ZeroZeroZero (20 page)

The Italian investigators are treading on virgin territory. They have trouble following Bruno into a reality so different from the one they know: the Medellín cartel, the Cali cartel. But it doesn’t mean a thing now if you come from Medellín or Cali: For the power system that orbits around cocaine, what matters most is if you’re a paramilitary or a guerrilla. Fuduli has been going to Colombia since 1996. His confidential relationship begins one year before the United States declares AUC a terrorist organization, whose ties to narco-trafficking are merely strongly suspected. FARC, though long a target of massive military aid, still passes for a subversive army funded by robbery and kidnappings.

It’s not surprising therefore, that the first time Fuduli names Castaño and Mancuso in his statements to the magistrates there’s a fair amount of confusion. In the end it is impossible to decide whether Fuduli, together with Ramiro and his brother, had been summoned “to the jungle” by the supreme commander and his number two or if the narcos negotiated the
nulla osta
for the shipment that was later stopped in Salerno with a lieutenant whose nom de guerre is Boyaco. Sure, the transcription is even more confusing than the recording of Fuduli’s interview with the magistrates, rambling on as he does about paramilitaries in general and about Carlos Castaño, who “by this point . . . has incriminated himself and has been completely condemned.” Yet the transcription does seem to preserve some trace of the kinds of misunderstandings that arise when one party alludes to information that the other party doesn’t know anything about. Fuduli probably expected to be asked more than merely “Mancuso who?” to which he responds with a laconic “Mancuso Colombian.” I certainly would have liked to delve deeper into his story, to know more about such an anomalous witness’s experience, even if it weren’t directly related to the investigation. The fact remains that Operation Decollo verified the connection between AUC and the ’ndrangheta, and was the first to do so. But Fuduli’s words have a different taste than the phone calls between Santo Scipione and Natale Scali. A strange, ancient taste. Not the taste of tales of those who went in search of treasure or explored uncharted lands but of
one who has ended up there because someone else willed it. They often reminded me of the accounts of the first missionaries sent to the American continent.

There’s one point in particular the investigators linger over, circle back to, even though Fuduli can’t provide them with any other essential information. He alleges that Felipe, toward the end of 2000, proposed he meet a narco-trafficker who had access to ships that could deliver supplies right off the Ionian coast—huge shipments, from both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries. The idea even enticed Natale Scali, and he sent one of his men, along with Bruno and a cousin of Francesco Ventrici, to represent him. The meeting didn’t take place in Colombia, nor in the bordering countries of Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, or Panama. The Calabrians were instead taken by tourist charter to Cancún, from there to Mexico City, and finally to Guadalajara. They were met at the airport and taken by car to a
finca
in the countryside. There they awaited the arrival of someone whom Felipe introduced merely as “my godfather.”

Fuduli cannot tell the investigators the godfather’s name or nickname. He doesn’t know if he is Mexican or Colombian. He’s been told he is in hiding, but he doesn’t know the country he’s wanted in. Felipe is the unreliable type, with delusions of grandeur that will reveal themselves later. So when he passes his “godfather” off as “one of the biggest in Mexico,” there’s no reason to believe him. But Ramiro, who is much more trustworthy, confirms to Bruno that every fifteen days he prepares a shipment and readies the runway so that Felipe can fly 400 kilos of cocaine to a private landing strip in Mexico. He also tells him that the reason those low-flying flights are made only every two weeks is simply that all the Colombian family cartels together aren’t able to fill the plane every week.

 • • • 

The Italian magistrates must not have found sufficient proof of the deals with the “godfather living in Mexico,” even though a Mexican
citizen figures among those condemned in the first round of the trial that followed the investigation. But in light of what has transpired in the more than ten years that have passed since these reports were transcribed, in light of the information that the Reckoning and Solare investigations provided, Fuduli’s story seems in fact to be the chronicle of the Calabrians’ first landing in Mexico.

When I think about Bruno, when I recall his words, I ask myself what it means to encounter your destiny by mistake rather than by chance. The difference between fate and accident depends on your point of view, on the stories you tell—or don’t tell—yourself about the meaning of your life. The error of accepting Natale Scali’s proposal. The error he decided to try and erase by collaborating with the law. But Bruno Fuduli continued to dwell in that error for nearly ten years. He wasn’t an independent broker, and he wasn’t affiliated with a clan. He’d get on planes and go to tropical borderlands, to no man’s lands brimming with mines, fear, and poverty. And right at the end he found himself locked up for two weeks in a hut in the Bogotá savannah, altitude 11,500 feet, guarded day and night by paramilitaries armed to the teeth. The problem, that time, was the Vibo Valentia guys’ shipment seized in Hamburg, valued at $3 million. The Colombians wanted to be paid, they wanted to collect on what they’d sent. The Calabrians didn’t want to hear it, though; they wanted to pay only for the goods they received. Natale Scali couldn’t step in anymore. He’d been arrested in Marina di Gioiosa Jonica. Pasquale Marando couldn’t either—he was killed, but there’s no trace of his body. Right before the end the double game was turning into Russian roulette, with more than one bullet in the barrel. Bruno lost twenty pounds; all they gave him was water. He got sick. They moved him to an apartment in the capital, fearing for the life of their hostage. From there, instead of calling his counterparts in Calabria, he came up with a way to alert the Carabinieri. The Special Operations Group (ROS) collaborated with the Colombian police, who on January 12, 2004, managed to rescue him without firing a single shot. Later the AUC came for Ramiro. They stuffed him in the same
hole of a hut Bruno’d been in until Ventrici and Barbieri finally settled their bill. Bruno’s double life as an infiltrator was about to end.

 • • • 

Even the judicial inquiries draw on the tree metaphor, and they propagate like branches. After Operation Decollo will come Decollo bis, Decollo ter, and Decollo Money, each of which will become intertwined with still other investigations. Follow the money: That was Giovanni Falcone’s pioneering investigative strategy and his lesson to magistrates who came after him. Yet this remains the hardest thing for investigators to do. It’s the fault of inadequate laws and tools, widespread complicity, and a lack of awareness and therefore of public pressure about the matter. It’s the fruit of a certain media logic, in which a drug seizure is worth at least ten lines in the paper, while the seizure of a property or business barely gets a mention in the local news, even though the economic aspects of Mafia activities are getting more attention in Italy. The information arrives, but it isn’t seen. The money even less.

Money isn’t merely that abstract entity, almost mystical for its volatility, infinite quantities of which can be moved from one end of the planet to the other with a mere click of a keyboard. Invested in the most cryptic funds, in the most high-risk stocks. At least not for the ’ndrangheta, or for mafias in general. For them, money is money. Cash, wads of it, suitcases crammed full of it, secret stashes. Their money has substance, weight—you can count it on your fingers. And the moldy smell it has isn’t lost even when it lands in the most unreachable bank accounts. ’Ndrangheta money is the fruit of their labor, the fruit of the tree. Which is why the ’ndrangheta does not disdain any method of cleaning it, reinvesting it, making the fruit of their labor bear more fruit. So their grand laundering schemes through finance companies that fit together like Chinese nesting boxes sit alongside the simple purchase of some two-room apartment or plot of farmland.

Operation Decollo’s first money trail discovery was incredible, both because of the amount involved and for the sheer simplicity of the
laundering method. The Vibonesi bought themselves a SuperEnalotto lottery ticket. In May 2003 there was a 5+1 jackpot. The winning ticket turned out to have been sold at the Poker bar in Locri, which belonged to the father-in-law of a young man named Nicola Lucà, who laundered money for the Mancuso family. He contacted the winner right away and offered him more than €8 million for the ticket. Then he opened new accounts at the UniCredit banks of Milan and Soverato, so that the National Lottery—the Italian state, that is—could credit him the money. For Nicola Lucà the easy money marked the moment of greatest media notoriety, whereas his ascent in the ’ndrangheta hierarchy passed unobserved. He moved to northern Italy, where he became the accountant for the “local”—a ’ndrangheta cell—of Cormano, near Milan, which elected him to represent it at the summit in Lombardy: The video recording of Lucà toasting along with the other heads of the Lombard locals at the Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Bordellino Club in Paderno Dugnano, ten miles outside of Milan, during an October 2009 meeting, became the most clicked-on report on the web about the Crimine-Infinito investigation. Not a summit among bosses in ’ndrangheta territory—in Platì, Rosarno, or Gioiosa Jonica, or some Calabrian forest. This summit took place twelve hundred kilometers away, in Lombardy, Italy’s wealthiest and most advanced region, which—despite a number of investigations that have proved otherwise—had always considered itself immune to the cancer of the ’ndrangheta and of organized crime in general.

Another way that the ’ndrangheta hides is through affiliation density, which in Calabria reaches about 30 percent—and more than double that in the heart of Aspromonte—and with a capillary diffusion beyond their home turf. For anyone who doesn’t deal with the ’ndrangheta professionally, there are simply far too many of them to memorize who and where they are, and what they do. The tree’s shape is covered by its lush foliage, the branches of which are too fine and intricate to trace.

We find Nicola Ciconte—the Australian-born affiliate with Calabrian roots involved in the Decollo investigation—ten thousand miles
from the base of the tree. Italy has been asking for his extradition since 2004. The most recent request is from 2012, a sentence in which he was condemned to twenty-five years. For now he tranquilly makes the rounds of the bars on the Gold Coast, the world’s surfing paradise, where he settled after making his way up the east coast from Melbourne. Since shipping Fuduli’s marble to the port of Adelaide, Ciconte has served time in Australia for fraud, swindled an ex-girlfriend, and driven a real estate agency into bankruptcy. Compared to what he did for the country he is most deeply tied to, these are minor things.

Australia—like Canada— has become such a ’ndrangheta colony that an independent Crimine has been established there, divided into six
mandamenti,
or districts, that coordinate directly with the Polsi Crimine, taking part in their decisions. Even the codes for affiliation and promotion to higher ranks have made their way to Australia. The illegal activities it engages in change over time, but the codes remain the same, regardless of where they are. Its strength, which allows it to take full advantage of globalization, rests on a double tie: on the one hand blood and homeland, on the other disciplined by immaterial bonds of rules and rites.

The ’ndrine began arriving in Australia, along with honest immigrants, in the early 1900s, then in earnest after World War II. They set about reinvesting dirty money from Italy in legal activities, and began cultivating cannabis, for which there was an endless amount of space, fertile terrain, and favorable climactic conditions. Then cocaine arrived, and all the families there—originally from Platì, and as well as from Sinopoli and Siderno, which are tied to the powerful Canadian branch—got in on the business.

Nicola Ciconte kept up his close contact with Vincenzo Barbieri, who, according to investigations, sent him another 500 kilos of cocaine, this time from Italy. But mostly he laundered money. For most of his life his official job has been as a broker, a financial broker. So Barbieri turned to him not only to get cocaine into the Southern Hemisphere, but also—and more important—money. Ciconte, who was not always
reliable, was another contact who often caused problems for U Ragioniere. But in the end he allegedly bounced the money through Hong Kong and some other offshore channels so as to launder and deposit it clean in Australian, and even New Zealand, banks. The Calabrian tree doesn’t seem to touch the minor Pacific islands. Maybe because there are so few banks there.

Vincenzo Barbieri was killed in March 2011, in a classic mafia ambush. A gray Audi A3 pulled up alongside him late one afternoon, right as he stepped out of a tobacco shop. Two killers, their faces covered, got out of the car and unloaded a 7.65 caliber and a sawed-off shotgun into him. The shotgun wasn’t to kill, but rather to tear the victim’s flesh apart in a sign of contempt. They shot him in the head and got back in the car, the motor still running. Panicked shopkeepers lowered their shutters; passersby ducked into coffee shops as much to avoid the danger of seeing too much as to escape the shooting. A well-oiled response, a primitive instinct, even though there hadn’t been any executions in San Calogero for quite a while. Barbieri hadn’t lived there for years, yet they killed him in the center of his hometown, right in those narrow, twisting alleyways, without worrying about the people on the street or the video cameras trained on them. The burned-out car was found four days later, a few miles away.

Who wanted Barbieri dead? Or who more than anybody else? Why right then? For the ’ndrangheta, U Ragioniere had committed plenty of errors. Cocaine importation, through Fuduli and his companies, had already been marred by fuckups and foul play. But whenever possible, “men of honor” prefer to solve conflicts with money, which is much quieter and more useful than lead. The answer lies in Barbieri’s expansion, with the help of his accomplice Francesco “Fatty” Ventrici, into another wealthy region in northern Italy, the Emilia Romagna.