30 Wednesday January 26 2022 | the times
Wo r l d
Customs officers are having almost no
impact on the trafficking of illegal
drugs into Europe, and are suffering
blackmail, bribery and violence as
mafias attempt to infiltrate their ranks,
the head of Belgian customs has said.
Kristian Vanderwaeran, director-
general of customs and excise in Brus-
sels, said his team had been making
record seizures of cocaine — but that
international gangs were spending
huge sums trying to subvert the legal
economy, plant informants in police
forces and corrupt local politics.
Drug-related violence is also grow-
ing, with the latest casualty being
Bledar Muca, 39, a British national and
a member of the Albanian mafia who
was shot in the head six times outside
his home in Antwerp on Saturday.
In 2020, Vanderwaeren’s customs
team seized 89,450kg of cocaine with a
street value they estimated at €12.8 bil-
lion, more than twice the amount seized
High times
Cocaine seized in 2019
Belgium
Netherlands
Spain
Romania
France
Portugal
Italy
Poland
Latvia
Turkey65,248 kg
43,836 kg
37,868 kg
16,157 kg
15,761 kg
10,567 kg
8,245 kg
2,248 kg
2,202 kg
1,634 kg
Source: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and
Drug AddictionA
supercar
that comes
with wings
has been
given the
green light to take to
the skies (Tom
Knowles writes). TheAirCar, which runs on
unleaded petrol, has
been awarded an
official European
certificate of
airworthiness after
completing 70 hours of
flight testing,including more than
200 take-offs and
landings.
Made by the
Slovakian company
Klein Vision, the
prototype weighs
1,100kg and uses a
140 horsepower,
1.6 litre BMW engine
to power wheels on
the road and a
propeller for flight.
The vehicle takes
only two minutes and
15 seconds to
transform from a car
into an aircraft, withUp, up a n d away
... flying supercar
earns its wings
in 2017. But that, based on statistics
gathered by the UN Office on Drugs
and Crime, probably amounts to barely
10 per cent of the total trafficked drugs.
The staff of 3,300 Belgian customs
officers avoid being photographed, to
protect themselves from intimidation
or pressure by gangsters who are
constantly preying on people in law
enforcement who are poor, with debts
or vulnerabilities to exploit.
“They look to the weak, the poorest
ones, ones who have problems pri-
vately, those who are spending too
much money,” Vanderwaeren
said. “Mob infiltration” can
begin with a tap on the
shoulder at the petrol
station, an offer of a
drink or perhaps a
friendly loan from a
family member.
Last month police
arrested staff working for
a bailiff who was using
access to national fi-
nancial databases to
identify indebted cus-
toms, police or other
officials as potential
bribery targets. In
March last year a
police operation tar-
geting the Sky ECC en-
crypted phone messagingCocaine cartels
pull the strings at
gateway to Europe
app led to the arrest of three customs
officers and senior police who were
passing intelligence on drug intercep-
tions to mobsters.
Other arrests included officials in the
public prosecutor’s office, lawyers, trea-
sury civil servants and staff in the Ant-
werp port authority and city hall.
“It was a breakthrough, but just one
tentacle,” said a senior officer.
A customs officer whose security
clearances allowed him to see which
containers had been identified as
potential cocaine carriers was detained,
as well as the chief police inspector on
Antwerp’s drug team. Vanderwaeren
said the corrupt officers had received
€50,000 to €80,000 for each tip-off,
allowing swaps of suspect containers to
take place before seizures were made.
A number of infiltrators were discov-
ered during the recruitment of 341 cus-
toms officers taken on as a result of the
increased controls needed after Brexit,
Vanderwaeren added.
Last year Bart De Wever, Antwerp’s
mayor, was placed under 24/7 police
protection following intelligence that
drug gangs were planning to attack
him. He said last month that a new class
of wealthy entrepreneurs funded by
laundered drug money was “subtly”
infiltrating Antwerp politics.
“These criminals seek the company
of respectable people and then you can
be subconsciously trapped or you can
be tempted, brought to make a deal with
them,” he said. “No one is immune.”
De Wever sees the drug mafia as a
bigger threat to security than terrorism.
Balkan crime gangs, particularly
from Albania and Serbia, play an im-
portant role in the cocaine trade and
the “Trojan horse” pick-up operations,
in which gang members hide in a Euro-
pean shipping container that is ware-
housed overnight near a drug shipment
from Latin America. During the night
they emerge to unload drugs from
high-risk containers which are likely to
be scanned, and switch them to low-
risk containers in order to evade cus-
toms checks. The technique relies on
the collusion of corrupt staff.
Four fifths of the cocaine that arrives
in Antwerp crosses the border with the
Netherlands, a few miles away, to be cut
and packaged before being distributed
across Europe, including Britain.
De Wever said that drug revenues
were also “poisoning traditional sec-
tors, such as property and hospitality”,
with billions of euros laundered
through property development and
fast-food restaurants. “This is going to
penetrate all of society,” he said. “This is
going to permeate politics.”
Vanderwaeren agreed: “They are in-
filtrating normal economic life. Like in
South America, it starts there, then
they enter public services and then they
influence politicians. If this continues
with billions and billions of money,
where will we be in five years?”Belgium
Bruno Waterfield Antwerp
President Biden is losing the crucial
support of black voters who did more
than any other group to get him into the
White House.
Six in ten black Americans approve
of Biden’s performance, down from
about nine in ten during the first six
months of his presidency, in polls
by Norc Center for Public Affairs
Research for the Associated Press.
The growing dissatisfaction points to
a disaster for the Democrats in many
areas in midterm polls in November,
notably the swing states where Biden
won in 2020 thanks to overwhelming
black support in cities such as Detroit in
Michigan, Atlanta in Georgia and
Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.
Black voters may not switch to theGangs mimic
corporations
Analysis
L
ike all successful
businesses, the criminal
cartels that oversee
Latin American cocaine
production and
distribution have shown
themselves highly capable of
adapting to change (Stephen
Gibbs writes). Recent years have
brought more nimble operations,
with new areas of production and
markets, and new threats.
Gone are the days when the
business was dominated by a few
godfather-like tycoons, among
them the Mexican billionaire
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán,
now serving life in the US.
Drug investigators say that
since his demise the cocaine
business has become more
corporate, more multinational.
Various mafia cells from several
countries, each specialising in
specific areas such as supply,
transport or money-laundering,
form networks as needed on a
particular shipment, and then
disband. Brokers, often based in
Europe, establish bespoke teams
for specific deals.
Colombia remains by far the
biggest supplier of cocaine, with
Peru and Bolivia also important
players, but Ecuador, Mexico,
Honduras, Guatemala and
Venezuela also now have
industrial-scale coca plantations.
The primary market is shifting
away from the US and towards
Europe and beyond.
The US, while still immensely
important, is always risky, with
Washington spending billions
tracking and extraditing drug
lords. Europe is far easier to
penetrate — and the cocaine
fetches 40 per cent more.
Markets are also being
explored in Turkey and
China.Last of the
godfathers: Joaquín
“El Chapo” Guzmán
Black voters abandon
United States
David Charter WashingtonRepublican party but many will stay at
home rather than vote, unless Biden
and the Democrats in Congress pass
key measures, such as voting rights and
police reforms, community organisers
warn.
“What happens in the midterms is
the same thing that happened in
Virginia in 2021: Democrats will lose,
and they will lose big,” said W Mondale
Robinson, founder of the Black Male
Voter Project, a group that worked to
persuade Georgians to turn out.
He was referring to Virginia’s gover-
nor election in November where the
Republican candidate, Glenn Young-
kin, reversed an early polling deficit,
partly due to voter disenchantment at
the failure of Congress to pass Biden’s
economic and social reforms.
Robinson added: “What we’ve seen
in Virginia was black people didn’t go