ZeroZeroZero (22 page)

Pizzata was too busy, his life too complicated, for him to take care of everything. So he delegated the bulk of the coordination in Italy to Francesco Strangio. Then he found out that the Bellocco family of Rosarno were allegedly about to meet with a Colombian agent in Italy
who could get his hands on enormous quantities of “material,” as cocaine is called over the phone. So toward the end of 2008 the two groups decided to form a business alliance. The man who provided that precious contact for the San Luca and Rosarno families was none other than Bruno Fuduli.

Bruno was arrested for drug trafficking and condemned to eighteen years of imprisonment on May 16, 2012. How was that possible? How was it possible that the leaf destined to rot on the ground found its way back onto the branches of the tree? How was it possible that in late October 2008, he declared on a TV program that they would track him down and kill him, and then, not long after, he got in contact with his old Colombian acquaintances and ’ndrangheta clients again? Despite Bruno’s previous collaboration, the judges did not grant him a sentence reduction.

To try and understand it I consulted the court records. They reconstruct the facts, the dates, and the evidence; they trace in great detail the events as they unfold, but they can’t reveal a person’s soul—even less that of a person so apt at hiding his intentions without even lying. The records say that Bruno managed again to make fun of the state. He met with the narcos’ middleman, even put him up in his home in Calabria, accompanied him to near where his appointments with Pizzata or Francesco Strangio were, almost always near the Central Station in Milan. When he was placed under police protection they made him live in Fiorenzuola d’Arda near Piacenza, not far away from Milan. But the San Luca and Rosarno men never saw him. He became a director and secret organizer. He evaluated costs and routes, came up with transportation systems, ironed out problems, calmed people down. All he needed was one person willing to act as an interface with the buyers. Probably an old acquaintance in this case as well: Joseph Bruzzese, a marble cutter by trade but whose résumé qualifies him for the Calabrian families. He was the one who proposed the new route to a Bellocco lieutenant. So the mechanism Fuduli thought up was set in motion.

No one, other than a few Calabrian newspapers, even noticed the incredible evolution of Bruno Fuduli’s story. They talk about a “return to his old love, crime,” and “to his first passion, cocaine.” They’re loaded with quotation marks for words like “infiltrator,” “songbird,” “deep throat,” “rat.” They all use the same vocabulary, full of ambiguous ironies, and they ooze contentment because the “supercollaborator is still in jail. In solitary confinement.” They even feign indignation at the infidelity of a man who had turned himself in, so as to water down the real reason for the scandal: The infiltrator had succeeded in insinuating himself with the upper echelon of the ’ndrangheta. Yet these are the same papers that had dedicated a lot of attention to another episode, the only documentable one in the period of Fuduli’s life between the end of the trial and the beginning of his return to drug trafficking.

The morning of May 21, 2007, an antimafia demonstration marched through the center of Vibo Valentia. That day was chosen because it coincided with the opening of the new eyewear store of Nello Ruello, the shopkeeper who, after enduring ten years of extortion and usury, decided to report his oppressors and turned government witness. Onstage, along with the other authorities, were the mayor and the prefect, an undersecretary of the interior, the president of the Antimafia Commission, Francesco Forgione, and Don Luigi Ciotti, the founder of Libera, an association on the front line in the battle against the mafia. Before them were gathered a hundred or so students, union and antimafia association militants, a few townspeople, and even fewer shopkeepers. A typical demonstration in mafia territories, unfortunately. Yet during the closing rally a small incident occurred. A man climbed onto the barriers enclosing Piazza Municipio and started shouting. “Where’s my money? Where’s my 5,000 kilos of cocaine?” The local papers took photos, and they printed the image of Bruno shouting and raising his left arm defiantly while being restrained by the police. He was wearing a new, light-colored linen suit, this time with a jacket, only his eyes are hidden behind a pair of sunglasses. Later on he was interviewed.

Fuduli said that he’d applied for the financial assistance provided to victims of rackets and usury, which he needed to start a new enterprise, two years before, but he still hadn’t seen a cent. He explained that he came to Vibo Valentia with his mother and brother because he’d decided to leave the protection program. One interview in particular is chilling, starting with the title: “Don’t collaborate with the law, they’ll screw you.” It opens with a statement Fuduli made: “Thanks to me, 140 people went to jail, I uncovered five tons of cocaine and the trafficking between Calabria and Colombia, but now I told them all to go to hell. . . .”

The rest of what he says is just as unequivocal. The state ruined his life, Fuduli claims. It gives him less than €1,000 a month. He’s starving, he’s being evicted from his apartment, he has a sister who suffers seriously from stress, an elderly mother. He’s so desperate he decided to expose himself right in the center of Vibo Valentia. When asked if he ever thought about going to the other side, he replies: “Yes, I’ve thought about it, and I regret not having done it, given what my collaboration with the law has brought me.” In the space of ten days he is granted the economic assistance he’d requested as well as a mortgage to start a new commercial enterprise. But perhaps it’s already too late. The former double agent had announced in no uncertain terms his intention to betray the state. Bruno Fuduli never lacked determination or courage. It’s only fair that he pay for his choice.

In a conversation the DDA of Milan intercepted in the context of its next inquiry, Pizzata remembers an episode from his trips to Colombia. He tells of a narco nicknamed Lo Zio, or Uncle, who allegedly cut off the hands of someone who had stolen material. “Mamma mia,” his brother-in-law Francesco Strangio responds. “We’re more flexible about those sorts of things. When has anything like that happened in our territory? Never. A shooting maybe, but not that sort of torture.”

Maybe Bruno Fuduli gambled on the range of possibility that could open up between that hoped-for flexibility and the bullet he was already expecting. Maybe he wasn’t going merely for narco dollars but for
something much higher: to prove himself in the long run as able and trustworthy as he used to be at high-level trafficking. Perhaps he might even have risked coming out into the open at that point. Maybe Fuduli was trying to ransom his own life with cocaine. We’ll never know if he succeeded.

It’s the most vexing mathematical equation you’ll ever have to solve. More difficult than the twin prime conjecture or Landau’s Problems. And more mysterious than crop circles. All things considered, you’re really only being asked a simple question: the ratio of cocaine seized to cocaine produced. A fraction. Grammar school stuff. Well, let’s collect the data, you might say. Okay. Where do we start? With the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s “World Drug Report”? Okay, take a look at the graph. The difference between the amount of cocaine seized in 2010 and 2009 is 38 tons: 694 as opposed to 732. A mountain of cocaine but substantially irrelevant in the ocean of world drug trade. So you might deduce that cocaine seizures in recent years have not varied significantly. Go back a bit further. Look at the stats for 2001 to 2005. Do you see how seizures are on a rise then, reaching a peak in 2005? Interesting, isn’t it? Maybe something happened after 2005. Maybe the drug traffickers wised up, maybe they came up with new ways of exporting cocaine. Maybe. But there’s another variable: In recent years cocaine’s purity has
decreased. Again according to the “World Drug Report”: The purity rate of cocaine seized in the United States over the four-year period 2006 to 2010 dropped from 85 percent to 73 percent. People are snorting tons of shit. But this consideration doesn’t throw off your calculations. Newly produced cocaine is 100 percent pure, but the stuff that ends up on the street outside your house is far less so. How do you compare the two? How can you have a fraction where the numerator refers to one thing and the denominator another? Can’t you just hear your teacher saying: “You can’t compare apples to oranges”? In other words, “You can’t compare pure coke with coke that’s been cut.” And besides, how much cocaine is actually being produced annually? Keep reading the report. The range varies from 788 tons to 1,060 tons. A pretty sizable difference, don’t you think? The difference corresponds to the total production of an entire country. And the purity percentage of seized cocaine isn’t always declared. I could also mention that some figures may in fact be doubled, the result of more than one police force being involved in an operation leading to the seizure’s being counted twice. If you’re okay with ignoring these last variables and do your own calculation, by using 694 tons of cocaine seized (knowing nothing about its purity) as your numerator and a figure that oscillates between 788 tons and 1,060 tons as your denominator, you’ll come up with between 65 percent and 88 percent. Isn’t a 23-point difference a bit too high to be reliable? I agree. Not that you’re the first to try such a calculation. The “World Drug Report” tried it in 2011. The result? From 46 percent to 60 percent. “Only” 14 points of uncertainty! But go back two more years and the percentage finally has a leg to stand on, and the number is 41.5 percent. How did they come up with that? you ask. By inventing an average purity index for street cocaine of 58 percent. Is it reliable? Maybe. Or maybe not, as many, including the antimafia
organization Libera, maintain. They focused on a year—2004—and did some calculations not unlike the ones you’re doing right now. World cocaine production that year came to 937 tons. Subtract from that the tons seized (490) and consumed (450) in the Americas. Then subtract the 99 tons of cocaine seized in the rest of the world. The result? A negative number: -102 tons. But Europeans snort cocaine too, lots of it, about 300 tons in fact. After some quick arithmetic it turns out that in 2004 a little over 400 tons are somehow missing, at least according to the data. Disappeared without a trace. One of the world’s many mysteries, along with the Loch Ness monster.

Now you know what you need to know. Now it’s up to you. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.

There are two kinds of wealthy people: those who count their money and those who weigh it. If you don’t belong to the latter category, you don’t really know what power is. I learned that from the narco-traffickers. I also learned that narcos are turning into citizens of the world, but no matter where they are, their gestures, their moves, their thoughts are the same as if they’d never left home. Live wherever you want, even in the middle of Wall Street, but don’t abandon the rules of your hometown. Old-fashioned rules that help you survive in today’s world without getting lost. It’s sticking to those rules that gives Italian organizations the upper hand when dealing with South American narcos and Mexican cartels, that lets them purchase tons of drugs with just a promise.

Calabrian drug traffickers may have shed the look of shepherds from Aspromonte, but Aspromonte’s rules, the rules of blood and earth, still provide their moral coordinates, still guide their actions. Except that now they also know the rules of economics and know how to move in the world so as to guarantee an annual turnover of billions of euros. Which is why it’s hard to describe the men who govern the world’s
narco-traffic. If you handed the material to a screenwriter, you’d get characters who go from bespoke pinstriped suits to gutter street dialect, from marble palaces to stinking streets, characters whose ambiguity is charming, whose paradoxes are worrisome. But all that’s fiction. In reality the drug-trafficking bourgeoisie is on the whole more solid and serene than the average industrial bourgeois family. Mafia families are used to closing ranks, to suffering and responding to setbacks—for them absence and distance are the norm. To cover or conceal things that shouldn’t be known isn’t tantamount to a fragile respectability but rather a fundamental necessity. They’re prepared for pain, loss, and betrayal, and it makes them stronger. They don’t deny the savagery of living in this world.

When I ask myself who the archetypical cocaine manager would be, two names emerge, like opposing poles of a magnetic field. North and South. The man from the North is the prototype of a self-made entrepreneur, trusting only in his own strengths and business sense. The man from the South is a bourgeois from the capital who had a taste of what it would be like to go beyond the secure existence of a government employee and went for it. Neither feels beholden to any political or moral position. If they need to be democratic and transgressive, they know how to do that. And if it’s better to seem like strict conservatives, they’re fine with that too. Businessmen capable of tempting upright, moral individuals by taking advantage of microscopic fissures, imperceptible weaknesses. They corrupt without ever letting the corrupted one feel as if he’s sinning, and pass off corruption as normal, a swift and weightless procedure, something that everybody does, after all.

The man from the North conveys first of all solidity and determination; the man from the South seems more vivacious and worldly, but both come across as middle-aged and middle-class gentlemen. This is clear even from their nicknames, which are banal, even slightly ridiculous. Who would ever suspect Bebè and Mario?

The younger one was born sixty-three years ago, in Almenno San Bartolomeo, a village in Lombardy. Bergamo’s not too far away, but it
takes even less time to cross the Brembo River and head into the Val Brembana, the valley that even for Lombards is the epitomy of provincial backwardness. He’s named Pasquale—probably in memory of his grandfather from Brindisi—Claudio, so he has a more modern name too. His last name is Locatelli, like just about everyone else around there. He becomes Mario later, again like everyone else.

Pasquale Claudio Locatelli is twenty when he starts making forays into the wealthy part of Lombardy, between Milan and Verona, to steal cars with powerful engines. He works with guys from Milan who grew up in the
ligéra,
the old criminal underworld still celebrated in popular songs in the local dialect, although the Bar del Giambellino and the Palo della Banda dell’Ortica described in those ballads now belong to a more innocent past. Milan has become a war zone: Political subversion is mistaken for and at times intertwined with common criminality, and the number of armed robberies and kidnappings is rising precipitously. Homicides average a 150 a year. Those criminals who don’t become stars, such as Renato Vallanzasca, Francis “Angel Face” Turatello, and his former second in command, Angelo Epaminonda, those who aren’t serving a life sentence for murder or other serious crimes, can carry on tranquilly.

Locatelli understands this; he understands that the crime that pays is not that of the fanatics of the 1970s. He goes from car theft to supplying all the services that a seller of stolen cars needs; he forms a network of contacts from Austria to France, studies foreign languages, eventually mastering four of them. He’s already thinking like an international-level entrepreneur. Illegal business is a business just like any other: What matters are reliability and foresight. A deceptive peace is settling over Milan, something that is both bubbly and creamy, like the food and drink that are so in fashion. The man who goes by the name of Mario but will also be called “Diabolik” understands that wherever there’s more money and a desire to have fun, that’s where new markets spring up. Fashion and design, private TV channels, young entrepreneurs, and lots of daddy’s boys and girls walking around,
swinging their hips. Here in Italy’s richest city and region more people can indulge in the vice of cocaine than elsewhere. Locatelli throws himself decisively into the business. He’s under house arrest for a past offense, and it’s this restriction on his movements that leads him to go into hiding. He tries to better his luck in a place where he knows he can easily find new clients, the Côte d’Azur. He moves into a villa in Saint-Raphaël, which is more sedate than nearby Saint-Tropez. People there, who know him as Italo Salomone, mind their own business, as wealthy homeowners usually do. They don’t know that the French police have been hunting him ever since they seized a false-bottomed suitcase from Colombia stuffed with cocaine at the Nice airport. Pasquale Locatelli has already been convicted twice for drug trafficking, in two French courts, and has been sentenced to twenty and ten years in absentia. Italo Salomone seems to be an ordinary Italian, enjoying the mild climate and carefree life. Till the day when, after three years of searching, the
flics
arrest him in his villa, where they find a stash of Colombian cocaine—41 kilos.

It’s 1989.

During this same period Bebè is restoring an old farmhouse in Valsecca, at the foot of the Bergamo Alps, half an hour from Brembate di Sopra, Locatelli’s last Italian residence. Bebè didn’t choose that spot for the peacefulness or the mountain air. He chose it in order to turn it into a refinery for white heroin—the rarest, most prized kind—for which there is still a niche market in the United States, so as to be able to trade it with the Colombian drug lords. According to police informer Saverio Morabito, the notorious former boss of the Milan ’ndrangheta, at the end of the 1980s the Colombians were trading 25 kilos of the purest Colombian cocaine for 1 kilo of white Bergamo heroin.

Bebè is Roberto Pannunzi, a Roman with a Calabrian mother, a former Alitalia employee now past sixty-five who emigrated to Canada when he was young, as many southerners did back then. The Calabrians there worked hard: construction, transportation, trash removal, restaurants. But the massive presence of Italian immigrants was exploited, not
just by Canadian employers, but by the lords of Siderno. U Zi, or “Uncle” Antonio Macrì, had quickly gained control of drug trafficking in Canada and also established excellent relations with the American Cosa Nostra. His murder in Calabria in 1975 set off the first ’ndrangheta war, but the entrepreneurial empire he’d constructed overseas remained untouched. Macrì had created or bought all sorts of commercial activities, in particular export-import businesses, which helped him establish excellent contacts in the most important ports. In the 1980s the Canadian police considered the organization he left his heirs to be the most powerful ’ndrangheta presence in all of Canada. In Toronto, Roberto Pannunzi rediscovers his maternal roots, thanks to Antonio Macrì. Zi’ ’Ntoni likes this kid with thick black hair, a round face, and a proud gaze. Roberto is respectful, and—more important—he’s loyal. Roberto sticks close to Macrì and learns. He’s ambitious and obedient—not like a servant, but because he’s convinced he can learn by obeying. He keeps his mouth shut and his head down, because when he grows up he wants to command. About the same time he meets Salvatore Miceli in Toronto: a Sicilian, and the point man for Cosa Nostra’s drug trade. The two become friends, and then accomplices.

Through Miceli, Pannunzi receives from Cosa Nostra heroin refined in Palermo; he has it transported to Siderno, where it is then shipped to Toronto, hidden among ceramic tiles, and picked up by Vincenzo and Salvatore Macrì, Zi’ ’Ntoni’s nephews.

Pannunzi is getting good. He’s not happy with the stuff his first contacts pass off on him. He wants the best price-quality ratio, and he gets it, that’s why people like him. Through Macrì’s friends he meets the major suppliers, who trust him precisely because of his connection with Macrì. By himself he never would have been able to get anywhere near the leading figures of the heroin trade, but he learns how to use Macrì’s contacts in ports around the globe. If a group can’t find a contact, Roberto comes up with one. He makes himself available to everyone, organizes shipments, even to parts of the world where heroin had never reached before. And when groups ask him for better quality stuff
at a lower price, he gets in touch with specialists who know how to solve the problem. He’s the one who arranges a meeting between the Sicilian Alberti and the Marseilles clans, who send one of their chemists to Palermo to set up a heroin lab.

And when Platì boss Pasquale Marando, in charge of drug trafficking in northern Italy, has to go into hiding, Pannunzi offers to mediate between the families of Marina di Gioiosa Jonica and Platì, in the heart of the ’ndrangheta region in the Aspromonte. Pannunzi unites rather than divides. That is his aim.

To bond even more with his financiers, when Bebè returns to Italy he marries Adriana Diano, who belongs to one of the most prominent families in Siderno. Even though they separate soon afterward, marriage and the mingling of blood are always more binding than a mere contract. Officially Roberto manages a clothing store in Rome. He also has a sense of irony and calls the shop Il Papavero or Poppy, in homage to his collaboration with the most important traffickers of Turkish heroin. In reality, he’s at the Calabrian clans’ disposal
.
The money the ’ndrangheta used to make from kidnappings must now be raised through drug trafficking. Roberto is ready. He knows where it’s best to invest.

The man from the South and the man from the North travel on parallel lines without seemingly ever intersecting in time or space. Locatelli is slightly ahead of Pannunzi, not so much because he started his career closer to Milan, which is still the best cocaine market in Italy. A minor geographical advantage doesn’t matter much when you’re playing on a global chessboard. No, Locatelli’s better sense of timing is more likely due to the fact that he is his own boss, is free to make new investments, is the only one to shoulder the risk. Pannunzi, on the other hand, is more like a top manager for a big holding company. New markets have to be conquered prudently, without letting the old, dependable ones lag behind, without risking a penny of their vast holdings. The idea of applying Calabrian expertise in heroin to cocaine production, thus increasing potential gains, is the typical stroke of inspiration any good manager would come up with to impress his superiors. Pannunzi
then puts his idea into practice: in order to find a farmhouse, he contacts Morabito as well as a ’ndrina ensconced in Lombardy, the Sergi of Platì. Then he brings in the best chemists from France, two men of the Marseilles clan who’ve already worked for Cosa Nostra and can guarantee excellent results.

While Pannunzi is laying the groundwork for a joint cocaine venture, Locatelli is on trial for international drug trafficking, and is sentenced to ten years’ prison in Grasse, the world capital of perfume. All he can see from jail is a scrap of that pleasing landscape which extends below the old town; the sea at Cannes is something he can only sense. But he doesn’t need the sea view: Diabolik/Locatelli is swift in thought and deed. He breaks his arm. He needs to be hospitalized, but the French are not so naïve; they suspect that it might not have been an accident. As a safeguard, they send him not to Nice but to Lyon, far—more than three hundred miles—from the coast he knows every inch of. The prisoner gets out of the police van and heads toward the hospital. After only a few steps, three masked and armed men appear, disarm his police escort, and vanish with the prisoner. It’s the end of an era. Locatelli crosses the border into Spain. He becomes Mario, Mario from Madrid: the point man for Colombian traffickers in Europe, the owner of a fleet of ships for international cocaine traffic.

 • • • 

The entrepreneur and the manager converge in the figure of the broker. They’re pioneers, the men who create out of nothing this figure who hadn’t existed previously in the drug-trafficking economy. They connect all the corners of the world. Istanbul, Athens, Málaga, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zagreb, Cyprus, the United States, Canada, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Australia, Africa, Milan, Rome, Sicily, Puglia, Calabria. They create perpetual motion within a tight, intricate net that reveals the motion of their merchandise only to the attentive eye. They become fabulously rich, and make those who turn to them rich as well. Always on the go, they need to find new channels all the time. Their lives come
to resemble ever more closely the game of connect the dots, which we played as kids in those rare moments when our parents put down their crossword puzzles and let us have the pen: You could only appreciate the image at the end, once you’d connected all the dots. The same is true with Pasquale Locatelli and Roberto Pannunzi. The picture of their trafficking only becomes clear when we connect all the dots that they have drawn.