Cocaine wars, Colombian style: Zero Zero Zero, by Roberto Saviano

Zero Zero Zero

Author: Roberto Saviano

ISBN-13: 978-1846147692

Publisher: Allen Lane

Guideline Price: £20

When Salvatore Mancuso Gómez, a paramilitary leader and drug trafficker, took the witness stand in a Colombian court on January 15th, 2007, he brought his PC with him. He opened his laptop and began to read out a list of some 300 names and places, all of them to do with killings that he had ordered or committed. La Granja, Pichilin, Mapiripán, El Aro, La Gabarra, El Salado . . . The list went on and on.

Gómez, known as El Mono Mancuso, was once second in command of the paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, or AUC. Members first claimed to be patriots fighting guerrillas such as Farc, but they quickly and enthusiastically took to “topping up” with drug trafficking.

Like any other crime syndicate, AUC spent a lot of time establishing its territory, in the process killing thousands of rival gangsters, presumed guerrillas and unfortunate citizens. That sometimes led to a problem about the disposal of the bodies.

On one occasion El Mono and associates decided to take out a certain Julio Cesar Correa, who they suspected was collaborating with the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Correa was lifted from a hideaway near Medellín and flown to the Cordoba region, where he was first tortured and then killed, probably with a chainsaw.

When the grisly business was over El Mono asked his companions what they should do with the body. No problem, said his fellow drug baron Daniel Mejia. “Danielito” had his own solution to the body disposal question: incinerators. He had two of them, in which he burned an average of 20 bodies per week. Holocaust in the jungle.

For the Italian author Roberto Saviano the most interesting thing about El Mono is that he was the first Colombian, back in the 1980s, to establish contact with the ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia, today Italy’s most powerful criminal group thanks to its access to the Colombian-Mexican cocaine cartels.

In more recent times the Mexican Sinaloa cartel have had the same “disposal” problem as El Mono. They went some way to resolving it thanks to the efforts of Santiago Meza Lopez, also known as El Pozolero – the Soupmaker. He was in charge of getting rid of the bodies that fell in a series of Tijuana drug wars, fought out for control of drug routes to the US.

El Pozolero had a recipe that he revealed when arrested in 2009. You need two empty oil barrels, 50kg of caustic soda, latex gloves and a gas mask. Boil away the body for up to 15 hours and all you’re left with are the teeth, which are “easy to get rid of”.

These are just some of the horror stories that Saviano recounts in his idiosyncratic, personalised and captivating Zero Zero Zero. Saviano is no ordinary muckraker. As the author of Gomorrah, an exposé of the Camorra (or Naples Mafia), he is a modern Italian hero.

Saviano's brave words in Gomorrah have earned him many death threats and forced him to live under 24-hour police protection for the past eight years. Zero Zero Zero contains a revealing note: "This book is dedicated to all the carabinieri in my security detail, to the 38,000 hours that we have spent together and to the hours still to come, wherever we are."

Pointing the finger

Zero Zero Zero is in essence a huge j’accuse: against consumers in the West who use drugs (especially so-called recreational drugs) and against the bankers who recycle the drug barons’ ill-gotten gains.

Saviano claims that today’s multibillion-dollar drug-trafficking trade has its global headquarters in the two greatest financial centres of the west: London and New York. In a state of something akin to apoplexy, Saviano wonders how come people walking across Times Square, Trafalgar Square or Via Del Corso don’t realise that a raging torrent is racing just below their feet: “white oil” – or cocaine – which, from Miami to Melbourne, from Moscow to Milan, generates absurd riches, often by the most violent means.

The Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar used to employ 10 accountants to handle the estimated $500,000 he turned over each day. When a drug run from Colombia to Mali went wrong in 2009 the traffickers thought nothing of burning the evidence: a Boeing 727 worth up to $1 million. Just petty cash.

Or what about HSBC Holdings plc? Last year the London-based bank agreed to pay a record $1.9 billion fine in the US after it was discovered that the Sinaloa and Norte del Valle cartels between them had laundered $881 million through it.

During a US congressional hearing in February 2012 the department of justice admitted that US banks are used daily to launder drug money, as millions are hidden behind the billions in constant transit from bank to bank.

You'll come away from Zero Zero Zero looking not to occupy Wall Street but to arrest it.

Paddy Agnew is Rome Correspondent