📸 Photo

SNOWING IN BALI

money to buy 10 at €7000,’ he argued. ‘So please, man, €5000 a kilo is a lot of money, you don’t have any costs, man. You just go out and kick some door to get this shit. Come on, you guys, don’t be greedy.’

And then it works, my words work. The guy says, ‘Okay, €5000.’ And then he says, ‘Where are you gonna pack this shit?’ I say, ‘Man, I talk about the miracle but I don’t tell the address of the angel.’ ‘Okay, well the coke is here in the police car, and I can deliver it for you, otherwise you might get busted on the way.’

So we go in the fucking black and white camburão [police car]. My friend and another cop, not the boss, they sit in the front, I sit in the back seat with the window open, the big bag of 10 kilos by my side, and then they say, ‘Let’s smoke a joint.’ I say, ‘Yes, let’s smoke a joint.’ There was a little bit of traffic, so I say, ‘Let’s light the joint and put on the siren, let’s go fast.’ ‘Okay.’ . . . Everybody pulled their cars to the side of the road, and we just pass through. So funny, you know. I was like . . . the world is crazy.

– Rafael

Rafael’s crew of packers was waiting to put it into windsurfer booms. He was sending the coke to Amsterdam in two lots. Often now he was using FedEx and DHL. The success rate was slightly less than horses, but with fewer hassles. He could easily send one board with two sets of booms – a smaller one for strong wind, bigger for lighter – which was normal for windsurfers to carry, and meant he was able to traffic more coke without it looking odd.

This time he put 1.5 kilos in each of the four tubes and sent the 6 kilos via FedEx to his friend Fabio, aka Psychopath – a top horse, who’d already done about five runs to Bali. But there