![]() Roberto Saviano’s 2006 bestseller “Gomorrah” and the eponymous TV series that began showing in America in August has focused attention on the Camorra, the mafia of Naples and its surrounding region. When most people think of an Italian crime syndicate, they have in mind the Sicilian Mafia and its transatlantic branch, the Cosa Nostra – outfits that gave rise to the Godfather novels and films, and provide much of the iconography of the fictional international underworld. Since the mid-1990s, Italian prosecutors and police have been warning that the almost impenetrable ’Ndrangheta, with its intractable name and its roots in the most godforsaken corner of their country, was the coming force in organised crime. ![]() It is perhaps the closest organisation in existence to SPECTRE, the felonious brotherhood with which James Bond grappled once again on the world’s cinema screens last year. Over the past 20 years its reach has extended to the farthest corners of the world. The ’Ndrangheta (pronounced ehn- DRANG-eh-ta, with the stress on the second syllable) originated in Calabria, the toe end of the Italian “boot”. Nicola Gratteri, the deputy chief prosecutor of Reggio Calabria and Italy’s leading authority on cocaine smuggling, estimates that 80% of the “snow” reaching Europe slips through Santos – and most of this is trafficked by the ’Ndrangheta, the world’s first criminal multinational. “It’s very difficult to find drugs without a tip-off,” admitted the helmsman as he nudged the PF’s boat down the main waterway. But in reality there are just 17 agents to check nearly 8m square metres of wharves stacked with hundreds of thousands of containers, any one of which could contain cocaine. They patrol in a bullet-proof launch, accompanied by a black-uniformed officer nursing a submachine pistol. In the ornate but decrepit city centre you can still visit the old coffee exchange where dealers used to sit in throne-like chairs and negotiate prices. It was in Santos that most of Brazil’s European immigrants landed, and it was from Santos that most of its coffee departed. Santos FC nurtured Pelé, Brazil’s greatest footballer. No city of its size – it has a population of less than half a million – has such a prominent position in Brazilian history. The drugs are most likely to end up in Santos, a sprawling, rundown place 50 miles south of São Paulo. You can go in or out of the country there without anyone needing to know about it.” At the border, you actually have to leave the road and go to a nearby town to get your passport stamped. “The other day I drove to Uruguay to visit friends. ![]() “The big problem is that are more worried about capital flight and tax evasion than they are about drugs,” says Luiz Augusto Sartori de Castro, a São Paulo lawyer who has defended several alleged narcotics smugglers. Cocaine is smuggled by the Colombian cartels and other South American producers through Brazil’s porous borderlands, which stretch for almost 17,000km. But it plays a crucial role in the international trafficking of the drug, which even Brazilians know little about. It has so far led to the seizure of more than 1.5 tonnes of cocaine in ports across the Western hemisphere.īrazil does not produce cocaine. And between 20 he directed the Brazilian end of a global operation mounted against the ’Ndrangheta, arguably the most sinister – and certainly the most cosmopolitan – mafia of them all. He has led a string of operations against the Primeiro Comando da Capital, the largest criminal organisation in Brazil. He arrested one of the leading Colombian narcos, Marcos de Jesús (“Marquitos”) Figueroa, who now stands accused of over 250 murders. Yet in his 15 years as a law-enforcement agent, Scalezi has notched up an impressive list of potentially mortal enemies. He has about him a slightly diffident air of the kind that is seldom encountered in successful detectives. Wiry, smartly dressed in a tight suit and with dark stubble across his chin and cheeks, he could be taken for a middle-ranking executive at one of the shipping firms that abound in South America’s busiest port. “If I’m murdered one of these days,” he says, leaning forward in a chair in the police station in the Brazilian city of Santos, “I fear it’ll be very difficult for my colleagues to work out who killed me.” The 37-year-old Scalezi is a senior agent in the Polícia Federal ( PF), Brazil’s equivalent of the FBI. Osvaldo Scalezi Junior has a dark sense of humour.
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