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 fo
r 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.
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