Speaker 1: There's more cocaine in the world right now than there
Speaker 1: has ever been before, and all of it is coming
Speaker 1: from this region in South America. Most of it is
Speaker 1: being transported on large commercial cargo ships. It's a big
Speaker 1: take from Bloomberg News. In my Heart Radio, I'm West
Speaker 1: Pasova today inside the global supply chain for cocaine. In December,
Speaker 1: we told you the wild story of smugglers who hid
Speaker 1: twenty tons of cocaine worth a billion dollars aboard am
Speaker 1: massive containership traveling to Europe from South America, and how
Speaker 1: the US found out and seize the drugs when the
Speaker 1: ship made a stop at the port of Philadelphia. That
Speaker 1: was a huge bus, but it barely made a dent
Speaker 1: in the global cocaine supply. For every shipment that sees,
Speaker 1: many many more tons go undetected. My colleagues Lauren Eder
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles and Vernon Silver in Rome are here
Speaker 1: with me now to tell the next part of the saga,
Speaker 1: what happens when all that cocaine reaches port in Europe.
Speaker 1: Lauren Vernon, thanks for being here, Hey, Thanks glad to
Speaker 1: be here. Thank you. You and our colleague Patricia lah
Speaker 1: have written a big investigation for Bloomberg Business Week that
Speaker 1: details the booming cocaine industry in Europe. And your story
Speaker 1: begins with a business importing fruit Vernon, maybe i'll start
Speaker 1: with you. Can you describe what happened? There's been this
Speaker 1: increasing problem, especially around the ports in Europe, in this
Speaker 1: case the Netherlands, with these fruit shipments having cocaine in them.
Speaker 1: In this particular case, in May two thousand nineteen, a
Speaker 1: warehouse of the group Fresh Group in a small town
Speaker 1: about an hours away from Rotterdam's port. They're going through
Speaker 1: their bananas and the employees they're found four hundred kilos
Speaker 1: of cocaine. That's a street value about thirty million dollars.
Speaker 1: At this point had already become policy of this company
Speaker 1: that when they found the cocaine, you know, they've never
Speaker 1: found this much before, they're just going to call the
Speaker 1: police and turn it over to the authorities, which is
Speaker 1: what they did. But within weeks, the unexpected happened. Word
Speaker 1: had gotten out that this fruit company had found the
Speaker 1: cocaine and turned it over the cops, and the two
Speaker 1: brothers whose family for generations had owned this company that
Speaker 1: had grown into, you know, a huge importer of Bananas
Speaker 1: started getting threatening messages and someone who was claiming that
Speaker 1: it was their cocaine that had been turned over to
Speaker 1: the police said that he wanted compensation for his loss.
Speaker 1: They threatened the group family, they threatened the employees. They
Speaker 1: tried to get payment in millions of euros in both
Speaker 1: bitcoin and cash in handovers. That never happened because the
Speaker 1: company and the family owned it wouldn't cooperate and wouldn't
Speaker 1: give into the extortion claims, and that began what turned
Speaker 1: into a two year reign of terror in this small
Speaker 1: town the municipalities called Monstril, where there were shootings and
Speaker 1: fire bombings of the homes of people first connected to
Speaker 1: the company, its owners, and then just people who had
Speaker 1: worked there, you know, former employees, current employees. And in
Speaker 1: one case, in the middle of the night, these two brothers,
Speaker 1: Henry and Yon villain Seepers, who had both worked in
Speaker 1: the warehouse, they were to crash through the window and
Speaker 1: then an explosion, and within minutes they found themselves jumping
Speaker 1: out the windows and uh, you know, barely came away
Speaker 1: with their lives and you know, broken owns and their
Speaker 1: house was burned to the ground. And that was kind
Speaker 1: of the peak of what, looking back on it was
Speaker 1: the really the terrorizing of an entire small community at
Speaker 1: the end point of a global supply chain. Lauren obviously
Speaker 1: what Vernion describes as a very extreme example of one
Speaker 1: of the effects of the growing cocaine trade throughout Europe.
Speaker 1: But this sort of thing where companies are discovering huge
Speaker 1: amounts of cocaine in shipments say you know nothing about,
Speaker 1: is not exactly uncommon. That's right. Over the past few years,
Speaker 1: especially in Northern Europe, as the cocaine trade has shifted
Speaker 1: from Spain the Iberian Peninsula to the major commercial ports
Speaker 1: of Northern Europe and the Netherlands and Belgium, the discovery
Speaker 1: and the interception of cocaine and shipping containers has become
Speaker 1: really a regular occurrence, so much so that the customs
Speaker 1: officials and law enforcement authorities in those nations and those
Speaker 1: ports are really struggling to keep up with the amount
Speaker 1: of cocaine that's essentially deluging their ports. The amount of
Speaker 1: cocaine that is flowing into Europe's largest two ports in
Speaker 1: the Netherlands, uh Rotterdam and Belgium Antwerp, has really skyrocketed
Speaker 1: over about a five year time period, so it's become
Speaker 1: a crisis for officials there and they really are tasked
Speaker 1: with finding what's often described as a needle in a haystack,
Speaker 1: because the cocaine is hidden in all kinds of consumer goods,
Speaker 1: whether it's tennis shoes or computer parts or scrap metal. UM.
Speaker 1: But it's primarily hidden in refrigerated containers that are carrying
Speaker 1: perishable goods such as fresh produce, vegetables, UM, shrimp, those
Speaker 1: types of items. And this cocaine is all coming from
Speaker 1: South America, Is that right? Oh? Yes, it all comes
Speaker 1: from South America. There are three primary countries that grow coca,
Speaker 1: and it's largely Colombia, but it's also Bolivia and Peru,
Speaker 1: and so there has been an explosion in the amount
Speaker 1: of coca that's being grown in these nations for lots
Speaker 1: of reasons. UM and a colleague of ours wrote an
Speaker 1: article describing the production in coca and also cocaine as
Speaker 1: being actually the golden age of cocaine right now. There's
Speaker 1: more cocaine in the world right now than there has
Speaker 1: ever been before, and all of it is coming from
Speaker 1: this region in South America. Most of it is being
Speaker 1: transported on large commercial cargo ships, and the vast majority
Speaker 1: of it is arriving in northern Europe where these large
Speaker 1: ports are Vernon. There's so much cocaine, as Learned describes
Speaker 1: coming into Europe that it's actually become kind of cheap.
Speaker 1: What's incredible is, you know, the U N and also
Speaker 1: European authorities tracked the street value and prices of cocaine,
Speaker 1: and what you're seeing is prices program in the US
Speaker 1: have kept up. You know, we're talking about you know,
Speaker 1: you can pay a hundred and twenty to two hundred
Speaker 1: dollars for a graham. But in the areas where this
Speaker 1: stuff is coming in, primarily Belgium and the Netherlands, you
Speaker 1: can get a gram of coke for you know, sixty
Speaker 1: five dollars or less. With that amounts to and you know,
Speaker 1: I spent two weeks traveling around the Netherlands working on
Speaker 1: this story. Is you can get you know, for what
Speaker 1: you pay, let's say for Margarita and Antwerp, you could
Speaker 1: probably get three or four lines of cocaine. So when
Speaker 1: people are being frugal and things are costing more in
Speaker 1: the cost of a dinner out costs uh, you know,
Speaker 1: more than it was a year ago. The one thing
Speaker 1: that's gotten cheaper is cocaine, and that has just a
Speaker 1: lot to do with the complete flooding of the market
Speaker 1: through the surge of of cocaine that's writing on top
Speaker 1: of the fruit shipments, and of course cheaper prices means
Speaker 1: there's even more demand, and more demand means there's going
Speaker 1: to be more supply, and so it just keeps on growing.
Speaker 1: One of the really interesting things in this system that
Speaker 1: you're describing seems to be that the nation's producing all
Speaker 1: of this cocaine and the drug cartels that want this
Speaker 1: supply to distribute in Europe were able to do this
Speaker 1: because of advances in shipping fruit. Yeah. Absolutely, Um, it's
Speaker 1: really fascinating when you start looking at the numbers when
Speaker 1: you look at kind of this spike in cocaine UM
Speaker 1: imports into into Northern Europe, and it's really over kind
Speaker 1: of a five this five to seven year time period. Um,
Speaker 1: there was a concurrent spike in the amount of fruit
Speaker 1: that was exported and other perishable goods from South America.
Speaker 1: They almost parallel one another. So what's happened is that
Speaker 1: the drug traffickers have figured out that there is increasing
Speaker 1: efficiency in the transportation of fresh fruits and vegetables from
Speaker 1: South America to northern Europe. And there's also been an
Speaker 1: increase in sort of the infrastructure that's been built up
Speaker 1: around the international shipment of these goods. The ports in
Speaker 1: South America have been really improved and lots of private
Speaker 1: investment has gone into these ports, allowing larger ships to
Speaker 1: call port there. Um, there has been all along this
Speaker 1: supply chain, what they call the cold chain, there's been
Speaker 1: all kinds of innovations. The shipping companies have rolled out
Speaker 1: new shipping containers that have innovations such as allowing fruit
Speaker 1: to ripen more slowly on the long voyage across the
Speaker 1: Atlantic Ocean from South America to Europe, and just a
Speaker 1: larger number of containers they call them reefers or refrigerated
Speaker 1: containers that are making that journey. And that's largely because
Speaker 1: there's growing demand in Western European countries, just like there
Speaker 1: is in United States and other markets, but for year
Speaker 1: round access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Products that consumers
Speaker 1: were only able to get during seasons when they're in season,
Speaker 1: they can now get them year round because they can
Speaker 1: you know, they're shifted across the world with increasing efficiency,
Speaker 1: and the prices have come down all of that. So
Speaker 1: that's a long story behind the reasons why traffickers realize
Speaker 1: that there is this increasing amount of just legitimate cargo
Speaker 1: that's moving from their key part of the world, Latin America,
Speaker 1: South America to Europe, and they really just piggybacked on
Speaker 1: that supply chain. They figured out they're all kinds of
Speaker 1: ways to penetrate that supply chain, whether it's infiltrating the
Speaker 1: exporter or the importer, or as we wrote about a
Speaker 1: few weeks ago, infiltrating the crew of major shipping companies
Speaker 1: to be able to load cocaine in the middle of
Speaker 1: the ocean as the ship is moving from one continent
Speaker 1: to another. The traffickers are logistics experts, and they have
Speaker 1: figured out that if they can piggyback on the increasingly
Speaker 1: efficient logistics and supply chain of the major shipping companies,
Speaker 1: that it's been very good business for them and they've
Speaker 1: been able to move increasingly large volumes and quantities of cocaine.
Speaker 1: Lawrence hit on a really good point from the European side.
Speaker 1: One of the you know, the more interesting and surprising
Speaker 1: things about the reporting from these stories was the data
Speaker 1: that explained what I was seeing here in Europe. I'm
Speaker 1: based in Italy, and I gotta say, before, you know,
Speaker 1: COVID times something like an avocado that was worth eating,
Speaker 1: or blueberries or you know, mangoes, forget about it. This
Speaker 1: was like you could go to a specialty market and
Speaker 1: maybe find one you could buy avocados um that were
Speaker 1: you know, maybe ripe if you kept them around for
Speaker 1: a while and they were right for half a day,
Speaker 1: to the point where like we'd go back to the
Speaker 1: US and you know, the first thing that our family
Speaker 1: would get for us if we went to California was
Speaker 1: you know, a big bowl of avocado so we could
Speaker 1: make guacamole. Seeing the reporting on this story out of
Speaker 1: South America, where I saw like, oh gosh, from Peru,
Speaker 1: exports of fruit to Europe have doubled in the four
Speaker 1: years through, that explained what I was seeing here, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, coming out of COVID, I could go to
Speaker 1: supermarket and it's like, gosh, here's you know, their mangoes.
Speaker 1: And until seeing the reporting for this story, it didn't
Speaker 1: click that there were real changes here. Demand has changed.
Speaker 1: Europe is getting tons more of this stuff and you
Speaker 1: follow it into the port you're finding then the cocaine.
Speaker 1: We went through the press releases from the prosecutors in
Speaker 1: the Netherlands for every press release they had over the
Speaker 1: past year of drug busts and narrowed them down to
Speaker 1: busts in the Rotterdam port, and then from there looked
Speaker 1: at what was in the containers where they were finding this,
Speaker 1: and a little more than half the time it was
Speaker 1: fresh fruits and vegetables. So there's like there's a direct
Speaker 1: correlation between what you're seeing coming out of Latin America
Speaker 1: right now and what you're seeing on the ground in
Speaker 1: the markets and in the drug busts in Europe. You know,
Speaker 1: it's one of these things where it's like it's right
Speaker 1: in front of you, like that the that the piggybacking
Speaker 1: was happening, and it all sort of fit together at
Speaker 1: this aha moment, learning Burning Please stick around. Our conversation
Speaker 1: continues after the break, Lauren, this coincidence of geography, let's
Speaker 1: cocaine hit rride on fruit shipments to Europe. Did you
Speaker 1: write that packing cocaine with fruit gives the drug runners
Speaker 1: another advantage once the ship reaches port in Europe. Can
Speaker 1: you describe why that is? Yes, there is this increasing
Speaker 1: efficiency along this logistics supply chain, along this cold chain.
Speaker 1: But the other really important factor here is that customs
Speaker 1: officials are under constant pressure to ensure that the supply
Speaker 1: chain moves quickly and smoothly and efficiently, and to ensure
Speaker 1: that the amount of cargo, that the cargo coming into
Speaker 1: their ports is not being held up unnecessarily. So their
Speaker 1: customs officials are actually under a lot of pressure to
Speaker 1: rapidly push through the containers to make sure that they
Speaker 1: reach their ultimate destination, to not slow down the rhythm
Speaker 1: of trade, of global trade is essentially because there's a
Speaker 1: lot of money on the line. There are customers waiting
Speaker 1: for their items. The shipping companies are very powerful and
Speaker 1: they really don't want the trade to be slowed down.
Speaker 1: So what that means is that when you're shipping a
Speaker 1: product like fresh fruit, there's an even greater sense of
Speaker 1: urgency to ensure that the product is is move swiftly
Speaker 1: through customs. And the traffickers know that because bananas can rot,
Speaker 1: shrimp can go bad, and so they realize that customs
Speaker 1: officials when they come across a container filled with perishable goods.
Speaker 1: There's a sense of urgency there that they're going to
Speaker 1: process it quickly, get it out of the shipyard into
Speaker 1: the market, and that they're not going to detain that
Speaker 1: container unnecessarily. What's interesting is that there isn't a no tolerance,
Speaker 1: zero tolerance view of this stuff getting through that in
Speaker 1: the customs industry. And remember that, like customs was set
Speaker 1: up as an idea of centuries ago as a way
Speaker 1: for countries to collect taxes. This is a this is
Speaker 1: a revenue business. It's not necessarily a law enforcement business.
Speaker 1: And I went to a meeting of the World Customs
Speaker 1: Organization and MASTRIX, and it was all about the technology
Speaker 1: that can be used to sort of tilt the balance
Speaker 1: of you know, speeding things through versus catching the contraband.
Speaker 1: It was about the balance. It wasn't about making sure
Speaker 1: that nothing made it through. And part of what Lauren
Speaker 1: found in her reporting was like, it is the cost
Speaker 1: of doing business for the drug traffickers that they know
Speaker 1: some of it will get taken by the by the cops,
Speaker 1: but a lot we'll get through. Lauren Divernon's point, you
Speaker 1: write that authorities are season more cocaine than ever before,
Speaker 1: but they can only inspect a small number the thousands
Speaker 1: and containers that arrive each day, so a lot more
Speaker 1: is probably getting through, Is that right. Yeah, it's really
Speaker 1: surprising actually, and it really just goes to show just
Speaker 1: the immense task that confronts customs officials. But globally, only
Speaker 1: two percent of containers are inspected by customs officials. So
Speaker 1: the hundreds of millions of containers that are being shipped
Speaker 1: around the world going to ports, two percent or less
Speaker 1: are inspected, are pulled out of the supply chain, the
Speaker 1: stream of commerce and inspected by customs officials. But in
Speaker 1: Northern Europe and in Antwerp and in Rotterdam, it's actually
Speaker 1: much less than two percent. It's around one percent, between
Speaker 1: one to two percent, and that's partly a function of
Speaker 1: the just the sheer difficulty of doing this. They first
Speaker 1: have to target the containers and figure out where is
Speaker 1: the cocaine. It's this ultimate game of hide and seek,
Speaker 1: because the traffickers are constantly shifting their methods. You know,
Speaker 1: once the law enforcement officials are kind of onto them,
Speaker 1: they come up with a new scheme to evade detection.
Speaker 1: And they've done this over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: So the police are always trying to kind of chase
Speaker 1: them figure it out, but they're also the customs officials
Speaker 1: are trying to target which containers the cocaine might be in.
Speaker 1: So the mayor of Rotterdam, he has explained that he
Speaker 1: would like to see every single container from South America
Speaker 1: carrying fruit to be inspected by customs officials. And this
Speaker 1: was seen as kind of a radical proposal because what
Speaker 1: that means is that if you're a legitimate shipper of
Speaker 1: bananas from Columbia or Ecuador, you're gonna automatically have your
Speaker 1: container pulled aside, pulled off the ship, pulled into the
Speaker 1: scanning facility, and held for hours, if not days. And meanwhile,
Speaker 1: your your bananas might row, your customers getting upset because
Speaker 1: they haven't received the product yet, and you may or
Speaker 1: may not find cocaine in that shipment. So even though
Speaker 1: customs authorities are inspecting just one to two percent of
Speaker 1: containers that arrive in their ports, in European Union authorities
Speaker 1: seized more than two and forty tons of cocaine. It
Speaker 1: was a record amount. It was triple the amount season.
Speaker 1: You can imagine that they're seizing this record amount of cocaine,
Speaker 1: but even more than that is likely getting through Vernion.
Speaker 1: Once all that cocaine gets to shore, they have to
Speaker 1: get it off the ships and get it into the
Speaker 1: hands of the distributors. How do they get it from
Speaker 1: the port into the streets? Yeah, I mean this is
Speaker 1: sort of an amazing part of going through the court
Speaker 1: records of the past a decade and talking to experts
Speaker 1: was seeing how that this is evolved. They've gone from
Speaker 1: a system where these container ships would start pulling up
Speaker 1: towards the port and somewhere in the North Sea, you know,
Speaker 1: dump bags essentially duffle bags off the back of these
Speaker 1: big ships and be met by fishing boats to have
Speaker 1: picked them up at sea, to just having it packed
Speaker 1: in the containers, which means that the action is now
Speaker 1: on shore, in the ports themselves and in warehouses on
Speaker 1: the street level. And city is like Rotterdam. The problem
Speaker 1: is that you have a lot of young people who
Speaker 1: are underemployed and who all of a sudden can be
Speaker 1: paid for one big mission where they get into a
Speaker 1: port and they get into a container and they somehow,
Speaker 1: you know, they grabbed the duffel bags full of cocaine
Speaker 1: and you know all you know and quotes. All they
Speaker 1: need to do is get it from there into a
Speaker 1: car and off the grounds of the port and to
Speaker 1: a distribution center a warehouse where these drugs are being accumulated.
Speaker 1: So I spoke to the mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Abu Taleb,
Speaker 1: and this was a real pain point for him. He
Speaker 1: has watched his city kind of transform as a cocaine
Speaker 1: trade has really kind of swept across Rotterdam. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that is really heartbreaking for him and
Speaker 1: also just very problematic in terms of solving, is that
Speaker 1: there are so many young people who are at risk
Speaker 1: of being recruited by the rug traffickers to do these jobs.
Speaker 1: And they appear as kind of simple jobs. Right. You
Speaker 1: might earn ten thousand euro to climb the fence of
Speaker 1: the shipyard, go in under the cover of night, sneak
Speaker 1: into or break into one of these containers that is
Speaker 1: known to be containing cocaine, snatched the bags out of there,
Speaker 1: the deffel bags of cocaine, and then jump the fence
Speaker 1: and runaway and you know, deliver the cocaine to the traffickers.
Speaker 1: That's just one job that you might be able to
Speaker 1: earn ten thousand thousand euro as opposed to you know,
Speaker 1: taking a normal kind of legitimate job as a carpenter
Speaker 1: or as a plumber, or as working in a shop.
Speaker 1: And so the mayor feels really up against the traffickers
Speaker 1: and the organized crime groups in a sense that how
Speaker 1: can legitimate employers compete with those wages that the traffickers
Speaker 1: are offering. So he described it really as kind of
Speaker 1: an undermining of civil society, because it's not overt all
Speaker 1: the time. It's just of these subtle ways where the
Speaker 1: criminal organizations kind of undermine legitimate kind of trade and
Speaker 1: undermine the above board markets, and how that has a
Speaker 1: trickle down effect and kind of captures these young men
Speaker 1: or you know boys in some instances who then get
Speaker 1: really kind of lured into this trade. He actually told
Speaker 1: me kind of an interesting and a little bit of
Speaker 1: a chilling story about how the traffickers work and how
Speaker 1: they kind of get people to cooperate with them. And
Speaker 1: this was actually involving shipping company employees or port workers.
Speaker 1: So the way it might work is you work at
Speaker 1: say a doc and your job is to kind of
Speaker 1: make sure the containers kind of you know, come in
Speaker 1: come out on time, and somebody might approach you and say, hey,
Speaker 1: we have this side job for you. We we just
Speaker 1: need you for ten tho euro to look the other way,
Speaker 1: just for five minutes. Step away from your post for
Speaker 1: five minutes and we'll give you ten thousand euro. And
Speaker 1: the guy is like, I don't know if I really
Speaker 1: want to do that. It's a little risky, but he agrees,
Speaker 1: so he does the job. They say, okay, meet us
Speaker 1: at this restaurant afterwards and we're going to give you
Speaker 1: your payment. When he arrives to pick up his payment,
Speaker 1: sitting there is not only the traffickers who are going
Speaker 1: to pay him, but one or two other employees at
Speaker 1: the port who now know that this individual has done
Speaker 1: something illegal. So in that very subtle way, he's now
Speaker 1: captured by the organization because he has these other people
Speaker 1: and he's in on it, and you can't kind of
Speaker 1: back out of that. So they're very sophisticated in the
Speaker 1: way that they recruit individuals, the way that they capture them,
Speaker 1: and kind of once you're in, it's very hard to
Speaker 1: get out. The ports and the customs officials will actually
Speaker 1: tell their employees like, please do not wear your uniform
Speaker 1: if you're going to leave, like say go pump gas
Speaker 1: or go to a restaurant or anything like that, because
Speaker 1: you suddenly become a target. And they're constantly being bombarded.
Speaker 1: There are track for curs that look for them on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1: They'll send them messages on LinkedIn and say, hey, do
Speaker 1: you want to earn you know, a little money. On
Speaker 1: the side, they are being hunted by these organized criminals
Speaker 1: trying to recruit them into the trade. And it's um,
Speaker 1: it's a very tricky problem that the city and the
Speaker 1: ports and the customs officials are facing. We'll be right back, Vernie.
Speaker 1: We've heard how this sophisticated international operation works, but who's
Speaker 1: in charge of it? Who are the organizations or cartels
Speaker 1: behind it all. What they're dealing with is transnational organized crime.
Speaker 1: There's no one location or one group for exactly. It's
Speaker 1: not you know, just the Sicilian mafia. It's many of
Speaker 1: them working together. And from these investigations the European authorities
Speaker 1: have done, we see connections to Eastern Europe. We see
Speaker 1: connections where some people from the Netherlands are now based
Speaker 1: out of the Persian Gulf countries. We see North Africa
Speaker 1: being involved. And this is partly because of distribution. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is partly because of you know, how learn in
Speaker 1: her reporting about the shipping itself has connected uh some
Speaker 1: of us to cruise from the Balkans. They have found
Speaker 1: from north to south and east to west through Europe.
Speaker 1: One connection, which is the cash that they can make
Speaker 1: off of this new flood of cocaine. And that's why
Speaker 1: it's been so hard, sort of like you know, a
Speaker 1: multi headed monster for them to whack it. You know,
Speaker 1: in in the Netherlands they talk about some kind of
Speaker 1: Moroccan mafia, but as it doesn't have anything really to
Speaker 1: do with Morocco. In Italy, where a lot of this
Speaker 1: stuff is also coming, it's the traditional organized crime groups UM.
Speaker 1: And then in Eastern Europe you were dealing with organizations
Speaker 1: that can you know, connect more deeply into Central Asia.
Speaker 1: It's truly a multinational, all conglomerate and all of this
Speaker 1: money has effects. You can see it as you write
Speaker 1: in Rotterdam that there are the effects of drug wealth
Speaker 1: wherever you go. In Rotterdam, you know, the city officials
Speaker 1: took me around for a walking tour and the first
Speaker 1: thing that was interesting was how afraid they were they
Speaker 1: said they feel safe in their city and all this,
Speaker 1: but when it came down to using anybody's names were
Speaker 1: describing their titles, they didn't want to do that for
Speaker 1: the reasons that Lauren outlined about everyone being a target.
Speaker 1: If somebody knows what you do, you can be targeted.
Speaker 1: So in some sort of anonymity, they took me for
Speaker 1: this walk around what seemed to me to be a
Speaker 1: really lovely neighborhood. Little by little they pointed out what
Speaker 1: they were seeing. There were lots of gold and jewelry
Speaker 1: shops with no customers in them, which to them were
Speaker 1: signs of potential money laundering. Some of them had changed
Speaker 1: hands and ownership, you know, two or three times in
Speaker 1: the last couple of years, another sign of We walked
Speaker 1: past the restaurant on a co owner that are beautifully
Speaker 1: rebuilt facade, new pink colored glass, again dinner time, no
Speaker 1: customers in there, and as they pointed out, they had
Speaker 1: learned that the person who paid for this stuff was
Speaker 1: just renting it wasn't even his building. And then we
Speaker 1: we keep going down this boulevard to a strip of
Speaker 1: garages with lots of BMW's and outis parked in the driveways,
Speaker 1: and they said that this is where the drug runners
Speaker 1: come to get their automobiles fitted out with secret compartments.
Speaker 1: In these secret compartments is where these duffel bags and
Speaker 1: bricks of cocaine are stashed to then be driven down,
Speaker 1: you know, these these big highways that go down into
Speaker 1: the rest of Europe and all over the place. Has
Speaker 1: the rise in cocaine trafficking in the Netherlands and other
Speaker 1: countries in Europe led to an increase in violent crime
Speaker 1: as well. The nutty thing is that nationwide, the stats
Speaker 1: showed that violent crime of all types has been decreasing,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean that life is better in some
Speaker 1: way because of it. There's this permeation and society there
Speaker 1: of of a sort of fear. Not that they are
Speaker 1: themselves targets of specific violent crimes, but they could be
Speaker 1: that someone their family might be targeted that you know,
Speaker 1: there have been assassinations of a journalist and a lawyer
Speaker 1: who are working on drug cases. There's sort of a
Speaker 1: paradox to it. Things have gotten nicer, but they've gotten worse.
Speaker 1: There are these chilling photographs published this past year when
Speaker 1: a prosecutor showed how they had found torture chambers when
Speaker 1: they had a dentist chair in it with straps on it.
Speaker 1: And fittingly, these torture chambers they found had been found
Speaker 1: in shipping containers. Is there anything that can be done
Speaker 1: to actually stem the flow of cocaine given what an
Speaker 1: enormous challenge it is. It really depends on who you
Speaker 1: talked to. The shipping companies and UM. Others in the
Speaker 1: shipping industry will often say like, look, there is a
Speaker 1: demand there for this product, and there's nothing that we
Speaker 1: can really do to stop it. I mean, they're all
Speaker 1: kinds of steps and measures that they could take. UM,
Speaker 1: But again, it gets to the root of this issue,
Speaker 1: which is institutions not wanting to disrupt this smooth flow
Speaker 1: of global trade. So the mayor of Rotterdam has kind
Speaker 1: of taken on this as a mission and he's really
Speaker 1: kind of studied the shipping industry and he's like, look,
Speaker 1: the shipping companies are making record amounts of money right now,
Speaker 1: and it's true they are because of the supply chain
Speaker 1: crisis in the week of the pandemic. So he's like,
Speaker 1: there are things that they could do to spend money
Speaker 1: to solve this problem. They could transform their fleet of
Speaker 1: shipping containers into what are called smart containers, which is
Speaker 1: essentially introducing some sort of technology, a little microchip into
Speaker 1: the container that would be able to track when a
Speaker 1: container is opened or shut, um track it's um it's
Speaker 1: voyage from point A to point B, and just to
Speaker 1: have a better kind of handle on the voyage or
Speaker 1: the life cycle of the shipping container. The shipping companies
Speaker 1: will also say, hey, look, if this is such a
Speaker 1: big problem, which they all acknowledge that it is, why
Speaker 1: don't the governments of say Belgium, in the Netherlands and
Speaker 1: other European government spend more money to hire more customs authorities.
Speaker 1: But people that I've talked to said that, look, you
Speaker 1: could hire an army of customs officials and you still
Speaker 1: would not be able to tackle this problem. Even if
Speaker 1: people disagree on what is the right solution, almost everybody
Speaker 1: agrees on one thing. If you're gonna fix this problem,
Speaker 1: it's going to cost more money. And who's going to
Speaker 1: end up paying that at the end of the day
Speaker 1: is the consumer. Your strawberries are going to be a
Speaker 1: more expensive, your shrimp is going to be more expensive.
Speaker 1: You're going to end up paying more for Consumer Goods.
Speaker 1: Lauren Edder, Vernon Silver, thanks so much for talking with
Speaker 1: me today. Thanks so much. Hey, thanks again. You're gonna
Speaker 1: read more from Lauren editor and Vernon s Over at
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to us here with
Speaker 1: The Big Take, the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I
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