In Greece, an investigation into the Noor One captivated the national press-and then spurred a new wave of public interest in the case via a preliminary criminal trial and the rise of a new media magnate. Phone records are exposing scores of police whom the smugglers bought off, from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates. The planners of the smuggling operation have turned on one another in a war of retribution that has left at least 17 people dead on three continents. The seizure of the drugs shipped on the Noor One has triggered a long series of seismic aftershocks in Greece and around the world. Greek authorities had disrupted the largest known movement of heroin in European history.īut that was just the beginning of the story. Another source eventually led them to Dubai. In Elefsina, thanks to a tip from a different source, they swarmed the Noor One and arrested its crew members. On June 22, acting on information from one of these sources, Katsoulis’s officers stormed the chicken coop near Athens airport and discovered another ton of heroin. “It was important to make it unclear who’d talked and who hadn’t,” an officer told me. To hide the identity of the original informant, the police also arrested him or her at the same time, they allowed others with known ties to the operation to escape. Over the next several days, the plotline shifted from The French Connection to The Wire: Greek intelligence services picked up one member of the operation after another and flipped them. At approximately the same time, another coast guard squad raided a mansion in the lush Athenian suburb of Filothei and found another half-ton of heroin stacked in its garage. Katsoulis’s team arrested the men without struggle and took them to Piraeus. Inside the warehouse were six Kurds and Greeks, 500 kilograms of uncut heroin, and a handgun. They just started convulsing and barking violently.” But in this case, there was so much heroin, the dogs didn’t know where to go. “Normally they sniff the heroin and move right toward it. “We got some sense of what we were dealing with when the dogs went berserk,” Katsoulis told me. The next evening, at around 9 p.m., Katsoulis dispatched 30 armed agents to surround the building. On June 11, Katsoulis sent five of his men to observe the squat cinderblock warehouse where the heroin was supposed to be held. The next day, Georgios Katsoulis, the head of the Piraeus branch of Greece’s coast guard, was informed-on the basis of this insider’s testimony-that “half a ton” was to be found in a small town east of the capital. He explained that somewhere outside Athens a huge haul of drugs was being prepared for export. Four days after the oil tanker reached the port at Elefsina, a figure on the fringe of the operation, unnerved by the idea of trafficking heroin, entered a police station. But as was the fate of that famed heroin transaction, the Noor One deal quickly unraveled. All the pieces were in place, in other words, for a latter-day Mediterranean sequel to The French Connection.
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