A fur shop in Milan’s Chinatown attracted the attention of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian military body that acts as judicial police. “It was a small leather shop where a lot of people came in, but nobody bought anything,” explains the lieutenant of the anti-drug operative group, Giorgio Targa. There were always men with a suitcase, but they never came out with a handbag or a jacket, nothing. The agents set up surveillance points and identified the suspected clientele. “They were all drug dealers”, he reveals. The place, run by Chinese citizens, served as a bank for criminal organizations. The narcos paid their bills or collected them at the same point. The Guardia di Finanza camouflaged surveillance cameras and microphones inside the tannery. In just six months, the Chinese moved 26 million euros.
In the police operation, the agents discovered several business cards from clothing stores and Chinese restaurants in Badalona. This was the discovery that gave rise to the most important international operation in the history of the Mossos d’Esquadra, which ended with the arrest on October 17 of 78 people, 20 in Catalonia and 58 in Italy, and in in which more than 716,000 euros in cash and 1.2 tons of hashish were confiscated.
Thanks to the investigation of a fake kidnapping of an Italian citizen, the existence of an organization dedicated to drug trafficking based in Barcelona was uncovered. The Italians were in charge of managing the shipments of hashish from Morocco, storing them in two industrial warehouses in Abrera and Sant Fost de Campsentelles and then hiding the goods in the cabins of trucks to transport them to Milan. In addition, this plot laundered money using several Chinese businesses in Badalona that acted as opaque banks. From clothing stores to restaurants, they used the fei system, which is used to transfer money through a series of branches that owe and clear each other’s money. So, the Italian drug lords who received the goods paid the money to the leather goods store in Milan so that those who participated in the transport of the drug to Spain would collect it in one of the stores in Badalona. The money did not travel or be transferred, but the two branches, the one in Catalonia and the one in Milan, owed each other the money. For this management, each of the intermediaries pocketed between 5% and 10%.
The Mossos are now analyzing the records of the Chinese bank in Badalona to look for more customers who have used this opaque service to launder money.
