📸 Photo

SNOWING IN BALI

was easy. Marco made it in, but his friend, and friend’s partners, didn't.

When I came second time I call my other friend in Brazil, I say come over because it’s no problem.

I flew Rio-LA, LA-Honolulu, Honolulu-Sydney. My friend came the other way; he flew Rio, Argentina, Auckland, Sydney. But in Auckland, there was this very small dog, and they found the stuff in his hang-glider. They don’t arrest him because he was in transit, so they call the Australian police and say, ‘There are two Brazilian guys arriving with drugs in their hang-glider.’

Did they go to jail?

Yeah, my friend went to jail for five and a half years in Sydney.

– Marco

The court was told that 20 packets of cocaine weighing more than 2.6 kilos were brought into Australia from South America compressed inside the struts of the dismantled hang-glider . . . In his defence Sonino, a Brazilian hang-gliding champion, said he had come to Australia for a world hang-gliding championship in January.

– Sydney Morning Herald, 13 November 1987

Marco was undeterred by his friends’ bad luck. Trafficking was his game; he was brazen, confident and loved it. But he had a penchant for tempting fate. On his way out of Sydney loaded up with drug money, he risked a kamikaze-style joke, crazily baiting an immigration officer. He pulled out a $10,000 wad, waving the notes in the official’s face, taunting, ‘You are crazy, man, I want to stay here for two, three months, I have $10,000 to spend, all this money here, but you only give me a month visa.’