The 30 Year Old Billionaire Cartel Boss Playing Professional Soccer
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Save on O'Reilly Brake Parts Cleaner. Get two cans of O'Reilly Brake Parts Cleaner for just $8. Valid in-store only at O'Reilly Auto Parts. Spring 2021 in Asuncion, Paraguay. DEA agents and Paraguayan police are deep into an investigation of a man who has changed the drug game in Latin America. Not an easy thing to do in this day and age.

Though barely out of his 20s, Sebastián Marcet has managed to create his own cartel, which he dubs the First Uruguayan Cartel. And he's right. He is the first Uruguayan narco kingpin. But that's not the main factor in why he's being hunted right now and will continue to be hunted by nearly half a dozen countries up to this day. See, Marcet has really revolutionized a new drug route in South America.

One that's even caught the attention of the Americans. He's been instrumental in what they call the Southern Route, moving tons and tons of coke south from Bolivia into Paraguay and Uruguay, and then onto Europe. A massive bust in Germany nets five tons in 2019, a record. And then three busts in Holland and Belgium net another 17 tons. All of this said to be the work of Marcet. But so far, he's managed to stay in the shadows.

They don't even know his name. He's a master at moving not only large amounts of yay around, but also money, laundering, setting up front companies, and he's sharp and possesses the natural charm to win over everyone from high-ranking politicians to massive criminal organizations like the Enjongueta and the Brazilian gang First Command of the Capitol. He also always seems to be one step ahead of law enforcement and travels under numerous aliases with fake documents.

He does have one flaw, though, that's going to lead to a massive global manhunt. Marcet loves soccer. He loves playing soccer. He even loves it so much, he starts buying professional teams and then puts himself in the game as a player.

At this point, both the DEA and Paraguayan law enforcement don't exactly know who Marcet is. But they get a tip that the cartel boss they're looking for is going to be boarding a private plane at the Silvio Pedrosi International Airport. And from wiretaps they've got up on lower-level cartel members, they learn that he has a lot of tattoos.

At the airport, the agents pinpoint a man who looks like who they've been looking for. He's using a fake passport, but when they run a check on his biometric data, an ID pops up of a Uruguayan, Sebastian Marcet. Nobody knows anything about him. So after he boards, they do a simple Google of his name, and up pops the profile of a professional soccer player on a local team.

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Welcome back to the podcast that dares to ask the question, what do you get the billionaire narco kingpin who has everything? We won't keep you in suspense for like a 10 episode series that's overproduced. The answer is a starting position on a mediocre second tier professional soccer team or football team, as my co-host Sean Williams would say. Sean, how are things? Oh, it's pretty good. I mean, you know, it's tough parenting alone and that.

My body's broken from... Yeah, right. Anyway, anyway, the viewers, the viewers do not care about your parenting updates. It is the middle of August. The dog days of summer. Everyone is on vacation except for us because we love you and we're dedicated. My name is Danny Gold. Together, Sean and I are two longtime journalists who every week...

bringing you an audio experience detailing the fascinating world of global organized crime. Yeah, I've got this like little sniffle that won't go away. And I've got a haircut off a student the other day, like five bucks. But you know, get what you pay for, right? Five buck haircut is a five buck haircut in there.

Yeah, you know, it's just... If you want more, you can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com slash innerworldpodcast for bonus episodes or sign up on Spotify or Apple. This week, I have an interview up with a man who helped bring down America's most notorious strip club,

that involve the mafia and other fun things like that. All right. Follow us on your podcast apps, Instagram, YouTube, you know, rate us five stars, all that other nonsense. Or why not buy a mug at underworldpod.com and click that merch link. The subject close to your heart, right? Mugs? What? What do you mean? Oh, the strip club. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I prefer mine to be not notorious, just poorly run.

Today, we are bringing you the story of Sebastian Marcet.

who gets to live out Sean's number one dream. No, not making a ton of money trafficking. Yay. That's number three on his list. But number one is buying a professional soccer team and inserting himself into the starting lineup, despite being extremely mediocre and likely costing his team victories. Honestly, man, if Narcos weren't behind so much murder and destruction, they would be pretty hilarious. Like who doesn't love the nouveau riche living out the fantasies of every 12 year old the world over.

Oh, I do. And I love that you skipped out number two on my list. So, yeah. So we can definitely make those guidelines on the YouTube videos. What was number two? No, I really, I can't say under legal advice. All right. Okay. Anyway, Sebastian's life starts us in Uruguay, a country we haven't touched on much. And that's because it's been known often as the Switzerland of South America.

Not because they love Nazi gold, that would be Paraguay, but because it has maintained strong state institutions and the cartel and gang violence that has plagued South and Central America for decades has mostly avoided Uruguay. Though in recent years, unfortunately, that has started to creep in, as has the drug game.

I spoke to Uruguayan journalist Mauro Bottega when I was researching the story. He's fantastic. He's actually the one who put me on to Marcet's story way before there was a massive Washington Post story on him that came out, I think, a month or two later. A few other people emailed about that. And he said that Marcet and the first Uruguayan cartel didn't pop up out of nowhere. Drug traffickers operating in Uruguay is an issue that's been bubbling up for a while, and the media there has somewhat ignored it.

It's become a big drug market hub. And he actually does not like the whole Switzerland of Latin America thing. Yeah. Who would Switzerland sucks. Well, his, I think his point was that like, you know, it's them trying to differentiate themselves from Latin America and say, you know, they don't have these issues like the country surrounding them, but they're starting to have these issues. So it's, it's not really accurate to say that anymore. Um,

There was a high-level Jalisco New Generation cartel guy captured there in 2016, and in 2017, an Andrangueta boss was also arrested. Not to mention the first command of the capital, the massive Brazilian gang that may be the most powerful in Latin America has been setting up shop there. And why is that? Because the southern route, that southern Latin America that takes coke into Europe has been getting way more popular and way more profitable and way more important. Oh,

A big part of that is the massive port in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, one of South America's largest. And the guy that helped really grow this southern route is none other than our subject right here, Sebastián Marcet, the first homegrown drug kingpin of Uruguay. Here's how Insight Crime described him a year ago. Quote,

Uruguay's most prolific drug trafficker, Sebastian Marcet, has strung together an intercontinental network of associates implicated in cocaine trafficking, money laundering, and high-profile assassinations, all while escaping the clutches of authorities in Dubai, Paraguay, and Bolivia.

To add to that, he's also been named as the alleged murderer of a prosecutor who was on his honeymoon by the president of Colombia. And of course, the Uruguayans are after him and so is the DEA. So yeah, I mean, this guy, he gets around. The Washington Post, who had that big piece out on him a few weeks ago that I'm using as like one of the main sources here, I think it was by Kevin Seif or Seif, claims he's a billionaire and a top drug trafficker in Latin America. Though as we'll learn, he's more of what you can call a broker.

I also used a lot of reporting by the Uruguayan paper El Pais and Inside Crime, of course. And there's a solid Vice piece on him from a couple years ago by Nathaniel Janowitz. Yeah, it might be worth taking a wee step back at this point as well, because I think maybe if most people don't know where Uruguay is, it's like a small state on the mouth of the Rio de la Plata that like feeds into Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital. And Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, is just a couple of hours from Viena on a ferry. So they're kind of like twin cities in a way.

That city is home to over a third of Uruguay's 3.5 million people, which makes them incredible at football per capita. And the whole place was fought over by Europeans as a major entry point into South America for centuries, I think, like Portuguese, Italians, Spanish and Brits or whatever. So I guess that's kind of what's happening now, right? Only with guys like the star of today's show.

Yeah, Carmen Sandiego over here. Is that a reference the kids will get or is that a bit dated? Wow. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, let's see. Let's see how that one goes. No one could rock a red trench coat like you can, Sean. Maricette's born in the outskirts of Montevideo, Uruguay in 1991. There's not a ton known. God, the Narcos are like born in the 90s now, right? Isn't that crazy? He probably doesn't know who Carmen Sandiego is.

There's not a ton known. What have we done with our lives? It's the worst thing about him. It's just like, there's nothing sadder than getting older and realize like, forget the NBA players. Like the Narcos are a lot younger than you now. There's not a ton known about his early life. I get the impression he wasn't dirt poor, but certainly not middle class. He was poor enough that he couldn't afford soccer uniforms. His parents divorced, but he's on record saying he had a good childhood.

He's a smart kid, and like so many others, he dreams of being a pro soccer player. He works at a gas station when he's, I think, in his teens, but somehow he still finds a way to go to the fancy nightclubs and hit on rich girls.

And, you know, if you look up pictures of him, he's a really handsome guy. Like he dresses quite well, not like over the top flamboyant, but elegant, slick. He's got actually good tattoos. You know how so many cartel bosses to end up looking like a fat uncle or just like too sleazy. He actually like he actually looks like he would play himself as the villain in a movie about a cartel boss. Relatable content. Yeah. Yeah.

After high school, he plays semi pro ball, but he's kind of a middling player. And he starts getting into trouble. I think he gets arrested for burglary. And then in 2010 or something low level, then at 2010 and 19, he gets popped on a narcotics charge. But I believe it wasn't like a significant amount. It might have even been personal use or just a small amount that he was dealing.

He must have risen up the ranks rather quickly, though, because a few years later in his early 20s, he's already coordinating big shipments of weed from Paraguay into Uruguay on private planes.

And the drug trafficker he's working with on this shipment is a guy known as Papacho, who just happens to be the uncle of a former president of Paraguay. He was the pilot for the private jet that carried the weed. And this is something we're going to see a lot of. Like this guy is connected to a whole lot of important people, including high-level politicians in many different countries.

They together had a shipment of 450 keys of weed, but Pappaccio gets caught in July of 2012. Marcet happens to escape capture, which again is another thing we'll see a lot. He's bagged up the following year though, when he's caught trafficking 137 keys of weed and just a little bit of yay. I think it was like a third of a kilo, which, you know, the way they party over there, that could just be personal use. Interestingly, and Marcet makes this point when he issues statements or talks to the

Uruguay actually became the first country to legalize recreational weed the exact same year, 2013, including having it, growing it, and selling it. So I don't know. I guess obviously he wasn't doing something illegal, but it's interesting to think about. He still gets convicted. He gets sentenced to five years. He's sent to La Libertad prison in Uruguay.

Remember how we said that Uruguay was starting to bubble up as a major drug trafficking hub? Well, our buddy Sebastian treats his prison time like a networking conference and apparently impresses a whole lot of veteran traffickers, including a Croatian mobster who was caught trafficking 2,000 keys of yay. And Sebastian apparently learns a lot.

It sounds a bit too much like that scene in Blow, but you know, it makes sense. The prison has a wing dedicated solely to drug traffickers, according to the Washington Post, which, why is there a wing solely dedicated to drug traffickers? I have no idea. But it seems like a bad policy.

It's like fucking real life LinkedIn right there, you know? Here, he connects with the PCC from Brazil, who we did an episode on, and the Andrangheta of Calabria, Italy, who we also did an episode on. Basically, two of the biggest drug trafficking groups in the world, I would say. That's including Mexico, right? Yeah, I mean, especially since, well, as you say, Fat Uncle No. 1 just got nabbed. I mean, just to shout out the Patreon, I'm going to be speaking to Luis Chaparro, I think...

the end of this week. Maybe they start next for Patreon subscribers. So yeah, look out for that. Yeah, he's been keeping up on all the stuff involving El Mayo and Chapo's kids and everything like that. He's the go-to guy for that. So that'll be great to get him on.

All right, Sebastian, he gets released in 2018 and then goes to work on what Paraguayan officials refer to as a family clan cartel. Actually, it was interesting to see the use of the word clan here. You don't really see that when it comes to Latin American trafficking and drug cartels and gangs a lot. I mean, I feel like I could be wrong here.

It's used to describe Marset's organized crime group and actually another one he teams up with that we'll talk about later on. But speaking to Morrow, he mentions it has to do with the fact that most of the other high-level people in his network are actually family members.

Brother-in-law, wife, half-brother, etc. I don't know. I just thought it was interesting that that, you know, because you see clan in other regions, you know, especially in the Middle East and places where family connections, I think, are a lot more involved. Well, I think that that might be an Italian thing, right? Because like pretty much all Uruguayans are of Italian descent and they call like the Camorra and then Drangheta. They call them clans back home in Italy, I think. So it could be an Italian thing.

You know what? You're probably right. Because, I mean, Maura was talking about the Italian connections there that the country has. And that actually makes a lot of sense that that is related to it. Because, yeah, they do call them the, you know, the clans in Naples and things like that. So that actually, damn, look at you, Sean, contributing everything. I did a thing. I did a thing. Yeah. Yeah. According to Maura, most of the major European players in the drug game are clan based. They're small timers who usually work with family.

So yeah, he's released at the age of 27, which is too old for a soccer career. Hello? But just right for a trafficking powder career. He gets a fake passport and identity and uses his newly made prison friends to establish some connections and heads to Paraguay to set up his enterprise.

The same year, though, he's also arrested for the murder of a childhood friend and former partner. I'm not sure what the details are exactly. It was allegedly over a drug debt, but it could have been related to the fact that the weed bust was allegedly because of a tip off. He gets off on the charges, though. But yeah, he leaves Uruguay and he's looking to expand his network. And around then, he sets up what he calls First Uruguayan Cartel or PCU for short.

That's what's stamped on his bricks. Sometimes the King of the South is also stamped on them. And the PCU starts getting some attention in 2020 when they send a threatening message to a narcotics prosecutor and also throw a Molotov cocktail at the headquarters of an anti-drug brigade.

The quantity of coke being confiscated at European ports is starting to set records in 2019. 2020, same thing. And some of that is attributed to Marsat's work. In 2019, German police grabbed 4.5 tons of Ye and Hamburg, a record that has come from Montevideo.

There's also three seizures in Antwerp and Belgium between June 20th and October 2021, totaling 17 tons. That's linked to Marseille. I remember that one in Hamburg. That was huge news over in Germany. That must be. Yeah, this must be making him wildly rich. Like these are huge amounts for a pretty I'm guessing it's just like a few guys at this point.

That Hamburg bus ruined your weekend, didn't it? I know. I know. Yeah. You didn't get to see me in my red jacket, as you just said. Yeah. I mean, the Washington Post estimates that he's... I don't know where they got the estimation from, but there's estimates that he's a billionaire. And this is... It really is pretty incredible. We're talking the span of like two or three years he sets this whole thing up. So he...

You know, he's not a he's going to do some dumb things, as we'll see. And as you heard in the cold open, but he seems like a very shrewd and sharp operator who like really has one of these innate business senses and knows what he's doing, you know, and is ruthless when he needs to be.

Paraguay, unlike Uruguay, is already well known as a huge drug trafficking area full of all sorts of shadiness. It's home to the infamous triple frontier or tri-border area where the borders of Paraguay meet Brazil and Peru, which is a major trafficking area for everything, for drugs, guns, weapons, people, goods, everything. And has long been the territory of organized crime groups, cartels, and even terrorist organizations like Hezbollah.

Paraguay is also the biggest weed producing country in the region. And it's right next to Bolivia, which is one of the biggest coke producing countries as well.

Yeah, and while we're on the subject of Paraguay, I mean, it's like, it's still humming with really weird German shit. I mean, like, Mengele and Rochman wound up there after the war, and then there's, like, all these weird little German-speaking towns dotted in the jungles around Paraguay, and I've heard some really odd things about them getting up to their good old tricks again, so...

Yeah, it's like, honestly, that country is so strange. It doesn't get anywhere near the media it should. Yeah, I mean, these guys that he links up with, I was really fascinated by them too. It's in Paraguay that he links up with this clan called the Inspron clan, I think. Inspron or Inspran. It's another organized crime group built on family connections. In this case, it's seven brothers.

They're heavily connected to Paraguayan politicians. I was really fascinated by them. I tried to find whatever I could out there, but there really isn't a lot, at least not a lot in English. They're a powerful family led by the brother known as Tio Rico, and they're heavily involved with drug trafficking and money laundering and also seriously connected in Paraguay. One brother is a pastor and the head or was a pastor and the head of a massive church.

Marcet works with them. They're helping with organizing storage, transpo, distribution. He's said to have a really shrewd brain for business structure and money laundering. Also, I should add, he doesn't really control territory at all, right? And his cartel isn't really a single group with a lot of people underneath them and a really coherent structure. He's more like a manager or a broker.

He puts people, places, and product together with multi-ton shipments. Though as the years went on, he got involved in more aspects of the production. Yeah, I mean, this is the startup Palo Alto world, right? This is bricks and mortar out. You just work online, just run networks. He's kind of, you know, he's at the vanguard.

Well, I think brokers have always been like a big part of the industry, you know. He just really seized on it and got really big really fast. This Inns friend, like that would – what are they like Lebanese Christians or something? That's such a weird name. I don't know. It's I-N-S-A. I didn't see anything about Lebanese there but –

That's such a strange name. I'm not sure what the origin is. So much EA is coming to Paraguay at this point before heading to Uruguay. I think it doesn't always head into Uruguay and then on to Europe. Even the US is noticing it. And of course, Marcet and his crew are stamping their ID on their bricks, which again is not a smart move. Paraguayan cops get involved. They start looking into it. And so does the DEA.

They get those wiretaps set up, and they keep hearing about this young Uruguayan guy, but they don't have a real name. All his trafficking ops, too, they have soccer code names. His MO is pretty simple. Small planes to Bolivia, pick up the yay, bring it back on hidden airstrips, then it's loaded onto trucks that take it to big ships on the river, and from there to the port of Montevideo in Uruguay, and then on to Europe.

For a while, though, they just can't get a beat on him. But he gets a little too arrogant or he just gets too sloppy. Sean, you've done episodes before on, you know, drug trafficking and soccer. Everyone knows about Pablo Escobar sponsoring his hometown team. And soccer teams have long been used to launder money, illicitly gained money. But this might be the first time I've ever heard of a narco buying a soccer team and then basically making the team put him into the game.

I mean, I think there was a story of some like Indian or Qatari billionaire doing the same, but at least in that case, they weren't wanted by like multiple countries, including the US. Yeah, I guess the closest I can think of is like there's Ahmad Grojny, which is run by the Kaderowsk. And I think it's now like the chairman is Kaderowsk's son or he might have played for them. And then there was another tale where I think Colonel Gaddafi's son played for a couple of teams in the Italian top flight.

And that's when...

I think the like, what was the name of the Libyan state oil firm was like sponsoring a bunch of stuff there. Weirdly, I looked this up quickly and there's like a Croatian guy who plays for Glasgow Rangers, who is the son of a big Serbo-Croat mafia leader, who is a guy you probably don't want to be messing with or tackling really hard. But yeah, this is about the most bold faced of all of them, this guy. Yeah. Our boy Sebastian, he buys a team called Deportivo Capiata.

They're mid-tier professional soccer team in Paraguay, kind of hardscrabble team at this point, down on its luck. And he shows up, you know, this handsome guy covered in tattoos, driving a Lamborghini, wearing a lot of golds and always having a different Rolex. You know, he pays 10K to wear the same jersey as Messi, number 10. And he's pretty mediocre from what it sounds like, though his teammates all insist he should be getting more playing time. And the refs are hesitant to call fouls on him.

I mean, I think Washington Post quotes certain people as saying they had no idea he was a cartel boss, but like, clearly they did. And you'd have to be a moron to not know what he was. Like, let's be real. The article also starts with him absolutely breaking a penalty kick he was chosen to take late in a game in May of 2021. Which, you know, happens to everyone, but still, it's just, it's funny.

There's also a story of him doing donuts in his Lambo in the gravel parking lot of the stadium. His wife and children would come to watch him play, and he offers to pay his teammates thousands extra if they win games. But the thing is, the team doesn't win too much. They just, they suck. And Marcet, he's part of the reason why. Meanwhile, he's also living the high life in Paraguay's capital, throwing ragers and living at penthouses.

Yeah, I'm going to say that if my Sunday team manager is listening to this, if you do offer me like a couple of grand, I might not eat fried chicken and drink beer the night before the games.

So something to think about there. Yeah, then I'm sure you'll be one of the best players on the team once you cut that out. Oh, yeah. The team, though, they had once been a force. They even beat Boca Juniors, which is one of the region's best in 2014. That's huge. But in the years since they hadn't, yeah, big time. I know what big Boca Juniors is, of course.

But in the years since, they hadn't done so great. They couldn't really draw fans. But when Marcet shows up, he starts pouring money into improving things for the team, for the fans, for the players, everything.

Which, you know, sort of begs the question, like, why aren't there drug lords who love podcasts? Just like, you know, take us on. We'll make you a host. You could give us cool sound effects. Just invest in it. Launder money through us. It's fun for you. It's fun for us. We'll do episodes on your enemies. We'll insult them. We'll spread rumors. Whatever you want. We are entirely for sale. Now,

Why did Marcet decide on this team? Allegedly because of a former Paraguayan senator and tobacco magnate named Enrico Galeano, who the stadium is named after. He's been president of the team since 2016. And check this out. While he was in office, he helped pass a law that made it so sports teams are immune from money laundering laws, which is just, I mean, that is just incredible stuff right there. One of the all-time legendary politician moves. He was also, of course, allegedly doing business with Marcet.

And Marcet, who is said to have like eight different aliases with passports and documents from multiple countries, for some reason was playing for this team under his own real name.

Eventually, though, the narcotic SWAT gets onto him and he just kind of stops showing up to practice. And like we said, family clan based, everyone's wrapped up in his brother in law, who looks like he's 12, have been locked up for murder in Uruguay, serving a six year sentence. And in 2021, his brother in law. Oh, I'm sorry. I think it was the half brother who'd been locked up for murder in Uruguay. But his brother in law escaped from prison in 2021. Later, there were five police officers arrested for being on the take.

So yeah, I mean, this family, they're not amateurs. Like they know how to maneuver. They're pulling off the prison escapes. This again is like mid 2021. Marset is getting big in the drug game, really big. And he's arrogant. And soon enough, the DEA has him in the crosshairs, which is something we've stressed repeatedly. You know, you can mess around a lot, but you don't, you want to stay off the radar of American federal agencies. It just makes life a lot easier if they don't care about you because they have a lot of resources.

But yeah, then we get to the scene from the cold open. Marcet had been in the shadows, but the police get that tip. They stalk out his private plane. They match the biometric data. And then up pops that Google search result with his soccer bio. Instead of busting him right then and there, they start following him to build a case. You know, they want to bring down everyone he works with. The guy, you know, seems like a dummy at first. Like he doesn't pick up on the tales. They're looking into his businesses and money laundering ops. And things are just, you know, starting to paint a clear picture.

From the Washington Post again, here's a quote. They chronicled the way Marcet created shell companies across Latin America's private sector, paying for publicity and local media so the businesses appear legitimate, investigation documents show.

I mean, that just sounds like toxic masculinity to me. Wouldn't you agree, Danny? Yeah.

I mean, sometimes you got to fight to live, you know? There's actually a Vice article that goes into a bit more detail about the music producing stuff. And it cites one of these articles that are like these promo articles that everyone like hires to get done that masquerade as journalism. You ever do one of those, Sean? Like when I worked in marketing for six weeks, it was absurd how much the general public would actually believe these like obviously promo articles that were paid for. I think Forbes is huge for that. Oh, that's the worst. Yeah. And speaking of Forbes too,

all those lists that you see about like the 10 best or top this or top that most of the time like people pay to be on those lists like you get offers in your email being like if you want to be on this list it costs this much money and stuff like that I actually worked for a company that did one of these pay for play sort of awards things and uh

I never know when is the right time to write a big piece about this because it was bent as all hell. I cannot believe it was almost a scam. I would say it was a scam, but I don't know whether I'm ready to do a story about it because it was huge as well. So much of those industry awards and promo material, stuff like that, it's just all fought or bought. I'm sorry, bought and paid for. Anyway, Quoting Vice.

It's said that the then 28-year-old had 15 years experience putting on music concerts and touted Marcet as a talented musician in his own right. He reportedly began performing as a singer in the Urbano genre at 15 before playing guitar in the band of renowned Uruguayan folk rocker Jaime Rus, the article stated. Local media later proved the second claim was false. He did actually produce some concerts and events over the years, including stuff for the Evangelical Church.

And something with legendary bachata singer Romeo Santos, who if you ever need to impress a Dominican or Puerto Rican woman in her 40s, you take her to one of his concerts. Okay. Noted. Yeah. Yeah. Write that down. Guy was not Sebastian's concerts, Romeo Santos' concerts, but the guy was a man about town, a sharp businessman, and the police do struggle to keep tabs on him.

But one day they managed to follow him to a new soccer stadium and he's playing for a new team. But again, he doesn't keep a low profile. Him and a bunch of his Uruguayan homies, they start pouring money into the team. They're all showing up in their Lambos. He gets his brother to recruit new players with lots of money. And he starts doing a lot of buying and selling players, which is a good and old school way to launder money in soccer. Sean, we don't really have that in American sports. Can you kind of explain what buying and selling players is, how it works?

Well, yeah, I mean, this might be hard for American sports fans to understand, but essentially you've got a player, someone wants a player, so you sell him and they buy him. Does that make sense? I don't know. It's quite difficult.

Well, you don't start up buy players in the US. You trade, and you throw things into the trade here and there, but you can't just be like, hey, I'm going to give you $20 million for this guy. Yeah, but that is way more complicated. With all these contract buyouts and stuff like this, this is so...

in American sports. But yeah, basically like I'm going to give you 20 mil and then I will sort out the contract with the player. That's like a separate thing. And yeah, that is like, I mean, even the biggest teams in the world are laundering tons and tons of cash through this. And it's like every year, FIFA and UEFA, the biggest organizations go into it and they hand out a couple of fines. But these are clubs that are owned by like Qatari state investment vehicles. So who gives a shit?

But yeah, that's my soapbox and it is pretty screwed up. So I can imagine that this guy was making quite a lot of money.

Quite a lot of dirty cash turned clean through transfers. Yeah. Yeah. So part of his new plan was to do this, buy and sell players with a European team that was also involved in the drug game and to do it at inflated prices and use that to launder money. Here's another quote from the Washington Post article I keep citing. They buy a Colombian player from a very low level soccer team and then take him to play in the Croatian soccer league.

but they sell him for a hundred times or 200 times more than what he costs. It's that a Colombian police official referring to one case in which Albanian drug traffickers laundered money through soccer transfers, providing cash for the transaction. So we got Albania, you know, everyone, everyone drink,

Yeah, just had my coffee. Also, I went to see a team playing Tirana, so that's capital of Albania once, and they had the most weirdly international team I've ever come across, and it has to be to do with this kind of shit, because they had a Japanese guy, I think they had a Chinese guy, they had an Ivorian midfielder, they had like...

like a belarusian guy playing in defense like this was so clearly this kind of stuff this is so fascinating that he was doing it pretty much in the open uh because it is a perfect way of laundering money there's pretty much no one's going to stop you yeah i mean he was using like what sounds like second and third tier teams you know so i think it's uh no one cares you know i'm just saying i'm but yeah i am for sale yeah if he wants to buy this uh

This investigation that they're looking into him for, it ends up being the biggest investigation ever against drug dealers in Paraguay's history. But Marcet still manages to sneak away and disappear in either June or the fall of 2021. And he heads to where else? Dubai. He's got millions in property there like every other gangster. He does the requisite dress like a sheikh and play with falcon stuff. In October, though, he's detained in the Dubai airport for using a fake passport. He's

He'd been heading to Greece to do something with a second tier soccer team called Trikala FC, which is in central Athens. You know, they're second tier in soccer, but top tier in criminality. Its former owner was shot a dozen times and the car he was in was set on fire. He was a drugs and weapons trafficker. And the president of the team had once been arrested for smuggling kilos of yay and did four years in prison.

Yeah, Greek football is low-key insane. If I remember, there was a thing from 2018, 2019, where the owner of one of the biggest clubs ran onto the pitch to argue with the ref, but he was carrying a loaded pistol. I think he might have got banned. Also, we should do a show on, is it Piraeus? It's like the port of Athens. There's tons of weird stuff going on there as well. So yeah, kind of a match made in heaven.

Yeah, I think that that works right down before Marseille is arrested, not arrested, detained, I guess a bunch of Paraguayan players and coaches had shown up there to that team in Greece, throwing around cash money. He'd sent the players there giving them 200k in cash to go. He was going to use the team to launder the cash and he was trying to set up a foothold in Greece also for drug trafficking, expanding his network, but he gets nabbed on that fake passport before he could.

While he's being held, the U.S. warns the officials in the UAE to be careful with him, but they don't listen. A Uruguayan diplomat visits him in jail. He's not being processed at that moment or extradited because they're waiting for an arrest warrant from Paraguay, which for some reason doesn't get over in time to the authorities in the UAE. Marcet gets his top lawyers on the case. He's trying to get Uruguay to issue him a new passport so he can get out of jail. And Uruguay, who knows who he is and what he does,

allows him to get that passport, which more on that in a minute. And while in prison, he has the guy who got him the fake passport that got him caught, a guy in Paraguay, killed. I'll stop butting in with random footy stuff now, but now I'm remembering there is a really weird tale, if anyone wants to look it up. There's a team in, I think, the 3rd Division in Wales...

called bang a town and they got bought by some weird argentine shady businessmen who bought like tons and tons of argentine players who were suddenly playing in like a small town in wales i think like three or four years ago and they went under and he was involved in sort of money laundering and drugs or something but yeah if anyone wants to look up a fun weird story that i somehow couldn't sell to a magazine uh look up the story of bang a town fc it's really interesting

So Sebastian Marcet, he gets his new passport and he skates. In February and March of 2022, the police in Paraguay, they raid everything having to do with him. They confiscate cash, planes, yachts, tractors, and thousands of cows. Says Inside Crime, quote, in March 2022, the sweeping Ultras...

Pai investigation in Paraguay, named Marcet as the leader of a transcontinental drug trafficking and money laundering scheme linked to members of the Inspron family, a Paraguayan clan heavily involved in politics and the Catholic Church.

Shortly after that, Interpol issues arrest warrants. And then there's a huge scandal in Uruguay when details of the passport acquisition while in Dubai jail services. Multiple high-level political officials are forced to resign, including the vice chancellor, the minister in charge of foreign relations, and the minister of the interior.

Around the same time, this big-time Paraguayan anti-mafia prosecutor who helped spearhead the massive operation in Paraguay involving Marcet's cartel is assassinated while on his honeymoon on a private beach resort in Colombia. I believe his newly married wife was also pregnant at the time.

Shortly after, the Colombian president accuses Marcet of being behind it. Also, that that murdered prosecutor had ordered the arrest warrants for five of the seven Inspron brothers. Yeah, you should definitely do a show about these guys. Maybe get some magazine to send you to a private beach resort in Colombia to do it. There's nothing out there on them. I mean, there's stuff out there on them, but like not a lot. This is it.

Fertile ground. I mean, there's some. There's some stuff out there on them. And I assume there's a lot more in Spanish, but I wasn't able to track it down. But yeah, I was fascinated by them. I wanted to know more. That year, Marcet also starts sending videos and voice notes and messages to journalists and television stations claiming innocence.

No one knows where he is. Eventually, though, they get tipped off. He's in Bolivia and playing for a soccer team again. The guy can't help himself. Again, it's a second tier team. He's once again very bad at soccer and driving cars worth a quarter million dollars around with his homies. I mean, the guy just doesn't do inconspicuous. He just loves the game, man. Jogo Benito. Yeah.

washington post quotes a player from his new team being shocked when he found out what the guy did after playing with him for a while which i mean come on man i don't know it's like one of those uh you ever see those like reels or like meme clips of like the uh it was like an asian guy who walks out of a uh like there's like a gambling bust like of a of a underground like gambling thing and the guy's like walking out wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette at like seven in the morning he's and they ask him like what uh

He's like, gambling? No, never heard of it. And he's clearly coming off like a 15-hour bender of up all night playing.

Incredible. Yeah, I don't buy that for a second. He had come to Bolivia at the end of 2022, built a mansion, hobnob with the rich and famous there, and bought the team, moving it from its original location to the city of Santa Cruz. Again, he starts building up the facilities, modernizing all that. Santa Cruz, the city in Bolivia where he was living, it's a big coke trafficking city and has been in the midst of a war between the two massive Brazilian gangs we've also done episodes on, the PCC and Red Command.

The Paraguayan police, who are spearheading the hunt for him, they finally figure out he's in Bolivia now, and they reach out to their Bolivian counterparts to make something happen. Marcedez, with his wife and kids, should be an easy target. They plan a major operation, the Bolivian police, but when they move on his mansion, he's already escaped.

They seize a whole bunch of assets, make a bunch of arrests, but it turns out he had likely been tipped off and fled days before. According to Vice, citing local media in Bolivia, quote, a neighbor of Marcet in Santa Cruz told local media that I practically never saw them. But when they did, the Marcets were very ostentatious people and that the first thing you think is that they are drug traffickers. He also reportedly had ocelots and monkeys at his house, which, you know, cool.

But, you know, no tigers, so second tier. Tigers are bigger and I feel like they need more space. An ocelot's a lot smaller. You know, maybe it's more humane to keep an ocelot in your house than a tiger. That is what the owner of a bad zoo would say. The BBC reported that when officers moved in to arrest him in Santa Cruz, one of his bodyguards took an officer hostage and Marcet managed to escape. But elsewhere, everyone else seems to say that he had left days earlier to

2,000, over 2,000 Bolivian cops scour the city and countryside for Marcet, but he evades them. The week afterwards, the Bolivian minister of justice says that Marcet had unusual economic capacity never seen before and had military grade weapons.

A couple of weeks later, in August of 2023, a Bolivian lawyer with a big social media following gets sent a video from our set where he says the director of the anti-narcotics police in Bolivia tipped him off ahead of the raid. And he thanks him, which, you know, dickhead move if he did tip him off. And if he didn't, that's very, very well played.

He ends up sending more videos and voice notes. He's taunting the police, telling them he's too smart for them, joking that he's far away. Again, I don't like that's just not a good move. You know, the whole mocking the people coming after you thing like, yes, it's cool. Yes, it will get you clout, but you always give something away and you motivate people and you don't want to motivate law enforcement authorities. That's a bad policy. Yeah, he's like in for a penny at this point. This feels like a far away.

more sophisticated, less clownish version of the Sam Walker story we did a few weeks ago. All of them ignoring our number one rule. So I don't know how it's going to end for this guy, but maybe not well. We'll see. He does start getting a fan base and a Bolivian singer writes a song about him called The King of the South. Interestingly, Moral told me that in Uruguay, they don't really romanticize him. Like despite him being the first narco cartel kingpin from there, he hasn't really given back to anyone in the community. He hasn't lived there in forever.

But these videos, he says, he does start to acquire a level of fame. And in November, a Uruguayan broadcast journalist takes two helicopter rides or two plane rides, I'm not sure, to meet him at a mansion in the middle of nowhere. All of this is arranged by his lawyer, which again, I don't know, man, it doesn't seem like a good thing for a lawyer to do.

Here, Marcet does a 60 minutes type interview with a journalist, filmed. He's tatted up to his neck, smiling, rocking a Louis Vuitton sweater and a big gold watch, big diamond earrings. He has a pretty sick fade too, which you don't really expect from someone on the run. And as someone who's had to struggle to get a good haircut in Austin, to get that in the middle of the jungle, it's impressive. I'm not going to lie to you.

He's like, he's smiling the whole time. It's a wild move to pull some choice quotes here about being on the run. You miss your country. You miss Dolce D'Alessa, a barbecue with your family. He said, uh, now Sean, I won't hesitate in agreeing that Dolce D'Alessa it's

It's delicious. And also he says that he will never give up. They'll never get him. He'll never give up eating Dolce de Leche. That's it. Don't take me down. I feel like he might have been holding himself back all these years in his football career with all this like...

dairy and booze and gear, but yeah, I don't know. Oh yeah, because football players aren't known for doing a ton of gear and booze, right? No. This is what he says on his children, quote, my children live it normally. For me, it is normal that they go to school and play soccer or swim, but with the situation we are in, they are not able to go to school, but dad and mom teach them at home. And he also says that he prints out handouts and explains the lessons to them and that they have a tutor. So, you know, he's a caring father.

He also denies a lot of the accusations against him, more so declaring the innocence of his family members and says he'll never give up his fugitive life.

The interview airs on December 4th, 2023, which, you know, shout out to Jay-Z. The program is called Santo y Sena. And they actually get criticized a fair bit in the media for being too soft on him. There's other accusations too. I haven't seen the full interview, but, you know, media people are, they're a jealous bunch. So who knows? Maybe it was too soft. Maybe it wasn't. It's also hard to go hard on somebody when you're in like their hideout and they're a ruthless cartel operative. So, you know.

I gave a little bit of sympathy to that journalist. Now, this past July, like a month ago, a lot happens. One of his main partners gets executed like two weeks ago and there's video. He's in a pickup truck parked outside a store. A guy pulls up right next to it on a motorbike, takes out a gun and fires six shots into the driver's side window. And then the bike actually, sorry, I shouldn't laugh at that, but the bike like stalls out.

And the guy like can't restart it. He needs like half a minute to restart it before driving off. And it looks so slick until the motorbike won't start. So that partner had international Interpol warrants for trafficking firearms, ammunition, explosives. He was a main target of a 2018 operation called La Nina. Also in July, Marcet's wife, who allegedly helps run things with him, is arrested in Spain in an airport traveling on her own documents.

She's 31, apparently been indicted for money laundering. She had started a high-end car company called Total Cars in 2021, where she owns 75% of the shares. Her brother's also involved. She was arrested on the basis of a warrant issued by Paraguay. She claims she actually turned herself in because she was tired of running. And interestingly, it seems there had been an Interpol red notice on her that was pulled very recently. It

Because of this, Interpol's Paraguay office was raided and people arrested because of that. It was like suspiciously just like deleted. So did she turn herself in or did she expect to be able to get through because there was no red notice on her? Moving on, Marcet's right-hand man was just extradited to the States on July 12th. He had been arrested in August of 2023.

So the guy is having a bad summer. So where do we stand? He is still free. And even though he gave that interview at the end of last year somewhere that seems like it might be an easy flight from Uruguay, Moro says most people seem to think he's in Dubai. I also saw rumors he was in Africa.

But Dubai was where his wife was coming from when she was caught. His sons are apparently living there. Yeah, I mean, everybody is there. I guess he's got like loads of friends who he's working with in Europe who are also living on the same street in Jumeirah or something. So yeah, why not go to Dubai? Meanwhile, things in Uruguay seem like they could be getting a lot worse. They can no longer avoid the drug violence of Latin America as it continues to be a transshipment spot. Some of the drugs are ending up in the local market. The gangs are starting to get more violence. And

And more worrying, the small family clans are now making alliances with bigger criminal organizations, like the PCC, who has been moving into Uruguay. Marcetto is still on the run, hunted by, I think, what, five, six countries.

Probably at the local parks right now trying to get a pickup game going. Yeah. And if he wants to use one of his 25 passports to go to New Zealand, then give him my number. We'll get him a game in Wellington. Do you think you're better than him? Yes, genuinely. But you're older than him and he did make it to as a semi-pro player on his own.

I had a couple games when I was younger for that kind of level team, but no, I am. I'm so slow that there is a picture of me playing on the weekend and the guy I'm trying to tackle is fixing his hairband. So that is awful. And we should close on that before I start crying.

Yeah. Anyway, more always at patreon.com slash new world podcast, Spotify, iTunes, do all that stuff and give us good ratings and money and launder money through us until next week. Yeah.

so