Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

In a conversation the DDA of Milan intercepted in the context of its next inquiry, Pizzata remembers an episode from his trips to Colombia. He tells of a narco nicknamed Lo Zio, or Uncle, who allegedly cut off the hands of someone who had stolen material. “Mamma mia,” his brother-in-law Francesco Strangio responds. “We’re more flexible about those sorts of things. When has anything like that happened in our territory? Never. A shooting maybe, but not that sort of torture.”

Maybe Bruno Fuduli gambled on the range of possibility that could open up between that hoped-for flexibility and the bullet he was already expecting. Maybe he wasn’t going merely for narco dollars but for something much higher: to prove himself in the long run as able and trustworthy as he used to be at high-level trafficking. Perhaps he might even have risked coming out into the open at that point. Maybe Fuduli was trying to ransom his own life with cocaine. We’ll never know if he succeeded.

It’s the most vexing mathematical equation you’ll ever have to solve. More difficult than the twin prime conjecture or Landau’s Problems. And more mysterious than crop circles. All things considered, you’re really only being asked a simple question: the ratio of cocaine seized to cocaine produced. A fraction. Grammar school stuff. Well, let’s collect the data, you might say. Okay. Where do we start? With the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s “World Drug Report”? Okay, take a look at the graph. The difference between the amount of cocaine seized in 2010 and 2009 is 38 tons: 694 as opposed to 732. A mountain of cocaine but substantially irrelevant in the ocean of world drug trade. So you might deduce that cocaine seizures in recent years have not varied significantly. Go back a bit further. Look at the stats for 2001 to 2005. Do you see how seizures are on a rise then, reaching a peak in 2005? Interesting, isn’t it? Maybe something happened after 2005. Maybe the drug traffickers wised up, maybe they came up with new ways of exporting cocaine. Maybe. But there’s another variable: In recent years cocaine’s purity has decreased. Again according to the “World Drug Report”: The purity rate of cocaine seized in the United States over the four-year period 2006 to 2010 dropped from 85 percent to 73 percent. People are snorting tons of shit. But this consideration doesn’t throw off your calculations. Newly produced cocaine is 100 percent pure, but the stuff that ends up on the street outside your house is far less so. How do you compare the two? How can you have a fraction where the numerator refers to one thing and the denominator another? Can’t you just hear your teacher saying: “You can’t compare apples to oranges”? In other words, “You can’t compare pure coke with coke that’s been cut.” And besides, how much cocaine is actually being produced annually? Keep reading the report. The range varies from 788 tons to 1,060 tons. A pretty sizable difference, don’t you think? The difference corresponds to the total production of an entire country. And the purity percentage of seized cocaine isn’t always declared. I could also mention that some figures may in fact be doubled, the result of more than one police force being involved in an operation leading to the seizure’s being counted twice. If you’re okay with ignoring these last variables and do your own calculation, by using 694 tons of cocaine seized (knowing nothing about its purity) as your numerator and a figure that oscillates between 788 tons and 1,060 tons as your denominator, you’ll come up with between 65 percent and 88 percent. Isn’t a 23-point difference a bit too high to be reliable? I agree. Not that you’re the first to try such a calculation. The “World Drug Report” tried it in 2011. The result? From 46 percent to 60 percent. “Only” 14 points of uncertainty! But go back two more years and the percentage finally has a leg to stand on, and the number is 41.5 percent. How did they come up with that? you ask. By inventing an average purity index for street cocaine of 58 percent. Is it reliable? Maybe. Or maybe not, as many, including the antimafia organization Libera, maintain. They focused on a year—2004—and did some calculations not unlike the ones you’re doing right now. World cocaine production that year came to 937 tons. Subtract from that the tons seized (490) and consumed (450) in the Americas. Then subtract the 99 tons of cocaine seized in the rest of the world. The result? A negative number: -102 tons. But Europeans snort cocaine too, lots of it, about 300 tons in fact. After some quick arithmetic it turns out that in 2004 a little over 400 tons are somehow missing, at least according to the data. Disappeared without a trace. One of the world’s many mysteries, along with the Loch Ness monster.

Now you know what you need to know. Now it’s up to you. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.

There are two kinds of wealthy people: those who count their money and those who weigh it. If you don’t belong to the latter category, you don’t really know what power is. I learned that from the narco-traffickers. I also learned that narcos are turning into citizens of the world, but no matter where they are, their gestures, their moves, their thoughts are the same as if they’d never left home. Live wherever you want, even in the middle of Wall Street, but don’t abandon the rules of your hometown. Old-fashioned rules that help you survive in today’s world without getting lost. It’s sticking to those rules that gives Italian organizations the upper hand when dealing with South American narcos and Mexican cartels, that lets them purchase tons of drugs with just a promise.

Calabrian drug traffickers may have shed the look of shepherds from Aspromonte, but Aspromonte’s rules, the rules of blood and earth, still provide their moral coordinates, still guide their actions. Except that now they also know the rules of economics and know how to move in the world so as to guarantee an annual turnover of billions of euros. Which is why it’s hard to describe the men who govern the world’s narco-traffic. If you handed the material to a screenwriter, you’d get characters who go from bespoke pinstriped suits to gutter street dialect, from marble palaces to stinking streets, characters whose ambiguity is charming, whose paradoxes are worrisome. But all that’s fiction. In reality the drug-trafficking bourgeoisie is on the whole more solid and serene than the average industrial bourgeois family. Mafia families are used to closing ranks, to suffering and responding to setbacks — for them absence and distance are the norm. To cover or conceal things that shouldn’t be known isn’t tantamount to a fragile respectability but rather a fundamental necessity. They’re prepared for pain, loss, and betrayal, and it makes them stronger. They don’t deny the savagery of living in this world.

When I ask myself who the archetypical cocaine manager would be, two names emerge, like opposing poles of a magnetic field. North and South. The man from the North is the prototype of a self-made entrepreneur, trusting only in his own strengths and business sense. The man from the South is a bourgeois from the capital who had a taste of what it would be like to go beyond the secure existence of a government employee and went for it. Neither feels beholden to any political or moral position. If they need to be democratic and transgressive, they know how to do that. And if it’s better to seem like strict conservatives, they’re fine with that too. Businessmen capable of tempting upright, moral individuals by taking advantage of microscopic fissures, imperceptible weaknesses. They corrupt without ever letting the corrupted one feel as if he’s sinning, and pass off corruption as normal, a swift and weightless procedure, something that everybody does, after all.