I Am the Market: How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton, in Five Easy Lessons - Hardcover

Rastello, Luca

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865479496 ISBN 13: 9780865479494

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2011

Synopsis

A page-turning account of the international cocaine trade, presented as five lessons in how to move tons of the drug across borders

Forget about cocaine concealed in false-bottomed suitcases or swallowed in ovules resistant to gastric juices. When entire national economies are kept afloat by the money from cocaine smuggling, the quantities these tactics represent are meaningless. When a commodity like cocaine becomes a mainstay of the international economy, grams and kilos are irrelevant. Because what is needed to sustain the market is cocaine by the ton.

Tons of cocaine means ships, cargo planes, and containers: large, cumbersome, extremely tangible, and visible amounts of white powder. So how is all that merchandise moved through harbors and airports? How are customs offices deceived, fiscal checks eluded, police networks infiltrated, and documents prepared to disguise mountains of cocaine?

It’s done with coca made into cubes, dissolved in liquid, hidden in marble blocks or inside electric cables. With friends in the right places. With cocaine smuggled in cranes. With sniffer dogs supplied to the police, free of charge. With money in cash, always. And yes, with willing mules swallowing drugs. But they will be arrested, and that’s part of the plan.

Drawing from years of research and conversations with criminal sources and convicted drug smugglers, with new information on the techniques, methods, and strategies used, Luca Rastello brings us a devastating portrait of the international cocaine trade. Told from the perspective of the formidable entrepreneurs whose tactics evolve and adapt to keep pace with shifts in the global economy, I Am the Market is a masterful exposé of a world we thought we understood—until now.

About this title

About the Author

Luca Rastello is a journalist at the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and director of Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, a think tank and website that specializes in the criminal economy and international relations.

Reviews

If La Repubblica journalist Rastello�s account of today�s cocaine trade has an overly Italian bent, or if his central conceit often distracts�he tells the tale in the wise-guy voice of an apparent composite of smugglers he met�this is still a compelling, credible explanation of cocaine�s clout in the global economy, how and where it is produced, and how it is distributed. For anyone connected to the trade, creativity is key, from expanding the growing areas of the coca leaf to diabolical ways of transporting the drug (as a paste inside electric cable, or by soaking clothes in it for later removal) and moving the cash used to pay for it. There might be a wickedly vicarious thrill to reading this story, but Rastello�s narrator was caught in the end. More important, the trade as an issue can only be genuinely engaged when it is understood, and for that, readers have Rastello to thank. --Alan Moores

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

 

LESSON ONE: The Problem

Finding a Better Solution Than Bribery

The secret of all secrets is the darkness, and you’re here to discover it. It’s the masterstroke, the brain wave, the revolution. The method of delivery in the dark changed the system of drug smuggling, changed the economy, changed the world. It’s a simple idea, as all the best ideas are, but one with unpredictable consequences: moving drugs by the ton using the legal economy as your carrier. If you are to understand it and put it into practice, there are a few little-known facts that you need to be aware of.

Have you seen Pulp Fiction? The War on Drugs was at its height when the film came out, and Tarantino had grasped something that Bush’s strategists hadn’t. The international market was changing; the American market was in deep crisis. Ronald Reagan’s smile had been extinguished, euphoria had drowned on a Black Friday that burst the financial bubble of the 1980s, the age of obligatory success and yuppie extravagance was over, and legions of forty-somethings had been knocked off the ladder to easy riches. Many people north of Tijuana began to taste the bitter fruits of failure. We traffickers too were attentive to the changes in demand, of course: some studied trends in consumption, as people do in all other businesses, and only an imbecile could still think of selling stimulants to the same poor bastards dressed in jacket and tie who had been our customers the year before. More relaxed models were needed now in the less “triumphant” United States. It was time to diversify supply, to suggest alternatives—sedative ones, if possible. And look what comes up on the screen. Instead of the hair-gelled, cocaine-snorting killers who abounded in the films of earlier years, here are Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta, with their tailored suits and their professional calm, pulling out syringe and tourniquet like any junkies in Naples or Marseille.

Yes, some relatively new substances emerge during that period, such as ecstasy-like synthetic drugs (though in fact the Germans had already used those in the First World War), and old hallucinogenic classics such as LSD come back into fashion, but what the mass of North American consumers are really asking us for is good old heroin, the queen of sedatives. In the 1990s the supply of heroin in America rises by 300 percent, from the ghettos of the Southwest to the middle-class districts in the big cities. Naturally, production too falls into line. It’s expensive to transport heroin from Asia, and the land is fertile over here too, so in Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and above all in Mexico, a new plant springs up all over the place: amapola, the opium poppy.

A lot of things change: long-established organizations that used to control the routes and the refinement lose influence; even the Italians don’t matter as much anymore. It’s the Mexicans now who supply the United States with heroin and who have largely supplanted the old godfathers.

And cocaine? It has to find other markets or risk overproduction and all the other problems that any shrewd trader associates with a big warehouse full of unsold merchandise. Europe, then, but it’s not an easy market. It’s accustomed to thinking of cocaine as a luxury product, fuel for the rich when they need to boost their performance. A niche market, shall we say? At the beginning of the last decade, flooding it with mass supply becomes a matter of survival. We need to take unprecedented quantities across the Atlantic, think up new strategies. The system needs new perspectives, new rules, a new professionalism. This is where the people known in the trade as “sistemistas” come in: they’re the heart of wholesale smuggling, formidable logistic experts capable of shifting goods in tons, evading the nets of the police and the traps and snares that catch out every good entrepreneur. The sistemistas—that’s us.

The market is changing, it’s adapting to the global transformations, but it’s huge, and it still offers great opportunities to anyone who knows what he’s doing. The possibilities are almost infinite. Let’s get to work, then.

The War Between the Cartels

The problem was bribery. Around 1986, five hundred kilos produced in the forest by the Cali cartel in Colombia and carried by truck to the port of Buenaventura required significant investment. In the first place, you had to have the truck drivers on your payroll. But in the harbor too, dozens of customs officers had to be paid not to ask questions. The merchandise might have to be loaded, for example, as it often was in those days, onto a coffee container—“longboats,” we used to call them—and taken to Los Angeles or San Diego. Back then we didn’t worry too much about protecting the shipments, and nobody thought seriously about substances for putting the dogs off the scent or opacifiers to fool the densitometers; it wasn’t particularly important to hide the merchandise well. You put it in the sacks of coffee, and that was it. There was no need to do any more than that because in both Los Angeles and San Diego you had your own people in the harbor, not least the police, dogs included. Didn’t you know? Most of the breeding kennels for sniffer dogs in the Caribbean were run by us. Amusing, eh? And of course, we were only too happy to give the police our best animals free of charge. We gave them the dogs that were supposed to intercept our merchandise.

That’s the way of the world.

Cops, then, but also shipping agents, carriers, and customs officers, just like in the port of departure. These guys were Yankees, though—lieutenants and captains on contracts. The blue-clad cops of the United States are expensive, far more so than a Colombian cholo, even those with stripes on their sleeves and braid on their chest. And don’t forget the middle part of the journey, between Buenaventura and San Diego—the ship’s captain, the radio operators, and the crew. An enormous number of people who all need to be bribed. And the point is this: if they’ve taken bribes from you, they might take them from others. From anyone. In other words, you never know how far you can trust them.

Too many expenses. And too many men involved, all of them liable to rat on you sooner or later. The most important thing for a good narco to know is the most banal thing of all, the thing you’re in danger of forgetting when you’re faced with a beautiful sunset, a generous gesture, or an evening with a woman: every man has his price.

The bosses of the cartels who warred against one another about twenty years ago were only too mindful of this law. In every port it’s easy to find a little fish who’ll be ready to reveal a lot if a policeman looking for promotion grabs him by the balls. And all it takes for a policeman to grab the right little fish by the balls is a tip-off. That’s the way to deal with your competitors. The result in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the collapse of billion-dollar operations, massive losses of merchandise, money, and good men who ended up behind bars or, worse, being protected in some federal witness program.

There were no alternatives at the time. From the bananaboat sailor to the shipping agent—and maybe even the ordinary down-and-out guys sitting around day and night on the benches of ports or in the waiting rooms of airports—you had to give everybody something. And with the ruthless competition that had developed, you can see why handling heavy loads had become a serious problem. The cunningly altered suitcase, the swallowed ovules, yes, of course, you could always get those through, but—I ask again—how much can you transport using those methods? And the trouble was that the war between the cartels was reaching its height just as a huge market was opening up in Europe.

Cocaine Invades Europe

The first to wake up were the Croats. They’d known for some time that there was going to be a war, and if there’s one thing you can always be sure of, it’s that a war means there is lots of money to be made. The Serbs controlled the supply route of Turkish heroin and took their slice from all the westward shipments, and the Croats, who wanted to break away from the old Yugoslavia, started to seize everything that passed through their territory. Listen to this, it’s incredible. In 1990 the Croats were rewarded by Interpol for having the most efficient police force in the world when it came to seizing heroin. Then in 1991, all of a sudden, the most efficient police in the world were no longer seizing a gram. Simple: they had set up in business. They were an independent state now, and they took their bribes too, just as the Belgrade officials did. At that point heroin had to find a new route. The Serbs didn’t want to lose the largest share of the business, and heroin stopped passing through Croatia.

But there was us. Well, not me, actually. I don’t like working with the Slavs—they’re ruthless, they kill just to show off their muscles, they have a completely different mentality from the South Americans. You see, the old Croat Nazis who fled the country after the Second World War had made their fortunes in South America on the back of the financial transactions connected with cocaine; and on the eve of a nationalist war (something a good Nazi is always hankering after) they had an opportunity to combine what was useful (business) with pleasure (arming their fatherland). They were in contact with people of the caliber of the Fidanzatis and, for money laundering, the Caruana-Cuntreras in the Antilles, down on Aruba—in other words with Cosa Nostra. And Cosa Nostra had some able people on the border of the new Croat...

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865479496
• ISBN 13: 9780865479494
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192