Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

The concerns that Andrea’s father — Antonio Melato — has about the young skipper he’d hired are understandable, but it’s not Mattia’s fault that the Blaus VII is intercepted. After his release he goes back to Padua and tries to pick up his carefree existence. Andrea tells his father he’s seen their friend Mattia around, and that he’s an idiot. “You must be joking!” his father barks, getting right to the point: “That guy can’t be trusted.” But it’s pointless for him to get so upset about somebody else, because the telephone being tapped is his own.

Melato is just one of the pieces in an investigation the ROS (the Special Operations Group of the Carabinieri) is carrying out in cooperation with the Milan DDA, which involves half of Europe, the Caribbean, and Georgia. He’s arrested in June 2012, along with his sons and the other components of a network spread across Bulgaria, Spain, Holland, Slovenia, Romania, Croatia, Finland, and, in Italy, the Veneto, Piedmont, and Lombardy. About thirty people are taken into custody, six tons of cocaine seized, seven years of work. The name of the operation, Magna Charta, implies a good dose of irony. The archaic spelling of that document signed by King John Lackland now alludes to the fleet of chartered ships engaged in drug running.

But it all started far from the sea, with more ordinary questions regarding fighting the mafia. In 2005 the Turin Carabinieri discovered that the Bellocco ’ndrina and the other Rosarno families were supplying Piedmont through an unusual Bulgarian channel. The Bulgarians, headed by Evelin Banev — Brendo to his friends — an upstart forty-year-old biznesman who became a millionaire through financial speculation, set themselves up as brokers. But they’d entrusted the task of locating skippers and false-bottomed boats to ferry the cocaine from the Caribbean or to pick it up somewhere between Africa and Spain to various Italians: Antonio Melato and his sons and even more to Fabio and Lucio Cattelan, also originally from Padua but now living between Turin and Milan. They’re the ones who hired the crew of the Oct Challenger, the cargo ship sequestered by Spanish customs officials on the same day as the Blaus VII, with another three tons of coke onboard. And it was also the Cattelan brothers who contacted two expert skippers, Guido Massolino and Antonio D’Ercole, who set out from Turin for a Croatian port where the sailboat they were to bring back full of cocaine was waiting. Following the same route as Mattia, the two first made port in the Balearic Isles, then at Madeira. From there they were supposed to reach the mother ship. But she waited in vain in the middle of the ocean. Guido and Antonio vanished. Probably swept away by a storm, devoured by the waves along with their fragile boat. They may have decided not to send an SOS, not wanting to be discovered in some improbable spot in the Atlantic, or maybe they thought they’d manage somehow and waited until it was too late.

The two men from Turin, shipwrecked without a trace, were both over sixty.

Cocaine skippers usually aren’t novices. For brokers, experience offers more of a guarantee, but even men who have lived their lives at sea seem to become more approachable as they grow older: the need to put aside some money so as to retire in style whenever they feel like it; the desire to live like the wealthy people they spend time with; a taste for adventure, for becoming importers of the same goods they — like everyone else — are already using. Where’s the harm in that?

There’s an ever-increasing number of sail and motorboat skippers whom narcos can turn to, and whoever hires them knows how to weigh the pros and cons. A small crew that can steer boats that are above suspicion, and that can slip into any little tourist port, is a profitable resource, even if it has to be paid well, and even if the skipper turns out to be more vulnerable than the more modest and less demanding tripulantes .

The Mariposa, the Linnet, and the Kololo II —these last two captured off the coast of Sardinia and escorted to port at Alghero — were carrying more than a ton of cocaine in total. The skipper and owner of the Kololo II, a forty-year-old Roman who’d set sail from the French Antilles and was heading straight for the ports nearest Rome, collapses under the weight of the nearly 300 kilos found in his boat. He collaborates in exchange for a reduction in his sentence. On the basis of his confessions, in July 2012 the Roman DDA calls for the arrest of another five accomplices, all of them residing in the Rome area. Some have police records, but none are mafiosi.

They sprout up in every corner of the continent, above all in areas without their own crime organizations. All of them are useful covers or sometimes just unsuspecting scapegoats, according to the investigators. Like the Italians — two from Bologna and the one from Livorno — who were arrested in 1995 because they were using the Sirio, the Más que nada, and a sailboat with the sarcastic name of Overdose to import cocaine from Brazil via Guadeloupe and the Canaries for a group of rich kids from good Bologna families. Or like the pilot of the Falcon Sheldan, a seventy-five-foot luxury yacht intercepted in September 2012 at the port of Imperia with three and a half tons of hashish. Or like the Croatian skipper living in Civitanova Marche, whom the DEA and the French, Croatian, and Italian police stop off the coast of Martinique in May 2012 with 200 kilos of cocaine on another sailboat. Or the Breton skipper Stéphane Colas, who was released in 2011 after being held for two years in Spain because the tanks for storing the drinking water for the voyage from Venezuela contained 400 liters of liquid cocaine. According to the investigations, all of them have highly useful covers. Their nationality doesn’t matter, but it’s best if their résumé, social class, and place of birth suggest a passion for sailing, so they can convince their eventual judges that they merely stumbled into being drug couriers by mistake. The accumulated evidence is often too weak to be upheld in legal battles devoid of specific legislation, and public opinion in the defendant’s home country — as in the case of the Breton captain — accepts his professions of innocence. The secret register of tripulantes is spreading more rapidly than their sails in Atlantic winds.

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And yet when I think about cocaine, the first thing I see isn’t a swift boat wandering the oceans. It’s something more compact, more omnipresent, more elementary. It’s the merchandise, merchandise par excellence, which like a magnet attracts all the rest. Fruit of other fruits, the only parasite that multiplies a thousand fold the value of the flesh it burrows into, a protean vector of profit of every form of commerce. I can still see the expanse of containers in the port of Naples, yellow for MSC, gray for Cosco, Maersk’s blue logo, green for Evergreen, red for the “K” Line, and all those other giant Lego blocks being stacked and restacked by the crane operators’ claws into movable architecture. The pure geometry, the elementary chromatism that encloses and hides everything that can be bought, sold, or consumed. And everything, or almost everything, can become an involuntary or willing host to the white stuff.

It seems paradoxical but not even the most well-concealed merchandise can do without its own logo. Branding originated with heads of cattle being seared with symbols so as to distinguish them from other herds. In the same way, each block of cocaine is marked to certify its origin, as well as to direct each load to the right buyer when the big brokers organize megashipments headed to different customers. A cocaine logo is above all a symbol of quality. It’s not some empty advertising slogan but serves a fundamental purpose: The brand ensures the integrity of every single block, how the narcos guarantee that the products they export are pure. The cartel’s good name is important. More important, apparently, than the risk of being easily tracked down if a shipment were to fall into the wrong hands. A business risk, just like in any other. Nor is it by chance that the traffickers often decide to adopt the symbols of the most sought after, popular brands. Their anonymous merchandise is, after all, the product of voluptuary consumerism par excellence, and it’s worth as much as all the other brands put together.