ZeroZeroZero (19 page)

Even when, as in this case, the investigators know almost everything, every move has to be weighed carefully. Pretend. Pretend it was all just a lucky strike. It doesn’t mean your opponents won’t smell a rat. But what matters most in this secret poker game between cops and robbers is to not raise the level of alarm too high. Or for too long. The investigators can always be sure of one thing: Narco-traffickers may fold a hand, but they never cash in their chips. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Given the market needs, the calculation of risk becomes relative.

 • • • 

Who knows how much Bruno Fuduli pondered the choice he was about to make that day when he decided to walk into police headquarters in Vibo Valentia. Never enough. He thought he could escape the loan sharks who would have strangled him and the increasing probability of
ending up in jail for a long time. Once he turned informer and eventually accomplice to the criminal investigation police, taking the code name Sandro, he knew he would receive protection and assistance in order to create a new life for himself, far from where people considered him a rat, a leaf destined to rot at the foot of a tree. One thing he knew for sure—if they discover that it’s me, they’ll kill me. If they only find out later—after I’ve made a new life for myself—who it was who betrayed them, they’ll never give up searching for me. Clear thinking, but too generic, too abstract. He simply couldn’t imagine in advance the anxiety that would assail him, day after day, as a leaf in the hands of those who were starting to interfere with the flow of sap. A choice always transcends the calculation behind it; it is made powerful and inescapable by its blind spot. You never know how much it will cost you. You don’t know how you will manage to hold to it, day after day. You really don’t understand what you’re doing, what you’ve already done. That’s the conclusion I came to as well, over almost nine years. It often wakes me up and crushes me, like a punch in the chest. Then I get up, try to breathe, and tell myself: In the end, this is the way it has to be.

In reality, Bruno already starts to realize the tribulations that await him the morning after the first shipment (the only one that comes off smoothly, even with an exchange of hostages between Calabria and Colombia) when his two bosses, Natale Scali and Vincenzo Barbieri, end up arguing over the price of the cocaine, and start threatening each other. The second shipment is a dud: cocaine that has already been cut, stuff no one in Calabria buys. The Australian shipment would have been the most profitable—the market price down under is pretty high—if most of it hadn’t been seized. At first the traffickers think they’ve been screwed. Then, when they learn more about the bust from the Internet , they insist that they were responsible for the goods only until they cleared customs in port, which they had done. Bruno scrambles, irons things out, negotiates discounts. But then, incredible as it may seem, debts start threatening the marble and cocaine imports as well. And since Fuduli is already in hock with the loan sharks, Barbieri
and Ventrici send him to contract more loans, with people even closer to the Mancusos and their vassal families. The lords of the province, kept out of his company by the gates, now appear at the windows.

All it would have taken to set things right was for the 870 kilos that arrived in Gioia Tauro in May-June 2000 and sold in bulk to the powerful Platì boss Pasquale Marando not to cause any more problems. But instead the shipment causes a frenzy. A frenzy born in a mini Colombian cartel, which infects the one established by Ventrici and Barbieri. The coke for that shipment was supplied by a family business, three or four brothers. But two of them hate each other. Felipe, in charge of sales and transportation, harbors deep rancor toward Daniel, who runs the production side and can be considered the head of the company. Colombians have a saying: “More people die in Colombia of envy than of cancer,” Bruno will say when telling the magistrates the story, which leaves them dumbfounded. Envy pierces and devours them, but profit holds them together, like the most poisonous glue. Felipe is kept at a distance with tasks that let him vent and even put to good use his violent nature and restless swagger. But envy merely waits for a soft landing to climb out of the crevice where it is hiding. It comes in the form of the two men from Vibo Valentia, with their lack of experience and their unflinching desire to hang on to the billions they’ve already pocketed from selling the shipment to Pasquale Marando. Felipe demands a small share of the payment for himself, saying he intends to ruin his brother and promising that he’ll be the one to deal with him. Ventrici, who unlike Barbieri can travel to meetings, is the first to give in. “Let’s pay the six million and let them sort it out,” he says to his partner. But for Daniel things aren’t adding up. He wants his share, he doesn’t care in the least about the money his brother got. He wants his own.

Daniel finds a way to make himself heard even while staying “in the kitchens” hidden in Colombia. He sends armed ambassadors to Ventrici with an ultimatum. Even worse, he personally sends him a fax from Colombia with a photograph of Ventrici’s house, followed by a
second fax in which he informs him that he’s going to give $2 million to his ETA (the armed Basque organization) friends to blow it up with him inside. Fatty Ventrici, who was insolent up to that moment, is now terrified. He asks Bruno to meet with the narco he’s on most familiar terms with in Cuba—a guy named Ramiro—who reassures him that while Daniel sells coke to the Basque terrorists, it’s out of the question that ETA would mobilize to collect the debt.

Things calm down. All this has probably had a strange effect on Bruno. He’s seen the man who took his company out from under him shit his pants—for reasons he knows all too well. And he’s gotten further confirmation that in the narcos’ hierarchies of respect, he’s on a higher rung than the two men who think they can control him like a puppet. Now Ventrici and Barbieri know it too, they know that Calabria, compared to Colombia, is like a kids’ playground. It’s easy to feel like a man when you have the organization backing you up. Easy when you’re grabbing on to the tree as if it were your mommy’s apron strings, or when you merely give them an adolescent tug. In the end it’s always the tree that controls each and every leaf that moves. But Bruno decided not to let the tree control him anymore.

In fact, hostilities only die down because the big branches intervene. Natale Scali and Pasquale Marando guarantee the Colombian brothers against insolvency. In other words, they take on Ventrici and Barbieri’s debt in Colombia. Holding them by the balls for a mere $6 million means the bosses can avoid a whole slew of hassles nobody really needs. They’ve got plenty of other more pressing matters to deal with. In Colombia, for example, Santo “Papi” Scipione is running into the usual snags when it comes to payments. The experience and authority he’s already acquired in the field aren’t enough to prevent the paramilitaries, who nabbed his most trusty narco the month before, from wanting to get even with him. There are enormous advantages to bargaining with AUC, but all it takes is one hitch, which for normal traffickers would become the object of a tranquil discussion, and you seriously risk ending up in a ditch. Santo Scipione waits for them to come get him.
“Because I don’t have anywhere to flee to, nowhere,” he sighs anxiously to Natale Scali, whose phone has already been tapped. The boss of Gioiosa Jonica wants to save Scipione: “A Calabrian’s life is worth more than a debt with these people, who don’t even know how to keep their word. They ask you for two but then they expect to get four.” Even the paramilitaries trust Scali’s word and, above all, his solvency. The hostages return home. But this time the veteran Calabrian narco has had the living daylight scared out of him.

 • • • 

Relying too much on past experience can sometimes betray you. You lean too much on what worked well before and have trouble evaluating anything new. This may partly explain why, curiously, the Aquino and Coluccio families of Marina di Gioiosa Jonica went into business with the Gulf cartel—to be precise, with Los Zetas, which, when the Italians first started dealing with them, was still the military arm of Friend Killer Osiel Cárdenas. What’s more, they did it from New York, after the Mexican narcos had already become the United States’ Enemy Number 2, when even direct imports of Taliban heroin could get into Europe more easily than a small shipment of cocaine from the heart of North America. It’s not as if the Calabrians didn’t try to be prudent. They shipped only microscopic lots, small enough at times to be sent by priority mail, and they never set foot outside the Big Apple when negotiating. But they still ended up with the DEA hard on their heels. The arrests started in 2008, and the substance of the huge investigation called Operation Reckoning (which in Italy was coordinated by the DDA of Reggio Calabria and was called Operazione Solare) became public. The United States punished the ’ndrangheta immediately by putting it on its Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklist, as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker. A tough blow. Excessive, from the Calabrians’ point of view. Their prudence wasn’t merely aimed at avoiding trouble with the DEA but with their new partners as well. They weren’t looking for some big business opening but were merely
testing a new, alternative supply channel that opened up, to supplement the Colombian one.

The Colombians have never been interested in or able to manage the European drug markets on their own, which is why the Calabrians preferred to cultivate their role as direct importers. But they find themselves in competition with the Mexicans. The strength of both lies in their handling the entire narco trafficking distribution chain, cocaine
in primis
. And both knew how to take advantage of Colombia’s growing weakness. But now the fragmentation of the Colombia cartels and their increasing subordination to the Mexicans was making ’ndrangheta business dealings more complicated and uncertain. Which is why it needed to find a way to adapt to the new economic reality but without running too many risks. What the Calabrians fear most is that the Mexicans will land in Europe and invade their markets. The apparent absurdity of importing through the United States seemed to reflect this fear. The ’ndragheta’s nightmare was not the Mexican cartels’ military but rather their commercial aggressiveness. Yet it wasn’t wholly indifferent to this other aspect either, perhaps because it believes itself to be an expression of a saner, more civilized Old World than the Mexicans, or because dealing with people capable of such incalculable ferocity increases the risks associated with their business. Yet the ’ndrangheta had worked with the Colombians, for whom mass killings were standard practice, and that collaboration had been successful for years. So it may be that, when the leaders in Marina di Gioiosa Jonica approved the New York experiment, the comparison between AUC and Zetas played a role, especially as Los Zetas had not yet become an independent and powerful cartel.

 • • • 

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.

 • • • 

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.