ZeroZeroZero: cocaine rules

by Steve Hide
This review first appeared in The City Paper in 2016

For related posts see ‘It’s the (narco) economy stupid’

Cocaine, we imagine, is at the heart of high-flying finance along with champagne, fat bonuses and fast cars. Now Italian investigative reporter Roberto Saviano goes further: the addictive drug is not simply an accessory of global markets, it is the global market, a commodity as powerful as oil or gold that underpins the world economy. Forget the ´narco-state´. Welcome to the ´narco-planet´.

This is the premise of Saviano´s latest book ZeroZeroZero.  Early on he reminds us that it was cocaine cash that kept banks afloat after the 2008 world financial crisis. In the following years 97% of money laundered by Colombian cartels passed through US and European banks.  No-one really knows the value of the annual cocaine trade but safe guesses put it around US$ 100 billion, which as a mostly cash business provides liquidity.  ´It´s not the world of cocaine that must orbit around the markets, but the markets that must rotate around cocaine,’ says Saviano.

Reading about cocaine can also be addictive, he warns, then goes on to deliver a 450-page hit that zooms in and out of global cocaine trade with both human stories (some in horrifying detail) and startling facts from the business world. Cocaine, says Saviano, is the wild card of the world economy, both enabling and destructive. Any smart kid with a gun and no conscience can muscle their way in and in a few years amass the same fortune it takes the world’s top companies decades to make.

Like many previous books on cocaine he details its production and purity (the book’s title comes from the name for the most-refined product called ‘000’), distribution and the extreme violence that swirls around the usual cast of Colombian and Mexican kingpins.  Where Saviano shines new light is on the higher strata of businesses, banks and financial institutions who sit much higher in the supply chain.

His entry point is Italian organised crime, particularly the Calabrian Ndrangheta which formed close links with the Colombian cartels in the 1990s. With astonishing detail he recounts decades of transatlantic dealings peppered with both the human and technical story behind the rise of the narco-economy.

Here Naples-born Saviano is on home turf, so to speak, though not on safe ground. The writer’s previous best-selling book on Italian crime and corruption, Gomorrah, won him world-wide plaudits for fearless reporting but also a death sentence from the Comorra crime clan. Today he lives under the constant protection of six armed police. This explosive fact adds weight to ZeroZeroZero, and you cannot help wondering if with his latest exposé he might need to double the caribinieri.

Saviano charts the trajectory of the super-rich cocaine brokers who flit between continents (having learned the lesson directly from Pablo Escobar to never spend more than two nights in the same place) and determined attempts by international police forces to track them and penetrate the fast-moving and often obscure world of money laundering. The old adage ´follow the money´ leads to all corners of the planet from landing strips in rural Mexico to island tax havens, from Russia to Wall Street to Switzerland and on to your high street bank.

Proving fiscal negligence in laundering cases is extremely hard and getting convictions is  ´like squeezing sand in your fist; the grains just slip through your fingers,’ writes Saviano. This is hardly surprising given the incredibly complex deals he recounts, such as the Australian drug baron who sent illegal funds through a Lebanese-Canadian bank with ties to Hezbollah which ended up purchasing used cars in the US then exported to West Africa, with fake bills of sale used to mask drug profits from Colombia.  Try following that money.

Where cases are proven, the writer rails at paltry fines against billion-dollar illegal profits and the scarcity of custodial charges against bankers.  The world of high finance is well rewarded for recycling dirty money. You cannot help but share his indignation at the New York bank which washed several billion US dollars of Mexican cartel money through dodgy casa de cambios, tried to block its own internal investigator, then plea-bargained a small fine and ‘one-year probation´.

According to Saviano, the banking system is more than just complacent, it is actually complicit and intentionally makes transactions hard to trace. And it is not just small or specialised banks to blame.  Large players like the Bank of New York and Bank of America have been caught up in laundering deals by Mexico’s notorious Zetas cartel, and according to US investigators the UK-based HSBC, the fifth largest bank in the world, allowed its HBUS world-wide network of US dollar account facilities to become a ´superhighway´ for illegal capital through lax controls.

Having shown us the shiny peaks of the global drug economy, Saviano brings us backs down to the murky depths of the cocaine trade (literally in his recounting of clandestine submarines) and the violence that surrounds it in Russia, West Africa, Central America, and, of course, back in Colombia

Many people living in Colombia cringe when yet another book or TV documentary on cocaine appears with the usual chapters on jungle lab busts or airport interdictions. My feelings on this were neatly summed up by a recent Internet post which asked: ‘if so much of the profit from cocaine is made in the US and Europe, then why do we only talk of the cartels of Colombia and Mexico?’. 

With Zerozerozero, Saviano takes Colombia away from centre stage and puts the whole global economy is in the spotlight, though in some ways this makes the bookeven more relevant to Colombia. Why should one country pay such a high human price for the war on drugs while global bankers cash in with so little risk?  This global-scale hypocrisy is what fuels Saviano’s anger. ´Everyone is talking a reality you know is bogus,’ he rages.  

Saviano´s own reality is hammered home in a relentless, chaotic , book that demands attention and, judging from reviews and sales, is getting it. And this week we became aware of at least one famous reader: even as the Saviano´s book hit the Christmas bestseller lists another act in the cocaine drama was unfolding as Mexican Navy special forces closed in on most-wanted drug lord Joaquin Guzman.  When a month later they stormed his hideout in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, they found a collection of El Chapo´s signature floral shirts. And his copy of Zerozerozero.

ZeroZeroZero, by Roberto Saviano, translated by Virginia Jewiss, Penguin Press,   448 pages, e-reader version can be downloaded from www.amazon.com.