ZeroZeroZero (36 page)

It takes preparation and mental strength to become a mule. You have to respect the rules and put your body through harsh training. Mamadu learns the secrets of the profession one suffocating afternoon, inside an abandoned shed on the outskirts of Bissau. Johnny told him to show up with an empty suitcase. “Why empty?” Mamadu had asked, but didn’t get an answer. In the middle of the shed is a long, low table on which is a row of capsules only slightly bigger than aspirin. Johnny, like a chef showing off his creations, gestures to Mamadu to come closer. He tells him to sit in the plastic chair in front of him, with the suitcase on his knees.

“Open it. Tell me what’s inside.”

Mamadu looks at him wide-eyed, he doesn’t know what to say.

“Don’t be afraid. Open it and tell me what’s inside,” he insists.

“It’s empty, sir.”

Johnny shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “It’s full. You are a tourist, you have some clothes with
you, bathing suits. If someone like me wants to know what’s inside your suitcase, that’s how you have to answer. That’s the first lesson, the most important one.

Rules. In order to become a mule, above all you have to be a good actor. A tourist is perfect. But not too overweight. Too many capsules make your belly swell, and the customs officers have a sharp eye: The first ones they stop are fat men traveling alone with just a carry-on. Then there’s the payment. On delivery only. Too many mules in the past decided to live the good life in Europe for a few days with the narcos’ money and their drugs. And finally there’s the physical training.

“I like you, Mamadu. For you, only top of the line products. We care about our employees’ health,” Johnny says to him.

Mamadu is naïve but he’s not stupid. He sighs with relief when he discovers that his mouth is the only orifice of his body he has to open.

“I like you, Mamadu,” Johnny repeats. “Let’s go just with the main entrance this time.”

The training is very simple: You start with one capsule, fighting the instinct to spit it up. The operation is repeated a number of times, until the mule is able to swallow several dozen of them and then walk around like a young African tourist dazzled by Old Europe. Mamadu is ready.

Africa is to Mexico like a giant supermarket is to a food wholesaler. Cocaine is like one of the epidemics that have spread with alarming speed all over the African continent.

Africa is white. The dark continent is buried under a blanket of white snow.

Senegal is white, and so is the Léopold Sédar Senghor airport in Dakar. From a strategic point of view, it’s perfect: not far from Europe; not far from the world, thanks to connecting flights to capitals around the globe. Coke has to move quickly, and here, in white Senegal, it finds the energy to do so. Spanish, Portuguese, South African: only three of the nationalities of the most recent mules arrested aboard planes either arriving at or departing from Senghor airport. When the
load is much larger, boats are needed. The
Opnor,
for example, which carried in its iron belly almost 4,000 kilos of cocaine destined for European markets before it was intercepted by the authorities in 2007 off the coast of Senegal. Senegal is a turntable, capable of taking in tons of coca to be treated, stockpiled, and then sent on.

Liberia is white. And Fumbah Sirleaf, son of the Liberian president, dirtied his hands white. It is he who works for the DEA, and who contributes to the fall of an organization whose ranks include African bosses and Colombian narcos. In 2010, thanks to a DEA operation, a network of South American, East European, and African drug traffickers was arrested. The associates had been in contact with this Liberian big shot, Sirleaf, for a long time, but they didn’t know that in fact he was a DEA informer. Sirleaf discovered that the network could count on high Liberian state officials for their traffic and gave precious information and tape recordings to the DEA.

Cape Verde, a turntable per excellence, is white. The ten islands that make up the archipelago hold out their hands to Latin America while remaining firmly anchored off the coast of Senegal. A drug traffickers’ paradise.

Mali is white. And white are the projects of Mohamed Ould Awainatt, a businessman arrested in 2011, the head of an organization that treated the desert as a highway heading north. Jeeps and cocaine.

Guinea is white. White are the affairs of Ousmane Conté, son of the president who governed Guinea for twenty-four years, arrested in 2009 for international drug trafficking. In an interview on national TV, Conté admits between the lines to being implicated in drug trafficking but denies being the head of Guinean narco-trafficking. His brother Moussa is arrested as well, and two years later a huge trial begins, involving dozens of big shots. But nearly all the accused, including Ousmane Conté, will be exonerated. Corruption and precarious institutions: the holes the traffickers slip through.

Sierra Leone is white. Fragile, poor, wounded by civil war right up
until the advent of democracy in 2002. And white is the Cessna that in 2008 was supposed to be carrying medical supplies and instead concealed more than half a ton of cocaine.

South Africa is white, and white are her coasts, white her ports, where ships from Latin America arrive. White are the customs of this country. As its wealth has increased, so has its consumption of cocaine.

Mauritania is white. White are the dusty runways where small planes land, jammed full of cocaine. It is the zipper between the Atlantic Ocean and the Maghreb.

Angola is white, because its ties with Brazil are white. Former Portuguese colonies that become brothers through transoceanic coke shipments. Here, as in southern Africa, a good part of the cocaine market is run by Nigerians, who boast of their important criminal history and one of the most organized structures in the world.

Africa is white.

 • • • 

I look at Mamadu and think about how individual stories can reflect the destiny of an entire continent. The hardest part was learning to deal with the stress, he says. To invent another self, as similar as possible to the few tourists he’s seen in his short life. Awareness has to be crystallized into habit, routine gestures must supplant instinct’s automatic response when faced with danger. Johnny tells him to meet him in front of the Bissau police station. He doesn’t tell him to bring a suitcase, because this time Johnny arrives with an elegant overnight bag. When Mamadu is a few steps away he hands it to him and tells him there’s five thousand dollars inside.

“You could be anybody. You’re a young man with a shiny overnight bag loaded with cash. Go into the police station, chat a bit with the police officers, and then come back out, as if it were nothing.”

“I was sure he was joking,” Mamadu tells me. “If the police officers caught me with a suitcase full of money, how would I explain?”

But Johnny’s not joking in the least. He’s deadly serious; even that conciliatory smile he usually wears is hidden between tightly closed lips.

“I plucked up my courage,” Mamadu tells me. “I prayed that this was the last test I had to face before starting my new job. Then I went into the police station.”

Johnny is the perfect exponent of the most effective and reliable criminal organization on the African continent: the Nigerian underworld.

The Nigerian underworld is an international force that has grown out from its roots to the four corners of the earth. They are small- to medium-size groups with a familial, tribal basis, and the branches of their interests extend to many important open-air drug markets. It’s a mix of tradition and modernity, which has allowed the Nigerians to get a foot in all the African capitals north to south, and to spread beyond the continent, thanks in part to the experience they gained selling heroin in the 1980s—international flights loaded with mules, and when those weren’t enough, Nigerian traffickers recruited the flight crew. Then cocaine arrives, and the Nigerians throw themselves into the new business. Europe’s needs have to be met, and the Africans are ready. So ready that they start obtaining coke directly from the producing countries. Today their presence in Europe is huge, and they’re in great demand by the Colombian and Mexican narcos, as well as by the Italian mafias. One of the progenitors is Peter Christopher Onwumere. Before he was arrested in Brazil in 1997, Onwumere proved he was a real international narco. He negotiated, bought, organized transports, and raked in the cash. The Nigerians are phenomenal subcontractors, and they know where to find cannon fodder, like Mamadu.

“I’ll never forget my first takeoff,” Mamadu tells me. “My stomach sank; it took my breath away. The passenger sitting next to me gives me a paternal smile when he sees me join my hands in prayer; he doesnn’t know I’m just begging God not to let one of the sixty capsules inside me explode. It’s a Royal Air Maroc flight, with a stopover in Casablanca,
then from there to Lisbon. I tell myself that it will all be over in a few hours. I can’t help but think how excruciating it will be to expel the capsules, or how I’ll survive a whole day in some unknown European capital. I look anxiously at the tourists who’ve boarded in Casablanca. If I had a sign on my chest that said ‘I’m a drug runner’ I probably would have been less conspicuous amid all these smiling, carefree men and women in shorts and flip-flops, cameras dangling around their necks. Then, like a lightning bolt, a thought comes to me and suddenly chases away my fear. Are these the people who use the stuff inside of me? Are they my clients? So I start looking at them differently, at the stranger in the center row, this really fat guy who’s resting his crossed arms on his belly. The woman next to him, she’s big too, is assailing him with words that have got to be important, but he acts like nothing’s wrong, or maybe he’s fallen asleep. Then I remember what Johnny said about the effects of cocaine, and I think these must be the two principal states: euphoria and oblivion.”

I’m struck by Mamadu’s wisdom, by his ability to see.

“I’ve done nineteen trips from Bissau to Lisbon, Madrid, Amsterdam. You could say I have a job with an ongoing contract, at least until I’m caught or a capsule opens inside of me. I’ve realized by now that I’m a resource that can be sacrificed. Which is why the bosses turn to people like me, even if the amount of merchandise I can carry is small. Because the risk is small too. If I’m arrested, somebody else will be ready to take my place the very next day.”

Mamadu didn’t start to see any money until after he’d done three trips. Johnny would always drag things out, say he didn’t have any cash on him; if Mamadu kept doing such a good job, the small change he had coming to him would soon become a distant memory. But every now and then Johnny would offer him a line, just one, because you have to be familiar with the product you’re selling, he’d say. A bit of white powder revs you up to face customs and the cunning gazes of those European women. Not that Mamadu needs the cocaine. He’s refined his disguise: Now he’s an African until he gets to Casablanca,
and then a tourist for the rest of the trip. Tourists have no nationality; being a tourist is an attitude, and at that point the color of your skin, your bloodshot eyes, and your crumpled clothes don’t matter. The fear he felt on his first trip has dissolved into routine. Word that controls are being tightened or news of the mounting tide of seizures don’t bother him at all. European countries have been flexing their muscles for years now, trying to stop the relentless flood of cocaine. Governments have decided to strike at the heart of illegal trafficking, and the list of detainments and seizures grows longer every day. But those names and facts have nothing to do with Mamadu, nor does the new transportation method some mules thought up: They impregnate their clothes with liquid cocaine. At this point he can toss down capsules as if they were cookies. And besides, he can’t stop now. Johnny has told him that there’ll be a stewardess on his next flight who is part of the organization, who facilitates the mules’ work.

“She’s cute,” Johnny added, “and it seems she just broke up with her boyfriend. You could ask her out.”

“I did the math,” Mamadu says to me. “By my thirtieth delivery I should have enough money to treat her to dinner in a fancy restaurant in
Lisbon.”

Andean folk art paintings

January 21, 2005, Fiumicino airport: A Guatemalan citizen is detained. Five paintings with pre-Columbian motifs are found in his luggage. Behind each painting is an envelope containing a kilo of 92 percent pure cocaine. Total value: €1 million.

Treated and partially treated calfskins

September 14, 2005, port of Livorno: The ship
Cala Palma
, which sailed from the Venezuelan port of La Guaira is impounded. Found among the calfskins are 691 kilos of 98 percent pure Colombian cocaine.

Statues of the Virgin Mary

March 30, 2006, Brooklyn: The DEA arrests eleven people for cocaine smuggling. They had hidden the precious merchandise—194 kilos of it—
inside statues of the Virgin Mary, destined for various churches and cemeteries.

Wooden doors

February 24, 2007, Guildford, Surrey, Great Britain: Paul Sneath, an English bloke from a good family, is sentenced to eighteen years for bringing 17 kilos of cocaine into the country. He had purchased handcrafted wooden doors carved with exotic parrots and had them stuffed with sheets of plywood soaked in liquid cocaine. On the market the drugs would have brought about £3 million.

Statue of Jesus Christ

May 30, 2008, on the Nuevo Laredo border crossing, across from Texas: A Mexican woman is detained at customs. Agents find 3 kilos of cocaine hidden inside the large statue of Jesus Christ in her luggage.

Fake pineapples

August 22, 2008, Naples: The ROS, which deals with organized crime, seizes 100 kilos of pure cocaine hidden in wax pineapples in a house in Poggiomarino. Value: €40 million.

Squid

January 2009, port of Naples: During routine controls, the Finance Guard discovers 15 kilos of cocaine hidden among 1,600 cans of squid shipped from Peru.

Children’s books

April 9, 2009, Christopher Columbus airport in Genoa: An Italian woman, twenty-one years old, is arrested after picking up a package of children’s books sent from South America. Inside are 300 grams of cocaine.

Ceiba speciosa

April 30, 2009, port of Vado Ligure, Savona: The Naples Finance Guard intercepts a shipment of
Ceiba speciosa
, a tropical tree known in Latin America as Palo Borracho, or drunken tree. Noted for their irregular, bulging trunks, the trees concealed 250 kilos of cocaine.

Suitcases

June 2, 2009, Santiago de Chile airport: Sandra Figueroa, a twenty-six-year-old Argentinian woman, catches the customs officers’ attention: The bags she is dragging along are too heavy. A chemical analysis reveals that her luggage is made of fiberglass, resin, and 15 kilos of cocaine.

Frozen sharks

June 17, 2009, port of Progreso, Yucatan, Mexico: The Mexican navy seizes eight hundred blocks of cocaine, hidden inside twenty or so frozen shark bodies.

Containers

June 21, 2009, Padua: The Carabinieri of Padua, with the help of antidrug dogs, discover about 400 kilos of cocaine in containers of bananas and pineapples on a trailer truck.

Trunks of precious wood

July 22, 2009, Calabria: The Maesano Brothers’ network is uncovered. Thanks to their import-export business they were shipping a container a month to Bolivia, with tools for cutting down forests. The container would be sent back full of precious tree trunks stuffed with blocks of cocaine, each weighing at least 100 kilos.

Transportation trailers

November 12, 2010, port of Gioia Tauro, Calabria: In the context of Operation Meta 2010 an undocumented container from Brazil filled with trailers for agricultural transport is inspected. Sophisticated tests reveal anomalies in the metal tubes that make up the frames. The tubes are opened with gas torches and one thousand blocks are extracted: 1,000 kilos in all.

Airplane cockpit

February 1, 2011, Fiumicino airport: Two airport technicians, grilled by customs officers made suspicious by their behavior, confess their desire to steal precious objects from the hold of a plane that has just landed from Caracas. But the investigators, alarmed by the antidrug dogs’ agitation, discover thirty blocks of cocaine—35 kilos—stuffed behind the instrument panel in the cockpit.

Frozen fish

March 19, 2011, port of Gioia Tauro: A container that arrived by cargo ship from Ecuador is intercepted. Hidden inside, among the frozen fish, are 140 kilos of pure cocaine.

Palm hearts

April 8, 2011, port of Livorno: The Rome Carabinieri seize a container filled with cans of palm hearts on a ship from Chile. In the cans they find 1,200 kilos of cocaine.

Cookbook

October 2011, Turin: A package sent from Peru via Frankfurt is seized. Inside is a cookbook, the pages of which are stuffed with cocaine. It weighs 500 grams. The person to whom the package is addressed, an Italian, is arrested in his home. In addition to cocaine, investigators find equipment for preparing individual doses, scales, and a press for packaging blocks. Subsequent investigations uncover a criminal network that was trafficking cocaine from Peru to Italy by way of Germany.

Coffee

October 27, 2011, port of Barcelona: The Civil Guard score the biggest drug seizure ever in the port of Barcelona: 625 kilos of cocaine hidden in a container transporting coffee.

Canned asparagus

December 10, 2011, Lima, Peru: Five hundred liters of liquid cocaine worth $20 million are seized in a home in a Lima suburb. The drug was in the brine of canned asparagus.

Artificial breasts and buttocks

December 21, 2011, Fiumicino airport: A Spanish model coming from São Paulo in Brazil is detained. A search reveals 2.5 kilos of pure cocaine crystals inserted in her artificial breasts and buttocks.

Valentine’s Day flowers

February 2012, port of Hull, England: Eighty-four kilos of cocaine hidden in boxes of flowers that an English florist purchased for Valentine’s Day are seized. The man had gone to Holland to buy them himself, and sailed from Rotterdam. He was loading his truck when the British police noticed that three boxes weighed five times more than the others.

Genitals

April 2012, Folcroft, Pennsylvania: Ray Woods, twenty-three years old, from Philadelphia, is detained by the police in an area known for drug dealing. When he is searched they find forty-eight doses of cocaine in a bag strapped to his penis.

Legumes, aluminum, foodstuffs

June 7, 2012, port of Gioia Tauro: The Finance Guard seizes 300 kilos of pure cocaine onboard the MSC container ship
Poh Lin
, which had set sail from South America. The drugs were found in three containers—in nine large black bags hidden among foodstuffs, legumes, and scrap aluminum—on their way to northern Italian businesses that do not usually import such products.

Peanuts

June 8, 2012, port of Gioia Tauro: Discovered in a container from Brazil are 630 kilos of cocaine. It was divided into 580 blocks and stuffed in sixteen bags hidden inside a shipment of peanuts.

Medical supplies for earthquake-damaged areas

June 8, 2012, port of Genoa: The Carabinieri find over €1 million worth of cocaine hidden among medical instruments being shipped to a business in Emilia that had suffered serious earthquake damage. The container, which arrived from the Dominican Republic, immediately raised suspicions because such medical equipment usually comes from China.

Sugar

June 15, 2012, port of London: Just outside the capital city, in one of the harbor terminals on the Thames, 30 kilos of cocaine hidden in a load of sugar that had arrived on a cargo ship from Brazil are seized.

Skins

July 22, 2012, Portugal: The Portuguese police arrest a businessman from Vicenza who works in the tanning industry. The investigators find 120 kilos of cocaine in the container of skins sent from Brazil.

Cocoa

August 23, 2012, port of Anversa: Belgian authorities discover just over two tons of cocaine in jute sacks filled with cocoa seeds onboard a container
ship from Ecuador. The cocaine, worth €100 million, was on its way to a warehouse in Amsterdam.

Parquet

August 23, 2012, port of Caacupe-mí, Paraguay: Hidden among irregularly cut pieces of wood for parquet floors are 330 kilos of cocaine; they are seized on a container ship ready to set sail from the private port in Caacupe-mí, on the Paraguay River. A corrupt customs officer is arrested.

Roast chicken

September 3, 2012, Lagos, Nigeria, airport: A Nigerian engineer returning from São Paulo, Brazil, where he had worked for the past five years, is detained at customs. The police find 2.5 kilos of cocaine hidden among the leftover roast chicken he brought to eat during the flight.

Hair

September 26, 2012, JFK airport, New York: Kiana Howell and Makeeba Graham, two girls who have just arrived from Guyana, a former British colony between Venezuela and Brazil, arouse the customs officials’ suspicion. When they are searched, each is found to have a block of cocaine, weighing about 1 kilo, hidden in her hairdo.

Chickpeas

October 12, 2012, port of Gioia Tauro: 100 kilos of cocaine sent from Mexico on the ship
Bellavia
are intercepted. The drug was hidden in sacks of chickpeas, officially destined for Turkey.

Balloons

October 14, 2012, port of Limón, Costa Rica: During routine checks of a cargo ship anchored in the port of Limón, which leads into the Caribbean, antidrug agents discover 119 kilos of cocaine hidden among multicolored balloons usually used for children’s birthday parties.

Shrimp and bananas

October 18, 2012, Milan: The Milan DDA arrests about fifty people tied to a huge cocaine network importing into Italy, Belgium, Holland, Austria, and Germany. The loads, hidden among frozen shrimp and cartons of bananas, arrived from Colombia and Ecuador, either in ships that docked at the Hamburg and Anversa ports or in planes that landed at the Vienna airport. The trafficking was managed by the Lombard branches of the most powerful Calabrian families: the Pelles of San Luca, the Morabitos of Africo, the Molès of Gioia Tauro.

Sweet potatoes

October 19, 2012, Paramaribo, Suriname, airport: Customs officials, whose suspicion was aroused by the excessive weight of six sacks of sweet potatoes leaving the Johan Adolf Pengel airport, the main airport in this former Dutch colony in South America, discover 60 kilos of cocaine inside the tubers.

Carpets

November 27, 2012, Milan: The Carabinieri of the province of Milan arrest fifty-three Italian and Colombian citizens, accusing them of drug
trafficking, unlawful possession of weapons, receiving stolen goods, and money laundering. The network, based in Cesano Boscone, was impregnating imported carpets with liquid cocaine. Once the carpets arrived in Milan they were washed with special products to release the drug from the wool fibers, which was then dried.