Don Semën was in prison for nearly all of the most dramatic phase of the Russian-Ukrainian gas war. But what has he got to do with it? In 2006 Julija Timošenko had already told the BBC: “We have no doubt that Mogilevic is the person behind the entire RosUkrEnergo operation.” Hers is one of the loudest among the many accusing voices that fell on deaf ears for years, until a document surfaced and caught the notice of public opinion in the West. It’s one of the secret files published by WikiLeaks: a cable from Kiev dated December 10, 2008, from the American ambassador William Taylor. It refers to a meeting with Dmitro Firtaš, the Ukrainian oligarch behind RosUkrEnergo, in which he warned Taylor that Timošenko planned to eliminate his company both for personal interests and internal political conflicts, for which she was willing to make concessions to Putin, thus strengthening his influence in Europe. But then, as if to preemptively remove any weapon his opponent might have to discredit him, according to Taylor, the gas magnate goes on: “He [Firtaš] acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Semën Mogilevic, stating he needed Mogilevic’s approval to get into business in the first place. He was adamant that he had not committed a single crime when building his business empire and argued that outsiders still failed to understand the period of lawlessness that reigned in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Another cable, which predates their meeting, talks of potential ties between Firtaš and Mogilevic, suggested by their shared investment in certain offshore companies and the fact that they have the same lawyer. These ties had already been noted in a previous intermediary gas company, Eural Trans Gas. But that same lawyer sues the Guardian for publishing documents circulated by WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange in an article by Luke Harding titled “WikiLeaks Cables Link Russian Mafia Boss to EU Gas Supplies.” In the correction that the London paper was forced to print on December 9, 2010, “to clear up any subsequent mistranslation or misunderstanding of their meeting,” Firtaš denies having any connection to Mogilevic other than a simple acquaintance.
The gas affair affects the vital interests of an entire continent. RosUkrEnergo’s profits just from 2005 to 2006 came to almost $1.6 billion, little less than half of which ended up in the pockets of Firtaš and whoever else shared in his earnings. What does natural gas have to do with cocaine? At first glance, nothing. Except for one essential factor: dependency. Cocaine creates addiction, while there’s no need to create an addiction for the gas to heat our homes. The business that those who’ve made real money bet on—money you can weigh, leaf through, smell—always originates from some irresistible need. And the Brainy Don, the specialist in scams and financial Chinese nesting boxes, knows this perfectly well.
Peter Kowenhoven, an FBI supervisory special agent, was asked to explain why they had put Mogilevic on their ten most dangerous criminals list, since he’s not a violent criminal or psychopathic serial killer. “He has access to so much,” he replied succinctly, “. . . that he can, with a telephone call and order, affect the global economy.”
13.
SEA ROUTES
I miss the sea. The overly crowded and dirty beaches where I spent my summers, echoing with shouts of vendors offering coconut slices, taralli, mozzarella, drinks, granite. Mothers shrieking for their children, wind-up radios broadcasting the soccer game and neomelodic Neapolitan songs, beach balls that either landed on my towel, spattering it with sand, or hit the wrong person on the head. Floating in the murky water, warm as a bath by this point, soaking myself for ages. I even miss the sunburn on my skin, the feel of the sheets, my shivers, which I tried to ignore, unable to fall asleep till very late. Nostalgia plays these sorts of tricks; it makes you yearn for things you’d really never want to experience again.
I miss even more the sea I’d later venture out on in a tiny fishing boat. I liked earning a little money that way, exhaling every time I saw the coast recede, nothing left but the expanse of azure, the smell of salt, the stink of nets and diesel. If the sea started to swell, I’d feel sick, and often vomited. But now even that is a precious memory, the proof that I really did travel by sea, proof I still carry in my gut.
I grew up on seafaring books. The catalog of ships in the Iliad fascinated me, and even as a boy I instinctively perceived that the Odyssey was about exploring the limits of human knowledge. A cunning and courageous man had circumscribed it in the beginning. I discovered and never stopped loving the typhoons and dead calms that put Joseph Conrad’s captains to the test; I got lost in the obsessive hunt for Moby Dick, demon of the human soul incarnated in a sperm whale. At the time I sided with the great cetacean and identified with Ishmael, lone survivor of the wreck of the Pequod, saved to tell her tale. Now I know I have the same obsession as Captain Ahab. My White Whale is cocaine. It too is maddeningly elusive; it too sails every sea.
Sixty percent of the cocaine seized in the last ten years was confiscated on the high seas or in port. Sixty percent is a lot. Because all the other transportation routes are busy too, all the time. The Mexican border is a sieve through which cocaine flows constantly into the world’s biggest consumer, the United States. Not one second passes without someone crossing over with coke stashed in the baby’s diaper or in the cake Grandma baked for the kids. About twenty million people cross the U.S.-Mexican border every year, more than at any border on the planet. The United States manages to monitor at most a third of the more than nineteen hundred miles, even with three hundred miles of fencing, helicopters, and infrared vision systems. None of which can stop the flow of illegal aliens who risk dying in the desert, and who fatten up the coyotes—cartel-controlled human traffickers. In fact, it has created a double source of income for the coyote: If you don’t have the fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars he demands, you can pay off your debt by carrying cocaine in your bag.
It’s impossible to search every person, car, motorcycle, truck, and tour bus lined up at the forty-five official checkpoints; vehicles are prepared in the most sophisticated manner, as well as cans of coffee and jars of chili peppers, whose odors are strong enough to fool the sniffer dogs. Convinced that the best courier is the one who doesn’t even know that’s what he is, narcos use magnets to attach cocaine to the underside of cars with permits to cross the border in the fast lane. Once the cars cross the border they find a way to retrieve the stuff. Or they catapult it over the fence from the Sonora Desert into the Arizona desert, using modified Leonardo da Vinci machines. They fly it in at night on hang gliders painted black, like nightmarish bats or Batmobiles: two thousand dollars and possible death to the pilot if the cargo to be dropped across the border releases poorly and throws off the balance of his glider. A man was found, broken to bits, in a lettuce field near Yuma, Arizona. Half the cocaine he’d been carrying was still in the metal cage under one of the wings, so it was clear it wasn’t some extreme sport accident.
The same is true with airplane transport. All over the world, every minute, some drug mule is boarding a commercial plane. And at that same moment dozens and dozens of containers purportedly filled with other merchandise are being loaded into the belly of a cargo plane.
Yet all this perpetual motion, all this ubiquitous, dusty frenzy, can’t even begin to equal the amount of cocaine carried by sea. The percentage is even higher in Europe: 77 percent between 2008 and 2010. And the European market has almost reached U.S. levels. The sea is the sea. Oceans cover more than half the earth’s surface: another world. If you want to work at sea, you have to accept its rules and those of seafaring men. “There’s no bar in the middle of the sea,” as they say where I come from. And no working cell phones, police stations, or emergency rooms. Nor are there jealous wives, anxious parents, girlfriends whose hopes you don’t want to dash. Nobody. If you want to avoid becoming an accomplice, you learn to look the other way.
These are things that people who organize maritime drug transport know well. They know that there are seamen who are well paid yet eager to earn more, as well as a growing number who work under the tabl
e and are underpaid. But that’s not the main reason that cocaine continues to travel primarily across the Atlantic. In order to move enormous quantities, up to ten or more tons in a single shipment, you need a huge ship. This makes it more affordable and lowers transportation costs by amortizing them, just as with any other export-import business, even though it increases the risks. Move the merchandise across the ocean in the safest way possible: that’s the only rule of narco-trafficking by sea. Such a simple axiom in theory, yet in practice it sparks an incessant search for new means, new routes, new methods of unloading the goods, new cover merchandise.
The world is like a single body that needs to be bathed constantly in cocaine. If one channel becomes obstructed by stricter controls, another must be found right away. So while cocaine used to be shipped mostly from Colombia, in recent years more than half the ships bound for Europe have sailed from Venezuela, and then from the Caribbean, West Africa, and Brazil. The country that used to hold the monopoly on drugs has slipped to fifth place.
Spain is still the point of entry par excellence: Nearly half of all cocaine seized in 2009 was headed there. France has just barely surpassed Holland. Yet that statistic seems odd when you look at a map. It’s based on seizures that for the most part occurred at sea, off the French Antilles or at some port of call along the African coast. In any case, once the routes toward the traditional northern European stronghold began to be controlled more rigorously, drug traffickers reacted immediately. They diverted traffic from the port of Rotterdam to that of Antwerp, which led to twice as many seizures in Belgium. In Italy, when the Gioia Tauro port came under tighter control, they fell back on Vado Ligure, Genoa, and Livorno, or rerouted shipments from Naples to Salerno. Transporting cocaine is like playing dominoes. If you move one tile, you have to rearrange all the others too.
The story of cocaine’s journey starts at the end. It’s the destination that determines both details and design. It’s one thing if the cocaine lands on the continent after being transferred from the mother ship onto smaller, more agile craft that can dock anywhere, another if the ship has to unload its secret fruit in port, after going through customs controls. In the latter it’s essential to hide it perfectly inside some other goods, whereas in the former you can choose some less sophisticated cargo as cover, or even do without. Mother ship: Drug trafficking revives the metaphorical force of maritime language. This is also true for the Spanish term, tripulantes, which means “crew” but which is derived from the verb tripular, which originally meant “to lead,” or “to guide.” Cocaine’s tripulantes are men who guide it to a safe haven. At times they’re corrupt sailors or crew members, at others they’re cartel men who board an uncompromised ship in order to guard the hidden cargo.
Sometimes the traffickers purchase the mother ship outright, as in the case of the Mirage II; other times they simply lease it, purchasing only the complicity of the tripulantes. They also use cargo ships, as Fuduli did with the Maersk Sealand vessels, and cruise ships, whose owners, together with legal export companies—often big multinationals—are totally unaware of the precious parasite they’re harboring inside the containers in the hold. In that case the shipments are called “blind loads.”
A transfer at sea offers several advantages: greater flexibility; and less complex and often less expensive planning, which therefore is quicker to organize. The sooner the coke is put on the market, the quicker the investment starts turning a profit. This still seems to be the most widely used method of getting cocaine into Europe, judging by the drugs seized on their way to Spain or off the coast of West Africa. But keep in mind that, in general, these shipments are hidden less hermetically, and thus easier to intercept.
The Mexican cartels have come up with a transshipment variation that mirrors their baroque taste for destructive waste, but that’s also an astute, effective tactic. Narco sea landings are, for a start, a speedy way to load cocaine without having to pass through heavily controlled ports. They take a car, stuff it full of coke, and take it for one last spin, to the top of a cliff, open the windows, and push it over the edge, into the sea. It could be a pickup or a jeep, one of their favorite makes, a Grand Marquis or a Cherokee. Both stay afloat just long enough for the cargo inside to be salvaged. Most of the packets, sealed in plastic, float to the surface, where they’re easily collected by men who arrive on a rubber raft or motorboat. They either deliver the coke directly to its destination or transfer it to a larger vessel. But all this has to come off without a hitch. So the narcos resort to various roadblock techniques to prevent access to the area where it’s happening. A narcobloqueo is often an act of spectacular violence that usually relates to a form of retaliation, ambush, or some other act of war. Armed commandos station themselves at various points along a road, or even a whole network of roads, where they hijack trailer trucks or force passengers off a bus. Then they position the vehicles sideways across the road, shoot out the tires, water them with gasoline, and set them on fire. This serves two purposes: They can get to the crash site without police or rival groups’ interference, and they sow terror.
It usually takes far less effort to recover the crashed cargo, though. A moving roadblock is often enough, with cars speeding in the wrong direction, causing accidents or traffic jams on streets near the transfer point—the same tactic is used to cover a boss’s escape route. In both cases the narcobloqueo creates a diversion, because the police have to try and reach the roadblock. In the meantime, the last packets of cocaine come floating to the surface undisturbed, and are scooped aboard.
• • •
The Mexican and Colombian cartels demonstrate their power through a mother ship that only they now use in any systematic way: the submarine. Every aspect of their power is summed up and symbolized by these vessels: economic and military power, as well as geopolitical control. It’s difficult to imagine the number of submarines and semisubmersible vessels—drug subs—stuffed with tons of cocaine that are moving through the water of the Pacific Ocean, between Colombia and Mexico, as well as along the more frequented Caribbean routes off the coast of Florida. Semisubmersibles move through the water with only twenty-eight inches, or ten square feet, of hull exposed, and take in air for the diesel engine through a so-called snorkel pipe. They can travel up to three thousand miles. Actual submarines can travel the entire route at a depth of one hundred feet, surfacing only at night to recharge the engine. It takes from two to a dozen crew to operate a drug sub, but the job demands more than just specialized training. These vessels are called “coffins,” after all. They’re so low and narrow inside that they have to be steered lying down, and so hot that other nicknames come to mind, such as “nonstop tanning bed.” But in truth, it’s not unlikely that they turn into actual rather than merely metaphorical coffins. No one knows how many of them have sunk into the abyss along with their cargo and a handful of men mourned only by some South American sailors’ women. On the other hand, they can carry up to ten tons of cocaine. Which is why American authorities are increasingly anxious. Submarines leave hardly a trace, other than perhaps a wake on the radar screen, which can never be attributed with certainty to an underwater vessel. What’s more, the narcos’ traditional means of transport—motorboats, fishing craft, fast ships—have only a tenth of a submarine’s cargo capacity.
Intelligence and antidrug services fear that what’s happening is something similar to when major airline companies renounced their old smaller planes for the new jumbo jets; the money and the need are both there. Submarines are becoming affordable enough for cartels, enough to form a fleet. Between 2005 and 2007 the Colombian navy confiscated eighteen of them off the Pacific coast, identified nearly thirty more, and estimated the existence of about a hundred. But their widespread use can’t be reduced to simply a question of cost. It is a technological progress story whose pioneer was none other than Pablo Escobar, who boasted having two submarines in his immense naval fleet. Innovation is driven in part by the irrational desire t
o emulate some legendary figure, to prove that you’re just as good because you can match or surpass him in power and riches. But the real tangible opportunities arrived when the Russian mafiosi began settling in Florida and offering to sell Soviet arsenals’ pièces de résistance to the Colombians.
For nearly a decade it seemed to the Americans engaged in the war on drugs that the narcos’ drug subs were like the Flying Dutchman: ghost ships, whose evanescent wake they could trail but which they could never capture, to the point of suspecting that they were nothing but legends, sailors’ superstitions, marine myths. But in 2004 the Americans dealt a decisive blow to the Norte del Valle cartel, the organization that took over in Colombia after the decline of the Medellín and Cali cartels. They arrested about a hundred members and extradited the real big shots to the United States, starting with the godfather, Diego Montoya, known as the Cyclist. Agents confiscated millions of dollars in cash, gold ingots, luxury goods, and properties worth $100 million. And they finally get their hands on an actual submarine: a handmade, fiberglass drug sub capable of reaching the California coast. It’s not clear whether the cartel men avoided interception by decrypting U.S. naval codes or if—more likely—they were tipped off by a Colombian admiral in their service.
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