As Sebastian Marset chased soccer desires, investigators tracked his medication

ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay — The undercover brokers ducked right into a squat brick home in a residential neighborhood.

The constructing — secretly rented by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — was now the headquarters of what had develop into one in every of Latin America’s most vital drug-trafficking investigations. It was not going properly.

The handful of American and Paraguayan brokers had been assigned to seek out the person on the middle of a brand new transnational drug cartel dispatching boatloads of cocaine to Europe. The brokers had been sealed off from the remainder of the police to keep away from leaks. However after months of labor, they nonetheless knew little about their goal, besides that he was harmful and well-connected.

Then, someday in 2021, the brokers acquired a tip. The person on the middle of the brand new cartel was about to board a personal jet at Silvio Pettirossi Worldwide Airport, simply outdoors Asunción, the capital.

As they watched the passengers, one of many males in line stood out. His tattoos matched those they’d heard about on wiretaps of cartel members. When he was requested for his identification, the person took out a Bolivian passport. The brokers have been instantly certain the doc was false. They searched his biometric knowledge, and the identify of an Uruguayan nationwide popped up. Sebastián Marset.

“Once we heard the identify ‘Marset,’ we questioned: ‘Who is that this man?’” recalled a senior Paraguayan official. “The very first thing we did was Google him and the primary hit was this soccer participant.”

The brokers noticed that their goal had till just lately been a midfielder on Deportivo Capiatá, a staff that performed not removed from their rented workplace. Marset had used his wealth and energy to satisfy a boyhood dream of taking part in skilled soccer, despite the fact that his expertise fell far in need of the extent required.

Phrase unfold amongst high-level Paraguayan officers, a few of them soccer fanatics, who questioned if they’d unwittingly watched their goal play.

“I couldn’t imagine that on the middle of this huge felony group, the chief was a failed soccer participant,” stated Cecilia Pérez Rivas, the justice minister.

Investigators stated they didn’t simply need to detain Marset on the airport, in order that they allowed him to board the airplane; the objective was to construct a case to dismantle his cartel. Over the following months, Paraguayan brokers started trailing him.

They adopted him as he drove an armored Toyota Land Cruiser to Asunción’s La Galería shopping center, the place he met alleged Brazilian drug trafficker Marlon Santos Silva Beiño; in a white BMW to a pastry store, the place he met Alberto Koube Ayala, the Paraguayan businessman who investigators stated was accountable for laundering a few of Marset’s drug proceeds. Neither Beiño nor Ayala could possibly be reached for remark.

They chronicled the way in which Marset created shell firms throughout Latin America’s personal sector, paying for publicity in native media so the companies appeared respectable, investigation paperwork present. Marset touted his success as a music producer (“a legend of live performance manufacturing,” stated an article on an Ecuadorian information website) or the proprietor of a luxurious automotive dealership (“high quality service for each form of car,” stated a Paraguayan auto journal) or the benefactor of a martial arts studio referred to as Workforce Drive Coaching Middle (its slogan: “To Struggle Is to Reside”).

Investigators began to really feel as in the event that they have been chasing a Zelig-like determine who seemed to be in a number of locations on the identical time. They struggled to discern which of his companies existed solely on paper and which have been actual. They questioned what had develop into of his soccer profession after he disappeared from Capiatá.

“He’s clearly very sensible,” stated one Paraguayan investigator. “And he’s additionally a sociopath.”

Sooner or later, two undercover brokers adopted a silver Lamborghini via the residential sprawl on the fringe of Asunción. The brokers drove an unmarked truck they’d seized in a earlier operation, retaining a distance from their goal.

Over a two-way radio, they reported their coordinates again to headquarters, one agent recalled. They relayed what they have been seeing: Marset had inexplicably detoured via the potholed roads of a no-name neighborhood.

Then the brokers watched as he pulled up in entrance of a soccer stadium and turned off the engine.

One of many brokers, clearly shocked, picked up the radio to report the discovering: “He discovered one other staff.”

II

Marset’s latest toy was a second-division staff referred to as Rubio Ñu. Its stadium was about 20 miles from Capiatá.

The staff performed in a middle-class neighborhood in Paraguay’s capital, filled with die-hard however perpetually disenchanted Rubio Ñu followers. Some had painted their properties within the staff’s colours, inexperienced and white. Many have been the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Rubio supporters. The stadium confirmed indicators of decay. The grass on the sector was patchy.

Followers traded rumors concerning the man within the Lamborghini. He arrived with a small group of males, all of their 20s and 30s, some with Uruguayan accents. Virtually instantly, he began funneling cash to the staff.

“We have been like, ‘What’s going on right here?’” stated one neighbor, who lives throughout the road from the stadium and spoke on the situation of anonymity for safety causes. “Lots of people have been scared. It was like a bunch of mafiosos had descended on us.”

Inside a number of weeks of Marset’s arrival, he employed a building staff to construct a brand new locker room. This time, he practiced with the staff, however didn’t play in video games.

After apply, he deployed the identical anodyne one-liners that he utilized in texts to the drug traffickers who labored for him:

“All the time be one step forward my bro,” he wrote.

Marset appointed his brother Diego Marset as an middleman between his drug-trafficking group and the staff, investigators stated. Diego went on a recruiting spree, including 11 veteran gamers. He couldn’t be reached for remark.

The brokers realized that as Sebastián Marset moved between soccer groups, he was additionally taking part in with methods the game could possibly be used to show illicit funds into clear money. He was increasing, they wrote in a 500-page Paraguayan report, “the universe of soccer inside his cash laundering scheme.”

At Rubio Ñu, investigators famous, Marset’s focus was on shopping for and promoting gamers — one of many oldest types of laundering cash via sport.

Officers at Rubio Ñu declined to remark.

It will later develop into clear what Marset had in thoughts, based on investigators: He recognized a staff in Europe with its personal connections to transnational crime. He would promote his Paraguayan gamers there. Transferring Latin American gamers to middling European groups for inflated charges — fronted by the vendor, not the client, or by recording faux transactions — has develop into an more and more frequent means of laundering drug cash, officers say.

“They purchase a Colombian participant from a really low-level soccer staff after which take him to play within the Croatian Soccer League. However they promote him for 100 instances or 200 instances greater than what he value,” stated a Colombian police official, referring to 1 case by which Albanian drug traffickers laundered cash via soccer transfers, offering money for the transaction.

By August 2021, the American and Paraguayan investigators have been getting nearer to arresting their goal. They’d provide you with a reputation for his or her investigation, “A Ultranza,” which suggests “At All Prices.” It was already the largest anti-narcotics investigation in Paraguay’s historical past. They’d sufficient documentation to supply not less than 50 indictments concentrating on Marset and his associates, investigators stated.

Then in September 2021, Marset vanished once more.

The Individuals acquired recent intelligence: He was not hiding in Paraguay. He had evaded the surveillance. This time, he had left the continent.

III

When the Uruguayan diplomat stepped via the excessive partitions of Al Wathba jail, surrounded by the Emirati desert, he defined to guards that he had come for a consular go to with a brand new detainee from his nation.

The guards requested for the prisoner’s identify.

“Marset,” the diplomat stated, earlier than strolling into the holding cell.

Marset was sleeping on the ground of the jail with a blanket, in solitary confinement, based on an Uruguayan diplomatic cable.

One of many world’s most elusive drug traffickers had lastly been caught. However it hadn’t been for trafficking medication. Marset was detained on the Dubai airport, the place authorities stated he had used a faux Paraguayan passport.

“He had lastly slipped up,” stated a Paraguayan official.

U.S. officers made a case to their Emirati counterparts: In the event that they didn’t strictly implement his detention till an arrest warrant could possibly be issued by Paraguay, Marset would bribe or finagle his means out of custody.

They have been proper. From his jail cell, Marset started a marketing campaign to acquire a brand new passport and safe his launch, an effort later documented by Uruguayan and Paraguayan authorities. For causes that stay unclear, Paraguay was unable or unwilling to subject an arrest warrant after studying of Marset’s detention.

The Uruguayan authorities, in the meantime, acknowledged Marset as a risk but in addition failed to stop his launch.

“A narco,” Uruguay’s chief consul, Pauline Davies, wrote of Marset in a WhatsApp message to the nation’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Álvaro Ceriani, on Sept. 21. The message was a part of a trove of paperwork collected by Uruguayan investigators and offered to The Washington Submit.

“A really harmful and heavy drug trafficker,” Guillermo Maciel, Uruguay’s deputy inside minister, wrote to Carolina Ache, the nation’s deputy overseas minister on Nov. 3.

Marset employed high-profile attorneys who organized conferences with senior Uruguayan officers, paperwork present. The staff was well-connected: Marset’s prime authorized adviser, Alejandro Balbi, was the president of Nacional, one in every of the nation’s most well-known soccer golf equipment. Balbi declined to remark.

Marset utilized for a brand new Uruguayan passport to be delivered to him in Dubai.

By November, regardless of the warnings concerning the hazard he posed, the brand new passport was being processed. Neither Uruguay’s Overseas Ministry nor its Inside Ministry, which grants passports, intervened, based on Uruguayan investigators.

Whereas he waited to be launched, utilizing a telephone he had obtained, Marset sought revenge.

He allegedly ordered gunmen to kill Mauricio Schwartzman, the person accountable for securing the Paraguayan passport that had landed Marset in jail, investigators stated. Two males utilizing a 5.56-caliber rifle and a 9mm pistol confronted Schwartzman in entrance of his luxurious dwelling in Asunción and shot him lifeless.

Paraguayan investigators later heard over their wiretaps that the gunmen had been ordered to hold out the hit by the “massive boss” of a cocaine-trafficking group, apparently alluding to Marset.

“In accordance with the massive boss, it was [Schwartzman’s] fault that the passport had issues,” the affiliate stated.

A high-profile Paraguayan prosecutor, Marcelo Pecci, was assigned to analyze the case. Pecci later informed journalists he believed Schwartzman may have been executed by one of many folks focused within the joint U.S.-Paraguayan investigation into Marset’s cartel.

Lower than a 12 months later, in Could 2022, Pecci could be killed on his honeymoon at a personal seashore resort in Colombia. Simply hours earlier, his spouse had introduced that she was pregnant. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, stated Marset was accountable for the killing. (Marset subsequently denied any position within the killing when questioned by a Uruguayan journalist.)

However lengthy earlier than that slaying, with Marset detained, investigators had one other query to reply: What was Marset doing in Dubai within the first place?

They might later discover photographs of him dressed as a sheikh with a hawk on his biceps, on the prime of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper together with his spouse, on a desert tour with alleged Bolivian drug trafficker Erland Ivar García López. Actual property data reviewed by The Submit present that Marset owned greater than $18 million value of actual property in Dubai. Emirati officers didn’t reply to requests for remark.

When investigators obtained Marset’s flight data, they realized that Dubai hadn’t been his closing vacation spot. He had been planning a visit to Greece.

“We began to ask: ‘What enterprise did he have in Greece?’” stated a Paraguayan investigator.

IV

Trikala F.C. is a staff primarily based in central Greece, 200 miles northwest of Athens, a longtime fixture within the Greek Tremendous League 2. Its low-slung stadium, the place solely a handful of followers sit throughout dwelling video games, is a brief stroll from an Early Bronze Age acropolis.

The staff’s fan base had diminished not solely as Trikala continued to lose however as its hyperlinks to organized crime and match-fixing have been uncovered. Earlier this 12 months, its former proprietor, Christos Gialia, was shot greater than a dozen instances with a Kalashnikov rifle and burned in his automotive in a mafia-style killing. He had beforehand been arrested on prices of arms and drug trafficking. The staff’s president, Sakis Karatzounis, was convicted of drug trafficking in 2017 after being present in possession of 20 kilos of cocaine, and served 4 years in jail.

Trikala F.C. generally recruited overseas coaches, who have been shocked by what they realized. In 2021, the staff employed David Magrone, a former member of the teaching employees at Tottenham Hotspur in England’s Premier League. Magrone left after 10 days, telling soccer journalists that he was scandalized.

“It’s probably the most amateurish and unprofessional atmosphere I’ve ever stepped into,” Magrone stated in an interview with FTBL, an Australian soccer web site. “It was just like the wild wild West and I don’t say that evenly.”

Magrone stated he was conscious of the staff’s potential involvement in match fixing. However Trikala’s illicit actions appeared to run deeper.

Just a few weeks after Magrone’s departure, in September 2021, an SUV arrived at Trikala’s stadium carrying 4 Paraguayan gamers and several other coaches and trainers. One coach, Manuel Caceres, instantly began paying the staff’s Greek workers in money, based on Trikala gamers, and commenced speaking about plans to purchase the staff. Caceres couldn’t be reached for remark.

The gamers and employees have been baffled, whilst they relished the sudden wave of recent sources.

“Why did they arrive from Paraguay to take a position on the opposite aspect of the Atlantic, in Trikala? It was an honor for us, okay, however isn’t it bizarre?” Zissis Katsandonis, the staff supervisor, stated in an interview. “However regardless of the staff requested them for, we acquired. Garments, gear. All the things was ordered immediately. All paid for.”

The Paraguayans would distribute wads of money within the locker room, stated Giorgos Panagiotou, Trikala’s basic secretary. “Come, guys, to the altering rooms and take it,” he recalled them saying.

What the Greek gamers and officers didn’t know was that the Paraguayans had been dispatched by Sebastián Marset, who was en path to Greece when he was detained in Dubai. After his arrest, based on a wiretapped dialog, he had despatched his associates as a substitute.

Two of the gamers and Caceres, the coach, had come from Marset’s final Paraguayan staff, Rubio Ñu. They have been among the many males Marset’s associates had been grooming, promising money in the event that they performed properly. Marset, investigators realized, supplied every of them $200,000 in the event that they have been keen to be transferred to an obscure Greek staff. They accepted.

Paraguayan investigators say Marset hoped to make use of Trikala to launder money and create a foothold in Greece to increase his drug-trafficking community. The Greek anti-narcotics police stated they have been unaware of Marset’s connection to the staff, maybe due to how shortly it dissolved. Together with his detention in Dubai, Marset’s Trikala scheme fell aside, investigators stated.

On the finish of 2021, the Paraguayan gamers and coaches left as abruptly as they’d arrived.

“No less than it was sudden for me. I didn’t know something,” stated Katsandonis, the supervisor. “All of them left Trikala earlier than Christmas. I don’t know the place they went after that.”

Two of the gamers, apparently broke, returned to Paraguay on a authorities repatriation flight, accompanied by migrant deportees.

V

On Jan. 10, 2022, Interpol wrote a message to Uruguay’s Overseas Ministry: “We’d respect in the event you may present us with an replace on its scenario and particulars of the place [Marset] is presently.”

Each the U.S. and Paraguayan investigators had assumed their goal was nonetheless detained in Dubai.

However the Uruguayan Overseas Ministry responded two days later: “The Consulate delivered the passport to the holder and we’ve got not had any details about the citizen since then.”

Marset was a free man.

“With the affect of his wealth and connections, he received,” stated a U.S. official.

A couple of month later, on Feb. 22, Paraguayan authorities carried out Operation A Ultranza, primarily based on their multiyear investigation into Marset’s group. Twenty-four of his associates have been arrested, most of them on drug-trafficking and money-laundering prices. Police raided luxurious properties and airplane hangars. They seized 9 personal jets, 4,000 head of cattle, 13 tractors and three yachts — in complete, greater than $100 million in belongings.

Erico Galeano, the Paraguayan senator whose soccer staff had welcomed Marset, was accused of cash laundering. However the authorities’s help for Galeano was clear: Weeks after his arrest, he was invited to a small soccer sport on the president’s residence.

On March 7, Interpol issued a global arrest warrant in Marset’s identify. However by then, he was as soon as once more a fugitive. Information broke in Uruguay about how he had managed to safe a brand new passport from a jail in Dubai.

The fallout was nearly fast. First the overseas minister resigned. Then the inside minister and one in every of his chief advisers. However Uruguay’s president, Luis Lacalle Pou, stated the issue was Uruguay’s legal guidelines, not corruption inside his authorities.

“Will we like {that a} drug trafficker has a passport? After all not,” Lacalle Pou stated at a information convention. “However that’s the present regulation.”

VI

The telephone buzzed within the newsroom of Channel 4, one in every of Uruguay’s hottest broadcasters. It was a textual content message from a South African quantity.

The sender launched himself as Sebastián Marset.

It was August 2022, months after his launch from the Dubai jail. Marset despatched a video message to reporters, who aired it on the nightly broadcast of “Telenoche.” He was fuming concerning the prices in opposition to him and his associates.

“They don’t have any proof of something of what they are saying. Nothing,” he stated within the video, by which he wears sun shades and a face masks.

U.S., Paraguayan and Uruguayan officers have been looking for him as soon as once more. The medication flowing from Bolivia to Uruguay and on to Europe had elevated. Investigators believed he was nonetheless operating the operation, from wherever he was.

Then the tip arrived.

Marset was in Bolivia. However he wasn’t simply hiding there.

He was taking part in for an additional skilled soccer staff.

VII

The gamers of the Leones del Torno, a staff in a second-tier Bolivian league, have been on their twentieth and closing 100-yard dash.

Carlos Villegas, a lanky 25-year-old Colombian ahead, completed first. He put his palms on his knees and turned, he recalled in an interview, to observe his teammates trundle throughout the road, struggling within the Bolivian warmth. It was Could 2023.

As all the time, among the many slowest gamers was a good-looking, tattooed Brazilian named Luis Amorim.

There was one thing odd about Amorim, Villegas thought. He was out of practice and sluggish on the sector. However he was all the time impeccably dressed and drove a rotation of shiny SUVs — Land Cruisers and BMWs — throughout Santa Cruz, the place the Leones had just lately moved.

Whereas Villegas struggled to scrape by on his $500-a-month wage, portray properties to make further money, Amorim was seemingly flush. Villegas wanted to know: How had his teammate discovered monetary success whereas languishing within the decrease rungs {of professional} soccer? He determined he would ask.

After apply, Villegas sidled as much as Amorim on a bench subsequent to the sector.

“How did you do it, man?”

Amorim responded passionately, however obliquely — in surprisingly excellent Spanish for a Brazilian.

“It’s all about work. You want to work and work and work. You possibly can’t ever quit,” Villegas recalled Amorim saying.

Villegas walked away from the dialog feeling impressed and a bit confused.

“He by no means informed me what he did to make the cash,” Villegas later stated in an interview. “And after I came upon, it was a shock.”

Amorim was a pseudonym.

Marset had arrived in Santa Cruz — Bolivia’s monetary capital — in late 2022, renovating a mansion within the middle of town, putting in safety cameras close to the entrance entrance. He launched himself into town’s elite circles. He hung out with a former Miss Bolivia and her husband. He sponsored occasions for Carnival, together with an exhibition soccer sport with highly effective enterprise executives. And most notably, he bought the Leones del Torno, a staff that performed within the small city of El Torno, an hour outdoors town.

Marset moved the staff to Santa Cruz. He constructed a cutting-edge athletic coaching complicated with an artificial turf area on the finish of a dust highway. He employed a former star participant from the nationwide staff, Gualberto Mojica, to educate the staff. And as soon as once more, he pressured his means onto the beginning lineup.

With regulation enforcement from throughout the Western Hemisphere on the lookout for him, Marset had chosen to not cover in a distant outpost. He had come to Bolivia’s largest metropolis — generally known as a sanctuary for drug proceeds, investigators say — sure that he may bribe authorities to not seize him.

For over a 12 months, Marset seemed to be proper; he expanded his actual property empire in Santa Cruz, both unnoticed or ignored.

On the soccer area, Marset wore the quantity 23, David Beckham’s quantity at Actual Madrid and Galaxy. The identify on the again of his blue jersey was solely “Luis.” His expertise had not improved.

“He wasn’t good,” stated a Uruguayan participant on the Leones, Lucas Casavieja.

“Once I handed him the ball, quite a lot of the time he missed it,” stated Villegas. “I acquired offended with him, like, ‘What are you doing?’”

In Could 2023, Bolivian authorities acquired a name from the Paraguayan anti-narcotics police. The Paraguayans had tracked down Marset in Santa Cruz, they usually wanted the Bolivians to behave.

The Bolivian police say they started surveilling Marset’s mansion. They flew a drone overhead. They posted officers round his tony neighborhood. Marset was hiding together with his spouse and 4 kids, who have been additionally utilizing false names. He had managed to enroll one in every of his sons within the revered coaching program of Blooming, a soccer staff in Bolivia’s first division.

Finally, police held a planning session to announce the operation, dubbed “Leon 23” after Marset’s staff and quantity. They deliberate to take down Marset’s whole community.

Dozens of officers acquired to his home on the morning of July 29, forcing their means inside. However Marset and his household have been gone.

A manhunt commenced: 3,000 Bolivian cops have been dispatched. They positioned 158 checkpoints throughout the nation to maintain Marset from escaping.

The police ultimately arrested 39 folks, together with the Leones del Torno coach, two of Marset’s teammates and the staff’s grounds supervisor. They seized the staff’s soccer area, 35 properties, 9 plane, 77 automobiles, 81 weapons and 1,315 head of livestock and poultry — a complete of $27 million in belongings.

Leones del Torno have been suspended from Bolivia’s soccer federation. Former staff officers couldn’t be reached for remark.

Officers and neighbors in Santa Cruz would later inform The Submit that Marset had fled days earlier than the operation started. Neighbors reported seeing folks loading vehicles outdoors Marset’s dwelling.

“The operation wanted to be earlier,” Jhonny Aguilera, Bolivia’s deputy inside minister and former nationwide police chief, stated in an interview. “We all know that in hindsight.”

Marset’s teammates and coach have been charged with “felony affiliation.” Their interrogation interviews yielded little: He was merely “one other participant,” they stated. “An investor” or a “businessman.”

However Bolivian officers stated they have been capable of hyperlink Marset’s attraction to the Leones to 2 knowledge factors — his obsession with soccer and the extra sensible query of what to do together with his drug proceeds.

“The target was clearly to launder cash,” Aguilera stated of Marset’s funding in Leones del Torno.

IX

Just a few weeks after Marset’s disappearance, Jessica Echeverría, a lawyer in Santa Cruz with a big following on social media, acquired a message from a quantity she didn’t acknowledge.

When she opened it, there was a video with Marset’s face within the middle of the body. Echevarría pressed play. She heard Marset clarify how he had been tipped off concerning the Bolivia operation.

“Due to the assistance of the director of the anti-narcotics police, I managed to depart,” Marset stated within the video. “He informed me that the minister had already issued an arrest warrant in opposition to me.”

Just a few weeks later, he despatched out one other video to native reporters. It was recorded from inside a automotive.

“I’m too sensible for you,” he stated, taunting the Bolivian police. “It’s to not say that you’re very silly; it sounds a bit higher to say that I’m simply smarter.”

He threatened to disclose the corrupt Bolivian officers who had allowed him to reside freely and escape unhurt: “If I open my mouth, it will get sophisticated.”

The query of the place Marset was hiding grew to become a parlor sport amongst Latin American officers. No less than a number of starry-eyed followers additionally waited for him to reemerge, hoping he could possibly be lured by one in every of his weaknesses.

“Between soccer and lovers, I’m gripped by the hope that Don Marset will return,” crooned Bolivian singer Belén Ortiz in her track “King of the South.”

After which, in November, Marset gave a tv interview.

An Uruguayan tv anchor, Patricia Martín, stated she had taken two helicopters to satisfy him — the primary to a spot that was “half jungle” and the second to a home in a clearing. Marset opened the door, she stated; a soccer sport was taking part in on the lounge tv. He wore a $1,100 Louis Vuitton inexperienced sweater and a gold watch and spoke vaguely about his capability to elude seize.

“I’ve folks to do what I have to do,” he stated.

Marset’s lawyer, Santiago Moratorio, who helped prepare the tv look, wouldn’t say the place it occurred, or provide any hints about his consumer’s latest hiding place.

On Wednesday, after months of radio silence, Marset’s spouse, Gianina García Troche, was detained on the Madrid airport in a joint operation of Interpol and the Spanish authorities. She had flown to Spain from Dubai, Uruguayan and Paraguayan officers stated.

Moratorio stated she wasn’t detained and insisted that she had turned herself in. “She was uninterested in operating from against the law she didn’t commit,” he stated.

Marset stays at massive, the goal of an ongoing manhunt, one of the in depth in current South American historical past.

Moratorio did share one element from the go to he made with the journalist to Marset’s undisclosed location.

Earlier than the tv interview was recorded, Moratorio stated, Marset issued yet one more order: Let’s play some soccer. His guests, guards and associates fashioned two groups and the sport kicked off.

That is the second of a two-part collection. Click on on this hyperlink to learn the primary half, “A double life: The cocaine kingpin who hid as an expert soccer participant.”