A Double Life: The Cocaine Kingpin Who Hid as a Professional Soccer Player
August 13, 2024 at 12:00AMSebastián Marset wanted to be a professional soccer player ever since he was a boy growing up in Montevideo, Uruguay. But he was mediocre. As a young adult, he fell into drug trafficking, which opened up a world of possibilities: buying soccer teams across Latin America and in Europe, inserting himself on rosters, and playing in their matches. In this cinematic story, Kevin Sieff exposes the dark, dirty world of soccer and its inextricable links to power, politics, and the drug war.
Officials documented how the unnamed man and his organization moved enormous quantities of cocaine. They would dispatch small airplanes from Paraguay’s main commercial airport, and then the pilots would turn off their radar. They would secretly fly across the border to Bolivia, landing on remote farms in Chapare, the country’s coca-growing region, where traffickers would fill the planes with between one and two tons of cocaine.
Then the planes would return to Paraguay, landing at one of the clandestine airstrips that now peppered the northern part of the country. The cocaine was taken by trucks to container ships waiting on the Paraguay River, which flows through Paraguay to the mouth of the Atlantic Ocean. Traffickers knew that those ships were almost never inspected before arriving in Europe; the port of Montevideo had only one semi-functional scanner. Each planeload of cocaine was worth more than $20 million once offloaded in Belgium or the Netherlands.
But officials struggled to learn the name of the man who was running the operation, the tattooed young Uruguayan. Nor did they know that when his voice disappeared from the wiretaps for stretches, it wasn’t always because he was off trafficking cocaine.
Often it was because he was in the middle of a professional soccer game.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/12/a-double-life-the-cocaine-kingpin-who-hid-as-a-professional-soccer-player/
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