ZeroZeroZero (18 page)

When he returns from Bogotá Bruno discovers that Scali has charged him 600 million lire in interest, to be paid with another trip, and then another. It’s no longer a matter of calling on people on Scali’s behalf. Now Bruno has to contact new suppliers. The deals he helps launch result in tons of cocaine being shipped to Calabria. Natale Scali had been right about Bruno. So when he offers to put an end to Bruno’s debt problems by taking over his company and gets a “no, thank you” in response, each serenely goes his own way. It’s not a problem for Scali, but it is for Bruno. This boss from Marina di Gioiosa Jonica has now
joined the Mancuso family orbit of usurers, and has taken a personal interest.

Towns in Calabria are small, and the ’ndrangheta’s branches are intertwined. There’s a small branch on the big tree that needs to be tended to. Mancuso narco Vincenzo Barbieri has just been released from prison and has to serve the rest of his time under house arrest. In order to leave the house he needs to find a job that the police will find credible. The solution is so simple, and so near at hand. Diego Mancuso, a Vibo Valentia ’ndrina boss, steps in. He merely asks a favor, that Barbieri be given a job—to help with his rehabilitation—at Fuduli’s company Lavormarmi. Maybe Bruno fools himself into thinking that he can keep up the facade with Barbieri and his partner, Francesco Ventrici, a guy with a clean record whom Barbieri brought along. Perhaps Bruno believes them when they insist they’d prefer not to have anything to do with the Mancuso family. Everything unfolds from there: Bruno ends up being outmaneuvered, and his companies, increasingly in the red, fall into the hands of the ’ndrangheta.

They make a strange couple, Vincenzo Barbieri and Francesco Ventrici, not exactly blood brothers loyal to the Onorata Società or ’ndrangheta, but something akin to that, anyway. Ventrici, the younger of the two, may not even be ritually affiliated with the organization but merely close to it, in part because he’s always close—very close—to Barbieri. They’re like one of those inseparable couples that sometimes form in small villages in southern Italy. Villages like San Calogero, buried in boredom, where all the men hang out at the bars, and where permission to enter them is already a rite of passage of sorts. Where certain kids cling to the most admired character, so that when they grow up, their untiring reverence and emulation is cemented into a real bond. Ventrici marries one of Barbieri’s cousins, and then they become family for real—they’re godfathers to each other’s children. Which is how Fuduli’s unrequested partners introduce themselves when they’re in San Calogero. Barbieri is the official owner of a company that makes living room furniture, and his well-kept, bourgeois look earns him the
nickname U Ragioniere or Accountant. Ventrici is a big kid with narrow eyes and a double chin, whose usual nickname, El Gordo—Fatty—must have been pinned on him by one of Barbieri’s Colombian friends. The trafficking they engage in through Fuduli’s companies and the service their owner provides make theirs a most productive friendship.

Bruno is still the pivot on which everything turns. Bruno, who now finds himself the servant of two masters and prey to many more. Bruno, who continues to fly across the ocean, to negotiate or mediate for Scali and the Vibo Valentia ’ndrina, to consider new contacts, new routes, new transportation methods, all the while winning more of his South American interlocutors’ trust. He meets them in Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador, but also in Italy and Spain. He’s growing more sure of himself, more confident, precise, and organized. A friendly partner, a pleasure to work with. If they talk on the phone about parties and the number of guests as codes for shipments and quantities of cocaine, it doesn’t mean they don’t invite him to parties for real.

All those business trips are exhausting, though. If you are in a certain line of work, Colombia can be a deadly forest, even when you stay in the best hotels in the capital or are a guest in the most luxurious villas. And after the collapse of the Cali and Medellín cartels, those that offer the best prices are also the most dangerous: AUC, FARC. Bitter enemies united by the production and wholesale marketing of cocaine, but also by the fact that they can nab you and make you disappear whenever they feel like it. At that point the only thing you can do is pray to the Maronna ‘ra Muntagna—the Madonna of the Mountain—and ask her to make sure your guys over in Calabria get the overdue payments there in time. But Bruno learns on his own how proud his compatriots are to be the only customers the Colombians don’t ask a percentage from in advance. They are men of honor, men of their word. Their word, sure, but there has to be a down payment in flesh and blood, withheld until the last drug dollar is credited. His turn could be next.

Bruno has been living this life for years now. Negotiate, oversee the process by which the blocks of marble, of
piedra muñeca,
are turned into something that looks like Swiss cheese, except they’re square: pierced with cylindrical holes that are then filled with plastic tubes stuffed with cocaine and sealed with a paste made of marble dust. Then contact the Colombian exporters—front businesses—to pick up the goods, which are to be shipped to one of his companies. And finally, go back to Calabria, take delivery of the shipment once it has cleared customs at Gioia Tauro, and get it transported to a quarry near San Calogero. That’s probably the critical moment. The moment when he stands before those blocks of marble weighing twenty tons, which, had they been left untouched, once they’d been cut and polished, would have revealed all their splendor: golden in color, rich with veins, so similar to travertine. Instead, Bruno, the former owner of Lavormarmi and now the owner on paper of Marmo Imeffe, he who accepts delivery of those marble blocks, now must teach complicit workers how to remove the cylinders without even scratching them. Salvage the cocaine. Reuse merely the scraps of those earthly treasures that take geologic eras to form and now are worth the same as an empty tin can. He prefers it when the cocaine ends up in flowers, or stinking leather skins, or cans of tuna fish. But when that’s the case, the coke isn’t unloaded in Italy, not right before his eyes anyway.

When Barbieri or Ventrici tells him he can leave because nothing that happens afterward has anything to do with him, Bruno, driving home, tumbles into darkness. This is not the life he wants. Not the life he’s willing to land in jail or be killed for. He feels old. He’s almost forty and doesn’t feel all that different from those blocks of marble filled with holes: a failed marriage, one business already lost, and the others he can’t seem to salvage. If he thinks back on how he was able to stand his ground with the Mancuso family: he was just a kid with a small business then, his turnover ridiculously small. Yet he had resisted the Mancusos for years. Then they crushed him for no reason, just for
the sake of trying to squeeze him like an orange picked on the Rosarno plain. And now he’s letting himself be squeezed, like the lowliest illegal immigrant.

But he’s not a lowly illegal immigrant. This is not who he is. If he wasn’t afraid as a kid, he shouldn’t be afraid now either, now that he has learned that everyone, whether in Calabria or Colombia, has a hand on his head that can crush him at any time, either in punishment, by mistake, of just for the heck of it. Who knows how long he would have harbored such thoughts, brooding over them ad nauseam. The fact is, one day Bruno makes up his mind. He goes to the Carabinieri again, this time not to report a threat but to turn himself in: his role, his trips, his marble shipments, and what they really contained. They’re incredulous at first. They need the assessment of a higher authority. But on the basis of investigations already under way, ROS, the Carabinieri’s Special Operations Group, realizes that Fuduli’s statements are true. For two years he acts as a confidential source. Then he takes a further leap: He becomes a government witness. A secret witness. An inconceivable figure in the heart of ’ndrangheta territory. An infiltrator.

 • • • 

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.