Book: 'ZERO, ZERO, ZERO'

'ZERO, ZERO, ZERO' by Roberto Saviano, Allen Lane.

When Pope Francis visited Mexico in February he spoke repeatedly of the damage being done by the illegal trade in drugs. As Colombia's drug lords were neutralised in the 1990s, the business shifted north to Mexico, with its permeable 2,000 mile border with the USA, the largest market for cocaine. More than forty mayors and dozens of journalists have been killed while investigating the cartels which are responsible for the deaths of an estimated 170,000 Mexicans since 2007.

Anyone interested in this tragedy should read Roberto Saviano's book. He links the misery suffered by Latin American peasants with the high life enjoyed in the world's money laundering capitals, New York and London, which process 97% of the revenues from narco-trafficking. In other words, it is our professionals - accountants, lawyers and bankers - facilitating the cocaine trade. The UN office on drugs and crime estimated that during the 2008 financial crash the only liquid investment capital in some Western banks was the earnings of criminal organisations.

To put the sums at stake in context, in the early 1980s, Pablo Escobar was making $500,000 a day. Each month he bought $2,500 worth of rubber bands to bundle up his dirty money. HSBC transferred $ 7 billion in dirty cash to its US subsidiary HSUS in 2007-8, for which it received a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile Citibank was cleaning money for the brother of the then Mexican president. The involvement of senior political figures in Latin America and beyond explains why there is so little will to provide brave prosecutors with the legal tools necessary.

Saviano's book is filled with larger-than-life figures: a Russian extortionist who walks around with scissors and a severed finger with which he threatens reluctant associates; a female Colombian female mobster with a German shepherd called Hitler, who named her son Michael Corleone; a Mexican responsible for boiling an estimated 300 bodies to dispose of them.

The most extraordinary section of the book concerns the methods used to ship cocaine to its customers, 30% of whom are in Europe. A Boeing 727 is found incinerated on a desert landing strip in Mali (borrowed with permission from the local Islamist jihadists), having served its purpose, bringing 10 tons of coke from Colombia via Panama. In Curacao there is a school for drug mules, teaching them how to swallow 120 capsules or about one kilo of cocaine. Drugs are packed into shipments of coffee or red peppers in the hope that the strong aroma will baffle the sniffer dogs. The most effective K9s have prices on their heads and require 24 hour a day protection.

Saviano's slightly self-indulgent style isn't to everyone's taste, and his section on the Italian mob becomes tedious. However, the portrait he paints of our degenerate society, and the damage our love of cocaine causes in Latin America, is compelling and disturbing.