Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

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I look for the photos of the tree near the Polsi sanctuary. I’m sorry I didn’t study it longer, didn’t observe closely what the top was like, the tips of the branches. I was with my Carabinieri bodyguards and a Calabrian carabiniere who was acting as guide. “Special tour in the land of the ’ndrangheta” he said to me. I had time to take some pictures with my phone, step inside the tree trunk, and linger a while longer, but then we had to move on to our next stop. I was a specialist tourist, and my guide was someone who usually came to these places to arrest someone, carry out a search, or look for underground hideouts. I couldn’t wander off on my own and contemplate the tree like some crazy poet in search of inspiration. To tell the truth, it didn’t even occur to me. After years of spending entire days with my escort I don’t even realize anymore how much I adapt my behavior to conform to the rules of the group. But that’s only normal. All of us have our rules, not just the Carabinieri or the ’ndrangheta.

Looking at a photo of myself inside the tree, I’m reminded of Santo Scipione, who left Aspromonte in order to become the ’ndrine agent in Colombia. He’s in jail now, but there are plenty of others like him in Latin America, western Africa, and in who knows how many other parts of the world where illegal commerce hasn’t been put on the map yet. Dreadful, dangerous places where you go to live only for business. I suspect that Santo Scipione would tell me there’s no difference whatsoever between what he was doing for the Onorata Società and what the heads of multinational corporations were doing when they paid AUC so as to obtain the best working conditions, as his wholesaler Salvatore Mancuso confirmed from prison in Warsaw. The only risk you have to reduce is your business risk. Your personal risk is compensated for with money. If, alas, things go poorly for you, if, for example, you happen to be at the petrol plant that Islamic terrorists storm and you end up dead, the company will always find someone who will go and replace you for the right price. But it’s not like these poor people could pick up the phone and talk with their boss, I can imagine Papi saying. The ’ndrangheta isn’t just some company with a head office and various businesses scattered about. It is a tree where the outer branches communicate with the trunk, which is welcoming, protective.

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Bruno Fuduli was becoming more and more indispensable for the tree he never wanted to be part of. That is what’s so absurd about his story. Even Natale Scali enlists his services again, because he realizes how good he is. And since he’s not concerned about his two accomplices, the last person he thinks he needs to fear is their puppet. So while investigations are under way, Bruno is leading not a double but in fact a triple life. In Calabria he’s nothing more than a useful cog in the wheel. But in Colombia his esteem continues to grow with the people who really count. He’s not dealing just with narcos anymore but directly with the upper ranks of AUC. He would be wise to take to heart the Colombian proverb about more people dying from envy than from cancer. He needs to be more careful, he realizes, about revealing his contacts in Colombia — so as not to make the Calabrians jealous — than about concealing his unspeakable secret. Only to the Carabinieri and the judges can and must he report everything, word for word. Fuduli is revealing a new world to them, in all its detail. He’s the first person in Italy, and most likely not just there, to put a face on the new world of drug trafficking. He tells of a FARC guerrilla who lives in the jungle on the border with Ecuador, and who comes to Bogotá exclusively to traffic cocaine and procure materials to make explosives. He describes a paramilitary who handles cocaine for AUC and calls himself Rambo. He talks about narcos not as Colombian drug lords but as small businessmen, coerced and consumed by subservient relationships far worse than the ones he himself is caught in. He remembers the stories his friend Ramiro confided in him, from fleeing Cali with all his family after the hegemony of the cartel ended, when his offering to the new arrivals wasn’t enough to placate them, to the last time he had to hightail it out of there because they hadn’t “set things right” with AUC for managing the “kitchens.” Cocinas, cocinero, negocio . Kitchens, cook, business. Bruno borrows from Spanish an untranslatable vocabulary, words that ooze toil and rivalry.

The Italian investigators are treading on virgin territory. They have trouble following Bruno into a reality so different from the one they know: the Medellín cartel, the Cali cartel. But it doesn’t mean a thing now if you come from Medellín or Cali: For the power system that orbits around cocaine, what matters most is if you’re a paramilitary or a guerrilla. Fuduli has been going to Colombia since 1996. His confidential relationship begins one year before the United States declares AUC a terrorist organization, whose ties to narco-trafficking are merely strongly suspected. FARC, though long a target of massive military aid, still passes for a subversive army funded by robbery and kidnappings.

It’s not surprising therefore, that the first time Fuduli names Castaño and Mancuso in his statements to the magistrates there’s a fair amount of confusion. In the end it is impossible to decide whether Fuduli, together with Ramiro and his brother, had been summoned “to the jungle” by the supreme commander and his number two or if the narcos negotiated the nulla osta for the shipment that was later stopped in Salerno with a lieutenant whose nom de guerre is Boyaco. Sure, the transcription is even more confusing than the recording of Fuduli’s interview with the magistrates, rambling on as he does about paramilitaries in general and about Carlos Castaño, who “by this point… has incriminated himself and has been completely condemned.” Yet the transcription does seem to preserve some trace of the kinds of misunderstandings that arise when one party alludes to information that the other party doesn’t know anything about. Fuduli probably expected to be asked more than merely “Mancuso who?” to which he responds with a laconic “Mancuso Colombian.” I certainly would have liked to delve deeper into his story, to know more about such an anomalous witness’s experience, even if it weren’t directly related to the investigation. The fact remains that Operation Decollo verified the connection between AUC and the ’ndrangheta, and was the first to do so. But Fuduli’s words have a different taste than the phone calls between Santo Scipione and Natale Scali. A strange, ancient taste. Not the taste of tales of those who went in search of treasure or explored uncharted lands but of one who has ended up there because someone else willed it. They often reminded me of the accounts of the first missionaries sent to the American continent.

There’s one point in particular the investigators linger over, circle back to, even though Fuduli can’t provide them with any other essential information. He alleges that Felipe, toward the end of 2000, proposed he meet a narco-trafficker who had access to ships that could deliver supplies right off the Ionian coast — huge shipments, from both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries. The idea even enticed Natale Scali, and he sent one of his men, along with Bruno and a cousin of Francesco Ventrici, to represent him. The meeting didn’t take place in Colombia, nor in the bordering countries of Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, or Panama. The Calabrians were instead taken by tourist charter to Cancún, from there to Mexico City, and finally to Guadalajara. They were met at the airport and taken by car to a finca in the countryside. There they awaited the arrival of someone whom Felipe introduced merely as “my godfather.”