Sebastián Marset: The Ultimate Score

0:00You may have heard of the sex cult NXIVM and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Alison Mack. But she's never told her side of the story, until now. People assume that I'm like this pervert. My name is Natalie Robamed, and in my new podcast, I talk to Alison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member, and what she thinks of it all now. How do you feel about having been involved in bringing sexual trauma to other people? I mean, I don't even know how to answer that question. Alison, after NXIVM from CBC's Uncover, is available now, wherever you get your podcasts.

0:40It was a rainy day at Enrico Galliano Football Stadium in eastern Paraguay, home of Deportivo Capiata. Suddenly, the early morning quiet was broken by the roar of a sports car engine. Stadium employees looked on, surprised, as a silver Lamborghini did donuts, careening in circles around the gravel parking lot. When a security guard walked up to the car, the driver affably rolled down his window. The man behind the wheel was young, square-jawed, handsome. The tattoos down his right arm and hand completed the appearance of a well-groomed football player with a slight edge. But even though he had the right look, there was something about him setting him apart from other hot shots on the field.

1:32Concerned, the security guard asked the driver if he was worried about damaging his very fancy, very expensive sports car. But the driver just looked him in the eye and said, Don't worry, I have four more. He then introduced himself as Sebastian Marcet, the newest member of the football team. Marcet, despite his flair for the dramatic, did not turn out to be a very skilled football player. In fact, he had become a thorn in his coach's side with his poor touch and lack of agility. But his coach was forced to play him, and his teammates were forced to play along with him. And referees were forced to turn a blind eye, even when he blatantly fouled other players right in front of them.

2:24Why? Because Sebastian Marcet was one of the biggest, baddest, most dangerous drug lords in the world.

2:40This is Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Sebastian Marcet, The Ultimate Score. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. On this episode, we dive into the story of a drug lord who used his obsessive love for football to fulfill his childhood dream, hide in plain sight, and to protect his vast drug empire.

3:39So Sebastian Marcet is apparently one of the most wanted drug traffickers in Latin America. He stands out in a couple of ways. He's young, he's good looking, he's brash. He has been able to navigate political and economic conditions in multiple countries on multiple continents. He's certainly one of the most successful South American drug traffickers in the last decade. Sebastian Marset was born on the outskirts of Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay. The country, nestled between neighbors Argentina and Brazil, is notable among other South American nations for relatively low levels of crime and corruption.

4:27In short, it was an unlikely birthplace for a future drug kingpin. We spoke with Chris Dalby, director of World of Crime, an investigative journalism think tank focused on organized crime. For more context about Marcet. First of all, he's from Uruguay. Now, Uruguay has a reputation as being one of South America's good pupils, right? It's not a big drug trafficking country. It's fairly safe. It has a good economy. It has good democracy and good institutions. So to suddenly have a major international drug trafficker from Uruguay was unusual. Marcet stood out from a young age smart and the kind of kid who would step into a teacher's place and confidently lecture his classmates.

5:14While he excelled academically and had any number of career opportunities available to him, Marcet had his sights set on one goal, to become a professional football player. Just a heads up, I'm going to use the word football to refer to the sport that Americans would call soccer. So Marset's dream was to play football professionally. But there was just one problem. He wasn't very good. His skills topped out at a semi-professional, intermediate level, falling just short of the heights he so desperately wanted to reach. Everybody who knows Marset agrees that he's extremely smart, that he's a sociopath, and that he's living his second best life because what he always wanted to be was a football player.

6:06He lacked the natural talent, but Marset didn't let that stop him. He eventually found a very roundabout way to make his dream come true, a way that involved becoming one of the most notorious drug lords in the world. He was himself a sort of mid-ranking football player in his young days, was never going to make it professionally, and so reconverted to drug trafficking. He reconverted to drug trafficking, it seems, as a way to make money to indulge his passion for football. Marset briefly took his eye off the ball to start building his criminal empire. And he started out with small-time crimes.

6:48When he was 18, he was arrested for possession of stolen goods. A year later, possession of narcotics. A few years after that, he took a step up to a slightly larger operation, receiving a shipment of marijuana that was being flown from Paraguay into Uruguay. Marcet arrived in the field where the plane was supposed to land. But there was a problem. Someone had tipped off the police. And they were there waiting for him. Marcet, using his wits, didn't resist. He immediately turned himself over to the cops and was sentenced to five years in prison. And not just any prison. A facility ironically called Libertad, the Spanish word for freedom.

7:37And it was one of the most dangerous and deadliest prisons in Uruguay. It housed some of the most hardened and innovative criminals in the world. For most people, spending five years in prison would be a major setback, to say the least. And for sure, it was no walk in the park, but Morissette used his time behind bars as an opportunity to step up his criminal operation. Almost like drug lord grad school. He is arrested. He goes to jail for five years in Uruguay. But he does look at prison as a step back. He looks at prison as a way to level up. In prison, Marcic got a job as a cleaner. This was a strategic move because it gave him the ability to go pretty much anywhere in the facility and talk to just about anyone.

8:33He chatted with notorious international drug traffickers, Brazilian gangsters, Italian mobsters. In Libertar prison, you had members of the PCC, the Primeiro Comando da Capital, or First Capital Command, the biggest drug gang in Brazil. You had members of the Italian Mafia, the Drangheta, who see Uruguay as a staging area. So he starts building contacts. He starts learning from these guys, from the way the Brazilians do business, from the way they move drugs from Bolivia through Paraguay into Brazil. He networked, and he learned the ropes of their criminal organization. from the bottom up. Making use of his smarts and of the time he had on his hands, Marset strategized about where he could fit into the global drug trafficking game.

9:24He learns how the Italians do business, how they secure their cocaine and move it across the Atlantic Ocean. And then when he comes out in 2018, he goes on almost like a video game quest around the region. He makes contacts in Bolivia to secure huge amounts of drugs. He goes to Paraguay, where he builds connections with the Innsfran clan, one of the biggest political, well, or narco-political families in the country. So when Marcet was released from prison in 2013 at the age of 27, he hit the ground running. And it just so happened that his re-entry into society coincided with an opportune change in the drug game.

10:12The cocaine business was booming.

10:21Around the turn of the century, South American drug traffickers were more focused on North America as a market. But by the late 2000s, things were shifting. The US was cracking down on illegal drugs, which was bad for business. So traffickers had to look elsewhere to make their millions. For the last couple of decades, the cocaine market has shifted from the US to Europe. In fact, cocaine consumption is down about 45 % in the US compared to about 20 years ago. Why? Because in Europe, cocaine is sold much more expensively. You have much more demand for it, especially in eastern countries, Russia, going into Turkey in the Middle East under Escobar.

11:04not on the Marset predecessors. Has there ever been a situation where cocaine was being produced in as many quantities, in as much as it is today, with as much demand around the world, and with as high a price as it is fetching? There's some minor percentage fluctuations year on year, but we are living in a global cocaine boom period. It is one of the hottest commodities in the world, legal or illegal, period. it. Marcet was able to set up a fantastically well-run operation in a few short years because of that, because he was tapping into something that was already booming. The way Marcet did it is through partnerships with Italian mafia, which the Drangheta control.

11:53They're in the top two European drug cartels that control the cocaine trade into Europe. So they're buying billions upon billions upon billions of dollars of cocaine every year from a range of traffickers, including from Marset. So it's not that he changed the cocaine game, it's just that when he came up, Europe was already where almost all the cocaine was going. But the fact that Marset was a nobody internationally when he came out of prison and was able to build that so fast is because he was able to show that he was trustworthy, that he had access to the cocaine on the supply side and they had access to buyers on the demand side.

12:30All he had to do was, hey, look, I can buy cocaine here and I can sell it to you here in this amount of quantity. That's it. Of course, he leveled up. He's clearly a very good businessman. Marcet was also uniquely well positioned to act as a go-between for Brazilian cartels and Italian mobs. Literally, his hometown of Monte Vidao, Uruguay, had a large port through which huge quantities of commercial goods were sent off to Europe. Marcet realized that this gave him a major opportunity, and he capitalized on it. Marcet was 27 when he was released from prison in 2018. He took on a fake identity, the first of many.

13:16Traveling with a Brazilian passport, he built his empire quickly. By the next year, he was shipping cocaine and cash across South America by private jet. Just a few years later, when he was 30, he had made more than$1 billion. And he had all of the cockiness you'd expect from a self-made 30-year-old billionaire. Marcet made a habit of taunting police, then slipping through their fingers just when it seemed like they had him cornered. But even as he built and managed a massive global criminal enterprise, Marset never lost sight of his first true love, football. It was an obsession that would take him around the world in a series of twists and turns that are almost too incredible to believe.

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14:42now back to the story

14:47so when he first popped on the scene a lot of investigative crime journalists were like well who is this guy normally when you get to that level of fame and that level of control you've been on the radar for a while right even if you're a young narco you've risen to power you've probably been in jail a couple of times and we've heard about him with Marset when he He burst onto the scene in about 2020, 2021, at least internationally, no one had really heard of it. By 2022, Sebastian Marcet had exploded onto the drug trafficking scene. He made a name for himself and made over a billion dollars by leveraging connections he made while in prison.

15:29And he was just getting started. One of the keys to Marsit's success was building off the work of other cartels and helping to establish a new route for drugs through his home country of Uruguay. So the way that he moved drugs was particular and has influenced the way others are doing it. He was a part of a wave of traffickers, Brazilian and him Uruguayan, and their contacts in Paraguay that pioneered that route, right? Going from Brazil, canal, moving it by boat down to Paraguay, Paraguay into Brazil and into Uruguay. This specific route offered a couple of advantages. So the advantage that he had is that he was operating in countries that are extremely difficult to legislate internationally in.

16:18Paraguay is a corrupt country to the core, even by the standards of Latin America. Bolivia doesn't play ball with almost anybody. And Uruguay were resting on their laurels that they just didn't have that drug trafficking problem, right? There might, of course, some shipments of cocaine might go through the old narco, but for one of Latin America's biggest kingpins to be Uruguayan was a complete revelation. So I would say his innovative ways were indeed using prison as a learning experience. his own profile and the way he used his wealth was, if not unheard of, unheard of in this generation of kingpins.

16:54Marcik took an innovative approach to positioning himself on the drug trafficking stage. He acted as a kind of middleman, like a manager or consultant, connecting different organizations to different routes. He directed a team of operatives in four different countries, telling them how to hide the cocaine, where to put the cash and who to bribe, and, when necessary, who to kill.

17:23Marcet was ruthless about ordering hits, and he even got his hands dirty with disappearing bodies from time to time. He was pretty much able to operate with impunity because he had close ties to the powerful politicians in his home country of Uruguay and in nearby Paraguay. And he found many creative ways to launder the drug money so he could put his ill-gotten gains to work. He created shell companies to pass his millions through. He bought a luxury car dealership as a front and even became a benefactor of a martial arts studio. But the hustle that he returned to time and time again was buying football clubs.

18:11Now, Marcet was by no means alone in his love for the game. In South America and huge swaths of the world, football is, as Ted Lasso's Danny Rojas says, life. The sport is a source of power and influence. And so owning and controlling football clubs is a quick path to raise your profile. And as an added bonus, it's also a great way to launder millions of dollars. This is because people tend to look the other way if money starts to pour into a beloved football club. Things like ticket sales, merchandise proceeds, player contracts, and transfers can all be paid for in cash. And lots of it. So the books are pretty easy to inflate to hide huge amounts of drug money.

19:05As it turned out, this was a time-honored trick among narcos like Pablo Escobar, who supported his hometown team, and an associate of El Chapo, who bought several teams in Mexico. In Bolivia and Paraguay, money buys everything. Also laundering money through soccer teams in Latin America is a tried and tested way of doing it. So buying football teams and using them to launder money was old hat. But Marce took things to a whole new level. He didn't just buy teams. He also bought his way onto the starting lineup. He was never going to make it as a football player. In 2021, he signed a contract. I put huge quotation marks around signed with Deportivo Capiata, which is a football club in Paraguay.

19:54A couple of years earlier, the club had fallen on hard times. The team had been relegated to a lower division, and players complained that they didn't have the gear or equipment that they needed. Funds and morale were running low. Then, Marcet showed up out of the blue, like he owned the place. Because, well, he did. He used his power to put himself on the starting roster. He played in the midfield, right in the center of all the action. He even threw in an extra 10 grand to wear the illustrious number 10 jersey, worn by icons like Messi, Pelé, and Maradona. For the most part, he was finally living his lifelong dream of being a professional footballer.

20:41He thoroughly enjoyed himself, attending daily practice, posing for team photos. During games, he played with absolute impunity. He doled out obvious fouls. The refs didn't card him. No one wanted to upset a murderous, well-connected drug lord. But here's the thing. For all his money and power, the one thing he couldn't buy was talent. He just didn't have the skill. Still, Marcet was desperate for a win. He brought his wife and son to the games, hoping to share the victory with them. But Capiata just could not win. Ironically, because he was on the roster. Marcet's coach was not pleased with the arrangement.

21:32His job was to win as many games as possible. But he was handicapped because he had to play Marcet or else he'd be fired. And Marcet's teammates were distraught as well. On the one hand, they benefited from the millions of dollars Marcet poured into the club. He procured new physical therapy beds, TVs, better food in the cafeteria. Marcet even offered each player a cash bonus of several thousand dollars if they won a game. For Marcet, who was living in a palatial penthouse, this was just chump change, a rounding error. But for his teammates, that was a life-changing amount of money. However, even with this massive incentive from Marcet, the team still struggled, often because of Marcet.

22:23He has no footballing reputation. He is not a particularly talented player. He played at some youth level in Uruguay. After talking to people who played with him, described him as slow, with wayward passing and a poor first touch. He missed an absolutely crucial penalty for the club. So it's this weird thing where he wants to be this beloved footballing figure, lavishly throwing money at clubs that he owns, but then insists on playing at number 10 and fluffs opportunities for his club to win. there's some hilarious stories where the coach the coach will be paid $10 ,000 or$100 ,000 to have him play and then he would absolutely blow it for the team he would lose matches, he would miss key penalties and actually cause the team to miss on titles and opportunities while bankrolling them in a ridiculously lavish way.

23:18So it seems that this man is a brilliant strategic drug trafficking mind and sort of living the life of a teenager buying his footballing career. But the dream didn't last forever. In May 2021, a few months after Marcet joined the team, he received a tip from some of his contacts high up in the Paraguayan government. Narcotics officers were on his tail. Marcet quit the team, stopped going to practice, and had his name taken off the roster. He went underground, but it was only a matter of time before he resurfaced, attempting the same bold move on another football team. He just loved the sport so much, he couldn't help himself.

24:05His pursuit of the game kicked off a worldwide game of cat and mouse.

24:13as marcit had been warned paraguayan law enforcement mounted a powerful offense to catch him and shut down his operation they got wiretaps they flipped marcit's men into informants but they still struggled to get information on the shadowy figure at the head of this new and prolific drug operation. They pieced together that he was young, from Uruguay, and had tattoos down his right arm. On wiretap calls, they only heard him referred to as El Jefe Mayor, the big boss. After months of investigating, they seemed no closer to nailing their man. But then in 2021, they got a break. One of their informants slipped that the Big Boss was about to board a private jet.

25:08Agents quickly descended on the airport, eager to catch their guy. As he flashed his fake Bolivian passport, they clocked his right arm. It was covered in tattoos, just like the Big Boss. When agents ran his biometric data, they were shocked at the name that came back. It was none other than the mediocre mid-player from Capiata, Sebastian Marcet.

25:41Up next, while in the crosshairs of a multinational investigation, Marcet eludes capture while traveling the world and playing professional football. Now, back to the story.

25:59For months in 2021, Paraguayan authorities had been trying to figure out who it was in charge of a new vicious and prolific drug cartel based in Uruguay. One day, they finally got a break in the case and confirmation that the head of the shadowy organization was Sebastián Marcet, who also happened to be a professional football player. This was quite a shock. As a rule, truck lords tend to keep a low profile, but not Marset. He had been out and about, living large, smiling for team photos and playing poorly in games. Until he was tipped off that authorities were on to him. Then he quit the team and went underground.

26:51But meanwhile, law enforcement continued collecting evidence on Marset. Once they had a positive ID, they started tailing him everywhere, trying to build a case about not just him, but his entire criminal organization. They wanted to take it out from top to bottom. Paraguayan agents followed him as he casually met with other alleged drug traffickers in shopping malls and pastry shops. By all appearances, he was unbothered by the authorities on his tail. Like it was just business as usual. Except, Marcet was itching to get back onto the football pitch. And it wasn't long before he zeroed in on an opportunity to do just that.

27:40He didn't look too far for his next target. It was a team called Rubio New, whose stadium was just 20 miles away from his previous team. Like Capillatas, the new team's facilities needed work. The grass on the field was patchy, and the stadium was falling apart. But then Marcet swooped in with his wallet, the one bursting with drug money. He channeled more money into the team, even bringing in a construction crew to build a completely new locker room. Ever a smart guy, he had learned from his mistakes in the first outing. This time around, he didn't play in the team's games where he might be caught and recognized on any number of cameras.