Pride can be heard as the criminal investigators and customs officers talk about their work in Düsseldorf on Monday. For example, how they tracked down the gang of smugglers who were shipping tons of cocaine from Latin America to Europe thanks to a tip from Colombian authorities. Or how they deliberately found a total of 25.4 tons of cocaine in nine containers in the port of Hamburg between May and September last year, between oil seeds, pineapples and wooden slats – the largest amount of the white drug to date in a single German investigation. And how 150 officers finally arrested eight main suspects a good two weeks ago.
In retrospect, says Ronald Lenz from the Stuttgart Customs Investigation Office with a smile, the name of the operation even turned out to be true: “Plexus means a network of veins and nerves – it somehow fit.” Because drug investigators seized a further eleven tons of cocaine in Ecuador and the Netherlands as part of “Operation Plexus”, a total of 35.5 tons were seized – with a record value of an estimated 2.6 billion euros. The majority of the confiscated coke has since gone up in flames – in a waste incineration plant near Stuttgart.
A 35.5 ton blow against organized crime. Because a public prosecutor’s office in Düsseldorf, which specializes in combating organized crime, coordinated “OP Plexus,” North Rhine-Westphalia’s Justice Minister Benjamin Limbach (Greens) was also at the table on Monday. The minister spoke of “a coup.” Limbach praised it as “a precise punch to the chin that hurts drug lords.” In keeping with the European Football Championship, the Green Party member changed the sport for another metaphor: “The state is on the ball and has the will to score!”
But is that enough to defeat the cartels? Investigator Tino Igelmann from the Customs Criminal Investigation Office admits that a record success is apparently not enough. So far, the federal official regrets, there have been “no discernible effects on the sales market and the price” when it comes to the sale of cocaine in Germany. The Federal Republic is facing a veritable “flood of cocaine”. Just in May, the Hamburg Senate announced that the amount of cocaine seized in the Hanseatic port had tripled in just five years.
The “punch” attempted by Minister Limbach also did not hit the drug cartels where they were most vulnerable – money. The network that has now been broken up appears to have been an international octopus that was mainly limited to logistics and transport: two Germans, two Turks, one Azerbaijani, one Bulgarian, one Moroccan and one Ukrainian were arrested. In the raids two weeks ago in seven federal states, only relatively small amounts of assets were confiscated: five gold bars, 23,000 euros in cash, a Porsche 911 Turbo (estimated value 250,000 euros) and other luxury items such as expensive watches. Compared to the cocaine value of 2.6 billion, that is not that much.
Nevertheless, “OP Plexus” reveals how cleverly the drug dealers and shippers operate. The tip from Colombia led the investigators to a bogus company in Mannheim and finally to a German entrepreneur from North Rhine-Westphalia who had founded up to a hundred “stock companies” years ago: companies that were founded in advance in order to send hot containers of hidden cocaine across the sea to Europe after 80 or 100 test runs. The dealers always wrote off the pineapple plants or sacks full of sesame seeds and let them go moldy.
Originally, the German investigators had concrete evidence of ten deliveries by ship. The “OP Plexus” intercepted nine containers. One got through.