By Lorenzo Bodrero

Their job is to deliver cocaine, tons of it. They work for trans-national organized crime syndicates and South American cartels. Thanks to them, people can buy cheap cocaine at some hidden corner in any city, fuelling a market that in 2009 the UN estimated at $85 billion annually.

They are cocaine brokers, using cargo ships and planes to deliver the white powder from South America to Europe and United States. They link Mexican and Colombian drug cartels with organized crime syndicates in Europe for the illicit retail market.

El Viejo (the Old Man) is a former cocaine broker who knows exactly how it was done in the 1980s, before he was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to jail.

Just released after a 17-year sentence in high-security prisons all over Italy, the gray-haired ex-con looks younger than 69.

At the time, it just seemed like good business—an investment that offered staggering returns.

“I was in charge of logistics only,” he says, meaning he had to solve the knotty problems posed by shipping tons of illegal material thousands of miles while evading law enforcement on two continents. He says he was good enough at it to help in cocaine’s transformation from a fringe drug favored by a wealthy few into a major cultural phenomenon.

The profits were impressive. “My boss used to (move) about 20 tons every year. With a purchase of $20 million at the source, he would make between $80 million and $90 million net a year.” El Viejo would not identify his boss or say anything about him, other than that he is now retired.

When El Viejo started, heroin dominated the market, both in the US and Europe. But with the rise of HIV in the 1980s, effective anti-AIDS campaigns focused attention on how intravenous drug use can spread HIV. The heroin market started to dry up and, he says, cocaine brokers were keen to step into that vacuum.

Another early cocaine broker was Roberto “The Baby” Pannunzi, who was arrested in Colombia and deported to Italy last July. It was the third arrest for Pannunzi in the past 20 years; the first two times, he managed to escape from custody.

He moved to Canada as a youngster where he met former crime boss Antonio Macrì. Police say Macrì was affiliated with an Italian crime organization called 'Ndrangheta, a Mafia-style group that originated in Calabria that, as former chairman of the Italian Antimafia Commission Francesco Forgione writes, “rose to become the most powerful and most modern organized crime group in Italy today.”

According to a book by Roberto Saviano, Macrì took Pannunzi under his wing and introduced him to the underworld. In 1975, Macrì was assassinated, and Pannunzi, by then an experienced manager, took over Macrì’s drug trafficking. He optimized the existing network being managed by 'Ndrangheta and improved collaboration with Sicily’s La Cosa Nostra.

Pannunzi was unusual in that he was not affiliated with any one syndicate, which became his strength.

Using Macrì’s contacts in many of the world’s main harbors, he collaborated with the Marseille mafia to set up a heroin refinery in Palermo. The Northern Hemisphere shift from heroin to cocaine likely began right there, El Viejo thinks.

As he recalls: “The act of genius was to start trading heroin for cocaine. Heroin was not (readily available) in South America and the cartels were hungry for it. We would provide heroin to them, they would give us cocaine in exchange.”

With the heroin market dominated by La Cosa Nostra, it was easy for Pannunzi to provide the cartels as much as they wanted, and they were willing to pay. “For one kilo of heroin you could get 25 kilos of pure cocaine,” writes Saviano2.

And so cocaine began its speedy, steady rise. 'Ndrangheta quickly concentrated all its efforts on cocaine and in a few years outperformed La Cosa Nostra in the drug trade, police and prosecutors say.

Cocaine brokers like Pannunzi turned the drug business upside down, made it more reliable for crime syndicates, harder to tackle for police forces, designed more efficient distribution chains and offered a cheaper product to consumers.

Prosecutors say Pannunzi simply professionalized what had historically been a more hit-and-miss proposition of getting the drugs into Europe. “He was the only one who could organize the shipment of cocaine cargos of more than three tons,” says Nicola Gratteri, the Italian prosecutor who coordinated the operation that arrested Pannunzi. With such supply potentials, cocaine was suddenly available to the large European market.

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