ZeroZeroZero

by Roberto Saviano

  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 mi
llions 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 jai
l 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.