A fur shop in Milan’s Chinatown caught the attention of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian military body that acts as judicial police. “It was a small fur store where a lot of people came in, but no one bought anything,” says the lieutenant of the anti-drug operational group, Giorgio Targa. There were always men carrying a suitcase, but they never came out with a bag or a jacket, nothing. Even during confinement, customer traffic continued. The agents set up surveillance points and identified the alleged clientele. “They were all drug traffickers,” he reveals. The store, run by Chinese citizens, served as a bank for criminal organizations. The drug traffickers paid their bills or collected them at the same point without having to send the money to any point even though the drugs and their transportation had traveled from Morocco to northern Italy, making a stop in Barcelona for transportation.
The Guardia di Finanza camouflaged surveillance cameras and microphones inside the fur factory. In just six months, the Chinese moved 26 million euros. In the police operation that followed that discovery, the agents intervened in a notebook where the operations were recorded and discovered several business cards from clothing stores and Chinese restaurants in Badalona. That was the discovery that gave rise to the largest international operation in the history of the Mossos d’Esquadra, which resulted in the arrest on October 17 of 78 people, 20 in Catalonia and 58 in Italy, and in which more were seized. of 716,000 euros in cash and 1.2 tons of hashish.
With the investigation of a false kidnapping of an Italian citizen, the first contacts were established between the Mossos and the Guardia di Finanza. Those investigations that finally came to nothing helped the Italian police inform the Catalan police of the existence of a very important drug trafficking organization based in Catalonia. Thanks to that, the Catalan police found an explanation for a suspicious event that had come to nothing. During the confinement, they intercepted an Italian in Badalona who had gone out into the streets without permission. In his backpack they found 300,000 euros in cash. The case had been archived by the court but after information from the Italians they were able to identify him as one of the leaders of an organization dedicated to drug trafficking. The majority of the people who were settled in Catalonia had a high standard of living, lived in high-end homes, did not have any known activity and led an important lifestyle,” emphasizes the head of the central organized crime area, Antoni salleras. The Italians were in charge of managing shipments of hashish from Morocco, storing them in two industrial warehouses in Abrera and Sant Fost de Campsentelles and then hiding the merchandise in the tractor units of the trucks that they transported to Milan.
The investigations into this organization, in addition to tracing the path that the drugs followed, made it possible to discover how they laundered the money they obtained for it. They used a Chinese criminal organization based in Badalona that acted as an opaque bank for their apparently legal businesses, such as clothing stores and restaurants. This branch used the “fei chien” system, an opaque network for transferring money that uses a series of branches that owe and clear the money between them. Thus, the Italian drug traffickers who received the merchandise paid the money to the Milan fur dealer so that those who participated in the transport of the drugs could collect it in one of the stores in Badalona. The money did not travel or be transferred but rather the two branches, the one in Catalonia and the one in Milan, owed each other the money. Through this management, each of the intermediaries pockets between 5 and 10%. “Money doesn’t travel. The money is compensated. It is a mechanism that guarantees safer transportation of money and that is carried out in a parallel and opaque manner to the conventional banking system,” says José Merino, head of the Central Area of ????economic crimes of the Mossos.
Although the researchers were aware of the existence of the practice of “Fei chien” – when performed by Arabs it is called Hawalla – it is the first time that it has been corroborated in Catalonia. In Italy, they have found evidence that several companies in the steel and plastic sector, with commercial links to the Chinese market, also went to these businesses to launder money and avoid paying taxes. And all thanks to the placement of the microphones and cameras. “We kept an eye on the criminal world and saw that they wanted to send the money to Badalona,” says the captain of the Guardia di Finanza, Giuseppe Macaluso. In Catalonia, the Mossos are analyzing the documentation seized in the premises of Badalona to pull the thread and know who has used that service.
