- The Feds are investigating one of the largest drug
busts in US history. - In June, 2019, news
breaks of a massive seizure in the port of Philadelphia. 20 tons of drugs in a single seizure. - Authorities say the drugs
could have a street value of more than 1 billion dollars. - This was not like just any
other drug trafficking case. Yes, drugs are smuggled on
container ships every day, but this one was extraordinary
and this one was different. It was not only the
sheer quantity of drugs, it was also the level of
involvement of the crew. - This wasn't just happening on one ship. The cartel's penetration
of MSC's crewing apparatus was so deep that they
could run multiple crews on multiple ships with
these massive loads of drugs that were going to Europe. It really has created this kind of gangland feel that overlays
global container shipping. - The fact that there's the
world's largest shipping company that's at the center of this, that makes it a very sensitive topic and also one that could have ramifications for the wider shipping industry. There is this really interesting and problematic tension just in the nature of
the globalized economy. Most people don't give a second thought to the way that their goods arrive. It all arrives on these
giant massive vessels that are sailing around the world. - 90% of global trade is conducted
on ships, and every year, 14 dollars trillion of goods
are moved around the world. - The shipping industry is
essentially the backbone of globalization, of a global economy. What that means is that
there's this pressure on ports and on shipping companies
and on customs authorities to ensure that global trade runs smoothly and that it runs quickly. Every time a container is opened,
that slows down the trade. - It also prevents security
services, customs officials, and others from really digging in and examining the containers as they move through this system. - The ports of Northern Europe,
primarily Antwerp in Belgium and Rotterdam in the Netherlands have long been central to global trade dating all the way back to the spice trade hundreds of years ago. As a result, the infrastructure
built up around these ports has been increasingly
efficient and spectacular. As the market for cocaine
has grown in Europe, it only makes sense to be shipping them through these two ports in the north. That gives the traffickers an opportunity to not necessarily service the markets in the Netherlands or in
Belgium, but all across Europe and even down into
Africa and Asia as well. We visited one of these law
enforcement customs stations where they scan cargo that they believe contains illicit goods. On this trip, just a regular
day in the port of Antwerp, customs officials had pulled
aside a shipping container. It had a high risk level, and they put it through the scanner and ended up searching it. It was cocoa beans from South America. Upon searching the container, they found almost a
thousand kilos of cocaine. - We have several
examples of where they are use all their creativity
to get things past us. I'm going to show you an
image of import of a Cadillac, a pink Cadillac, and
then you see in the door of the Cadillac all kind
of strange packages. So when we examined it, it was
ecstasy, 50 kilos of ecstasy. As you see here, they filled like the shell of pineapples with cocaine. This one is an import
of teak from Ecuador. The left pile of wood had darker edges. The cocaine was hidden in the wood itself. And also, the structure of
the container and truck. Sometimes they hid stuff in the structure like in the floor or the ceiling. - On a yearly basis, we are talking about 40 to 50,000 containers which are scanned. The number of containers
entering and leaving the port are millions of millions, and today, we do not have the infrastructure to scan all the containers. We scan 1.5% of the containers
entering the port of Antwerp. We stop a lot of tons, but
if you look to the outcome, the effect is zero. There is still huge quantities of cocaine entering the European market. - For customs officials,
they're essentially inundated with this problem and really outmatched, and that's something actually
that the traffickers know and realize and have taken advantage of. For them to lose a thousand kilos here, a thousand kilos there, is
not the end of the world because they just expect that they're just going
to continue shipping more. Around 2008, 2009, there
was kind of a new phenomenon that police officials,
customs authorities, started noticing. These large commercial ships, before they entered the
ports, crew on board the ship would actually toss over
bags filled with cocaine. One of their collaborators
or co-conspirators would come up in a smaller
kind of fishing vessel and pick up the cocaine. And this was known as "the drop-off". And that was a really big breakthrough. What this meant was that
there was somebody on the ship that was in on it. As European law enforcement investigators started kind of honing in on this problem of commercial shipping companies being at the center of
the global cocaine trade, they started finding patterns,
putting together pieces, and they realized that there
was one shipping company that seemed to be at the center
of a lot of these drop-offs, and that was MSC. Mediterranean Shipping Company
is known by its initials MSC. They are today the world's
largest shipping company. - MSC is a really interesting company. Over a period of five or six decades, They go from one ship
to a fleet now of 650 surpassing everybody. It's a private company in Switzerland so its finances in
particular are pretty opaque. It does sort of make
the miracle that MSC is in terms of the empire that they built over a short period of time all the more intriguing and
all the more mysterious. - Starting in the early 2000s, MSC became a major player in the sea lanes from
South America to Europe. They started investing heavily
in what are called "reefers" or refrigerated containers
to move refrigerated goods. - That turned out to
be a golden opportunity for the traffickers because you
basically could put the coke inside containers of blueberries
or strawberries or bananas and it would move quickly
through the system, and they don't wanna like slow those down because the fruit is a perishable
commodity, into Europe. - The cooling compartment
is a very popular place to hide cocaine because that
compartment can be opened and closed without breaking
the seal of the container. - One of the key moments in the build out of this infrastructure was the
expansion of the Panama Canal in 2016. So you've got much bigger ships, much greater amounts of cargo. Again, much of it fruit
and vegetables, meats, other kinds of commodities,
but that expansion around 2016 basically correlates with a
big jump in cocaine seizures in the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam. - Because MSC dominated
this particular route, they became an easy target by traffickers. Law enforcement
investigators started seeing that cocaine that had
made its way to Europe had actually stopped through a US port. So they started kind of
working backwards at first, thinking if all of this
cocaine is ending up in Europe but it's stopping in the US,
how did we not detect it? - At the same time, European
authorities are also conducting investigations
where they're coming across the infiltration of other parts of the shipping industry
generally, but especially MSC. - So over the course
of two to three years, they started following about four ships, and that was the MSC
Desiree, the MSC Carlotta, the MSC Avni, and the MSC Gayane. The MSC Gayane is a monstrous ship. This is a ship that is the
length of three football fields. It's one of the biggest ships
sailing the oceans today. - MSC Gayane was following
a particular route from the west coast of South America through the Panama Canal
up to Philadelphia, and from there, from the east
coast of the United States over to Rotterdam and Antwerp. - Gayane set sail in the spring of 2019. In mid-June after the Gayane
had been at sea for many weeks, it pulled into the mouth
of the Delaware Bay. This day, instead of the Gayane being
met by a riverboat pilot, they were met by the Coast
Guard, Philadelphia Police, Homeland Security officials, customs and border protection officials. There were over a hundred law
enforcement agents waiting. They corralled the crew,
start questioning them, swabbing their hands for
any traces of cocaine. Those came back positive. They started doing a deeper
inspection on the containers and eventually found kind of
their first hit of cocaine and then they found more and they found more and eventually came up with the 20 tons. Initially, law enforcement
investigators were stumped. How did they get so much
cocaine on this ship? So what they came to find out
through interviewing the crews and through other kind
of physical evidence that they were able to obtain was that the cocaine was actually
loaded onto the ship while it was in the open
ocean of South America. As the Gayane was powering
through the open ocean, in the middle of the night,
small boats pulled up alongside and essentially loaded
the cocaine that way. The crew members used
the crane of the Gayane and basically hoisted up large nets filled with the bales of
cocaine onto the cargo ship. Then they would take that cocaine and then they pushed it
into some of the containers and basically stashed it on the ship. So it was an extremely brazen operation. - They do this loading
at sea not just once, but multiple times. They load it as it's going down the west coast of South America, turns around at a port in
Chile, and then goes back up, and they do it several
times on the way back up. There were eight crew
members in all on the Gayane that was involved in
the smuggling operation including the chief mate, and the chief mate plays a
really key role on the ship. He puts together the schedules,
for example, of the crewman, so he can get the crew that he knows are in on this operation
working, for example, all at night when he needs them to be
there to load the cocaine. He also has a lot of information
about the stowage plans, so which containers are going where. US authorities did not arrest
the captain of the ship, but you don't need the captain. But for an operation like this, you do need a very senior officer who can control the movement
of the crew, the ship, and all sorts of things. And keep in mind that this wasn't just happening on one ship. US authorities had also made seizures on the Carlotta and the Desiree which they believed operated
in exactly the same way. This is something that
was by 2019, June of 2019, it was a pretty well-oiled system, so that's why they were confident they could move that that many drugs, that tonnage of cocaine on a single load. - In total, there were
about eight crew members that were implicated in
the Gayane smuggling, and of those eight, four of
them had in fact been recruited before ever stepping foot on the Gayane on that particular voyage. At least one of them had been recruited in their home country of Montenegro. - Montenegro has a long
history of seafarers. The country's right on the Adriatic, produces a lot of sailors
and crewmen and officers who are very skilled at what they do and they've been plying
the oceans for centuries. MSC taps into that in a way that's bigger than any other shipping company. They employ basically a
third or more than a third of all Montenegrin sailors. - Organized criminal groups are particularly strong in the Balkans. There's a large network
of individuals and groups that have been operating there for years, really in the wake of
the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Balkan Wars. As the economy there collapsed,
it beget a lot of crime. If you're a cartel, if
you're trafficking drugs, it only made sense and
it was easy for them to target not only sailors, but to target sailors on MSC ships. - Senior law enforcement officials from at least three countries
approached MSC management and said, look this is
what the problem is. They had been told that their
crew were being recruited by the Balkan cartel and so from the point of view
of law enforcement in Europe and ultimately law enforcement in the US, MSC had multiple opportunities
to try and fix this problem before 2019 and didn't
do enough to do that. MSCs view is that they
did try and do things that would help curb this problem. Some cases, they put guards on some ships going from the east coast
of South America to Europe. They tried to find other
ways which they could secure those logistic
lines from traffickers. But their point mainly
is that we were doing everything that every other
shipping company was doing. There's an ongoing investigation
based out of New York into the Balkan cartel and
key individuals in the cartel. Recently, there was a
breakthrough arrest in Miami. This individual was a
former heavyweight boxer from the Balkans, and
according to the indictment, he played a major coordinating role helping to recruit
sailors aboard MSC ships and there are eight
crewmen who were charged and ultimately pled guilty and
are in federal prisons now. - After the crew members were sentenced, it turned out the case
wasn't entirely over. There was still the lingering question of what responsibility does
MSC have in any of this? And it turns out that there's a statute that says essentially that
if you're caught with any illicit cargo, in particular,
if you're caught with cocaine, you will be fined 1,000 dollars per ounce. Customs and border protection authorities added up all the cocaine,
the 20 tons of cocaine, multiplied it by the
1,000 dollars per kilo, and came up with what their fine would be. It was over 600 million dollars. The largest fine ever assessed
against a commercial carrier. The Gayane was seized by US officials during the course of the search and was detained for over a month. - The Gayane is worth at least
a hundred million dollars but it's also, once you seize it, you take one of these massive
assets out of the lineup of cargo ships that the company is using to move goods around the world. So it was a pretty shocking event for MSC. They reached an agreement
with US authorities to pay 50 million dollars, which is essentially putting
the ship out on bail. There's a civil case going on right now where there's an effort
by US authorities to show that that initial seizure
should turn into a forfeiture. In other words, MSC should lose the ship. MSC is arguing that they're not culpable. US government is arguing
that in fact they are and that case has the potential
to really change the map for shipping companies. US authorities really want to
make an example of this case for not just MSC, but the
shipping industry generally. It's absolutely clear MSC wasn't itself, as a company, smuggling the drugs, the Balkan cartel was smuggling the drugs. But there's a question about
how the company behaves as its infrastructure is being used and misused by drug trafficking. - Even the most amount of money that a shipping company can spend on this, on guards, and on cameras, and on other technology
like smart containers that can detect when a container is open, even throwing money at that, it's gonna be very difficult
to make a dent in this problem because you still have an
enormous trade in cocaine. - Even though there were 20
tons of cocaine on that ship, it was just a fraction
of the overall cargo and the cocaine was found in
seven different containers. But that's seven containers out of 4,000. It's a really, really,
really hard problem to solve.
