was particularly good in circumventing.
Alfredo also supplemented his income by importing heroin from Afghanistan; it was a small amount of his overall business, but it did pay for the annual Christmas and Easter parties he threw in the town at the foot of his hilltop. It went without saying that he did not pay much in the way of taxes, though in Italy this was merely a sign of his smart business sense.
Nuri realized that while many Italian magistrates would have loved the headlines that would come from arresting a mafioso, they could not stomach the obituaries that would inevitably follow. But he wasn’t counting on an arrest. He was hoping he could interest the Italian antimafia police in a visit to Alfredo’s estate, at which time he might talk to Alfredo about the Wolves—a conversation he assumed would go nowhere—but also borrow whatever home computers he had in his house. For the intercepts that had yielded the conversations led to other conversations indicating he was making financial transfers via the Internet; one of them was surely going to the Wolves’ account. With the murder so recent, there were likely to be traces of the payoff somewhere in the computer.
With Western countries under pressure from the U.S. and the UN to do something about the Afghan heroin trade, which had thrived despite the apparent demise of the Taliban, Nuri decided to use that as his opening. He focused on the evidence connecting Alfredo to the trade and skipping any mention of the murder in Berlin, which he guessed the Italians weren’t too likely to care about.
A tall, thin man in his mid-thirties met them at the ministry. He introduced himself as Pascal La Rota, the magistrate who specialized in the Naples-area mafia. He had a military air—close-cropped hair, wide chest, and a nose that seemed to have been broken when he was a young man. He offered the two Americans caffè —in Italy, this meant espresso—then began looking at the evidence Nuri had brought along.
In the Italian justice system, a magistrate was closer to an American district attorney than a judge. They had a wide range of investigative powers and could be extremely unpleasant when crossed. Those who worked in the antimafia commission were reputed to be among the toughest in the nation—or the craziest.
La Rota impressed Nuri as neither. His manner was mild, almost studious. He put on a pair of glasses and began reading the information Nuri had brought, while Gregor spooned sugar into her coffee.
MY-PID had collected ships’ manifests and various information on different shipments connected to Alfredo’s empire. It showed that a middle-level heroin dealer in Florence who supplied a British network received yearly deposits into an Austrian bank account from one of Alfredo’s companies. It connected a truck stopped at the French border with a hundred kilos of heroin to another of Alfredo’s firms. And best of all, it included the transcripts of three phone calls between Alfredo and two contacts in Iran referring to shipments of flowers, which circumstantial evidence indicated was a code word for heroin.
The transcripts were clearly the smoking gun, a direct link between the mobster and the drugs. They had been recorded nearly eighteen months before, as part of an NSA program collecting raw intelligence from Iran. But they weren’t of sufficient priority for even a computer transcription, let alone to trigger a human review. MY-PID had found them listed along with three thousand other files that it judged might have a connection to the heroin trade and Italy, and had done the brute translation work itself.
As valuable as they were, they proved a sticking point for La Rota.
“Interesting,” he said, leafing through the papers. His English was good enough that he could read the summary sheet in the original without referring to the translation that had been prepared for him. “But, as far as this is concerned for evidence—I must tell you, Italian
Alfredo also supplemented his income by importing heroin from Afghanistan; it was a small amount of his overall business, but it did pay for the annual Christmas and Easter parties he threw in the town at the foot of his hilltop. It went without saying that he did not pay much in the way of taxes, though in Italy this was merely a sign of his smart business sense.
Nuri realized that while many Italian magistrates would have loved the headlines that would come from arresting a mafioso, they could not stomach the obituaries that would inevitably follow. But he wasn’t counting on an arrest. He was hoping he could interest the Italian antimafia police in a visit to Alfredo’s estate, at which time he might talk to Alfredo about the Wolves—a conversation he assumed would go nowhere—but also borrow whatever home computers he had in his house. For the intercepts that had yielded the conversations led to other conversations indicating he was making financial transfers via the Internet; one of them was surely going to the Wolves’ account. With the murder so recent, there were likely to be traces of the payoff somewhere in the computer.
With Western countries under pressure from the U.S. and the UN to do something about the Afghan heroin trade, which had thrived despite the apparent demise of the Taliban, Nuri decided to use that as his opening. He focused on the evidence connecting Alfredo to the trade and skipping any mention of the murder in Berlin, which he guessed the Italians weren’t too likely to care about.
A tall, thin man in his mid-thirties met them at the ministry. He introduced himself as Pascal La Rota, the magistrate who specialized in the Naples-area mafia. He had a military air—close-cropped hair, wide chest, and a nose that seemed to have been broken when he was a young man. He offered the two Americans caffè —in Italy, this meant espresso—then began looking at the evidence Nuri had brought along.
In the Italian justice system, a magistrate was closer to an American district attorney than a judge. They had a wide range of investigative powers and could be extremely unpleasant when crossed. Those who worked in the antimafia commission were reputed to be among the toughest in the nation—or the craziest.
La Rota impressed Nuri as neither. His manner was mild, almost studious. He put on a pair of glasses and began reading the information Nuri had brought, while Gregor spooned sugar into her coffee.
MY-PID had collected ships’ manifests and various information on different shipments connected to Alfredo’s empire. It showed that a middle-level heroin dealer in Florence who supplied a British network received yearly deposits into an Austrian bank account from one of Alfredo’s companies. It connected a truck stopped at the French border with a hundred kilos of heroin to another of Alfredo’s firms. And best of all, it included the transcripts of three phone calls between Alfredo and two contacts in Iran referring to shipments of flowers, which circumstantial evidence indicated was a code word for heroin.
The transcripts were clearly the smoking gun, a direct link between the mobster and the drugs. They had been recorded nearly eighteen months before, as part of an NSA program collecting raw intelligence from Iran. But they weren’t of sufficient priority for even a computer transcription, let alone to trigger a human review. MY-PID had found them listed along with three thousand other files that it judged might have a connection to the heroin trade and Italy, and had done the brute translation work itself.
As valuable as they were, they proved a sticking point for La Rota.
“Interesting,” he said, leafing through the papers. His English was good enough that he could read the summary sheet in the original without referring to the translation that had been prepared for him. “But, as far as this is concerned for evidence—I must tell you, Italian
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