"It's killing time"

El Enano" (the Dwarf) didn't come to Madrid to go sightseeing. He had a mission as a qualified employee of a multinational corporation. A short man with a wrinkled face, Héctor Manuel Torres Silva (born in Líbano Tolima, Colombia in 1966), was the alleged representative, in Spain, of one of the most powerful drug kingpins in South America, whose name the police recommend not to mention. A discreet yet efficient man capable of destroying anyone or anything that got in his way.

Business matters: the organization hired a Chechen to assassinate Nicolás Rivera. The hit man confessed this to the police while sipping from a bottle of mineral water at the El Corte Inglés café in Vigo. He turned his right hand, like someone waiting for a lock to click, then thrust it forward: "All it takes is one stab." The worst part of his job, he says with disgust, is having to cut up the body afterwards and put it into bags. "Knifing yes; cutting up, no."

The worst part of his job, he says, is having to cut up the body afterwards

"If the operation is important, there's a Colombian. No one trusts people here"

The Russian thug is still not behind bars. Nicolás Rivera Gámez, or "Nico," (born in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1961) is alive, but locked up in the León prison since September 2010, accused of smuggling 3,000 kilos of cocaine into Spain from Argentina and Brazil. His partners were fed up with him. It was killing time. He checked with Colombia. But back in the jungle, the gangster whose name can't be mentioned said "no."

The degree of "affection" between Torres Silva and Rivera Gámez was mutual. "They're fed up with the Dwarf here," one of Rivera's partners said with regret in a text message. "They were close friends," says one of the investigators of the case. They both tried the same route that was "almost perfect; impossible to detect." A fruit import business that smuggled into Spain "6,000 kilos of cocaine before summer, and stopped working until the next year."

The Dwarf had set up the whole scheme for the cartel. Then Rivera, an enterprising kind of guy, wanted to join in. An untouchable who lived the high life, he was a neighbor of Cristiano Ronaldo in La Finca de Pozuelo de Alarcón, an exclusive housing development outside Madrid. He had 65 luxury cars and several Rolexes. When the police arrested him in his home, at 1pm on a Friday afternoon, he had just hired a chauffeur to drive his Aston Marin to another European city. He was planning on taking a vacation... something smelt very fishy.

That same day, at the same time, officers from the organized crime unit knocked down the door of a modest flat next to the IKEA in San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid). It was the Dwarf's residence. There were no luxuries in sight. Apart from wads of bills, all they found was the keys to a Volkswagen. With these two men they took down "two operations in one," according to the inspector in charge of Operation Scythe, "the most spectacular container stake-out to date." Nico and the Dwarf had two different ways of doing business. One of them, ostentatious, worked independently; the other carried out orders from Colombia. The Dwarf was the cartel's sales "representative" in this country, as the state security forces call them. A man with a mission and the key piece to the puzzle: the figure in the middle of the organization chart.

"If the operation is important, there's a Colombian. Always. Since 2009, each gang has had its man in Spain. No one trusts people here anymore," says the chief inspector of the Alicante GRECO (Special Response Group against Organized Crime). A bare light bulb sways over his head in his office. The space next door, a future steakhouse, is under construction and the place shakes with every blow of the hammer. "They don't trust them because they've screwed up too many times." Each Colombian mafia family, fragmented since the 1990s, has got a man in Madrid. The representative changes identity and sometimes even nationality.

"What the heck would a South American be doing in Pontevedra or in Antwerp?" says one member of the Civil Guard's Criminal Analysis Unit. So he becomes Venezuelan or Mexican. And not only because his passport is suspicious: since 2001, Colombians need a visa to enter the European Union. His reason for coming to Spain? He is supposedly going to start up a company or sound out the viability of a business proposal in situ: "I'm sending you one of my men; you can tell him about it." This is how Colombian narcos deal with those looking to do business with him. The mission consists of transporting, by land or by sea, the drug from South America to Europe. There are no signatures, but they are always closed deals. You can't work with anyone else, or on any other operation at the same time. The man is tied to his organization. And his mission is to "redistribute the riches of the jungle in Europe," says one officer. He handles no money; he only offers a share of the merchandise.

"He's a guy with contacts," according to one observer from within the judicial police. He needs men he can trust in the ports, credible import companies, warehouses and merchandise transportation people. Each one gets their cut. They get paid in kind, up to 30 percent if the mission is important or "by points" (each point is 1,000 euros) if it's minor. It takes time to set up the cartel's office in Spain; sometimes as much as two years. "Office work, pure and simple," according to one Civil Guard captain.

They almost never deal with collecting payments or making sure the money gets across the ocean to the boss. There is another office that sees to that. The sales representative, in a quick meeting in some European city, is given money for his expenses or merchandise he can sell off to finance his stay. "Money and drugs can never be together. That's the law." No one handles "both briefcases" at once "like in the movies." The money is handed over in one place, and the merchandise in another. Both deliveries are done with hostages and under surveillance, all coordinated by cellphones using code words: "The kids are here. They're fine." Sometimes, the police say, they have slipped up: "A child and a half arrived." But they don't usually make any mistakes, and they alert their people to possible wires.

"He's usually a man with experience, but then each of them has his peculiarities," says one senior member of the judicial police. But the police have a standard portrait of this ambassador of cocaine. He's a trusted man over 40 years old who has already held other positions in the organization; a serious guy who "can't be out partying all night or drawing attention to himself."

He lives in a flat on the outskirts of town and drives a mid-range vehicle, like a Citroën C5. Uncle Charlie, sent by the Los Comba cartel, takes this rule to the extreme: he uses the subway to get to his meetings in hotel cafés. He doesn't use the phone much, although he might have as many as 500 mobiles. Normally he has four or five of them. His favorite brands are Nokia and BlackBerry. The subordinates use LGs. He might use an HTC, like the Dwarf. But he doesn't usually have a Vertu, a luxury cellphone that can cost up to 30,000 euros - four of them were found in the home of his enemy Nicolás Rivera. Even so, he prefers to pass on messages and orders in person. If he can't, his preferred means of communication is "the secretary" as he calls email. He never goes to any meeting without having staked out the place several times. He jots down license plate numbers and sometimes will even drive the wrong way down the street to make sure no one is following him.

"I've seen one of them drive around for seven hours," says an officer specializing in surveillance, who finds a very simple reason for it: "Every one of them has been screwed, and sometimes getting screwed means getting two bullets." He goes to those "meetings" in disguise. He might pretend to be the chauffer, the interpreter or a messenger. He likes to watch people's faces. He's afraid of the police, but also of con men... and of paleros, criminals who specialize in stealing from drug gangs. And if he remembers, he tears up the scraps of paper where he has written down his plans into little pieces. That was one of the mistakes Nico made in a Vigo café. "After the meetings, it's essential to go see what's left on the table," says the person who picked up that brainteaser of containers, ports and tons scrawled on a napkin.

The Dwarf never forgot to buy something for his wife if he traveled. He missed her, as he told his brother, Javier Tenorio. She had stayed back in Colombia. Gangsters like to have the people they love close to them when they're traveling. They are governed by the "rule of responsibility," which holds that everyone must do what he's supposed to do and always pay, with money or in kind; with their own life or their family's. On occasion, the representative must go back to the headquarters to explain himself. Sometimes no one ever sees him in one piece again: "They execute him in the jungle. In this business, there is no such thing as getting fired."

The family of the drug dealer Leónidas Vargas (Belén de los Andaquíes, Colombia, 1949), who was murdered in January 2008 while he was being treated at 12 de Octubre Hospital in Madrid, knows the rules. That's why they asked for police protection, which was authorized by a court, and withdrawn not long after, when it was considered, at the insistence of the police, that the lifestyle of his daughters and the protection that they already had were being paid for with drug money. One attorney notes that Vargas' son, in prison for crimes against public health, has agreed to "collaborate" in exchange for protection. Such offers are not rare, although nothing usually comes of them. "They ask to be released first, and then they'll tell you," says one officer.

The representative also wants to meet the family of the people with whom he is going to do business. He asks to be invited to a meal at the new partner's home, which he either attends on his own or with a paid companion. The entire family must be at the table; he wants to know every single member, and for them to know that he knows them "in case he has to kill them" - even the children. No meal, no deal. The preferred partners are also required to send a trusted man to Colombia to answer for the merchandise. The Colombians are "serious" - they don't cheat and expect not to be cheated.

Finally the business is up and running. For the logistics part of the operations, employees are needed: lookouts, drivers, errand boys, thugs and money launderers. They find them among their compatriots in Spain or bring them from Colombia, sometimes entire groups from the same village. They are people from very humble backgrounds who charge, depending on their job, between

2,000 and 3,000 euros a month. The ones with the best connections are assigned tasks that do not involve direct contact with illegal activities. In 2011, 7,649 people were arrested for cocaine trafficking.

The notary certifies that the merchandise leaves its point of departure and reaches its destination. His eyes are the eyes of the boss. The transportation people pray that the authorities put out a press release when the merchandise is intercepted. If it appears on television, they're safe. If not, they're done for: the distributor will think he's been robbed and seek revenge.

Once the cocaine enters Spain, first it loses weight: there are lots of people who work on commission, and almost all of them get paid in kind. But once it has slimmed down, it must be fattened up again. This is the job of the cook, the expert at the chemical process to make cocaine chlorohydrate. He is not some renegade from Bayer, but a person of humble origins, sometimes illiterate, who has grown up on the cocaine plantations and has a special talent for multiplying the drug or salvaging it from the substance in which it has been disguised for shipping. His services are very expensive; he travels by private jet and sometimes even has an agent who rents him out for days, like a star DJ. The risk is that because he is in contact with various organizations, he can "have a tail." In other words, he could be compromised by some police investigation. This same process involves another very highly valued individual: el probón; a kind of taster.

Nono and Pumuki spent the summer of 2010 sniffing cocaine in the bar Edén and driving around in their BMWs. They were the trusted men of Jacobo Portabales, alias "El Gordo," who was in turn presumably the one the Dwarf had chosen to set up the entry route for drug shipments from Argentina to the ports of Barcelona and Alicante.

The representative never speaks to the people at the ports. He doesn't use money; he doesn't corrupt directly. But he observes and asks for collateral: "Bring me the guard or the customs officer." The Colombians also contacted David Temes, a rather well-known man from the fruit-import business at the port of Vigo, a paddle-tennis player and a yacht-club regular who allowed the organization to use his company, with a long history in the fruit-importation business, and the warehouses where the merchandise would be stored until they moved it to the cache or safe house. There the caletero, or cache boss, keeps watch. His only job is to make sure "the merchandise doesn't move" until a new order is received.

Once the cocaine has "settled" for a few days, the dealers take away packages of 10 or 15 kilos. Their nationalities are varied, and so are the places where they will sell the drug. One agent sums up the final - not very glamorous - episode: "Some black guys come and take their kilos to a cousin in Dusseldorf."

With that, the representative's job is over.

When the police burst into his home, the Dwarf had his plane tickets for Bogotá tucked away in a little chest. The man who put him behind bars turns the wheel gently and says how the Galician drug dealers, who didn't use to need any go-between to deal with Colombia, now sell supposed contacts for a cup of coffee and a bit of gasoline. "A lot of heads could roll if the Colombians lose their patience." On the other side of the Atlantic, he says, they're getting tired of the lack of seriousness. As the police officer drives, the landscape opens up from the top of a hillock. The bar El Cañón appears on the right. Then warehouses, boats, restaurants specialized in wedding banquets; the skeleton of an unfinished mansion: legendary places in the world of Galician drug dealing. The afternoon sun beats down and everything seems totally calm.

"There are dead bodies in the offing," says the head of the GRECO in Galicia, echoing what a criminal lawyer had said a week earlier. The unnamed boss nods: "The lawyer knows. It's time."