The The Pursuit Of The Smugglers Italian Dubbed Free Download
Vanina Mazzillo
In most cases, the powerful blue hulls managed to trade without being caught. When caught in the act, daring chases were born between the patrol boats of the Guardia di Finanza and the blue hulls. The pursuit lasted for hours and ended if the military vehicle managed to approach the blue hull, even for just a few seconds. In this case, the military threw a line into the propeller or short-circuited the engines with a powerful water cannon.
the The Pursuit of the Smugglers italian dubbed free download
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Naples, 4 April 1972. Neapolitan smugglers celebrate a funeral ceremony at sea in memory of three young colleagues shot dead by an American soldier during a negotiation that ended badly. The victims are Alberto Bravaccino, aged 35 (father of six children); Achille Diodato, aged 30 (father of five children) and Nunzio Pipolo, aged 19.
The facts date back to the previous night and involve the twenty-three-year-old Edward Michael Cox, a young corporal of the marines who on board the aircraft carrier Roosvelt was supposed to deliver six hundred cartons of cigarettes to the smugglers by motorboat. Something went wrong when paying. The soldier demanded a higher amount than agreed, starting a dispute that ended with the death of the three men. After appropriating the money, Cox provided magistrates with a bogus version of the facts, claiming to have witnessed a feud between smugglers with his own eyes.
To reach North Africa they travel for days under harsh desert weather conditions, suffering abuse from people smugglers and criminal networks while parting with huge sums of money for the journey. A good number get stranded in transit countries, forcing some to return to their countries of origin.
Thereafter, clandestine travel became the rule rather than the exception. Such transit of the Mediterranean often depended on the illicit networks that had previously been engaged in smuggling, whether of cigarettes, drugs and drug-related raw materials, or arms and ammunition. At first, these professional smugglers, who often collaborated with and were shielded by various segments of the Cosa Nostra around the central Mediterranean, dominated the market for the Tunisia-Italy voyage. After September 11, 2001, the connections between these smugglers (and other transgressive seafarers) and their political patrons in Italy led the authorities to oppose some, but not all, kinds of infiltration of Italian territory: Terrorism was cast as a more menacing threat than illicit migration. In an attempt to prevent the former, state officials were willing to overlook the latter. From the late 1990s, then, more and more Tunisians and other North Africans made the surreptitious voyage to Italy, taking advantage of the existing infrastructure and its protection from the interference of the authorities.
In Italy, court cases and police and government reports reveal an intricate web of Mafia families that through bribery, intimidation, and murder control the smuggling of billions of Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds cigarettes into Europe through Cyprus, Albania, and Montenegro. In Spain, at least one major distributor for RJR is allegedly a black market distributor linked to illegal drug trafficking. In Canada, RJR sales executives dealt directly with smugglers linked to the American and Canadian mafia. In some cases, tobacco industry executives actively played various gangs off against each other and solicited and received millions of dollars in kickbacks or bribes in return for selling to preferred criminal syndicates, according to court records and sources.
Investigators have not only to build a picture of the smugglers in Africa from the main source countries and those operating in Turkey but also the gangs handling the Mediterranean crossings from Libya to Italy and from Turkey to Greece. Then they have to identify the gangs handling the land routes to the more prosperous north European states once the refugees and migrants have landed.
On phone intercepts that authorities used to track Mered, he was heard laughing about the fatal overloading of migrant ships. He boasted about underfeeding the migrants staying in his warehouses, and brushed off the idea of providing them with life jackets. Over the past six years, some two million people, mostly from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, have made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean in overpacked, often unseaworthy boats, struggling to escape war, brutal repression, and economic hardship. More than 16,000 have died along the way, putting political pressure on European governments to stem the unprecedented influx of migrants. Combating illegal migration has become a central focus of police and prosecutors across Europe, who have been ordered to crack down on the smugglers who ferry refugees seeking a better life for themselves and their families. So far, authorities have taken down some low-level operatives in the smuggling syndicates in Europe, but top bosses like Mered have eluded their grasp.
The investigation by the Center's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is based on a review of thousands of pages of corporate and government documents and dozens of interviews with law enforcement officials, smugglers and other sources worldwide. It indicates that tobacco smuggling is increasingly dominated -- often with the knowledge and consent of the tobacco companies -- by a handful of criminal organizations that in some cases have links to organized crime.
Court documents in Hong Kong, reviewed by the Center, show that between 1987 and 1993 BAT sold at least HK$8.5 billion (US $1.2 billion) worth of cigarettes (about 50 billion cigarettes) to a Hong Kong-based network, smuggling into China and Taiwan. The network was backed by the Triad, Asia's most notorious criminal organization. Hong Kong authorities calculate that pipeline profits multiplied sevenfold, with the smugglers and street retail vendors earning total gross profits of about HK$60 billion (US $8.3 billion).
The affidavit states that Wingate and Bernstein said "that the company's organizational structure necessitated new marketing strategies. According to them, these strategies included selling cigarettes to smugglers."
The smuggler continued: "In my discussion with Richard Ward it's very clear to me that tobacco companies knew more about smuggling and how it worked and how to improve it than any smugglers on Earth. And to show just how good they were and just how intimate their knowledge was, when the business moved from interprovincial to international, the tobacco companies ended up with more of the provincial and federal taxes than the smugglers did, and they took it not with willful blindness. They were participants without being in the room."
To further distance itself from the operation, RJR-Macdonald transferred
equipment from Canada to Puerto Rico, where it began large-scale manufacturing of its Canadian brand cigarettes. The entire output of the plant was sold to smugglers, primarily Pine Partnership. The sales arrangements were made through Northern Brands International, Thompson said.
After his arrest, company officials portrayed Thompson as a rogue operator. But when he ran his one-man, direct-to-smugglers sales department at Northern Brands International, it was another story. During those years, his bosses repeatedly commended him for his excellence. They threw a party for him and gave him an Indian headdress in joking recognition of his sales to American Indian smugglers. On June 23, 1993, RJR-Macdonald president Pierre Brunelle wrote to Thompson that his "hard work and dedication to the company have made significant contribution to the success we have realized over the years especially in recent months." Thompson's 1993 performance evaluation applauded him for hitting "every target and objective assigned to him." As one former RJR senior executive told the Center, NBI and Les Thompson saved RJR-Macdonald from possible bankruptcy.
Manufacturers still kept the networks running and, according to court testimony last year from RCMP Sgt. Raymond Blair Lutz, large-scale smuggling continued until 1998. Lutz told a pretrial hearing in Montreal in February 2000 that manufacturers were still sending millions of cigarettes to the J. Stanley Company in New Jersey. In what police call "around the flagpole" smuggling, J. Stanley shipped the cigarettes in bond back to Canada, where they were sold to smugglers, who reshipped them back to the U.S. still in bond. They were then smuggled back into Canada. The process was designed to distance the tobacco companies and J. Stanley from the smuggling.
Thompson said La Rocca once told him he knew Michael Haenggi, who bragged to the press in 1998 that he sold millions of RJR's Winstons to smugglers who smuggled them into Spain. Thompson said that La Rocca had been instructed to warn Haenggi that if he didn't "zip his lips," he would be cut off by RJR. "I understood from Dick that that statement was coming to him indirectly from (CEO of RJR Nabisco) Steven Goldstone," Thompson said.
On the night of Feb. 23, 2000, as a full moon drifted in and out of scattered clouds, revenue agents with Italy's Guardia di Finanza drove along a highway near the Adriatic port of Brindisi. They were hunting tobacco smugglers. Suddenly, out of the darkness, a Range Rover with reinforced front bumpers and its headlights off swung across the highway and deliberately crashed into the agents' tiny Fiat Punto. Alberto De Falco, 33, and Antonio Sottile, 29, were killed. Two others sitting in the back seat were seriously injured.
Beginning in the early 1980s, Philip Morris and RJR, from offices in Basel, Switzerland, ran a cigarette export operation through three Swiss companies that had close ties to Italian organized crime, the 53-page report said. These licensed distributors were identified as Balmex AG, owned by Patrick Laurent; Basilio AG, owned by George Kastl; and Algrado AG, owned by Werner Denz. "This circuit . . . constituted the supply channel for the tobacco smugglers," the report said.
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