ZeroZeroZero (23 page)

No one deliberately designed an innovation that, had it been proposed in abstract terms, would have been rejected. No criminal organization would have said it was willing to share a significant part of its profits with someone outside the organization. It happens gradually; the qualitative leap is made simply because it happens at a certain point.

Mario from Madrid gains the Colombians’ trust when they are still at the height of their power. He travels with a bodyguard and a personal secretary, has learned from Pablo Escobar never to stay more than two nights in the same place, and changes cell phones as frequently as anyone else changes socks. But he’s not part of the Medellín or Cali cartels. And this turns out to be an advantage not only for himself, but also for the cocaine monopolists in Colombia, who start warring ruthlessly among themselves, a sign of their slow decline.

Bebè Pannunzi is tied to the Siderno and Platì families, linked by blood and lineage, but he never affiliates himself with any clan. He’s not an ’ndranghetista, a
camorrista,
or a mafioso. He unites different groups into a single investment company: Calabrians, Sicilians, groups based in the Salento, along with others. He creates a joint venture for drugs, capable of increasing contacts and contractual power beyond what any one clan could do: a stratified organization with strong membership bonds and a clear division between commanders and subordinates. Pannunzi is a skillful broker who constructs enormous financial operations with ease and moves quantities of drugs that would prove unmanageable for a single clan. Without this new figure, a broker, cocaine acquisition would have kept on functioning the old way: The mafia family sends a representative to South America, pays for part of the
load in advance, leaves its trusted man—who risks getting killed if anything goes wrong or if the final payment is delayed—in the narcos’ hands as a guarantee, and then contacts an intermediary to arrange for shipment.

Pannunzi reshuffles the cards. He moves to Colombia. He’s learned what there is to learn through close contact with the ’ndrine, and knows the time has come to pass on his example and teachings. He brings his son, Alessandro, into the business, who marries the daughter of a Medellín boss. On the telephone he speaks Spanish and calls him “Miguel,” to throw off any unwelcome listeners. His daughter, Simona, gets engaged to Francesco Bumbaca, who becomes his father-in-law’s right-hand man. They nickname Francesco Joe Pesci and Il Finocchietto (“Little Faggot”). In the early 1990s, Pannunzi takes advantage of the power of the Colombian cartels, who have punctuated the jungle with private airports. The ’ndrangheta could use a cargo plane for intercontinental trips, so Bebè gets them one.

He can afford a whole fleet of planes for moving the white merchandise. He collects millions and millions of euros from the various organizations. He acts as his own guarantor with the cartels in order to obtain enormous discounts for bulk purchases. He guarantees the transport and arrival of shipments to the ports. He also knows who will handle the cocaine once it reaches its destination. The more investors he has, the lower the price per kilo. He spreads out the losses caused by raids. He monitors the quality. He travels, creates contacts, meets clients. He seeks out financial backers and capital, but he’s the one to decide where and how to purchase. He looks for good carriers, safe coastlines, storage towns.

Locatelli’s actions mirror Pannunzi’s. He’s closer to his suppliers, so he keeps his base in Europe in order to maintain more dynamic relationship with his clients. He deals with everyone: the Bagheria and Gela families, the San Luca and Platì
’ndrine,
the most powerful clans from the area north of Naples. And, true to his entrepreneurial instinct, he deals in everything: cocaine and—increasingly—recycling are his
core businesses, but it would be stupid not to take advantage of the nearness of North Africa, transporting hashish across the Strait of Gibraltar, which is one of his naval strongholds. Drawing on old relationships and past experience, he also sets up an international sales network for stolen cars. But events in a country farther from the Iberian Peninsula are what allow Mario to make yet another leap. He is one of the first to grasp the immense potential that the tensions and then the war in the former Yugoslavia present. Drugs, weapons, money—he creates a business triangulation based on these three elements, bouncing them from Spain to America, from America to the Balkans.

The man from Bergamo structures his business like a family firm, allowing himself only a few trusted collaborators. Close relations and people in his pay who are kept constantly under pressure and controlled, rigid hierarchies, a conspiracy of silence. Despite not having any historical ties to the mafia, the Bergamo enterprise absorbs more and more of its characteristics, thereby acquiring its winning impermeability as well. But the mafias’ operational model is nothing other than a distinctive inflection of Italy’s dominant business model. The intertwining of affection and business risks becoming an Achilles’s heel, just as it does for real mafiosi. In 1991 the Carabinieri discover that when Locatelli is in Italy, he lives with his girlfriend, Loredana Ferraro, in Nigoline di Corte Franca, a village near Brescia. They’re just about to spring the trap when Diabolik gets in a car and speeds away, eluding capture and turning the Franciacorta vineyards into a new version of a Hollywood high-speed chase scene. He and Loredana stay together and she, like their two sons, shares his interests and his fate: Ten years later she too will be arrested in Spain, the last of Mario’s network to be brought to justice.

Men like Bebè and Mario, but also those bosses who drank the ancestral family rules with their mothers’ milk, often turn out to be vulnerable because of a relationship with a woman. It’s not the ones they buy for a night who put them at risk, women who to them are no different from other expensive luxury goods. It’s the women they bond
with, with whom they form a relationship of trust. The pawn who seems at one point to point to Pannunzi is named Caterina. She’s not just any girl, susceptible to the charms and power of an older businessman, nor would Bebè have wanted to really share the actual substance of his life had she not been able to offer all the necessary guarantees to become his true accomplice. Caterina Palermo has a reassuring pedigree: She’s the sister of a mafioso from the same clan as Miceli. The investigators find out that she has booked a flight from Madrid to Caracas, so they trail her. After landing in the Venezuelan capital Caterina heads to a town on the Colombian border, where her companion is then living. They’d agreed to an amorous appointment there, but Pannunzi, tipped off by some unknown informer, doesn’t show. The woman and the policemen return to Italy, for once sharing the same feeling: disappointment.

 • • • 

The broker from the North and the broker from the South are the Copernicus and Galileo of the cocaine business. With them the model changes. Before it was cocaine that rotated around money. Now it’s money that has entered cocaine’s orbit, sucked into its gravitational field. When I follow their trails I feel as though I’m leafing through a textbook on how to be a successful broker: First of all, vast available funds—the prerequisite for being able to dictate the terms of a deal. Formidable organizational skills. A broad vision combined with precision in defining every detail. They excel at mediation and have learned how to solve problems. They guarantee provisions to anyone who gets in their good graces and can pay. They know it’s better to keep their distance from politics, and from violence. All they want to do is move the white stuff, and to do that, all they need is money and good connections. Criminal groups, even rivals, allow them this freedom, because thanks to Mario and Bebè, they make money.

Last, they have intuition, a quality you can’t buy and can’t learn; it is
priceless. It’s something you’re born with, and they were both born with far greater than average doses. Intuition is above all empathy, knowing how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, sniffing out his habits, his weak points, his resistance. For Bebè and Mario, a client is an open book. They know how to get to him, how to convince him. They know that if he hesitates, that’s the moment to insist; if he seems too sure of himself, that’s the time to make him understand who holds the purse strings. They switch easily from one language to another, from one culture to another; they know how to be sponges, how to transform themselves, to belong to whatever part of the world they happen to be in. They know how to appear as humble intermediaries and when to unleash their authority, sympathy, charm. That’s what intuition is: knowing human nature and knowing how to manipulate it.

But intuition is also foresight. If financial brokers had learned from cocaine brokers, they probably wouldn’t have crashed into the cement wall of economic crises. Pannunzi and Locatelli intuited that the mass market for heroin was coming to an end. They understood this even while the world continued to consume heroin by the ton and while the Italian mafias were still investing everything in it. Cocaine was about to invade the world, and it would prove more pervasive, and more difficult to check. And Pannunzi and Locatelli were there early.

The police nab them a couple of times, but the two brokers always find a way to resolve the problem. They don’t order any killings. They have a lot of money; they know how to defend themselves, how not to leave clues. They don’t draw media attention; very few journalists have heard of them; only a tight group of people in the know are aware of how important they are. When they get out of jail, there’s no public uproar.

The year 1994 might have been their
annus horribilis,
but the cyclone that strikes them isn’t strong enough to uproot them. In January Pannunzi is arrested in Medellín, where he’s been living for four years. And the million dollars he offers the police to let him go isn’t enough.
Shockingly, they won’t play along. Pannunzi remains locked in a Colombian prison, awaiting extradition to Italy, where he’s transferred in December.

Meanwhile, the final phase of a maxi-operation, subtly named Operation Dinero, which international police forces and the DEA and FBI have coordinated, is coming to a head. According to the DEA, the two-year investigation led to 116 arrests in Italy, Spain, the United States, and Canada. All in all, including two continents, around $90 million in cash and a huge quantity of cocaine—nine tons—were seized. On September 6, 1994, Locatelli is having dinner at Adriano, a well-known restaurant in Madrid, surrounded by his inner circle: his Swiss secretary, Heidi, who, like him, travels with fake documents; and his right-hand man in Italy, the Pugliese lawyer Pasquale Ciola. Domenico Catenacci, the deputy public prosecutor of Brindisi, is also there. Recently he’d thought of running for public office, but at the last minute he changed his mind and moved to Como. Later Catenacci is accused of having ties to organized crime and is suspended, but when put on trial he is able prove that he had no idea who Pasquale Locatelli was, and is acquitted. Mario is arrested and sent to jail in Madrid. He loses four of his ships in addition to his liberty, which were already loaded with drugs and weapons and ready to sail for Croatia, as well as many other pieces of his empire.

Operation Dinero is a huge success, and the head of the DEA and the Italian interior minister boast about it in press conferences on their respective sides of the ocean. Two years of investigations and top-secret operations. Infiltrators on two continents, and then the big bait: a bank opened in Anguilla for laundering narco-dollars. A real bank, duly registered, with elegant offices and highly qualified and extremely competent employees who welcome clients in various languages. Yet the whole thing is controlled by the DEA. The RHM Trust Bank offers dream interest rates, especially to wealthy clients. The Colombians grow greedy. One of the DEA’s financial consultants manages to establish a rapport with Carlos Alberto Mejía, alias Pipe, a narco-trafficker linked
to the Cali cartel who organizes shipments to the United States and Europe, by showing him the RHM Trust Bank’s credentials. The bank is located in a British fiscal paradise and guarantees seriousness, ease of access, and extremely advantageous rates. The narcos are used to a life of luxury and money that comes and goes like a tropical rainstorm. Mejía loves to spend money on one of his country’s abiding passions: horses. Paso Fino horses are native to Colombia, dating back to the arrival of Spanish conquistadores astride mysterious, gigantic beasts that the terrified
indios
thought were gods. During the era of the cocaine kings the handsomest and most famous horse is Terremoto de Manizales, a sorrel belonging to Pablo Escobar’s brother. But just at the time that the DEA infiltrator was getting close to Carlos Alberto Mejía an enemy group kidnapped Terremoto, killing his jockey. They abandoned the horse a few days later on a Medellín street, castrated. They knew that this mutilation would hurt more than killing many men and would be a serious blow to the Escobar family’s image. There’s a legend in Colombia that Terremoto was used to produce an identical horse sixteen years after his castration, cloned by a specialist firm in the United States.

Mejía too owns a stable of prized Paso Fino horses, as well as an art collection, which he seems less attached to. He decides to entrust the bank’s intermediaries with three paintings: a Picasso, a Rubens, and a Reynolds. Experts estimated their value at $15 million. But money laundering is the real business for the bank. Mejía starts with almost $2.5 million, from narco-trafficking in Italy, to be reinvested, money that arrives through a trusted colleague of Mejía’s Italian partner who operates in Spain and Italy.

Which is how the DEA agents suddenly and unexpectedly find themselves on the trail of Pasquale Locatelli. Their plan had been to hit the strongest narco-trafficking organization in the world at that time, the Cali cartel. Mario from Madrid appears practically out of nowhere. He and his organization turn out to be incredibly difficult to get their hooks into. Never a call from a traceable phone.
Money-laundering schemes so swift that no one can keep up with the transfers. Precisely because of the Italian partner, the investigation comes to a dead end. The team decides to put an undercover agent on him, a very special agent. An inspector in the anti-crime unit of the Italian police whose financial expertise has been honed by years of investigations but who has never done an undercover mission. Young, not even twenty-seven years old, but very presentable, an impeccable presence. Fluent in several languages and familiar with sophisticated money-laundering methods. And a woman.