Things we have learnt about cocaine in the past 24 hours…

The British absolutely love it, you’ll find it just about everywhere, and there’s been a massive spike in cocaine-related deaths over on Mud Island.

Right, on to the latest cocaine-based lesson, which has to do with how Italian police are combatting trafficking efforts.

In short, they’ve just nabbed a massive bust and are pretty stoked with themselves, but here are more details via the Guardian:

Italian police have taken possession of more than two tonnes of cocaine in the largest drugs seizure in the country in 25 years, after a sting operation involving three other nations across two continents.

The drugs, discovered in 60 bags in a cargo container at the Port of Genoa, have a total value of €500m (£436m) and were found with the help of the British, Colombian and Spanish police.

The cocaine belongs to various drug-trafficking organisations associated with an organised armed group known as the “Gulf Clan”, which makes use of contacts in numerous European ports where drug expeditions are carried out. The container set off from Colombia and arrived in Genoa last week and was then destined for Barcelona in Spain.

To catch the traffickers in Barcelona, the Italian investigators replaced the cargo of drugs – 1,801 bricks of pure cocaine – with salt and let it continue on its journey. In the Catalan city, Spanish police arrested the alleged recipient of the shipment, a 59-year-old Spaniard.

Let’s go to the video screen:

Solid police work there, folks.

Another massive bust was also pulled off in Livorno earlier this week, where cocaine was seized at the port:

In that case, 644 kilos of cocaine were hidden inside bags of coffee. The drugs were divided into 582 bricks inside 23 bags, hidden in one of the thousands of containers loaded on a ship flying the Portuguese flag and coming from the Spanish port of Algeciras.

The value of the cocaine found in the earlier raid was around €130m…

The two operations were not connected, police said, although both Italian ports seem to have become important destinations for cocaine trafficking from South America.

It is believed that the Calabrian mafia, or so-called ‘Ndrangheta mafia, may have a hand in the trafficking efforts, and they’ll be pretty bleak with those hits to their bottom line.

Then again, a 2013 study claimed that the ’Ndrangheta mafia made more money than Deutsche Bank and McDonald’s put together, with a turnover of €53bn the year before.

Reckon they’ll bounce back just fine.

[source:guardian]