Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

Fatty enjoyed making sensational, exaggerated statements during more important negotiations as well. He works with a family, he’s not a gypsy, and in twenty years of trafficking cocaine, he’s never once paid €30,000 a kilo. This is the substance of his retort to the Colombians who came to see him in his rustic villa in Emilia Romagna to talk about the differences of opinion blocking 1,500 kilos of cocaine in Ecuador. The German pilot, Michael Kramer, who had already pocketed a €100,000 advance, refused at the last minute to take the load to Lubiana, Slovenia. Ventrici shit his pants again, fearing that his about-face was a sign that he’d somehow hired a DEA infiltrator. Then Barbieri was killed, and Ventrici decided to interrupt his first big drug deal organized without U Ragioniere. The magistrature took care of the rest: From January to August 2011 it bombarded him with arrest warrants and seizure orders, from Catanzaro to Bologna.

Vincenzo Barbieri, like his accomplice or ex-accomplice, had organized an import circuit with close relatives and personally recruited accomplices. He wanted to do things in style, and even got himself an agent in Colombia, a young man who’d already started a family and had opened a restaurant. In the department of Meta, where many cocaine fields and “kitchens” had moved, the restaurant’s name — La Calabrisella — which evokes not only a popular folk song but also the marijuana grown in Calabria — has a bitter, sarcastic taste. But things didn’t go smoothly for him this time either. In September 2010 a load of 400 kilos was seized in Colombia, and in November the same thing happened to an entire ton that had landed in Gioia Tauro, inside agricultural trailer frames. Barbieri, who was varying the cover-up methods he’d tried out with Fuduli, had another 1,200 kilos of pure cocaine sent from Brazil in cans of palm hearts. The container was seized at the port of Livorno on April 8, 2011, by which date the buyer was already dead.

U Ragioniere managed to set off a scandal of unprecedented proportions even from the grave. It was the first time his name echoed all over the media without disappearing quickly into the burial mound of mafia news. The DDA of Catanzaro opened a new line of inquiry within the mother investigation, Decollo Money. The public learned about it on July 29, 2011. In December 2010, Vincenzo Barbieri allegedly summoned the manager of a San Marino bank to the King Rose Hotel in Granarolo and gave him two suitcases filled with cash: €1.3 million ended up in an account in his name at the Credito Sammarinese bank, and a comparable amount was subsequently deposited in an account in the name of one of Barbieri’s relatives, transferred thanks to the mediation of some notable individuals in the Calabrian town of Nicotera. But that’s not all. Thanks to the economic crisis the bank was facing serious liquidity problems, and so was up for sale for the sum of €15 million. Credito Sammarinese was already negotiating with a Brazilian bank, but U Ragioniere allegedly promised to put up the same amount, thus raising the prospect of a ’ndrangheta takeover. The public prosecutor, assisted in his investigation by San Marino magistrates, asked for the indictment of former manager Valter Vendemini, the president and founder Lucio Amati, as well as the Calabrian middlemen and the holders of the still active accounts. In the end, Credito Sammarinese was forced into receivership.

A suspicious activity report, or SAR, was sent, but too late: on January 31, 2011, five days after the Catanzaro magistrates had Barbieri arrested again in the context of Decollo ter.

Barbieri was ambushed just before he was able to return to Bologna. It’s thought that they feared he would expose the whole tree, in particular the Mancuso ’ndrina, that all the newspapers and TV news dragged in every time there was a story that had to do with him. The sensational seizure in Gioia Tauro in November 2010, which could not fail to trigger inquiries, severely shook the entire organization’s business serenity. Moreover, it is not unlikely that in Calabria they knew about his San Marino bank plot and thought it a huge mistake to open an account in one’s own name in an offshore paradise just sixty miles from home.

The press painted Vincenzo Barbieri and Francesco Ventrici in increasingly superlative terms: superpowerful bosses, top narco-trafficking brokers, incredibly dangerous criminals. Sure, they imported tons of drugs. But from close up they look pretty insignificant. Greedy bunglers with only average intelligence. Duped by their own victim. It was merely the use of violence that gave them strength. That and — much more important — cocaine. Cocaine money. Cocaine money ready to buy up failing banks. Cocaine money transformed into trucks, ready to supply an entire supermarket chain, and thus be turned into millions more in profit. With money laundering you keep on earning. It’s not that complicated.

• • •

What hurts me the most, though, is knowing that their mediocre affairs found more space, filled more pages, than other stories. Extraordinary stories like Bruno Fuduli’s. When Operation Decollo went public there were only a few passing mentions in the Italian press of an unnamed infiltrator. Then, years later, a few more lines when El Mono made news with his disclosures from a United States prison. Nothing more. Invisible. Invisible, like almost everyone who pays with silence for words offered in the name of justice. Who pays for the affront they caused that tree watered by fear and fed by business deals? Them. Not the others. Not men like Ventrici and Barbieri, who move in and out of prison as if playing a real-life game of Snakes and Ladders. And who then serve most of their time in their own homes, in the place where they chose to live, surrounded by their loved ones, integrated into society. With the chance to cultivate their interests, legal and illegal, with oodles of money to invest or spend for whatever they desire or need. Only killers and those bosses condemned to a special regime or forced to reconcile commanding and living in hiding are worse off than those who helped to denounce them.

But they have respect.

Respect. A word tainted by the use mafias all around the world make of it. Aped by the most disastrous, ferocious youth gangs. Respecto . The maras in Central America shout it when they beat a new affiliate bloody. Respect . Fat gansta rappers loaded with gold chains and surrounded by girls wiggling their hips utter it. Respect , brother. Yet this desecrated and ridiculed word continues to mean something essential. The certainty of possessing — by right — a place in the world, a place among other people, wherever you are. Even in the void of an underground hole or the vacuum of solitary confinement.

Yet those who choose to side with the law often lose even that certainty. And then what’s left? Can the decision to choose liberty turn into the most radical solitude? Can an act of justice be repaid with unhappiness? Informers become invisible. Like ghosts. Like the shades of Lake Averno, the mythical entrance to the underworld. I think about it a lot when I try to come to terms with those in Italy who accuse me of having received too much public attention. Nothing replaces the friends lost along the way, the cities left behind, the colors, tastes, voices, the use of a body that can move freely, walk, sit on a wall and stare at the sea, feel the wind through its clothes. Public attention can weigh on you like a prison. But it is also related to respect. Attention lets you know that your existence counts for other people. It tells you you exist.

Bruno Fuduli testifies at the trial. He shows his face to his loan sharks and the business partners imposed on him, but also to the Colombian narcos with whom he had become friends. Then he returns to the shadows. He is invited to appear on an investigative TV program on the port of Gioia Tauro. The appointment is at the Salerno train station, chosen at random because they can’t reveal where he lives or film his face. They stop to do the interview along the waterfront. Bruno is wearing pants and a white, raw linen shirt. He looks like a burly giant compared to the reporter and the girl in sneakers who accompanies him. He has a deep voice, like a baritone, and he appears calm the whole time. He doesn’t lose his composure when he reveals he’s afraid and suffers from insomnia. He doesn’t betray the least emotion as he talks about the ten men armed with pistols and machine guns who watched over him when he was held hostage in Colombia. Finally, as if mentioning an inescapable fact, he says that something will happen to him someday. They will look for him, if they aren’t doing so already, and sooner or later, they’ll kill him. The ’ndrangheta may wait fifteen or even twenty years, but it doesn’t forget. Just a few minutes to sum up a life. A body without a face on the screen. And then, once again, nothing. Until two years later.