The number of narcos using boats for drug transport is increasing also here in the Mediterranean. An all-Italian gang has been recently captured. They imported high quality hashish by boat, a Leopard yacht called Elizabeth G, from Morocco to the Côte d’Azur and then supplied to the market in central and northern Italy.
They were all arrested on charges of having imported over 1,100 kilos of hashish and more than half a kilo of cocaine. Among the arrested also two important traffickers prejudiced, Francesco Massimiliano Cauchi and Marco Bruno Bernini.
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Narcos in the Med, this is how they got caught
Everything starts from the discovery, in a garage in Via Padova in Milan, of a huge quantity of hashish (11 million euros in value) and cocaine crammed into a double wall in September 2018. But there is another strange detail. The discovery of a radar boat Garmin, still new and packed. On that occasion three people were identified, including Silvestro Giannini, whose name is linked to a report from the Carabinieri of Savona.
He is the owner of the Elizabeth G, a boat with the Dutch flag, moored at the Marina of Varazze (Savona), already kept under control by the Carabinieri for its suspicious navigation, thanks to a GPS. A trip, above all, is carefully monitored: the one that left in July 2018 from Varazze. Elizabeth G arrives in Almerimar, in southern Spain, after a few stops on the French coast. Then off to Morocco, with a stop on the high seas, not far from Gibraltar.
How did the traffic happen?
According to the judges, it was precisely at that time that the drug was transhipped (and crammed into a craft compartment on board the boat). The delivery, once the boat returned to Italian waters, was performed again on the high seas, with the transhipment on a smaller rib helmed by a member of the band, Antonino Capone.
The car with which the dinghy had been taken to the Port of Rapallo (from where it sailed to reach the Elizabeth G) was headed to Melissa Mirabella, companion of the aforementioned Cauchi.
Cauchi and Bernini, we said, are two recidivist narcoskipper. They had already set up a drug trafficking boat, from Morocco to Italy, from 2012 to 2014: this last criminal enterprise was nothing more than the re-proposition of a scheme already tested, carried out with a new gang.
