They know how to get around, how to locate the right container and, above all, they know how to leave the port of Genoa with kilos and kilos of drugs. Camalli and dockers by day, accomplices of drug traffickers at night to supplement their salary or to pay for their addiction to drugs or gambling. The cross-section of the main cocaine hub is confirmed by the arrests made by Gico della Finance Guard coordinated by the District Anti-Mafia Directorate.

Four people ended up in handcuffs: Massimo Malinconico, 48, a Culmv worker, the single company workers and various goods, Alberto Pinto, 47, Natale Giuliano, 33, and Rocco Lazzaro, 38, all three port employees. A year ago they tried to smuggle out of the port over 400 kilos of white powder stored in containers carrying coffee on the ‘ship of mysteries’, MSc Adelaide where a slaughtered seafarer was also found. The ship had arrived from Rio de Janeiro in the port of Pra’. The drug would have yielded around 30 million euros. That day he was arrested the camallo Fabio Papa, 50 years old. According to the investigators, coordinated by prosecutor Marco Zocco, Lazzaro, Pinto and Giuliano, who arrived in Genoa from Calabria to work at the Bettolo terminal, were the ‘instigators’ of the operation. Inspections had been made, mobile phones registered to foreigners were used with whom they communicated via EncroChat (an encrypted communication system) and jammers were used to identify any bugs. However, the operation had failed because the Finance had arrested dad.

The latter had become a concern for the other three who thought he might mention their names. For this reason, he had been ‘hired’ via clandestine cell phones that arrived in prison Salvatore Mayo (investigated in this investigation for aiding and abetting) to convince him to keep silent during the interrogation. Maio had been convicted in the first instance of the double murder that took place in 2016 in Genoa in front of a bar. “If they understand (the magistrates, ed) that the Calabrians are behind it, it takes twenty years for association, so that they shut their mouths because they don’t talk in prison”, Giuliano and Pinto say on the phone who in the meantime are trying to organize another trafficking of 300 kilos of coke to be taken in Gioia Tauro but who had been blocked in Greece. The pressure on the camallo worked so much so that when questioned by the investigators he never mentioned the names of his accomplices.