Sebastián Marset: The Ultimate Score 48:18

It was a rainy day at Errico Galeano Football Stadium in eastern Paraguay, home of Deportivo Capillara. 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 hotshots on the field.

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

This is Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called "Sebastian Marset: The Ultimate Score." I'm Sarah James McLachlan. In 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.

So, Sebastian Marcet is currently 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.

Sebastián 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. In 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 Marset.

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.

Marset stood out from a young age as smart and the kind of kid who would step into a teacher's place and confidently lecture his classmates. While he excelled academically and had any number of career opportunities available to him, Marset 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 Marcet's dream was to play football professionally. But there was just one problem. He wasn't very good. His skills topped out at his semi-professional, intermediate level, falling just short of the heights he so desperately wanted to reach. Everybody who knows Marcet 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.

He 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. Marcet briefly took his eye off the ball to start building his criminal empire. And he started out with small-time crimes. When 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. And 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 Morrissette 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, Marcet 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.

He chatted with notorious international drug traffickers, Brazilian gangsters, Italian mobsters. In Libertad 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 organizations from the bottom up. Making use of his smarts and of the time he had on his hands, Mars had strategized about where he could fit into the global drug trafficking game.

He 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 like 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 Insfrán clan, one of the biggest political 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. The cocaine business was booming.

Around 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 U.S. 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 U.S. to Europe. In fact, cocaine consumption is down about 45% in the U.S. 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, not under Marcet's predecessors, has there ever been a situation where cocaine was being produced 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. 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. They'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 Marcet. 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.

The fact that Marcet 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 he had access to buyers on the demand side. All 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 Montevideo, 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. Traveling 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, Marcet 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. More on that after the break. Now, back to the story.

So 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 you.

With Marcet, when he burst onto the scene in about 2020, 2021, at least internationally, no one had really heard of him. By 2022, Sebastián 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. And he was just getting started.

One of the keys to Marcet'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? Again, 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. Paraguay 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. Marsa 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. Marcet 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. 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. 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.

As 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, Marceau 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. A couple 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. He thoroughly enjoyed himself, attending daily practice, posing for team photos. During games, he played with absolute impunity. He doled out obvious fouls, but 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 Capillata just could not win. Ironically, because he was on the roster.

Marset's coach was not pleased with the arrangement. His job was to win as many games as possible, but he was handicapped because he had to play Marset or else he'd be fired. And Marset's teammates were distraught as well. On the one hand, they benefited from the millions of dollars Marset 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.

He 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 in

insists on playing at number 10 and fluffs opportunities for his club to win. There's some hilarious stories where 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.

So 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. His pursuit of the game kicked off a worldwide game of cat and mouse. As Marcet had been warned, Paraguayan law enforcement mounted a powerful offense to catch him and shut down his operation.

They got wiretaps, they flipped Marcet'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. Agents 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. Up 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.

For 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 Sebastian 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 onto him. Then he quit the team and went underground.

But meanwhile, law enforcement continued collecting evidence on Marcet. 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. He 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 Capillara's, 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. Instead, he limited himself to just team practice.

And he was also learning and experimenting with even more ways to combine his drug operation with his football teams to launder money. He increasingly focused on player transfers as a way to hide and move illicit funds.

And another way to do it, of course, is you sell players from Latin America to European teams, usually lower league clubs in less mediatized countries. But of course, you sell them at a value which is 100 to 200 times what they would actually be worth. So he was operating in waters that traffickers have exploited for years. For a few months, Marcet kept a low profile. I mean, for him, attending practice by day and running his criminal empire by night.

Meanwhile, an international team of agents continued to collect evidence and build a case against him. But in September of 2021, he seemed to vanish altogether. A month later, he reappeared at the Dubai airport of all places. Marcet was stopped for carrying a fake Paraguayan passport and taken to prison in the UAE. Now, for many criminals, this would have been the end of the line.

caught red-handed and with an international manhunt closing in around him, it seemed like just a matter of time before South American authorities scooped him up and charged him with all the evidence they'd been gathering. Paraguayan authorities sent word to Dubai to make sure they kept Marcet in custody. But meanwhile, Marcet was sending messages of his own. He reached out to his lawyer who got in touch with contacts in the government of Uruguay where Marcet was a citizen.

Marcet also allegedly put a hit out on the man responsible for the fake passport that had gotten him busted. In no time, that man was shot dead by two armed men. And that was far from the only murder that Marcet was allegedly connected to.

he's decapitated people there's been messages about whether he should dissolve bodies in acid he's left or his men have left notes on the bodies of people explaining why they were killed and taunting the police so again he's used violence when he's had to but certainly he's killed some people in in very dramatic ways the most dramatic murder that has been connected allegedly to marset

is the killing of Paraguay's chief anti-mafia prosecutor, Marcelo Pecci. Marcelo Pecci was on honeymoon in Colombia in 2022. He was shot dead on the beach by a Venezuelan. And the president of Colombia goes on television and says, Sebastian Marcet was behind the killing. Now, Marcet has denied this.

And that's unusual for him. Usually he's pretty keen to be talked about in very dramatic ways. So the fact he denied that connection is interesting. Back to 2021, Marcet was still behind bars in Dubai. Very expeditiously though, his contacts went to work and got him out of his dilemma. He's there on a fake Paraguayan passport. It gets detected. He gets arrested from prison. His legal team

So once Marsik got a valid passport rushed to him, he just walked out of the prison.

Meanwhile, he left a wave of chaos in his wake as the Uruguayan government scrambled to figure out how this had happened. Someone high up in the government must have been compromised to work with Marcet's lawyer to get him freed. It was embarrassing if nothing else, particularly for Uruguay, that prided itself on being above the kinds of corruption seen in other Latin American countries.

He always brought down the Uruguayan government, like the scandal of that in the Uruguayan government, a government that believed itself above these things, that believed itself to be the good example in Latin America. He brought down ministers, he brought down deputy ministers. There's an ongoing scandal and investigations in the country about who knew what and who facilitated what. And he wasn't even in the country, he was in a different continent.

So, after getting arrested in Dubai for the very serious crime of trying to pass off a fake passport, Marsit just made a couple of calls. Then he walked out of prison and continued on his way. Now that is power. That is being well connected. Marsit looked truly untouchable. And so why would he stop there? As it turned out, Dubai wasn't even his final destination.

He was on his way to Greece, where he planned to extend his cocaine-funded football empire. His latest target was a team called Trikala FC. Like the other clubs Marcet had gotten involved with before, this one was floundering a bit. Trikala was on a losing streak. But also, it was becoming more and more apparent that the club was caught up in match fixing and organized crime. But for Marcet's purposes, this was perfect.

In September 2021, while Marcet was held up in a Dubai prison, a strange delegation arrived at the Trikala Stadium, an SUV full of Paraguayan players, coaches, and trainers. These were associates of Marcet. He sent them in his place since he'd been detained. The idea was to set up the same kind of player trading and money laundering racket that he had run in Caballada and Rubio knew.

So in 2021, this club, Trikala FC, in Greece gets visited by these Paraguayan goons, essentially, and a coach who's quite famous in Paraguay. Some of his colleagues and the coach of one of his clubs in Paraguay turn up on the doorstep of this Greek club called Trikala FC, which had a long history of money laundering and match fixing as well.

and starts throwing money at the players, gets the club to buy Paraguayan players at massively inflated prices. That didn't last too long. And the way they're not even trying to hide it, they paid the team's employees in cash.

They started talking openly about buying the team. They would arrive in the locker room with wads of cash and just let the players take handfuls of cash to make them happy, to make them stay quiet, while they were trying to sell Paraguayan players at 200% more value than they would be to Launder Marseille's drug money.

But when Marcet failed to show up to organize the effort, that branch of the operation kind of fell apart. By the end of 2021, the Paraguayans left Greece just as suddenly as they'd shown up. However, that didn't mean that Marcet was done expanding his global empire. He just kept moving, looking for other places to expand.

The deal in Greece essentially disappears once he gets arrested in Dubai. But four different times in three different countries, he was constantly involved in football. So it is an obsession of his. While Marcet continued to follow his football obsession around the world, international authorities grew obsessed with catching him and bringing down his operation.

By 2022, he was one of the biggest and most significant drug traffickers in South America. In response, Paraguay launched their largest ever drug bust with the codename "A Ultranza," which loosely translates to "At All Costs" or "Whatever It Takes."

In late February, authorities simultaneously raided luxury homes and private airplane hangars, ultimately seizing over $100 million in assets. Police arrested 24 of Marset's associates for drug trafficking and money laundering. But guess who they didn't catch? Marset. Interpol sent out an international arrest warrant, but it was too late. Marset was in the wind. Again.

However, by this point authorities knew enough about his MO to guess where he might pop up. They knew that wherever he was, he couldn't resist the lure of a professional football pitch for very long.

Every single time he pops up in a new country, whether it's in Paraguay, whether it's in Bolivia, whether it's in Greece, he wasn't in Greece personally, but he was laundering money through a Greek football club. Every iteration of his plan involves buying a football club, transforming the conditions for that club, and then paying to have him play for that club. I think he just sees football as his love. I think that's his weakness. He is utterly besotted with football.

and in the absence of skill, pays for himself to live his fantasy. With this in mind, law enforcement kept their eyes trained on different football stadiums around the world. Later in 2022, they got a hit. Marcet was back to his old tricks again, this time in Bolivia. He gets arrested in Dubai on a fake passport.

Through contacts manages to get a legitimate Uruguayan passport sent to him gets released sets up shop in Bolivia And you think okay, you've got caught you managed to get out by the skin of your teeth. Everyone's looking for you Maybe you go under the radar not at all. He buys a club He lives in a condo with a pool and he pulls up to the club in a Lamborghini He literally builds a training complex for the club again pays for himself to be on the on the starting lineup and

He was again repeating his pattern, but with slight tweaks. On the Bolivian team, Lioness del Torno, he used a fake name on the roster to keep some heat off of him. He also paid off Bolivian authorities to avoid capture. And for about a year, it worked. Marcet was back on the field, playing the game he loved. Of course, his skills hadn't improved at all. He was still slow, and he still had poor aim.

Meanwhile, Paraguayan authorities had gotten in touch with their Bolivian counterparts to plan another sting, hoping to catch Marcet once and for all. On the morning of July 29, 2022, police descended upon Marcet's lush Bolivian condo, but they found the place empty. Marcet and his family were already gone. They'd been gone for days.

Again, his connections paid off. Clearly he had been warned about the operation ahead of time. A massive manhunt commenced with 3,000 officers dispatched and checkpoints set up across the country to stop Marsid and prevent him from getting away yet again. But in the end, Marsid got away. Yet again. And even that wasn't enough for Marsid. He decided to release a video taunting authorities.

Alleged drug trafficker Sebastian Marcet Cabrera thanks the Bolivian police, claiming that they tipped him off and let him get away prior to the arrest. In addition to thanking his connections within the Bolivian police force, Marcet also boasted that he was too smart for authorities and that they could keep hunting him, but he was already far away. Marcet has constructed a carefully crafted image in the press.

As I said, he taunts the police, he organizes interviews with journalists, he contacts investigative outfits in Uruguay to do interviews. He loves the limelight. He pulls up in a Lamborghini to clubs while authorities are looking for him. In that, he's old school. Most drug traffickers today are what we call invisibilists.

invisible because after Escobar, after El Chapo, you don't want to be above the radar, right? You don't want to be the nail that's sticking up because it's all too easy to hammer you home, especially if the US are looking for you. But even as one of the most wanted fugitives in the world, Mars had seemed to relish being the nail that's sticking up, going out of his way to draw attention to himself. For example, in November 2023, he actually gave a televised interview

while he was on the run. To accomplish this, he flew out a reporter by helicopter to an unknown spot where she was transferred to a second helicopter that flew to a remote location in the Paraguayan jungle where she was then driven to the clandestine site. And if that wasn't strange enough, the interview itself was pretty off the wall, including cutaways to music videos because Marset identified with them.

Whatever else you say about Marcet, his sociopathic killings, his poor football skills, he has a flair for the dramatic. So far, he's managed to stay a step ahead of the law and keep his criminal enterprise up and running. Despite a global manhunt that has been going on for years, however, pressure might be mounting on him and his associates to give themselves up.

Marset's very lucrative window of opportunity might finally be closing. So here's the thing we don't actually know because since the raid in 2023,

They seized a lot of assets. They arrested his brother, who was his right-hand man, but he still has connections to Paraguay. Paraguay is probably, in terms of a government after Venezuela, maybe the most corrupt political system in the region in terms of Horacio Cartes, who was the former president, is in bed with drug traffickers. His uncle,

The uncle of the former president of Paraguay was caught as a pilot in drug deals associated to Marcet. So he's hiding in Paraguay, has access to the drugs, still plenty of drugs coming in from Bolivia. From Paraguay could certainly still be negotiating deals through Brazil, through Uruguay, to Europe. So he's still in business. He's probably still doing quite well. As long as Marcet is at large and harbors his undying love for football,

it seems there's a chance that he might be drawn back out onto a pitch somewhere. But who knows? His luck might finally run out. Possibly. Does he pop up a couple of years from now with another luxury house and another football team in Paraguay or Bolivia or somewhere else? Maybe unlikely. Can you fool the devil a fourth time? But it wouldn't surprise me. In any case, in the tale of Sebastian Marcet,

The drug trade wasn't just the path to money. It was an opportunity to fulfill his childhood dream of being a professional footballer. And his story shows just how much you can do when you can throw around stacks of drug money. You can pay to make your dreams come true and buy off anyone who stands in your way. Marset wasn't the first to go down this dark and violent path, and he won't be the last.

If Sebastián Marcet was arrested or killed tomorrow, the Drangueta, the PCC, the Bolivian drug dealers in the province of Chaparé from where he was getting his drugs in Bolivia, it'll take them a week to find somebody else to take the strain. If and when Marcet finally has to hang up his cleats and breaks of cocaine, there will be someone there, right on the sidelines, ready to step into the game.

Thank you for tuning into The Opportunist. This episode was written by Nani Ukwelagu and executive produced by Connor Powell. We'll be back next week with new stories about people seeing an opportunity to get ahead and taking it. Until next time.