In a nondescript shopping mall in the industrial outskirts of Venice, a major new European drug route is taking shape.

Antonino Vadalà, a hot-headed man who dominates the room, sizes up his potential partner, a local businessman he hopes will help him import hundreds of kilos of cocaine into northern Italy and Slovakia.

The plan is to use legal goods to disguise the drug shipments.

“We load bananas, cereal, nuts, we load some bullshit,” Vadalà says. “We ship it to your company … and we pay off customs. We clear it with them when [the container] arrives.”

Vadalà, 44, a Calabrian expatriate who lives in Slovakia, is a member of the second generation of Italian men to leave their mafia-dominated hometown to settle in the Central European nation. Officially, he raises cattle and sells beef. But prosecutors in Venice allege that Vadalà is also a drug trafficker who worked with the ‘Ndrangheta, one of the world’s most powerful organized criminal groups, to open a major new cocaine route into Europe.

Shipping bricks of cocaine across the Atlantic Ocean mixed in with perishable cargo has become the favorite transport method of international drug traffickers.Credit: Guardia di Finanza.

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