The endless forest of symbols the cocaine trade has turned into recalls the ever-changing tangle of routes and handoffs and all the networks that need to be stabilized before a load can depart. The forest’s origins can be found in the constant search for boats large and small; crews; the containers that need to be able to be recognized among hundreds of others that all look the same, all stowed in the same mother ship; the legions of people who need to be corrupted in shipping and navigation companies, at customs offices and in ports, in the police forces and military, in local and national politics. All the coca plantations scattered throughout Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia; all the hundreds of thousands of farmers who harvest the coca in the forests of the Andes; all the laborers and chemists involved in the chain of production, turning leaves into blocks or liquid cocaine, are only a marginal part of the whole business. The rest is transportation.
Transportation is what has allowed the Mexican cartels to become more powerful than the Colombian ones. The availability of the port at Gioia Tauro has provided the basis of the ’ndrangheta’s strength and transnational prestige, in particular of the Piromalli family and its allies, which, according to the DIA (Anti-Mafia Investigations Directorate) has become the largest clan in all of western Europe. Since most narco-trafficking investments and profits are gambled on sea transportation, it has become such a complex problem that it has given rise to a new and specialized professional figure, who is paid handsomely: the logistics manager, also known as a systematist or Doctor Travel. He may be more important and earn more than a broker, especially if the broker doesn’t have the economic and organizational powers of a Pannunzi or a Locatelli but is one of the many smaller intermediaries who first contract supplies and then monitor their movement through the principal phases of embarkation, major stopovers, and arrival at destination.
The logistical manager—the systematist—has to take care of everything else. Of every leg of the journey, every intermediate transshipment, of every formality, every customs inspection, every kind of cover shipment. He must also develop strategies for solving or staunching problems and figure out how to minimize the damage in case something goes wrong. He has to plan every detail, keep every step in his head, and review in advance all the channels the cocaine takes in the course of its journey. He has to make transit not a fluid flow but a project that is as differentiated as it is stable: a system.
It requires months of work to develop a transportation system for a huge shipment of cocaine. And once it has been worked out, tested, and utilized a few times, it’s already time to modify it or think up a new one. Systematists work across the entire surface of the planet, but they’re always working against time. They are forever racing against the investigators’ skills of intuiting cocaine’s movements. Which is why their services are so expensive, affordable only to the major narcotics organizations and the biggest brokers. The richest and most powerful cartels try out new routes by first dispatching “clean loads,” with no drugs, as part of a test run for every system.
That’s exactly what the Sinaloa cartel did without knowing it was already under scrutiny by the Boston FBI and the Spanish police, who were united in Operation Dark Waters, a key inquest in the history of drug trafficking because it revealed the Mexican cartels’ interest in supplying cocaine directly to the European market, which until that point had been dominated by the Colombians. On August 10, 2012, Spanish police arrested four members of the Mexican organization in the center of Madrid, including the cousin of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, at the time the most wanted and powerful boss in the world, the legendary Chapo. Manolo Gutiérrez Guzmán had moved there with a legal adviser and two other of his right-hand men, to lay the foundation for new projects that included regular, easy entry of shipments through the Spanish port.
It all started years earlier, when the FBI came across something more precious than a submarine stuffed with tons of cocaine: a source with access to the upper echelons of the Sinaloa cartel. They decided to investigate the information they received further through a big undercover operation. Starting in early 2010, the infiltrators approached Chapo’s cousin and other influential men pretending to be affiliated with an Italian organization already well established in the United States and Europe. They claimed they were looking for new suppliers and had excellent contacts at the Andalusian port of Algeciras. The Mexicans were excited by the idea and began negotiating: They would furnish a ton of cocaine a month, sent by container ship from South America. The “Italian partners” would get 20 percent of each shipment as a reward for getting the cocaine through the port of Algeciras, while the Mexicans would sell off the rest directly, all over Europe, through their new network of operational cells. By August 2011, everything was ready. But before risking such a large quantity of cocaine, the Sinaloa cartel decided to test the safety of the route: Four times in a row they sent containers filled only with fruit through some Ecuadorian companies under their control. Once they’d tested the system the Mexicans let it be known that they were ready to send the first shipment, hidden in a container leaving from the Brazilian port of Santos: 303 kilos, intended for various points of the European market. A rather meager load that was prudently meant to break the ice—a good business practice even for the biggest holding. But not prudent enough this time. On July 28, 2012, the authorities intercepted the shipment in the port of Algeciras, and almost simultaneously, they detained the Mexicans who arrived at the appointment with their fake partners in order to discuss new shipments. The greatest damage to the Sinaloa cartel was that its expansionist aims for Europe had been revealed and temporarily checked. The rest—the seizure of a few shipments, even the arrest of some important men such as the boss’s own cousin—are inevitable losses, which such a strong and deeply rooted organization must take into account.
Those who toil in vain, however, even in less dramatic circumstances, are the specialists who plan the whole enterprise. The Doctor Travel systematists get paid just as many other freelancers do. An advance to cover system start-up and development expenses, the rest when the shipment reaches its destination. Payment may also come in the form of a percentage of the merchandise, from 20 percent to 50 percent of the total, after transportation costs. Everything—even transportation costs and the systematist’s pay—is calculated on the basis of the end point of the journey. The riskier the final destination, the more perfectly planned the system must be. It’s far less expensive to come through the Iberian Peninsula than into Italy, which has become one of the most difficult and thus exorbitant points of entry in all of Europe.
There is an entity that establishes every quotation at stake in the cocaine market, including transportation costs. Much like the diamond exchange, formerly in Antwerp and now in New York, the world cocaine exchange takes place in the major import centers: in the past Amsterdam, and now Madrid. The average costs and prices used to be set in Holland, but ever since the Iberian Peninsula became the privileged delivery point and the place where the principal buyers gather—first among them, the Italian mafias—the bargaining has moved to Spain.
There’s no way to explain the systematist’s job and the hefty sums the narco-traffickers are willing to pay him unless you look more closely at two crucial problems he has to deal with: ports and cover goods. Big ports—like big airports—most at risk are now equipped with gamma ray or heat-sensitive machines capable of detecting undesirable substances such as drugs or explosives inside containers. A container passes through these immense “metal detectors,” where, basically, it is scanned. The various materials inside it show up in the monitor in different colors. Cocaine is yellow. But just as in the Amsterdam airport, a “100 percent security screening” is applied only on planes coming from certain countries, such as the Dutch Antilles, Surinam, and Venezuela; it is impossible for big European ports to fully monitor all incoming shipments. The port of Rotterdam, for example, is not only the largest in Europe but also one of the best equipped in terms of control instrumen
ts. Nonetheless, with storage capacity for eleven million containers, the best they can do is to expand as much as possible targeted as well as random screening procedures. And screening takes time, as anyone who has had to endure the endless security lines snaking through the airport on a peak travel day and risked missing his flight knows. No one compensates the unfortunate passenger, but for goods, time is money, money that a company can demand back if a shipment is slowed by customs officials. If a perishable shipment is held up too long, one that, once it’s checked, turns out to be just fruit or flowers or frozen fish, the company it is being shipped to—a big supermarket chain, for example—can demand to be reimbursed for the loss. Which means that either they’re checked quickly, or they are more likely to pass through customs without undergoing any screening.
So what Doctor Travel does is study security systems and their flaws in order to take advantage of them. State-of-the-art detection system? Just get yourself some carbon paper. Place it in front of your load, and it disappears from the monitor.
A systematist’s work includes evaluating a high quantity of complex variables. Let’s take, for example, the convenience of concealing cocaine in some kind of perishable merchandise. And let’s remember the basic rule that the cover merchandise must be a typical export product of the area where the shipment originates: So, for shipments coming from South America, why not always slip the blocks of cocaine in among cases of bananas? Bananas are, in fact, often used as cover for the very reasons listed above, to which can be added the fact that they have a vast and steady yearlong market. Yet this is exactly why banana shipments may attract more attention. Besides—and this is more complicated—the destination port may be experiencing a drop in deliveries that really has nothing to do with bananas but rather with other kinds of products, which is what seems to be happening with the economic crisis. If customs is less backed up, the chance that the bananas will be waved through diminishes. So you have to modify your plan, betting not on speedy transit through customs but rather on the persnickety perfection and originality of the camouflage. The systematist has to keep constantly abreast of the situation in every port and the success of all the goods being used as cover. A dizzying job, as if he were working simultaneously for every export-import company on an entire continent—two continents, in fact, given that shipments are coming not only from South America but from West Africa as well. The catalog of cover merchandise, like that of the symbols for stamping blocks of cocaine, must be impressive in its variety. It’s impossible to list all the cover goods used for transporting cocaine. And even more impossible to know about those where cocaine has never been discovered.
• • •
Tom Thumb: This tiny hero has to manage without helpers or magic, no resources other than his own vigilant mind. He is the figure who best symbolizes the disparity of forces of those leading the fight against the global cocaine traffic. I’ve felt like him for years, and I steadfastly follow his example. I try to gather up every bread crumb scattered in the dense forest, to pick up every scrap of knowledge that can help me to get through it. Yet the more I try to look closely at narco-trafficking, bordering on the edge of obsession and exhaustion, the more I sense that something is escaping me, or rather that something keeps getting ahead of my imagination. It’s not enough to know, to understand. I need to grasp a more profound dimension, imprint every organ with it, metabolize the mass of notions until they become a mode of natural perception, a second sight. How is it possible otherwise to comprehend that they ship eight tons of cocaine in a single container of bananas, and at the same time have special suitcases made out of fiberglass, resin, and cocaine, which they then treat so as to extract a mere 15 kilos? The first answer is that whoever lost that stratospheric load must have successfully concluded the same operation other times. There’s a good chance that they’re the same ones who developed new suitcases that look like Samsonites for quick restocking via air, and as a future research investment. Because behind all this there is a logic, just one: sell, sell, sell. Sell any way you can, with whatever system, better to sell a lot than a little. But even if it’s less, much less, you can’t do without it. It’s still business, and it can’t be lost. No business in the world is so dynamic, so relentlessly innovative, so loyal to the pure free market spirit as the global cocaine business.
This is the reason cocaine became the merchandise par excellence at a time when markets began being dominated by stocks that were inflated with empty numbers, or securities as intangible as those driven by the new economy, which sold communication and make-believe. But cocaine is tangible. It uses the imaginary, bends it, invades it, fills it with itself. Every seemingly insurmountable limit is about to fall. The new mutation has already arrived, and it’s called liquid cocaine. Liquid cocaine can make its way inside any hollow object, can impregnate any saturatable material, can dissolve in any drink, any creamy or liquid product, practically without adding any telltale weight. Half a kilo of cocaine can be dissolved in a liter of water. It’s been found in shampoo and body lotion, in shaving cream, glass cleaner, and spray starch, in pesticides, contact lens solution, and cough medicine. It has traveled together with canned pineapple, in containers of coconut milk, in nearly five tons of oil barrels, and in two tons of frozen fruit pulp; it has permeated clothing, upholstery fabric, loads of jeans, canvases, diplomas for deep-sea diving. It’s been sent through the mail as bathroom sets and as pacifiers. It has crossed borders in bottles of wine, beer, and other drinks, from Mexican tequila for margaritas to Brazilian cachaça for caipirinha, but mostly in bottles of rum, like the Colombian brand confiscated in the same month in Bologna and Milan: the Medellín brand, aged three years. And as if rum and Coke, which contains much more coke than alcohol, weren’t enough, they’ve also found it in bottles of Coca-Cola. Cocaine can turn into anything at all, yet it always remains the same.
14.
AFRICA IS WHITE
The island of Curaçao, part of the former Dutch Antilles, now a constituent country of the Netherlands, is perfect for tourism. Along with the pristine beaches and emerald waters typical of the Caribbean, it can count on many months of good weather annually, because it is outside the path of hurricanes. A paradise, in other words. The Donald Duck Snackbar, in the suburbs of Fuik, in the southern part of the island, is a paradise as well—for narco-traffickers. Between a sandwich and a caipirinha, they talk business. Lately the conversation’s mostly about ways to transport cocaine. Controls have grown tighter, so they need new methods.
When you spend years tracking drug traffickers you come to see things not for what they are but for what the traffickers can do with them. I can’t look at a world map anymore without seeing transportation routes, distribution strategies. I can’t see the beauty of a city piazza anymore without asking myself if it would be a good base for pushers. I can’t see the fine, golden sand of a beach anymore without wondering if it would make a good landing spot for an important shipment. I can’t fly anymore without looking around the plane and calculating how many mules might be onboard, their stomachs full of cocaine capsules.
It even happens with diapers. What’s more innocent than a baby’s diapers? They make me think of the woman from the Antilles who was detained at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in 2009, after police found a kilo of cocaine hidden in her two-year-old daughter’s diaper. There are highly organized gangs that use their own children for trafficking, sticking balls of liquid cocaine inside their diapers. Easy to transport, difficult to pick up on X-rays. But there’s a down side: While it’s true that coke dissolves easily, it’s also true that the crystallization process to render it salable adds not insignificantly to the cost. Even the physically disabled are welcome. Who would ever dream of searching a man with no legs in a wheelchair? No one, as long as the sniffer dog doesn’t discover cocaine in the chair’s frame, as happened to a young Dominican guy in September 2011. There’s no end to it. Cocaine under the cassock of a fake priest. Cocaine in the stom
achs of two Labradors. Cocaine in a shipment of two hundred boxes of red roses. Cocaine hidden inside cigars. Candies and cookies filled with cocaine. Loose cocaine inside bags of foodstuffs. Liquid cocaine in condoms tied with elaborate knots.
There’s a school in Curaçao. Aspiring mules come from all over the world. Narcos teach them how to package and ingest the capsules without hurting themselves, because they’ll use their stomachs as storage during flights. During the first phase of their training the mules swallow big grapes, chunks of bananas or carrots, then condoms filled with confectionary sugar. Two weeks before departure the mule goes on a diet to regularize his digestive cycle. The mule has to eat light: to keep down the capsules, which are the size of those containers inside a Kinder Surprise Egg, you have to stick with fruits and vegetables. It takes a mule two hours to swallow the capsules and settle them in the bottom of his stomach. It hurts; it hurts a lot. So the mule paces, palpitates his stomach to make them go down, helps them along with a little Vaseline, or at most some yogurt. The stomach is a container that needs to be optimized, and even half a glass of water takes up space. A beginner manages to ingest thirty to forty capsules, while a well-traveled professional can get up to 120. The record seems to be held by a man detained in the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in 2009 with 218 capsules, amounting to 2.2 kilos of cocaine.
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