dred mini-cartels. But over the past three years, a new and gigantic cartel has emerged that has unified them all under its domination.
Two independents who tried to hold out were found dead after spectacular suffering, and resistance to the new unifiers ceased. The mega-cartel calls itself the Hermandad, or “Brotherhood,” and operates like a major industrial corporation with, in back, a private army to guard its property and a psychotic punishment squad to enforce its discipline.
The Brotherhood does not manufacture cocaine. It buys the entire product of every mini-cartel as the finished white powder product. It offers a “fair” (its own definition) price not on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, but on a take-it-or-die basis. After that, the Hermandad merchandises to the world.
QUANTITIES: Total product is about 600 tons per year, and this divides into about 300 tons for two destinations: the USA and Europe, almost the only two continents that use the drug. Given the profit margins listed above, the total profits are not calculated in hundreds of millions of dollars but in tens of billions.
DIFFICULTIES: Because of the vast profits, it may be there are twenty traders between the cartel and the end user. These traders may be transporters, passers on or final sellers. That is why it is extremely hard for the FLO (Forces of Law and Order) in any country to touch the big players. They are massively protected, use extreme violence as a deterrent and never even touch the product personally. The smaller fry are constantly caught, tried and jailed, but they seldom “squeal” and are immediately replaced.
INTERCEPTIONS: American and European FLO are in a constant state of war with the cocaine industry, and interceptions of cargo in transit or captures of depots are ongoing. But the FLO of both continents achieve only around 10 to 15% of the cocaine market, and, given the staggering margins, this is not enough. It would be necessary to raise the “intercept” and “confiscate” levels to 80% or more to cripple the industry. If they lost 90%, the cartels would implode and the cocaine industry would at last be destroyed.
CONSEQUENCES: Only thirty years ago cocaine was popularly regarded as mere “nose candy” for socialites, bond traders and entertainers. Today it has grown to a massive national scourge causing disastrous societal damage. On two continents, the FLO estimate that around 70% of acquisitive street-level crime (car theft, burglary, mugging, etc.) is carried out to get the funds to support a habit. If the “perp” is high on the particularly vicious by-product of cocaine called “crack,” insensate violence may accompany robbery.
Beyond that, the profits of cocaine, once laundered, are used to fund other crime forms, especially trafficking weapons (also used for crime and terrorism) and people, most particularly illegal immigrants and abducted girls for the sex-slave trade.
SUMMATION: Our country was quite properly devastated by the destruction in the fall of 2001 of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon, which cost almost 3,000 lives. Since then no American inside the homeland has died from foreign-generated terrorism, but the war on terrorism goes on and must go on. Yet in that decade, a conservative estimate must put the figure of destroyed lives through narcotic drugs at ten times that 9/11 casualty cost, and half of these by the chemical called cocaine.
I have the honor to remain, Mr. President,
ROBERT BERRIGAN
Deputy Director (Special Operations)
Drugs Enforcement Administration
AROUND THE TIME the Berrigan Report was being delivered by messenger to the White House, a British ex-customs officer sat in a nondescript dockside office in Lisbon staring in extreme frustration at a picture of a battered old trawler.
Tim Manhire had spent his whole adult life as an excise man, not always the most popular of professions but one he believed to be profoundly necessary. If revenue-gathering for a greedy government from a hapless tourist does not quicken the blood, his job in the dusty back streets of Lisbon’s dockland was a fulfillment of a sort, and would have been more so but for the frustrations of that old enemy: inadequate resources.
The small agency he headed was MAOC-N, yet another acronym in the world of law and order. It stood for Maritime Analysis Operations Center for Narcotics and drew together experts from seven countries. The six partners of the UK were Portugal, Spain, Ireland, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Portugal was the host, and the director was a Britisher, transferred from HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs) to SOCA (Serious and Organised Crime Agency) to take the job.
What MAOC did was to try to coordinate the efforts of the European FLO and naval forces to counter the smuggling of cocaine from the Caribbean Basin across the Atlantic to the twin coasts of Western Europe and West Africa.
The reason for Tim Manhire’s frustration that sunny morning was that he could see another fish with a big and valuable cargo about to slip the net.
The photo had been taken from the air, but beyond taking pretty pictures the patrol aircraft had been helpless to do anything. It had simply passed the image within seconds to MAOC many miles away.
The photo showed a shabby beam trawler on whose bow was the name Esmeralda-G. She had been found by a stroke of luck just on the cusp of darkness and dawn in the eastern Atlantic, and the absence of a wake indicated she’d just hove to after cruising unseen through the night. The definition was good enough for Manhire, peering through the magnifying frame above the picture, to see that the crew was about to drape her from stem to stern with a blue tarpaulin. This was the standard practice for cocaine smugglers at sea to avoid detection if they could.
They cruised at night, then spent the day bobbing silently beneath a tarpaulin that blended with the surrounding sea, extremely hard to spot from above. At sundown the crew peeled back the tarpaulin, stowed it and cruised on. It took time, but it was also safer. To be caught at dawn about to drape the tarpaulin was a giveaway. This was no fish catcher. Her cargo was already in the hold, up to a ton of white powder, multiwrapped and baled to prevent salt and water damage, where it had been since loading at a rotten timber jetty in a creek of Venezuela.
The Esmeralda-G was clearly heading for West Africa, probably the narco-state of Guinea-Bissau. If only, Manhire groaned, she had been farther north, passing the Spanish Canary Islands, or Portugal’s Madeira or Azores. Either country could have put a Coast Guard cutter to sea to intercept the trafficker.
But she was way down south, a hundred miles north of the Cape Verde Islands—but they could not help anyway. No equipment. And it was no good asking the line of failed states running in a curve around from Senegal to Liberia. They were part of the problem, not the solution.
So Tim Manhire had appealed to six European navies and the USA, but they had no frigate, destroyer or cruiser in the neighborhood. The Esmeralda- G, having seen the aircraft that photographed them, would have realized they were spotted and would have abandoned the tarpaulin trick to cruise hard for landfall. They had only two hundred nautical miles to go, and even at a plodding ten knots would be safe among the mangrove swamps off the Guinea coast before the morrow.
Even after an interception at sea, the frustrations did not end. After a recent stroke of luck, a French frigate had responded to his plea and found, with MAOC’s directions, a coke-carrying freighter four hundred miles out. But the French were obsessed with legal niceties. Under their rules, the captured smugglers had to be towed to the nearest “friendly” port. That happened to be another failed state—Guinea-Conakry.
Then a French magistrate had to be flown from Paris to the captured ship for “les formalités.” Something about the rights of man—les droits de l’homme.
“Droits de mon cul,” murmured Jean-Louis, Manhire’s colleague on the French contingent. This even the Britisher managed to recognize as “rights of my arse.”
So the freighter was impounded, the crew arraigned and the cocaine confiscated. Within a week the ship had slipped her moorings and sailed. She was crewed by her own team, who had easily secured bail from a magistrate who had graduated from a dusty Peugeot to a new Merced
es, and the impounded bales had, sort of, vaporized.
So the director of MAOC sighed and filed the name and image of the Esmeralda- G. If she was ever seen again . . . But she would not be. Forewarned, she would be rerigged as a tuna fisher and renamed before entering the Atlantic again. And even if she did, would there be another lucky aircraft belonging to a European navy that just happened to be flying past when the tarpaulin was flapping in the breeze? It was a thousand to one.