Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

• • •

The investigation Fuduli contributed to was called Operation Decollo (Takeoff), and to this day it is still considered the mother of all transnational drug-trafficking investigations of Calabrian families. The leaf has fallen, the tree is more visible now. Visible doesn’t mean uprooted, though. In terms of its economic and operational repurcussions, Operation Decollo, which involved police and investigators from Italy, Holland, Spain, Germany, and France, together with the DEA and Colombian, Venezuelan, and Australian magistrates, and which led to arrests in Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany, and Campania, as well as the seizure of five and a half tons of cocaine, was merely a scratch on the tree’s bark. The primary worth of the investigation was informational. Seizures are data points, proof that shipments left from one country and arrived in another, sometimes with stopovers and transfers along the way. They provide a reliable measurement of the tree, or at least of some of its main branches.

Early in 2000, three containers that left Barranquilla, Colombia, aboard ships owned by the Danish company Maersk Sealand pass through the port of Gioia Tauro. All on their way to Fuduli’s companies, all filled with marble blocks that contain 220, 434, and 870 kilos of cocaine, respectively. In March 2000 another container with 434 kilos of cocaine stashed in marble blocks is shipped from Barranquilla to Australia, to Nicola Ciconte, a man with Calabrian roots but born in Wonthaggi, a farming town southwest of Melbourne. It arrives in the port of Adelaide in August. The Australian police eventually track down about two thirds of it, which a Calabrian has already put in storage. Then they start to strike in Italy, but with strategic prudence. It’s not the amount of cocaine seized that matters but rather the fact that another mode of transport has been uncovered, and even more, that it leads directly to another branch of the tree, the Lombard branch. On January 23 and March 17, 2001, at Milan Malpensa Airport, 12.1 and 18.5 kilos of cocaine are seized on two different commercial flights from Caracas, Venezuela. A SEA employee, the company that manages the airport, is there to remove the bags in which the goods are stashed from the luggage carousel. He is from San Calogero. The Mancuso and Pesce of Rosarno clans are set up to speedily restock the Milan drug market, where the demand for coke is inexhaustible. Almost a whole year goes by before they touch another ship. January 10, 2002: At the port of Vigo in Galicia, a container from Ecuador is searched. Inside are found 1,698 kilos of cocaine, stashed in cans of tuna in olive oil and destined for the Conserva Nueva in Madrid. Bruno Fuduli, who negotiated the deal with the Colombians, the Vibo Valentians, and the Spanish, had kept the investigators informed.

April 3, 2002, is an important date. The first real big action in Italy. The shipment was supposed to arrive at Gioia Tauro, but it ends up by mistake at the port of Salerno, where it is seized. This time the container left from La Guaira, Venezuela, and the 541 kilos of cocaine are stuffed in the loading pallets for the granite blocks being sent to Fuduli’s Marmo Imeffe.

Another year of waiting, and of apparent calm. Then comes the most important blow, just beyond Europe’s main port of entry for cocaine. During the night of June 3–4, 2003, Spanish authorities intercept the trawler Alexandra off the Canary Islands, with 2,591 kilos of cocaine onboard. It was probably loaded off the coast of West Africa, in Togo or Benin perhaps, where the ’ndrine have storage and transportation facilities.

But it’s not over. The next action covers the entire Atlantic, right up to where it becomes the North Sea. On October 29, 2003, a shipment from Manaus, Brazil, that has come through Rijeka, Croatia, is stopped at the port of Hamburg: 255 kilos of cocaine are hidden in a load of plastic ceiling panels. Stopovers make drug trafficking easier, since the number of the container is changed every time. The one that arrived in Hamburg was supposed to be delivered to San Lazzaro di Savena, to a company called Ventrans, owned by Francesco Ventrici, which a road haulage portal elected “company of the month” in 2002 for its “seriousness, reliability, and precision.” Mancuso’s man was held up as a model businessman in the town near Bologna where he had taken up residence.

It’s not until January 28, 2004, three years later, that the port of Gioia Tauro is hit. A shipment of 242 kilos of cocaine hidden in blocks of piedra muñeca that sailed from Cartagena for Marmo Imeffe is seized. It’s the final act, the moment when the investigators remove their masks. Arrests are under way. Operation Decollo is over.

Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Croatia, Italy, Africa, Australia. The first points to mark for sure on the map. They’re not the only ones, though; they couldn’t be. When the investigators insist that they only manage to confiscate 10 percent of the cocaine destined for the European market, which amounts to a typical business risk — less than the percentage of goods stolen from a supermarket or checks bounced in a small business — they’re merely revealing publicly what they can of the bitter truth. It’s extremely difficult, of course, to find the eggs smuggled inside the body or the lots hidden with increasingly sophisticated methods, to intercept ships that sail the high seas and anchor for the night off the coast, wherever they choose. It’s difficult even when they’ve gathered detailed information. The narco-traffickers often manage to get away with it right under the noses of those trailing them. But there’s also another, more complicated aspect. The state not only needs to get cocaine off the streets; it also needs to block and possibly break up the organizations that sell it. But these two objectives conflict. If you keep hitting the same port, the traffickers will know for sure that you’ve got them in your sights, so they will alter their routes and cover-up cargo, dock in unpredictable places, in ports under less surveillance. In the case of Operation Decollo, the investigators had an extraordinary hidden card to play: an infiltrator who informed them in real time about new shipments and destinations. But this isn’t usually the case. They may resort to extensive wiretapping, but precautions on the other side make it extremely tricky to identify routes and unloading points. One risks losing the trail, and with it the entire investigation, which necessarily depends on such confirmations.

Even when, as in this case, the investigators know almost everything, every move has to be weighed carefully. Pretend. Pretend it was all just a lucky strike. It doesn’t mean your opponents won’t smell a rat. But what matters most in this secret poker game between cops and robbers is to not raise the level of alarm too high. Or for too long. The investigators can always be sure of one thing: Narco-traffickers may fold a hand, but they never cash in their chips. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Given the market needs, the calculation of risk becomes relative.

• • •

Who knows how much Bruno Fuduli pondered the choice he was about to make that day when he decided to walk into police headquarters in Vibo Valentia. Never enough. He thought he could escape the loan sharks who would have strangled him and the increasing probability of ending up in jail for a long time. Once he turned informer and eventually accomplice to the criminal investigation police, taking the code name Sandro, he knew he would receive protection and assistance in order to create a new life for himself, far from where people considered him a rat, a leaf destined to rot at the foot of a tree. One thing he knew for sure — if they discover that it’s me, they’ll kill me. If they only find out later — after I’ve made a new life for myself — who it was who betrayed them, they’ll never give up searching for me. Clear thinking, but too generic, too abstract. He simply couldn’t imagine in advance the anxiety that would assail him, day after day, as a leaf in the hands of those who were starting to interfere with the flow of sap. A choice always transcends the calculation behind it; it is made powerful and inescapable by its blind spot. You never know how much it will cost you. You don’t know how you will manage to hold to it, day after day. You really don’t understand what you’re doing, what you’ve already done. That’s the conclusion I came to as well, over almost nine years. It often wakes me up and crushes me, like a punch in the chest. Then I get up, try to breathe, and tell myself: In the end, this is the way it has to be.