The latest survey by our colleagues from Release in the port of Antwerp reminds us of the extent to which drug trafficking, and mainly cocaine, is insinuating itself everywhere. The Belgian port is still today the main gateway for cocaine in Europe.
”We are under surveillance, and not only police, nods Mat (assumed name), one of Antwerp’s 8,000 dockers. The traffickers have moles in hospitals, banks or casinos to look for those among us who have flaws: a kid with cancer, gambling debts… Once, it was downright a drone hovering above our heads, we threw bottles at him. And besides that, the politicians make us look rotten, as if we were all getting a ticket.” The hammer and the anvil: “It’s become so frowned upon to be a dockworker that today you ask yourself questions when you change your car, give Omar as an example. If you take it too bright, either the neighborhood will think you’re into it, or the dealers will spot you…”
If controls exist, smugglers do not lack imagination to avoid them. Florence Angelici, spokesperson for the FPS Finances, quotes the “‘rip/off’ (a sports bag is placed with the cam easily accessible just before sealing the container on departure, and an accomplice recovers it as soon as it arrives at the dock) or the ‘Trojan horse’ (the smugglers lock themselves in in the container with their goods, at the risk of suffocating from the heat). Then the double bottoms of all kinds, in the loads (faux marble, cars, exotic trunks), in the structure of the containers, in particular the refrigerated parts, even boats. Sometimes, it is in a ‘torpedo’ hung under the hull that a diver must go to recover the illicit cargo. Even more ingenious, the cocaine is injected in liquid form into t-shirts, coconut milk or fertilizer, before going through the laboratory”further explains the investigation of Release. Car in fineless than 2% of containers passing through the port are checked…
Sky ECC, a gateway to a new world
But the fight against drug traffickers has entered a new phase. “Since the Belgian, French and Dutch police broke through, at the beginning of 2021, ‘Sky ECC’, this Canadian messaging service long deemed inviolable and prized by criminals, a whole infraworld hitherto contained in the ‘cryptophones’ of the mafias has been risen to the surface. A billion communications have been intercepted: an almost endless dump of barely coded messages and ‘striking’ photos, a euphemism used by Belgian investigators to designate beheadings, torture and stacks of banknotes, in a summary by the federal police of Antwerp.”
”Sky is the black box of European drug trafficking, still entrusts a Brussels criminal lawyer to Release. Unheard of: the torture chambers, the corpses cut up and then minced in Serbia, the hilarious guys posing in front of 300 kilos of packaged cocaine, the diagrams of the caches in the containers… There is everything. This folder is Netflix.”
Find our survey on the major challenges of the port of Antwerp