The Cobra

The director’s Crown Victoria was waiting in the car parking lot. On command, the driver brought it swerving to the door of the West Wing. In forty minutes, the director was back across the Potomac in Arlington, ensconced in his top-floor suite at 700 Army Navy Drive.

He gave the job to his head of operations, Bob Berrigan. The younger man, who had made his bones out in the field rather than behind a desk, nodded glumly, and muttered, “Three days?” The director nodded.

“Don’t eat, don’t sleep. Live on coffee. And, Bob, don’t stint. Make it as bad as it is. There may be a budget hike in here down the line.”

The ex-field operative headed down the corridor to tell his PA to cancel all meetings, interviews and engagements for three days. Desk jockeys, he thought. Delegate, ask the impossible, go out for dinner and look for the money.

BY SUNDOWN, the San Cristobal’s cargo was onshore, but it was still inside the port perimeter. Flatbed trucks were choking the three bridges they had to cross to pick up their imports. Stuck in a tailback along the Niederfelde Brücke was one from Darmstadt with a swarthy man at the wheel. His papers would show he was a German citizen of Turkish extraction, a member of one of Germany’s largest minorities. They would not reveal that he was a member of the Turkish mafia.

Inside the perimeter there would be no tailback. Customs clearance for a certain steel container from Suriname would be problem-free.

So vast is the quantity of freight entering Europe via Hamburg that a rigorous examination of every container is quite simply impossible. German customs, the ZKA, does what it can. Around five percent of incoming cargoes secure close examination. Some of these are random, but most derive from a tip-off, something odd about the description of the cargo and its port of departure (bananas do not come from Mauritania) or just inadequate paperwork.

The checks may involve opening the sea container by breaking the seals, measuring containers for secret compartments, chemical tests in the on-site laboratory, the use of sniffer dogs or just X-ray inspection of the collector truck. Around 240 trucks in a single day are X-rayed. But one banana container would have no such problems.

This container had not been taken to the HHLA Fruit and Refrigeration Centre because it was tagged to depart the docks too quickly to make that worthwhile. Clearance at Hamburg is achieved largely by the IT-based ATLAS system. Someone had entered the twenty-one-digit registration number of the consignment into the ZKA computer and cleared it for release before the San Cristobal had come around the last curve in the river Elbe.

When the Turkish driver had finally inched his way to the head of the queue by the dock gate, his steel container was cleared for collection. He presented his papers, the ZKA man in his booth by the gate tapped them into his computer, noted the clearance for a small import of bananas for a modest little fruit company in Darmstadt and nodded the go-ahead. In thirty minutes, the Turkish driver was back over the bridge, gaining access to the sprawling network of Germany’s autobahns.

Behind him rode one metric ton of pure Colombian cocaine. Before sale to the final inhalers, it would be “cut” or “bashed” to six or seven times its original volume with the addition of other chemicals like benzocaine, creatine, ephedrine or even the horse tranquilizer ketamine. These simply convince the user he is getting a bigger thrill than could be acquired from the amount of cocaine actually going up the nose. Further bulk can be achieved with simple but harmless white powders like baking soda and icing sugar.

With every kilo of a thousand grams converted into seven thousand, and the buyers paying up to $10 U.S. per gram, each kilo of pure would finally sell out at $70,000. The driver had a thousand such kilos behind him, a street value of $70,000,000. Based on the pasta bought from the Colombian jungle peasants for $1,000 a kilo, there was enough to cover the cargo plane to Suriname, a fee for the banana plantation, the tiny freight charge on the San Cristobal and $50,000 slipped into the Grand Cayman account of the corrupt official in Hamburg.

The European gangsters would bear the cost of blenderizing the hard bricks into talc-like fine powder, cutting to multiply the bulk and merchandising to the users. But if the overheads from jungle to Hamburg dock gate were five percent and the European overheads another five, there was still ninety percent profit to split between the cartel and the mafias and gangs across Europe and the USA.

The American President would learn all this from the Berrigan Report, which hit his desk three days later as promised.

While he read the report after dinner, another two tons of Colombian pure in a pickup truck sneaked across the Texan border near a small town called Nuevo Laredo and vanished into the American heartland.

Dear Mr. President,

I have the honor to present the report on the narcotic cocaine as requested by you.

ORIGINS: Cocaine derives solely from the coca plant, a weedy undistinguished shrub that has grown since time immemorial in the hills and jungles of the northwestern arc of South America.

Over that same period it has been chewed by local natives who found that its effect was to mute their permanent hunger and stimulate their mood. It rarely produces flowers or fruit; its stem and twigs are woody and without application; only the leaves contain the drug.

Even then the drug constitutes well under one percent of the leaf by weight. It takes 375 kilograms of harvested leaf—enough to fill a pickup truck—to create 2.5 kg of coca paste— the intermediate form—which in turn will provide one kilo of pure cocaine in the familiar white powder form.

GEOGRAPHY: Of the global supply today, approximately 10% comes from Bolivia, 29% from Peru and 61% from Colombia.

However, Colombian gangs take over the product of the two smaller contributors at the coca paste stage, complete the refining and merchandise virtually 100% of the drug.

CHEMISTRY: There are only two chemical processes needed to turn the harvested leaf into finished product and both are extremely cheap. That is why, given the desperate poverty of the jungle farmers who grow what is virtually only a very tough and hardy weed, eradication at source has proved so far impossible.

The raw leaves are steeped in an old oil drum in acid—cheap battery acid will do—which soaks out the cocaine. The sodden leaves are then scooped out and thrown away, leaving a sort of brown soup. This is shaken up with alcohol or even gasoline, which leaches out the alkaloids.

These are skimmed off and treated with a strong alkali such as sodium bicarbonate. This mixture delivers a scummy off-white sludge which is the basic paste, or “pasta.” This is the standard unit of the cocaine trade in South America. This is what the gangsters buy off the peasants. About 150 kg of leaves have become 1 kg of pasta. The chemicals are easily obtained and the product is easily transportable from jungle to refinery.

FINISHING: In secret refineries, also usually hidden by the cover of the jungle, the pasta is converted into snow-white cocaine hydrochloride powder (the full name) by adding more chemicals such as hydrochloric acid, potassium permanganate, acetone, ether, ammonia, calcium carbonate, sodium carbonate, sulfuric acid and more gasoline. This concoction is then “reduced,” the residue dried, and what is left is the powder. All the ingredient chemicals are cheap and, being involved in many legitimate industries, easy to acquire.

THE COSTS: A coca-growing peasant, or “cocalero,” may work like a dog all year harvesting up to six crops from his jungle patch, each crop netting him 125 kgs of coca leaf. His total production of 750 kgs of leaf will yield five kilos of pasta. After his own overheads, he may earn just $5,000 a year. Even after refining to powder, one kilogram can be priced at about $4,000.

THE PROFITS: These are the highest for any product in the world. That single kilogram of Colombian “pure” rises from $4,000 to $60,000 to $70,000 just by traveling three thousand miles from the coast of Colombia to the USA or five thousand miles to Europe. Even that is not the end. The kilogram will, at the buyer’s end, be “cut” (adulterated) to six times its weight and volume without loss of price per gram. The users will finally pay the last dealer in the chain about $70,000 for that sugar-bag-sized kilogram that left the coast of Colombia valued at just $4,000.

RESULTS: These profit margins guarantee that the big operators can afford the finest technology, equipment, weaponry and expertise. They can employ world-class minds, bribe officialdom—in some cases up to the national presidential level—and are almost embarrassed by the number of volunteers clamoring to help in the transportation and merchandising of their product in exchange for a cut. No matter how many low-level “mules” are caught and sent to prison, there are always thousands of the destitute and/or stupid prepared to volunteer to take the risks.

STRUCTURES: After the killing of Pablo Escobar of the Medellín cartel and the retirement of the Ochoa brothers of Cali, the gangsters in Colombia split into up to a hun