fly across the ocean, to negotiate or mediate for Scali and the Vibo Valentia ’ndrina, to consider new contacts, new routes, new transportation methods, all the while winning more of his South American interlocutors’ trust. He meets them in Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador, but also in Italy and Spain. He’s growing more sure of himself, more confident, precise, and organized. A friendly partner, a pleasure to work with. If they talk on the phone about parties and the number of guests as codes for shipments and quantities of cocaine, it doesn’t mean they don’t invite him to parties for real.
All those business trips are exhausting, though. If you are in a certain line of work, Colombia can be a deadly forest, even when you stay in the best hotels in the capital or are a guest in the most luxurious villas. And after the collapse of the Cali and Medellín cartels, those that offer the best prices are also the most dangerous: AUC, FARC. Bitter enemies united by the production and wholesale marketing of cocaine, but also by the fact that they can nab you and make you disappear whenever they feel like it. At that point the only thing you can do is pray to the Maronna ‘ra Muntagna—the Madonna of the Mountain—and ask her to make sure your guys over in Calabria get the overdue payments there in time. But Bruno learns on his own how proud his compatriots are to be the only customers the Colombians don’t ask a percentage from in advance. They are men of honor, men of their word. Their word, sure, but there has to be a down payment in flesh and blood, withheld until the last drug dollar is credited. His turn could be next.
Bruno has been living this life for years now. Negotiate, oversee the process by which the blocks of marble, of piedra muñeca, are turned into something that looks like Swiss cheese, except they’re square: pierced with cylindrical holes that are then filled with plastic tubes stuffed with cocaine and sealed with a paste made of marble dust. Then contact the Colombian exporters—front businesses—to pick up the goods, which are to be shipped to one of his companies. And finally, go back to Calabria, take delivery of the shipment once it has cleared customs at Gioia Tauro, and get it transported to a quarry near San Calogero. That’s probably the critical moment. The moment when he stands before those blocks of marble weighing twenty tons, which, had they been left untouched, once they’d been cut and polished, would have revealed all their splendor: golden in color, rich with veins, so similar to travertine. Instead, Bruno, the former owner of Lavormarmi and now the owner on paper of Marmo Imeffe, he who accepts delivery of those marble blocks, now must teach complicit workers how to remove the cylinders without even scratching them. Salvage the cocaine. Reuse merely the scraps of those earthly treasures that take geologic eras to form and now are worth the same as an empty tin can. He prefers it when the cocaine ends up in flowers, or stinking leather skins, or cans of tuna fish. But when that’s the case, the coke isn’t unloaded in Italy, not right before his eyes anyway.
When Barbieri or Ventrici tells him he can leave because nothing that happens afterward has anything to do with him, Bruno, driving home, tumbles into darkness. This is not the life he wants. Not the life he’s willing to land in jail or be killed for. He feels old. He’s almost forty and doesn’t feel all that different from those blocks of marble filled with holes: a failed marriage, one business already lost, and the others he can’t seem to salvage. If he thinks back on how he was able to stand his ground with the Mancuso family: he was just a kid with a small business then, his turnover ridiculously small. Yet he had resisted the Mancusos for years. Then they crushed him for no reason, just for the sake of trying to squeeze him like an orange picked on the Rosarno plain. And now he’s letting himself be squeezed, like the lowliest illegal immigrant.
But he’s not a lowly illegal immigrant. This is not who he is. If he wasn’t afraid as a kid, he shouldn’t be afraid now either, now that he has learned that everyone, whether in Calabria or Colombia, has a hand on his head that can crush him at any time, either in punishment, by mistake, of just for the heck of it. Who knows how long he would have harbored such thoughts, brooding over them ad nauseam. The fact is, one day Bruno makes up his mind. He goes to the Carabinieri again, this time not to report a threat but to turn himself in: his role, his trips, his marble shipments, and what they really contained. They’re incredulous at first. They need the assessment of a higher authority. But on the basis of investigations already under way, ROS, the Carabinieri’s Special Operations Group, realizes that Fuduli’s statements are true. For two years he acts as a confidential source. Then he takes a further leap: He becomes a government witness. A secret witness. An inconceivable figure in the heart of ’ndrangheta territory. An infiltrator.
• • •
The investigation Fuduli contributed to was called Operation Decollo (Takeoff), and to this day it is still considered the mother of all transnational drug-trafficking investigations of Calabrian families. The leaf has fallen, the tree is more visible now. Visible doesn’t mean uprooted, though. In terms of its economic and operational repurcussions, Operation Decollo, which involved police and investigators from Italy, Holland, Spain, Germany, and France, together with the DEA and Colombian, Venezuelan, and Australian magistrates, and which led to arrests in Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany, and Campania, as well as the seizure of five and a half tons of cocaine, was merely a scratch on the tree’s bark. The primary worth of the investigation was informational. Seizures are data points, proof that shipments left from one country and arrived in another, sometimes with stopovers and transfers along the way. They provide a reliable measurement of the tree, or at least of some of its main branches.
Early in 2000, three containers that left Barranquilla, Colombia, aboard ships owned by the Danish company Maersk Sealand pass through the port of Gioia Tauro. All on their way to Fuduli’s companies, all filled with marble blocks that contain 220, 434, and 870 kilos of cocaine, respectively. In March 2000 another container with 434 kilos of cocaine stashed in marble blocks is shipped from Barranquilla to Australia, to Nicola Ciconte, a man with Calabrian roots but born in Wonthaggi, a farming town southwest of Melbourne. It arrives in the port of Adelaide in August. The Australian police eventually track down about two thirds of it, which a Calabrian has already put in storage. Then they start to strike in Italy, but with strategic prudence. It’s not the amount of cocaine seized that matters but rather the fact that another mode of transport has been uncovered, and even more, that it leads directly to another branch of the tree, the Lombard branch. On January 23 and March 17, 2001, at Milan Malpensa Airport, 12.1 and 18.5 kilos of cocaine are seized on two different commercial flights from Caracas, Venezuela. A SEA employee, the company that manages the airport, is there to remove the bags in which the goods are stashed from the luggage carousel. He is from San Calogero. The Mancuso and Pesce of Rosarno clans are set up to speedily restock the Milan drug market, where the demand for coke is inexhaustible. Almost a whole year goes by before they touch another ship. January 10, 2002: At the port of Vigo in Galicia, a container from Ecuador is searched. Inside are found 1,698 kilos of cocaine, stashed in cans of tuna in olive oil and destined for the Conserva Nueva in Madrid. Bruno Fuduli, who negotiated the deal with the Colombians, the Vibo Valentians, and the Spanish, had kept the investigators informed.
April 3, 2002, is an important date. The first real big action in Italy. The shipment was supposed to arrive at Gioia Tauro, but it ends up by mistake at the port of Salerno, where it is seized. This time the container left from La Guaira, Venezuela, and the 541 kilos of cocaine are stuffed in the loading pallets for the granite blocks being sent to Fuduli’s Marmo Imeffe.
Another year of waiting, and of apparent calm. Then comes the most important blow, just beyond Europe’s main port of entry for cocaine. During the night of June 3-4, 2003, Spanish authorities intercept the trawler Alexandra off the Canary Islands, with 2,59
1 kilos of cocaine onboard. It was probably loaded off the coast of West Africa, in Togo or Benin perhaps, where the ’ndrine have storage and transportation facilities.
But it’s not over. The next action covers the entire Atlantic, right up to where it becomes the North Sea. On October 29, 2003, a shipment from Manaus, Brazil, that has come through Rijeka, Croatia, is stopped at the port of Hamburg: 255 kilos of cocaine are hidden in a load of plastic ceiling panels. Stopovers make drug trafficking easier, since the number of the container is changed every time. The one that arrived in Hamburg was supposed to be delivered to San Lazzaro di Savena, to a company called Ventrans, owned by Francesco Ventrici, which a road haulage portal elected “company of the month” in 2002 for its “seriousness, reliability, and precision.” Mancuso’s man was held up as a model businessman in the town near Bologna where he had taken up residence.
It’s not until January 28, 2004, three years later, that the port of Gioia Tauro is hit. A shipment of 242 kilos of cocaine hidden in blocks of piedra muñeca that sailed from Cartagena for Marmo Imeffe is seized. It’s the final act, the moment when the investigators remove their masks. Arrests are under way. Operation Decollo is over.
Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Croatia, Italy, Africa, Australia. The first points to mark for sure on the map. They’re not the only ones, though; they couldn’t be. When the investigators insist that they only manage to confiscate 10 percent of the cocaine destined for the European market, which amounts to a typical business risk—less than the percentage of goods stolen from a supermarket or checks bounced in a small business—they’re merely revealing publicly what they can of the bitter truth. It’s extremely difficult, of course, to find the eggs smuggled inside the body or the lots hidden with increasingly sophisticated methods, to intercept ships that sail the high seas and anchor for the night off the coast, wherever they choose. It’s difficult even when they’ve gathered detailed information. The narco-traffickers often manage to get away with it right under the noses of those trailing them. But there’s also another, more complicated aspect. The state not only needs to get cocaine off the streets; it also needs to block and possibly break up the organizations that sell it. But these two objectives conflict. If you keep hitting the same port, the traffickers will know for sure that you’ve got them in your sights, so they will alter their routes and cover-up cargo, dock in unpredictable places, in ports under less surveillance. In the case of Operation Decollo, the investigators had an extraordinary hidden card to play: an infiltrator who informed them in real time about new shipments and destinations. But this isn’t usually the case. They may resort to extensive wiretapping, but precautions on the other side make it extremely tricky to identify routes and unloading points. One risks losing the trail, and with it the entire investigation, which necessarily depends on such confirmations.
Even when, as in this case, the investigators know almost everything, every move has to be weighed carefully. Pretend. Pretend it was all just a lucky strike. It doesn’t mean your opponents won’t smell a rat. But what matters most in this secret poker game between cops and robbers is to not raise the level of alarm too high. Or for too long. The investigators can always be sure of one thing: Narco-traffickers may fold a hand, but they never cash in their chips. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Given the market needs, the calculation of risk becomes relative.
• • •
Who knows how much Bruno Fuduli pondered the choice he was about to make that day when he decided to walk into police headquarters in Vibo Valentia. Never enough. He thought he could escape the loan sharks who would have strangled him and the increasing probability of ending up in jail for a long time. Once he turned informer and eventually accomplice to the criminal investigation police, taking the code name Sandro, he knew he would receive protection and assistance in order to create a new life for himself, far from where people considered him a rat, a leaf destined to rot at the foot of a tree. One thing he knew for sure—if they discover that it’s me, they’ll kill me. If they only find out later—after I’ve made a new life for myself—who it was who betrayed them, they’ll never give up searching for me. Clear thinking, but too generic, too abstract. He simply couldn’t imagine in advance the anxiety that would assail him, day after day, as a leaf in the hands of those who were starting to interfere with the flow of sap. A choice always transcends the calculation behind it; it is made powerful and inescapable by its blind spot. You never know how much it will cost you. You don’t know how you will manage to hold to it, day after day. You really don’t understand what you’re doing, what you’ve already done. That’s the conclusion I came to as well, over almost nine years. It often wakes me up and crushes me, like a punch in the chest. Then I get up, try to breathe, and tell myself: In the end, this is the way it has to be.
In reality, Bruno already starts to realize the tribulations that await him the morning after the first shipment (the only one that comes off smoothly, even with an exchange of hostages between Calabria and Colombia) when his two bosses, Natale Scali and Vincenzo Barbieri, end up arguing over the price of the cocaine, and start threatening each other. The second shipment is a dud: cocaine that has already been cut, stuff no one in Calabria buys. The Australian shipment would have been the most profitable—the market price down under is pretty high—if most of it hadn’t been seized. At first the traffickers think they’ve been screwed. Then, when they learn more about the bust from the Internet , they insist that they were responsible for the goods only until they cleared customs in port, which they had done. Bruno scrambles, irons things out, negotiates discounts. But then, incredible as it may seem, debts start threatening the marble and cocaine imports as well. And since Fuduli is already in hock with the loan sharks, Barbieri and Ventrici send him to contract more loans, with people even closer to the Mancusos and their vassal families. The lords of the province, kept out of his company by the gates, now appear at the windows.
All it would have taken to set things right was for the 870 kilos that arrived in Gioia Tauro in May-June 2000 and sold in bulk to the powerful Platì boss Pasquale Marando not to cause any more problems. But instead the shipment causes a frenzy. A frenzy born in a mini Colombian cartel, which infects the one established by Ventrici and Barbieri. The coke for that shipment was supplied by a family business, three or four brothers. But two of them hate each other. Felipe, in charge of sales and transportation, harbors deep rancor toward Daniel, who runs the production side and can be considered the head of the company. Colombians have a saying: “More people die in Colombia of envy than of cancer,” Bruno will say when telling the magistrates the story, which leaves them dumbfounded. Envy pierces and devours them, but profit holds them together, like the most poisonous glue. Felipe is kept at a distance with tasks that let him vent and even put to good use his violent nature and restless swagger. But envy merely waits for a soft landing to climb out of the crevice where it is hiding. It comes in the form of the two men from Vibo Valentia, with their lack of experience and their unflinching desire to hang on to the billions they’ve already pocketed from selling the shipment to Pasquale Marando. Felipe demands a small share of the payment for himself, saying he intends to ruin his brother and promising that he’ll be the one to deal with him. Ventrici, who unlike Barbieri can travel to meetings, is the first to give in. “Let’s pay the six million and let them sort it out,” he says to his partner. But for Daniel things aren’t adding up. He wants his share, he doesn’t care in the least about the money his brother got. He wants his own.
Daniel finds a way to make himself heard even while staying “in the kitchens” hidden in Colombia. He sends armed ambassadors to Ventrici with an ultimatum. Even worse, he personally sends him a fax from Colombia with a photograph of Ventrici’s house, followed by a second fax in which he informs him that he’s going to give $2 million to his ETA (the armed Basque organization) friends to blow it up with him inside. Fatty Ventrici, who was insolent up to t
hat moment, is now terrified. He asks Bruno to meet with the narco he’s on most familiar terms with in Cuba—a guy named Ramiro—who reassures him that while Daniel sells coke to the Basque terrorists, it’s out of the question that ETA would mobilize to collect the debt.
Things calm down. All this has probably had a strange effect on Bruno. He’s seen the man who took his company out from under him shit his pants—for reasons he knows all too well. And he’s gotten further confirmation that in the narcos’ hierarchies of respect, he’s on a higher rung than the two men who think they can control him like a puppet. Now Ventrici and Barbieri know it too, they know that Calabria, compared to Colombia, is like a kids’ playground. It’s easy to feel like a man when you have the organization backing you up. Easy when you’re grabbing on to the tree as if it were your mommy’s apron strings, or when you merely give them an adolescent tug. In the end it’s always the tree that controls each and every leaf that moves. But Bruno decided not to let the tree control him anymore.
In fact, hostilities only die down because the big branches intervene. Natale Scali and Pasquale Marando guarantee the Colombian brothers against insolvency. In other words, they take on Ventrici and Barbieri’s debt in Colombia. Holding them by the balls for a mere $6 million means the bosses can avoid a whole slew of hassles nobody really needs. They’ve got plenty of other more pressing matters to deal with. In Colombia, for example, Santo “Papi” Scipione is running into the usual snags when it comes to payments. The experience and authority he’s already acquired in the field aren’t enough to prevent the paramilitaries, who nabbed his most trusty narco the month before, from wanting to get even with him. There are enormous advantages to bargaining with AUC, but all it takes is one hitch, which for normal traffickers would become the object of a tranquil discussion, and you seriously risk ending up in a ditch. Santo Scipione waits for them to come get him. “Because I don’t have anywhere to flee to, nowhere,” he sighs anxiously to Natale Scali, whose phone has already been tapped. The boss of Gioiosa Jonica wants to save Scipione: “A Calabrian’s life is worth more than a debt with these people, who don’t even know how to keep their word. They ask you for two but then they expect to get four.” Even the paramilitaries trust Scali’s word and, above all, his solvency. The hostages return home. But this time the veteran Calabrian narco has had the living daylight scared out of him.
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