The Mirage II has to drop anchor in Colombia, take on the cocaine, circumnavigate the South American continent so as to avoid rigorous inspections at the Panama Canal, and then set sail for Sicily, where the shipment would then be loaded onto fishing boats off the coast of Trapani. A huge vessel that plows the ocean waves, ports that await containers: It was all decided on March 2, 2001, in a hotel in Fiumicino, near Rome, the Hotel Roma. Details are worked out: the route to take from Colombia; the precise strip of sea where the merchandise will be picked up; the modes of transfer from the mother ship to the Mazara fishing boats; the code names and the radio frequencies to be used. After almost a year and a half of negotiations and preparations, the Mirage II can finally hoist anchor.
Before it gets to Colombia, however, the ship has engine trouble and goes down off the coast of Peru, near Paita. The captain describes the tragedy, goes crazy over the engine failure, doesn’t know what to do. Pannunzi, who has been following the whole operation from afar, immediately smells a rat: Did the Greek Gentleman deliberately sink the ship? Pannunzi doesn’t believe in fate. For him chance can’t do much when there’s commitment and money involved. Chance is something you confront.
The problem is that the Gentleman, true to his nickname, sent the suppliers one of his own men as a guarantee. Now he’s the drug traffickers’ hostage. What’s more, the ship sank before its precious cargo was loaded into the hold. These factors, which would seem to suggest a blameless accident, only increase Pannunzi’s doubts. He suspects that the captain calculated with cynical cunning the risk of cheating his fearsome associates in order to pocket the insurance on the Mirage II. For the money he would make, the hostage in Colombia could be sacrificed. If that’s the case, Pannunzi is sure he’ll be able to verify it. Which, for a shipowner in the cocaine business, would mean the end of his career and probable death.
But for the moment he has to put a good face on things so that he can get the insurance money to his investors while simultaneously arranging another voyage. The Sicilians, represented by Miceli, hire the Turkish Paul Eduard Waridel, known as the Turk, who had a history of getting Turkish heroin into Sicily. Waridel has good contacts in Greece too, and knows who can arrange sea transport for any kind of merchandise. Now, as gangsters say, “It’s a three-way job”: Three containers set out from Barranquilla to Athens, with a port of call in Venezuela. About 900 kilos are concealed among the cover cargo of sacks of rice: enough to amortize the loss of the Mirage II and guarantee a considerable profit.
But the Greek police intercept one of the three containers as soon as it arrives in Piraeus and seize 220 kilos of pure cocaine hidden among the rice. Mysteriously, they don’t notice the other two containers, which remain in port, waiting to clear customs. The Colombian suppliers once again find themselves without a cent, because the drugs are usually paid for when they’re delivered to the Calabrians. Holding Gofas’s right-hand man hostage isn’t enough; they realize his life might not be worth anything. So they kidnap Salvatore Miceli, the Cosa Nostra representative responsible for the transport and final distribution to the ’ndrine.
Cosa Nostra is in trouble. The most watched criminal organization in the world, the one most talked about, seems incapable of handling the situation. The Trapani clan doesn’t have the money. The Turkish wheeler-dealer had let them know it would take four hundred thousand dollars to get the two containers through customs and the goods to Italy. Pannunzi intervenes. He moves swiftly to save his accomplice and get the ball rolling again. He sends two representatives from his group to Lugano to hand deliver the money to Waridel, who in turn is supposed to take it to Athens. But the Turk, like the Greek shipowner before him, is playing dirty. Maybe he wants to get his hands on the cocaine as well, or maybe he just wants to keep the money that’s supposed to be for getting the container through customs. After pocketing the cash he says that the remaining cocaine has disappeared from Piraeus and is now in an unspecified location in Africa, where a trustworthy fellow countryman is holding it. On the phone he uses an unintentionally poetic expression to refer to Africa: “on the other side of the bulls”; in other words, facing Spain.
The Calabrians and the Sicilians realize that Waridel is swindling them. But revenge has to wait—business first. They organize yet another trip, this time from Namibia to Sicily. In late September 2002, the ship carrying the cocaine is off the coast of the Aegadian Islands, but there’s no sign of the Sicilian fishing boats that are supposed to do the pickup. A whole day goes by without the commander getting a reply signal. A second night, but all’s still quiet. The commander waits until the third night. He tries to make contact, following the established procedures, but still nothing. In the end it turns out that the fishing boats from Trapani were using a different radio frequency. Incredible. They had misunderstood. Pannunzi can’t check on every step. He’s merely a broker, not a mafia boss: And when he makes a mistake, it’s because someone else made a mistake in carrying out his orders.
Salavatore Miceli is scared. The Colombians no longer trust him. The excuses the Italians offer are worth less than nothing. When Pannunzi says he’ll vouch for the deal, Miceli is finally freed. But Bebè is disappointed in his friend, who risked his reputation too. The ’ndrangheta bosses are even more furious. They hold the Sicilian partly responsible for the mess that threatens to blow the entire operation sky-high, the mess they’ve had to pay millions of dollars to extricate him from. At this point the Sicilians are excluded. Cosa Nostra is out. Pannunzi takes full control of the situation and decides that the shipment should be delivered to Spain. No problem: He’s got connections there; for example Massimiliano Avesani, known as the Prince. The Prince is a wealthy Roman with ties to Pannunzi and the Calabrian ’ndrine. For several years he’s been the respected owner of a shipyard in Málaga. Pannunzi knows that police forces around the world have managed to identify his shipment and are trying to trace its route. But this time the Calabrians and their accomplices don’t make mistakes: They use extremely cryptic language and change phone numbers frequently. The investigators lose the scent. On October 15, 2002, the ship arrives in Spain and the cocaine’s troubled voyage ends in Avesani’s sure hands.
Meanwhile, the Catanzaro Finance Guard agents have discovered another possible pretext. Although phone communication between Italy and Colombia has been maniacally prudent, they’ve traced a number of calls to one particular landline. But it’s a Holland number. It turns out to belong to an Amsterdam law firm, that of Leon Van Kleef. He and his partners are so well known, they were featured in the popular weekly magazine Nieuwe Revu. As usual, the link is Pannunzi, who builds his credibility through mutual acquaintances, not to mention his own savoir faire as a successful and worldly businessman. And so, in an elegant quarter of Amsterdam, in offices lined with contemporary art, a bunch of mafiosi, ’ndranghetas, and Colombian narcos come together to talk serenely about their business. In the investigation, reference is made to a shipment of 600 kilos or so of cocaine, which, according to Pannunzi is of a quality that’s “never been seen before, something you dream about.” They dub the enterprise the Flower Deal in homage to Holland’s most famous export. If Bebè was the one to make up the name, he might have chosen it for the added pleasure of alluding to the tulip fever that swept across Holland in the seventeenth century, the first speculative bubble in history. Cocaine had become the same sort of exponential money multiplier that tulip bulbs had been back then, and it seems fitting that the place of negotiation is the same. Paolo Sergi and the Sicilian Giuseppe Palermo commute between Italy and Amsterdam to carry on the increasingly difficult negotiations. The lot is reduced to 200 kilos, but Alessandro Pannunzi phones his father, worried that they may not be able to cover the entire purchase with the cash they have on hand, and so may need to reduce the lot again by half. In the end, the Flower Deal crumbles, thanks to a banal hitch. Even though they have the money, the Marandos can’t change it into dollars quickly enough. The Dutch won’t accept
any other currency, and since there’s no shortage of interested buyers for such high-quality merchandise, they sell it to someone else.
The Italian antimafia unit investigated Leon Van Kleef but to no avail; he insisted that a lawyer with an international clientele can’t be expected to know what the people waiting outside his office might be discussing. He has his name to defend, as well as the twenty-year reputation of a law firm that the Dutch magazine describes as “the choice of many leading criminals.” On their elegant Web site the firm’s lawyers let it be known that they specialize in homicide, manslaughter, extortion, fraud, and money laundering, and that they are not prepared to represent informers or whistle-blowers. Van Kleef, who specializes in Spanish speakers, decided to stand by his client to the end. And Dutch law has no provisions for such crimes as external support of a criminal organization. Even the DDA of Reggio Calabria finally decided not to press charges against him.
• • •
After the unfortunate dinner at the Adriano Restaurant in Madrid, Pasquale Ciola continued to live peacefully in his house in Ostuni for seventeen years, contesting sentence after sentence and trusting in the slowness of the Italian judicial machine. The Supreme Court doesn’t hand down a definitive sentence until February 2011: seven years and two months. Ciola, who was then nearly eighty years old, packed his suitcase and was escorted to the regional jail.
Mario from Madrid, on the other hand, survives for years behind bars, like an old-school mafia boss. From Spain he goes to Grasse, to the same prison he’d escaped from almost a decade earlier. The French are far more attentive this time, but in 2004 they have to extradite him to Naples for one of his many trials. And in Italy the Supreme Court orders him to be released. Mario doesn’t waste a minute before disappearing again into the “land of bulls.” He’s arrested in Spain in 2006 with a passport and credit card belonging to a Slovenian citizen and €77,000 in cash. The Spanish judges decide to release him on a technicality. Two months later he is arrested again, this time while passing himself off as a Bulgarian, but once again he is released on a technicality.
Locatelli always seems to find a way to pick himself up when he stumbles. His two sons, who stayed in Italy, are grown men now, capable of running a sizable, dynamic enterprise. The best thing for them to do—their best cover—is to keep making dirty money, lots of it, while officially making clean money. The Locatelli family owns LOPAV S.p.A., a flooring company in Ponte San Pietro, a few miles from Brembate di Sopra. Their company has excellent credentials and has expanded significantly, thanks to its competitiveness and competence, and it contributes notably to the wealth of the territory. It’s not their fault if their father, who left when they were young, turned out to be a rogue; they rolled up their sleeves and provided honest jobs to lots of people. That’s how the locals, both ordinary and important folks, think of them. They don’t ask where the financing came from to build the business to the point of dominating the industry nationally in less than ten years. Those Locatelli boys are enterprising; they’re good, that’s all. Everybody’s good opinion of them is confirmed when LOPAV is awarded a five hundred thousand euro contract to build the undercoating and exterior floors for earthquake-proof housing in L’Aquila, as well as the flooring for a new shopping center in Mapello. Brembate and Ponte San Pietro have reason to be proud when the company’s official Web site boasts that “the earthquake victims of L’Aquila will walk on ‘Bergamasque ground.’”
But just as work in Abruzzo is about to begin, the Naples DDA issues an international arrest warrant for Pasquale Locatelli, once again accused of association with international drug trafficking. The link this time is the Mazzarella clan, Locatelli’s clients in Campania, who get their cocaine and hashish through him. A joint operation coordinated by the Naples Finance Guard and involving Interpol and the Spanish police leads to his arrest at the Madrid airport in May 2010, after authorities trailed his son, who was on his way to Spain to see him. But people are even more bewildered when Patrizio and Massimiliano are also jailed five months later; wiretaps led to their being accused of playing a very active role in both money-laundering activities and the astronomical fees paid to drug traffickers. Pasquale Locatelli had built a mechanism that worked perfectly, even when he was in hiding or in prison. As much as they can try to stop him, he is the Galileo of cocaine. They can condemn him—and yet cocaine moves.
• • •
It seems impossible by this point, but on April 5, 2004, the Italian police flush out Roberto Pannunzi in an elegant Madrid neighborhood, along with his son Alessandro and his son-in-law Francesco Bumbaca. Once again he is sent to jail in Italy. And here he pulls off one of his typical magic tricks. For health reasons, on February 21, 2009, he’s transferred to the Parma prison clinic, where he’s kept under special surveillance. Then a heart ailment gets him house arrest for a year. The court indicates the Tor Vergata General Hospital for his treatment. But Pannunzi, after spending a few months at a clinic in Nemi, in the province of Rome, chooses Villa Sandra, a private clinic in the city. The media doesn’t have its eye on him, public opinion doesn’t know about him, so he’s not considered a threat. Italian politics is distracted by completely different concerns. And thus, a couple of months before his house arrest is to end, Pannunzi escapes from a clinic a second time, leaving no trace. But what’s even more incredible is that they only notice by chance that he’s gone. On March 15, 2010, the Carabinieri make their usual rounds: Pannunzi’s not there. His room wasn’t guarded, and no one is sure exactly when he made his excape: He was supposed to be serving a sixteen-and-a-half-year sentence, and a first-level court had already sentenced him to an additional eighteen years. A man condemned to hard time but who wasn’t even being guarded, who escapes easily, who buys himself silence and intercontinental plane tickets. The Italian state should not allow men with the unlimited financial resources of a Pannunzi to convalesce in private clinics. As Nicola Gratteri, the magistrate who has been following him for years, says: Roberto Pannunzi “is part of that class of people who don’t count their money; they weigh it.”
This is something drug traffickers know.
But Bebè’s freedom doesn’t last long. On July 5, 2013, he is arrested in a shopping center in Bogotá. In his pocket is a fake Venezuelan ID card, with the name Silvano Martino, which he shows to the police, denying that he is the narco-trafficker they’re looking for. But the mug shots from the Italian authorities don’t leave room for doubt. On the Colombian news that evening his face appears behind the journalists, who announce the arrest of “one of the most wanted drug lords in Europe.” He had four arrest orders for drug trafficking and “mafia association” hanging over his head. Interpol had classified him as a “red alert.” After the ritual photos, in which the Colombian agents show him off like a trophy, Pannunzi is put on a plane for Rome, via Madrid. He’s not the only VIP on board: Raffaella Carrà is on the flight too, Italian television’s most famous showgirl, who, like all the other passengers, is oblivious to the boss’s presence. The photos of his arrival at Fiumicino airport show him wearing the same long-sleeved white polo shirt he’d had on in the video of his arrest in Colombia, the last shirt he put on as a free man. Pannunzi now has to serve twelve years, five months, and twenty-six days in jail. During his criminal career various epithets have been pinned on him— “prince of drug trafficking”; “the most wanted broker in Europe”; “the Italian Pablo Escobar”; “king of evasions”—but I prefer to call him “the Copernicus of cocaine,” because he was the first to understand that it’s not the world of cocaine that must orbit around the markets but the markets that must rotate around cocaine.
His arrest required the collaboration of the Italian security forces, the American DEA, and the Colombian police, as well as about two years of investigations coordinated by the public prosecutor’s office in Reggio Calabria. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that only two days before his arrest, “il Principe,” Prince Massimiliano Avesani, Bebè’s
contact in Spain, was arrested in Rome. He too had a fake ID in his pocket, a driver’s license registered to a Giovanni Battista—who had a clean record—but after he was taken to police headquarters he had to admit his real identity. Avesani, who was considered the pivot between the Calabrian clans and the Roman criminal organizations, had been arrested in Montecarlo in 2011, but he went into hiding in order to avoid a fifteen-year sentence for international drug trafficking. He didn’t go very far though: His hideout was an elegant apartment in the Torrino neighborhood in the south of Rome, where the police found other blank IDs that would have come in handy for his life as a fugitive. Apparently he congratulated the police officers who arrested him: “Bingo” he allegedly said. In truth, they were still one number shy of bingo, but it arrives two days later with the arrest of Bebè Pannunzi on the other side of the planet. Who knows, maybe it was Avesani himself who extracted the winning number from the tumbler. Pannunzi may have lost his protection once Avesani fell.
Some day I’d like to meet Roberto Pannunzi. To look him in the eye, but without asking him anything, because he wouldn’t tell me anything other than empty chatter fit for a journalist who writes insubstantial fluff. There’s something I’d really like to know, though: Where does he get his inner serenity? You can see he doesn’t look tormented. He doesn’t kill. He doesn’t destroy people’s lives. Like a good drug broker, all he does is move capital and cocaine around, without ever touching the latter. Just as others do with oil or plastic. Don’t they cause car accidents, irreversible pollution all around the world, even wars that go on for decades? Do oil companyexecutives lose sleep over such things? Do plastic manufacturers? Or the heads of multinational IT companies, who surely know how their products are built, or that cornering the coltan market is the root of ongoing massacres in the Congo? I’m sure that’s how Pannunzi rationalizes things. But I’d like to hear what sort of justifications he’d offer, one by one. What does he tell himself in order to say: “I’m just a broker. You give me the money and I’ll give you the goods. Like everyone else.” That’s all. No better or worse.
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