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In the favelas of the capital, Praia, I met crack addicts in their thirties who’d started aged 12. Inspector Neves and his colleagues live in fear of retribution from the drug cartels: when I interviewed him, his bosses insisted I identify him by a pseudonym.
Amid fears that the islands could become a narco-state, the drugs squad get help from the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre (Narcotics), a Europe-wide counter-trafficking cell based in Lisbon that pools intelligence. The cell, which provided the tip-off that led to the Eser being searched, is headed by Michael O’Sullivan, a former Garda detective who cut his teeth fighting Dublin’s drug lords.
It’s not just the Russians, O’Sullivan insists. There is a myriad of nationalities involved and, aside from the odd shooting, they generally co-operate like model EU communautaires. Rather than offloading all ten tonnes on to one buyer, he says, the Eser’s Russian couriers would have taken bulk orders in advance, which would then be passed on individually. It is, if you like, the traffickers’ equivalent of Ocado: pick a slot, choose your order, pay and wait for delivery. ‘It’s a bit like a European common market — the Brits might chip in to buy two tonnes, the Irish or Spanish one tonne, and so on. The larger the consignment, the cheaper the wholesale price.’
At this level, Covid-19 has had little effect, according to O’Sullivan. After all, many trafficking boats don’t rely on regular ports. Nor do the bosses like hearing excuses. Two weeks ago, a vessel travelling from South America was intercepted carry-ing three tonnes of cocaine off the coast of Spain. And last week police in Portugal seized two tonnes in a container. Indeed, if anything, O’Sullivan suspects that smugglers are taking advantage while police are busy enforcing lockdown measures. ‘It’s business as usual for organised crime groups,’ he says. ‘The cocaine market in Europe is worth €10 billion. It won’t stop because of the virus.’
Russian gangs are well-placed to be wholesalers. Along with Ukraine, their homeland still has a huge pool of Soviet-trained merchant seamen, many now jobless. Over the past 20 years, sailors from lawless ports like Odessa and Sebastopol (in what is now Russian Crimea) have featured in many other record-breaking drug busts.
There is, however, the question of what the Russians behind the Eser shipment will have said to all their European customers now that it is, ahem, gone. The Colombians usually expect payment up-front, so back in Europe, the crime gangs who stumped up will be out of pocket. ‘If they’ve delivered reliably in the past, they may be given a chance to make a few more deliveries to make up the losses,’ says O’Sullivan. ‘If they’re deemed to be clowns, things may get nasty.’
Federico Varese, a criminologist at Oxford University, tells me that these days, the Colombians offer insurance against losses, where you pay a premium per kilo to cover mishaps in transit — just like those excess waivers touted to you by car hire firms. Nobody knows, though, if whoever organised the Eser shipment took one out. In other words, someone somewhere may now owe hundreds of millions of pounds to every organised crime group in Europe. It’s a reasonable guess that even if the other drug runners are out and about, that particular someone is very locked down indeed.
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