Buying Heroin Crete

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Buying Heroin Crete

BY Maria Pappa. So generally speaking, you should be careful who you talk to. Random street dealers may be an easy solution but no one can guarantee the quality of the product and there is a high risk of getting arrested. Covid fuelled a major increase in substance abuse worldwide and Greece is no exception. Different groups are doing different kinds of drugs. The youth prefer weed. MDMA and ketamine are more popular in the club scene. Raves are full with hallucinogens while the gay community has a thing for crystal meth at sex parties. The only drug that everyone seems to agree on is cocaine. Photography by Alex Mihai. Berlin The Lowdown on Drugs in Berlin. Jamaica The Lowdown on Drugs in Jamaica. More from Drugs. Find someone you can trust and keep wary of strangers when buying your party drugs. The Lowdown on Drugs in Jamaica Recreational drugs are illegal in Jamaica, and contrary to popular belief, that includes weed. The Lowdown on Drugs in New York City Weed is legal in the city, when it comes to other drugs, know your source or skip it. What's The Lowdown on Drugs in Barbados?

The Lowdown on Drugs in Athens

Buying Heroin Crete

On April 28, , a fishing trawler intercepted an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, a day after the tanker had left Dubai for Greece. Three men climbed aboard the tanker and spent the night packing hundreds of small sacks of heroin, weighing at least two metric tons in total, into its ballast boxes. After they finished, two of the men sailed back to the coast. One stayed behind. Early on the morning of June 6, it nosed into Elefsina, a grimy port just west of Athens. The truck was supposed to move most of the heroin to a port in northwest Greece, then across the Adriatic by ferry to Italy. From there, it would be distributed to the street corners of Belgium and the Netherlands, kicking back hundreds of millions of euros to its owners. All the pieces were in place, in other words, for a latter-day Mediterranean sequel to The French Connection. But as was the fate of that famed heroin transaction, the Noor One deal quickly unraveled. Four days after the oil tanker reached the port at Elefsina, a figure on the fringe of the operation, unnerved by the idea of trafficking heroin, entered a police station. He explained that somewhere outside Athens a huge haul of drugs was being prepared for export. On June 11, Katsoulis sent five of his men to observe the squat cinderblock warehouse where the heroin was supposed to be held. The next evening, at around 9 p. They just started convulsing and barking violently. Inside the warehouse were six Kurds and Greeks, kilograms of uncut heroin, and a handgun. At approximately the same time, another coast guard squad raided a mansion in the lush Athenian suburb of Filothei and found another half-ton of heroin stacked in its garage. Over the next several days, the plotline shifted from The French Connection to The Wire : Greek intelligence services picked up one member of the operation after another and flipped them. To hide the identity of the original informant, the police also arrested him or her; at the same time, they allowed others with known ties to the operation to escape. In Elefsina, thanks to a tip from a different source, they swarmed the Noor One and arrested its crew members. Another source eventually led them to Dubai. By August, 33 people were in custody. Greek authorities had disrupted the largest known movement of heroin in European history. But that was just the beginning of the story. The seizure of the drugs shipped on the Noor One has triggered a long series of seismic aftershocks in Greece and around the world. The planners of the smuggling operation have turned on one another in a war of retribution that has left at least 17 people dead on three continents. Phone records are exposing scores of police whom the smugglers bought off, from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates. In Greece, an investigation into the Noor One captivated the national press—and then spurred a new wave of public interest in the case via a preliminary criminal trial and the rise of a new media magnate. And an ongoing investigation into who funded the Noor One threatens to ensnare Greek oligarch Evangelos Marinakis, one of the most powerful figures in global shipping and soccer. They began three months after the Noor One was seized. Early on in the criminal investigation, authorities in Greece had allowed the most crucial figure in the operation to escape: the driver of the black SUV that had picked up the heroin when it arrived in Elefsina in June An Iranian Kurd, he sometimes went by the name Mohammed Diesel. Fearing arrest, Diesel had flown to Istanbul and pleaded with a childhood friend named Naji Sharifi Zindashti to smuggle him to safety into Dubai. Thirty years earlier, Zindashti and Diesel had been sentenced to execution in Tehran on heroin trafficking charges. Together they broke out of Evin Prison by killing a guard. Diesel fled for Pakistan, Zindashti for Istanbul. Over time, Zindashti came to occupy a remarkable place in the maelstrom of Turkish politics. It is widely believed that in the mids he brokered ties with a political cell called Ergenekon. Zindashti was imprisoned again for heroin trafficking in , but was released early for allegedly informing against the most prominent members of Ergenekon. Other figures who owned stakes were Diesel and at least four other Kurdish gangsters—men based in Dubai, Amsterdam, and Brussels. At least 20 million euros cash was paid to Iranian or Afghan producers. They entrusted their product to a Greek oil broker whose incentive for the job—perhaps a large fee, perhaps a cut of the cargo—remains a mystery. They also knew that someone with a history of informing existed in their ranks: Zindashti. The barely concealed threat in this message was anything but idle. Two weeks after Zindashti received that email, his white Porsche was rolling down an Istanbul boulevard when rounds of bullets ripped through its doors, killing the driver and passenger. Zindashti himself was not in the car. The driver was his nephew, the passenger his daughter; both were on their way to classes at Istanbul University. The body count continued to rise. Days after the killing, United Arab Emirates authorities informed their Canadian counterparts that the assassins had flown to British Columbia. A week after that, a farmer was strolling through his blueberry patch an hour east of Vancouver when he stumbled upon the body of one of those alleged assassins, chewed through with bullets. Days later, the body of the other was found in a burnt-out car several miles away. In January , Dutch newspapers reported the shooting of a cocaine trafficker with ties to a Noor One funder in Panama City. Two years later, the brother of the gangster killed in Dubai was kidnapped from his house in Tehran and executed in a dog pen in southeastern Turkey. Nine months after that, the prominent attorney of another funder was gunned down with an Uzi while out to breakfast with his family in Istanbul. By April , 13 people connected to the Noor One had been assassinated. Four others had died in suspicious circumstances. Despite these claims, Zindashti has never been successfully convicted for a single murder. Police were regular visitors to his Istanbul villa as the killings were being carried out. Greece, where the Noor One remained docked all this time, was to be the most consequential source of conflict over the deal once the bloodletting started to abate. Whenever the Noor One appears about to fade from national headlines, the story seems to will its way back into the fore. News flutters in of another strange murder, another inexplicable resignation of a prosecutor, another bomb in the mail. Such, at any rate, was the dominant impression left by the official Greek investigation into the Noor One deal. From the outset of the inquiry in the fall of , police efforts in Greece were dogged by a bizarre series of disruptions. Three weeks after the seizure, a year-old Dutch national, Ebru Tok, arrived in Piraeus and visited the Kurds in prison, claiming to be their legal counsel. But Greek investigators know one thing for sure: After this visit, anything the accused Kurds told police—about the critical question of who owned the heroin, for instance—could no longer be trusted. Within a year, some of the accused could no longer tell the police anything: They, too, began to die off, albeit in less overtly violent fashion. In July , one of the Kurds who had unloaded the heroin from the Noor One was transferred from the prison where he was held to an Athens hospital, where he died of heart failure; the autopsy attributed his death to a stroke resulting from a pulmonary edema. Prison authorities did not open any investigation. That autopsy also indicated heart failure. What was happening? In October , the trial began against the 33 defendants arrested in connection to the Noor One , with charges ranging from drug trafficking to evidence tampering. Weeks into the trial, the presiding judge was forced to step down. Soon enough, the maelstrom stretched beyond procedural matters into the realm of physical threats. In May , a prosecutor on the case was granted round-the-clock security after a couple of men were spotted on security cameras breaking into her apartment building and secretly observing her comings and goings. Several members of the judiciary and coast guard received letter bombs or bullets in the mail. In June , the police informant who had pointed Greek authorities to Dubai was killed in a suspicious car crash. It also seemed that Greek journalists reporting on the story had been targeted. In June , the charred remains of Panagiotis Mavrikos, a reporter investigating the ship, were found in his burnt-out Porsche on a highway north of Athens. In March , an unidentified assailant pulled a handgun on another journalist in the Hilton Athens as he arrived for an interview about the Noor One. Gradually, one key figure came to occupy a central role in all the intrigue. For two years following the bust, Greek investigators and prosecutors dug into the backstory of an Athenian named Efthymios Yiannousakis, who had begun leasing the Noor One in A swaggering oil broker who owned a fleet of convertibles, Yiannousakis had inherited a handful of nightclubs from his father, who had been beaten to death outside his own bar in Two years later, Yiannousakis relocated to Dubai. Weeks after acquiring the Noor One , he outfitted it with a Togolese flag—thereby granting the ship and anything that happened aboard it immunity from most international jurisdictions—and had it sailed from Piraeus to the Persian Gulf. In August , Yiannousakis received a life sentence on drug trafficking charges. They started doing jobs together. Yiannousakis would dispatch the Noor One to Iran, where it would pick up contraband fuel from fishermen; he sold this fuel to Diesel, who found additional buyers at higher prices. In early , after a year devoted to the fuel scheme, they decided to move into heroin trafficking. That same year, the relatives of a funder in Belgium set up additional front companies to buy the marble dust and Pakistan White Sugar bags. The next spring, Yiannousakis hired a crew of Indian men whom he arranged to pay through a network of shipping agencies. At these confabs, Yiannousakis said, the partners arranged to divide the profits and to distribute the heroin across Western Europe from its Greek landing point. Despite claims to the contrary, Yiannousakis was no stranger to the heroin business, as investigators into the Noor One case soon learned. Indeed, by that time, Greek investigators could demonstrate that at least one other person—apart from Zindashti and the members of the operation who were subsequently jailed or assassinated—had known about the Noor One before it departed Dubai for Greece. This figure was one of the richest and most influential men in Greece. Evangelos Marinakis is a huge man, encircled almost everywhere he goes by bodyguards clad in black. A gallery owner in downtown Athens once told reporters the story of a valuable painting Marinakis wished to purchase from her. She claimed not to have it for sale. Two days later, a group of men stormed the gallery with cups of yogurt, which they tossed on her. He bought up blocks of its real estate. He sponsored food drives for refugees disembarking at its quays. He adorned its streets with statues of Greek heroes. He put himself forward as the patron of its working class. A collection of newspapers he purchased in lauded its leadership. As his clout continued to grow, Marinakis has emerged as a global financier to be reckoned with. Marinakis denies any wrongdoing, and the trial surrounding the scandal is still ongoing. Marinakis also made allies in Beijing, which in acquired the port of Piraeus for a pittance as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, designed to further loop global trade flows through China. Overnight, Marinakis presided over one of the largest tanker contingents on Earth. But at just the time all this had been happening—the acquisition of soccer teams and the amassing of armadas and the clinching of lucrative oil contracts—authorities back in Piraeus were investigating Marinakis and three of his associates on claims they set up a criminal organization that financed the trafficking and sale of narcotics. Marinakis also denies these charges. And if he had been in on the ground-floor planning for the Noor One deal, he managed to profit off the Noor One where so many others lost their fortunes or lives. But outside the slow-moving legal inquiry into the Noor One deal, a new, even more damning story was told about Greece. But its shipping magnates—Marinakis foremost among them—had just reaped greater profits than ever. On the contrary, his power and influence have only continued to grow—and in such a way as to make any lasting legal reckoning improbable. Outside Greece, it became difficult to believe that a man with enough credibility to buy soccer teams and oil tankers seemingly at will could ever be connected to the world of men like Zindashti. In August , Kotsonis received a suspended year prison sentence for having set up a Sharjah, UAE, front company in to absorb potential drug profits. The next link was Yiannousakis. Marinakis has never confirmed or denied knowing the man who now sits in prison for life on drug trafficking charges. But according to Yiannousakis, they were business partners. Yiannousakis claims that Marinakis came to visit him in Dubai the summer before the Noor One left for Greece; they convened at the Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai, together with the oil sheiks to whom Yiannousakis and Mohammed Diesel were selling contraband fuel. Around the time of that alleged meeting, Greek investigators learned, Marinakis began wiring large sums of cash to Yiannousakis. As evidence of these meetings and major cash infusions came in, an obvious question presented itself. If Marinakis knew Kotsonis and Yiannousakis, the two Greeks who seemed poised to profit most from the Noor One operation, did he also know about the operation itself? A potential answer came from an entirely separate investigation. Marinakis was swept up in the surveillance net—as was a phone registered to Fataul Haque, the Pakistani identity Marinakis uses for some of his communications. Get what thing started? In July , 17 of the 33 defendants in the Noor One trial were acquitted on grounds that they had no idea the tanker was trafficking heroin. But the evidence collected over the past two years—the cash infusions, the meetings in Dubai, and the phone calls referencing big future plans—was enough to put a new question front and center. Why had Evangelos Marinakis taken such interest in Yiannousakis and his contraband ship? Throughout the inquiry, Marinakis has denied any links to drug trafficking and claimed in a statement posted on his personal website that the allegations against him were politically motivated. That investigation remains ongoing. Meanwhile, five of the men imprisoned in the trial are appealing their verdicts. Among them is Yiannousakis. If he was a front man, if he was working for someone more powerful, now is his time to start talking. Twice a month, the former oil broker struts down a Korydallos Prison hallway that is spattered with dog shit, into a bare courtroom mounted with an icon of Jesus on the cross. He wears a pair of aviator sunglasses and moves in a cloud of cologne. From his left hand, below a fat gold watch, purple worry beads protrude through his knuckles. Patches of his hair have fallen out. Yiannousakis is in solitary confinement at Korydallos after stints in prisons across Greece. At all his prior stops in the system, he claims, other inmates have made attempts on his life. In October , Yiannousakis was temporarily admitted to Dafni psychiatric hospital, where he attempted to kill himself by smashing a bed plank into his forehead. At a September 16 hearing for his appeal, he entered the courtroom and sat alone in the back, as he has over the five-year course of the case. Unaware that he was being recorded, during an interview with a Greek journalist, Yiannousakis swiftly upended everything that prosecutors believed they knew about the Noor One. He had never trafficked two tons of heroin into Europe, he said; there had been three. Far from being a bust, the Noor One had profited someone. And according to Yiannousakis, that person was Marinakis. The place to look, he maintained, was Crete. As the Noor One was approaching the island on its way to Elefsina, he said, a smaller vessel had swung past it, picked up a ton of its heroin, then went up the Adriatic toward ports near Serbia. This ton belonged to Marinakis personally, Yiannousakis claimed. As with so much of what Yiannousakis has said over the last six years, there were plenty of reasons to doubt this latest sensational allegation. There were additional reasons to take his claims seriously. Witnesses interrogated in Istanbul years earlier had baffled authorities by also insisting that three—not two—tons of heroin had been trafficked into Europe, according to Turkish police documents unearthed by a journalist who asked not to be named. And inside the Noor One itself, a month after authorities claimed it had been searched, a handwritten note had been found referencing a curiously similar transaction to the one revealed by Yiannousakis. Please give us a date and a meeting point in South Crete. Please contact us. Master Jack. Through his newspapers, Marinakis has countered that the Seychelles Prelude note is a forgery, citing the fact that the vessel was sailing near Liverpool at the time of the supposed transaction. But if the note is indeed a forgery, another fraught conundrum presents itself: Why was the fake document planted in the Noor One at all? Upon arrival, he was asked to open his suitcase. The dispute is at the heart of the ongoing investigation in Piraeus. Meanwhile, the long-running Turkish inquiry into the Noor One has converged on the Greek case. Marinakis had nothing to do with the Noor One , he rushed to explain. The report of a third ton of heroin successfully trafficked through the Balkans had been a fabrication. Across the Aegean, Turkish authorities appeared to comply. The next Sunday, Marinakis publicly pronounced his innocence. This was self-satisfaction masquerading as vindication. Turkish prosecutors had never made any claim that Zindashti was the mastermind behind the Noor One. He was arrested for allegedly murdering the lawyer of a murdered Noor One funder. Either way, the Turkish action ultimately proved to be another dead end in the case. Three arrests followed; Zindashti was not among them. Will the Noor One tell a similar story about Greece? The investigation into Marinakis might yield an answer—but in the meantime, the case has already morphed into a proxy conflict within the Greek political system. For those on the left, Marinakis and the Noor One seemed to represent everything that they had voted Syriza into power in to destroy: above all, the interlocking directorates of power that conjoin political dynasties and oligarchic capital. Nor is my best man someone who is awaiting trial for smuggling a couple tons of heroin. The next summer, Kammenos sparked another media furor when he was photographed in Monaco alongside the prosecutor who had launched the investigation into Marinakis. What about Marinakis himself? He denies any connection to the Noor One whatsoever. He likens himself instead to Socrates—a wise man condemned by a state that fails to appreciate his services. Marinakis declined to be interviewed for this article. But Zindashti was willing to talk. For months, he wrote me emails from an undisclosed Middle Eastern country about his life, his friend Mohammed Diesel, and what he knew about the ship whose arrival on Greek shores, he insists, led to the murder of his daughter. It was a meeting about the Noor One , scheduled to depart weeks later. Yiannousakis confirmed this meeting for me, including the date when Zindashti said it happened, and its locale. However, Yiannousakis claimed not to know anyone who went by the name Shishko. The photo he sent back was the one of Marinakis. Late last summer, I visited the Noor One. It can still be found in Elefsina, meters from where it came to rest six years and 17 deaths ago. It slumbers down an unlit dirt road in a lonely bay. The slip where the ship is now located is flanked on one side by cement stacks belching white smog; on the other is the tumbledown sanctuary where the ancient Athenians once celebrated their religious mystery rites. The march of rust and the lap of the sea are slowly eating away at its hull; the Noor One lists into the water, as though doing its best to disappear from sight entirely. There are no buyers. The reporting for this story was funded in part by a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser and improve your visit to our site. Alexander Clapp.

Buying Heroin Crete