As a trafficker pursued dreams of soccer glory, investigators closed in

ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay — The undercover agents ducked into a squat brick house in a residential neighborhood.

The building — secretly rented by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — was now the headquarters of what had become one of Latin America’s most important drug-trafficking investigations. It was not going well.

The handful of American and Paraguayan agents had been assigned to find the man at the center of a new transnational drug cartel dispatching boatloads of cocaine to Europe. The agents had been sealed off from the rest of the police to avoid leaks. But after months of work, they still knew little about their target, except that he was dangerous and well-connected.

Then, one day in 2021, the agents got a tip. The man at the center of the new cartel was about to board a private jet at Silvio Pettirossi International Airport, just outside Asunción, the capital.

As they watched the passengers, one of the men in line stood out. His tattoos matched the ones they had heard about on wiretaps of cartel members. When he was asked for his identification, the man took out a Bolivian passport. The agents were immediately sure the document was false. They searched his biometric data, and the name of an Uruguayan national popped up. Sebastián Marset.

“When we heard the name ‘Marset,’ we wondered: ‘Who is this guy?’” recalled a senior Paraguayan official. “The first thing we did was Google him and the first hit was this soccer player.”

The agents saw that their target had until recently been a midfielder on Deportivo Capiatá, a team that played not far from their rented office. Marset had used his wealth and power to fulfill a boyhood dream of playing professional soccer, even though his skills fell far short of the level required.

Word spread among high-level Paraguayan officials, some of them soccer fanatics, who wondered if they had unwittingly watched their target play.

“I couldn’t believe that at the center of this massive criminal organization, the leader was a failed soccer player,” said Cecilia Pérez Rivas, the justice minister.

Investigators said they didn’t just want to detain Marset at the airport, so they allowed him to board the plane; the goal was to build a case to dismantle his cartel. Over the subsequent months, Paraguayan agents began trailing him.

They followed him as he drove an armored Toyota Land Cruiser to Asunción’s La Galería shopping mall, where he met alleged Brazilian drug trafficker Marlon Santos Silva Beiño; in a white BMW to a pastry shop, where he met Alberto Koube Ayala, the Paraguayan businessman who investigators said was responsible for laundering some of Marset’s drug proceeds. Neither Beiño nor Ayala could be reached for comment.

They chronicled the way Marset created shell companies across Latin America’s private sector, paying for publicity in local media so the businesses appeared legitimate, investigation documents show. Marset touted his success as a music producer (“a legend of concert production,” said an article on an Ecuadorian news site) or the owner of a luxury car dealership (“quality service for every kind of vehicle,” said a Paraguayan auto magazine) or the benefactor of a martial arts studio called Team Force Training Center (its slogan: “To Fight Is to Live”).

Investigators started to feel as if they were chasing a Zelig-like figure who appeared to be in multiple places at the same time. They struggled to discern which of his businesses existed only on paper and which were real. They wondered what had become of his soccer career after he disappeared from Capiatá.

“He’s obviously very smart,” said one Paraguayan investigator. “And he’s also a sociopath.”

One day, two undercover agents followed a silver Lamborghini through the residential sprawl at the edge of Asunción. The agents drove an unmarked truck they had seized in a previous operation, keeping a distance from their target.

Over a two-way radio, they reported their coordinates back to headquarters, one agent recalled. They relayed what they were seeing: Marset had inexplicably detoured through the potholed roads of a no-name neighborhood.

Then the agents watched as he pulled up in front of a soccer stadium and turned off the engine.

One of the agents, clearly taken aback, picked up the radio to report the finding: “He found another team.”

II

Marset’s newest toy was a second-division team called Rubio Ñu. Its stadium was about 20 miles from Capiatá.

The team played in a middle-class neighborhood in Paraguay’s capital, full of die-hard but perpetually disappointed Rubio Ñu fans. Some had painted their homes in the team’s colors, green and white. Many were the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Rubio supporters. The stadium showed signs of decay. The grass on the field was patchy.

Fans traded rumors about the man in the Lamborghini. He arrived with a small group of men, all in their 20s and 30s, some with Uruguayan accents. Almost immediately, he started funneling money to the team.

“We were like, ‘What is going on here?’” said one neighbor, who lives across the street from the stadium and spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons. “A lot of people were scared. It was like a group of mafiosos had descended on us.”

Within a few weeks of Marset’s arrival, he hired a construction team to build a new locker room. This time, he practiced with the team, but didn’t play in games.

After practice, he deployed the same anodyne one-liners that he used in texts to the drug traffickers who worked for him:

“Always be one step ahead my bro,” he wrote.

Marset appointed his brother Diego Marset as an intermediary between his drug-trafficking organization and the team, investigators said. Diego went on a recruiting spree, adding 11 veteran players. He could not be reached for comment.

The agents realized that as Sebastián Marset moved between soccer teams, he was also playing with ways the sport could be used to turn illicit funds into clean cash. He was expanding, they wrote in a 500-page Paraguayan report, “the universe of soccer within his money laundering scheme.”

At Rubio Ñu, investigators noted, Marset’s focus was on buying and selling players — one of the oldest forms of laundering money through sport.

Officials at Rubio Ñu declined to comment.

It would later become clear what Marset had in mind, according to investigators: He identified a team in Europe with its own connections to transnational crime. He would sell his Paraguayan players there. Transferring Latin American players to middling European teams for inflated fees — fronted by the seller, not the buyer, or by recording fake transactions — has become an increasingly common way of laundering drug money, officials say.

“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 100 times or 200 times more than what he cost,” said a Colombian police official, referring to one case in which Albanian drug traffickers laundered money through soccer transfers, providing cash for the transaction.

By August 2021, the American and Paraguayan investigators were getting closer to arresting their target. They had come up with a name for their investigation, “A Ultranza,” which means “At All Costs.” It was already the biggest anti-narcotics investigation in Paraguay’s history. They had enough documentation to produce at least 50 indictments targeting Marset and his associates, investigators said.

Then in September 2021, Marset vanished again.

The Americans received fresh intelligence: He was no longer hiding in Paraguay. He had evaded the surveillance. This time, he had left the continent.

III

When the Uruguayan diplomat stepped through the high walls of Al Wathba prison, surrounded by the Emirati desert, he explained to guards that he had come for a consular visit with a new detainee from his country.

The guards asked for the prisoner’s name.

“Marset,” the diplomat said, before walking into the holding cell.

Marset was sleeping on the floor of the prison with a blanket, in solitary confinement, according to an Uruguayan diplomatic cable.

One of the world’s most elusive drug traffickers had finally been caught. But it hadn’t been for trafficking drugs. Marset was detained at the Dubai airport, where authorities said he had used a fake Paraguayan passport.

“He had finally slipped up,” said a Paraguayan official.

U.S. officials made a case to their Emirati counterparts: If they didn’t strictly enforce his detention until an arrest warrant could be issued by Paraguay, Marset would bribe or finagle his way out of custody.

They were right. From his prison cell, Marset began a campaign to obtain a new passport and secure his release, an effort later documented by Uruguayan and Paraguayan authorities. For reasons that remain unclear, Paraguay was unable or unwilling to issue an arrest warrant after learning of Marset’s detention.

The Uruguayan government, meanwhile, recognized Marset as a threat but also failed to prevent his release.

“A narco,” Uruguay’s chief consul, Pauline Davies, wrote of Marset in a WhatsApp message to the country’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Álvaro Ceriani, on Sept. 21. The message was part of a trove of documents collected by Uruguayan investigators and provided to The Washington Post.

“A very dangerous and heavy drug trafficker,” Guillermo Maciel, Uruguay’s deputy interior minister, wrote to Carolina Ache, the country’s deputy foreign minister on Nov. 3.

Marset hired high-profile lawyers who arranged meetings with senior Uruguayan officials, documents show. The team was well-connected: Marset’s top legal adviser, Alejandro Balbi, was the president of Nacional, one of the country’s most famous soccer clubs. Balbi declined to comment.

Marset applied for a new Uruguayan passport to be delivered to him in Dubai.

By November, despite the warnings about the danger he posed, the new passport was being processed. Neither Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry nor its Interior Ministry, which grants passports, intervened, according to Uruguayan investigators.

While he waited to be released, using a phone he had obtained, Marset sought revenge.

He allegedly ordered gunmen to kill Mauricio Schwartzman, the man responsible for securing the Paraguayan passport that had landed Marset in prison, investigators said. Two men using a 5.56-caliber rifle and a 9mm pistol confronted Schwartzman in front of his luxury home in Asunción and shot him dead.

Paraguayan investigators later heard over their wiretaps that the gunmen had been ordered to carry out the hit by the “big boss” of a cocaine-trafficking organization, apparently alluding to Marset.

“According to the big boss, it was [Schwartzman’s] fault that the passport had problems,” the associate said.

A high-profile Paraguayan prosecutor, Marcelo Pecci, was assigned to investigate the case. Pecci later told journalists he believed Schwartzman could have been executed by one of the people targeted in the joint U.S.-Paraguayan investigation into Marset’s cartel.

Less than a year later, in May 2022, Pecci would be killed on his honeymoon at a private beach resort in Colombia. Just hours earlier, his wife had announced that she was pregnant. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, said Marset was responsible for the killing. (Marset subsequently denied any role in the killing when questioned by a Uruguayan journalist.)

But long before that slaying, with Marset detained, investigators had another question to answer: What was Marset doing in Dubai in the first place?

They would later find photos of him dressed as a sheikh with a hawk on his biceps, at the top of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper with his wife, on a desert excursion with alleged Bolivian drug trafficker Erland Ivar García López. Real estate records reviewed by The Post show that Marset owned more than $18 million worth of real estate in Dubai. Emirati officials did not respond to requests for comment.

When investigators obtained Marset’s flight records, they learned that Dubai hadn’t been his final destination. He had been planning a trip to Greece.

“We started to ask: ‘What business did he have in Greece?’” said a Paraguayan investigator.

IV

Trikala F.C. is a team based in central Greece, 200 miles northwest of Athens, a longtime fixture in the Greek Super League 2. Its low-slung stadium, where only a handful of fans sit during home games, is a short walk from an Early Bronze Age acropolis.

The team’s fan base had diminished not only as Trikala continued to lose but as its links to organized crime and match-fixing were exposed. Earlier this year, its former owner, Christos Gialia, was shot more than a dozen times with a Kalashnikov rifle and burned in his car in a mafia-style killing. He had previously been arrested on charges of arms and drug trafficking. The team’s president, Sakis Karatzounis, was convicted of drug trafficking in 2017 after being found in possession of 20 kilos of cocaine, and served four years in prison.

Trikala F.C. sometimes recruited foreign coaches, who were shocked by what they learned. In 2021, the team hired David Magrone, a former member of the coaching staff at Tottenham Hotspur in England’s Premier League. Magrone left after 10 days, telling soccer journalists that he was scandalized.

“It’s the most amateurish and unprofessional environment I’ve ever stepped into,” Magrone said in an interview with FTBL, an Australian soccer website. “It was like the wild wild West and I don’t say that lightly.”

Magrone said he was aware of the team’s possible involvement in match fixing. But Trikala’s illicit activities appeared to run deeper.

A few weeks after Magrone’s departure, in September 2021, an SUV arrived at Trikala’s stadium carrying four Paraguayan players and several coaches and trainers. One coach, Manuel Caceres, immediately started paying the team’s Greek employees in cash, according to Trikala players, and began talking about plans to buy the team. Caceres could not be reached for comment.

The players and staff were baffled, even as they relished the sudden wave of new resources.

“Why did they come from Paraguay to invest on the other side of the Atlantic, in Trikala? It was an honor for us, okay, but isn’t it weird?” Zissis Katsandonis, the team manager, said in an interview. “But whatever the team asked them for, we got. Clothes, equipment. Everything was ordered right away. All paid for.”

The Paraguayans would distribute wads of cash in the locker room, said Giorgos Panagiotou, Trikala’s general secretary. “Come, guys, to the changing rooms and take it,” he recalled them saying.

What the Greek players and officials didn’t know was that the Paraguayans had been dispatched by Sebastián Marset, who was en route to Greece when he was detained in Dubai. After his arrest, according to a wiretapped conversation, he had sent his associates instead.

Two of the players and Caceres, the coach, had come from Marset’s last Paraguayan team, Rubio Ñu. They were among the men Marset’s associates had been grooming, promising cash if they played well. Marset, investigators learned, offered each of them $200,000 if they were willing to be transferred to an obscure Greek team. They accepted.

Paraguayan investigators say Marset was hoping to use Trikala to launder cash and create a foothold in Greece to expand his drug-trafficking network. The Greek anti-narcotics police said they were unaware of Marset’s connection to the team, perhaps because of how quickly it dissolved. With his detention in Dubai, Marset’s Trikala scheme fell apart, investigators said.

At the end of 2021, the Paraguayan players and coaches left as abruptly as they had arrived.

“At least it was sudden for me. I didn’t know anything,” said Katsandonis, the manager. “They all left Trikala before Christmas. I don’t know where they went after that.”

Two of the players, apparently broke, returned to Paraguay on a government repatriation flight, accompanied by migrant deportees.

V

On Jan. 10, 2022, Interpol wrote a message to Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry: “We would appreciate if you could provide us with an update on its situation and details of where [Marset] is currently.”

Both the U.S. and Paraguayan investigators had assumed their target was still detained in Dubai.

But the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry responded two days later: “The Consulate delivered the passport to the holder and we have not had any information about the citizen since then.”

Marset was a free man.

“With the influence of his wealth and connections, he won,” said a U.S. official.

About a month later, on Feb. 22, Paraguayan authorities carried out Operation A Ultranza, based on their multiyear investigation into Marset’s organization. Twenty-four of his associates were arrested, most of them on drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges. Police raided luxury homes and airplane hangars. They seized nine private jets, 4,000 head of cattle, 13 tractors and three yachts — in total, more than $100 million in assets.

Erico Galeano, the Paraguayan senator whose soccer team had welcomed Marset, was accused of money laundering. But the government’s support for Galeano was clear: Weeks after his arrest, he was invited to a small soccer game at the president’s residence.

On March 7, Interpol issued an international arrest warrant in Marset’s name. But by then, he was once again a fugitive. News broke in Uruguay about how he had managed to secure a new passport from a prison in Dubai.

The fallout was almost immediate. First the foreign minister resigned. Then the interior minister and one of his chief advisers. But Uruguay’s president, Luis Lacalle Pou, said the problem was Uruguay’s laws, not corruption within his government.

“Do we like that a drug trafficker has a passport? Of course not,” Lacalle Pou said at a news conference. “But that is the current law.”

VI

The phone buzzed in the newsroom of Channel 4, one of Uruguay’s most popular broadcasters. It was a text message from a South African number.

The sender introduced himself as Sebastián Marset.

It was August 2022, months after his release from the Dubai prison. Marset sent a video message to reporters, who aired it on the nightly broadcast of “Telenoche.” He was fuming about the charges against him and his associates.

“They have no proof of anything of what they say. Nothing,” he said in the video, in which he wears sunglasses and a face mask.

U.S., Paraguayan and Uruguayan officials were searching for him once again. The drugs flowing from Bolivia to Uruguay and on to Europe had increased. Investigators believed he was still running the operation, from wherever he was.

Then the tip arrived.

Marset was in Bolivia. But he wasn’t just hiding there.

He was playing for another professional soccer team.

VII

The players of the Leones del Torno, a team in a second-tier Bolivian league, were on their 20th and final 100-yard sprint.

Carlos Villegas, a lanky 25-year-old Colombian forward, finished first. He put his hands on his knees and turned, he recalled in an interview, to watch his teammates trundle across the line, struggling in the Bolivian heat. It was May 2023.

As always, among the slowest players was a handsome, tattooed Brazilian named Luis Amorim.

There was something odd about Amorim, Villegas thought. He was out of shape and sluggish on the field. But he was always impeccably dressed and drove a rotation of shiny SUVs — Land Cruisers and BMWs — across Santa Cruz, where the Leones had recently moved.

While Villegas struggled to scrape by on his $500-a-month salary, painting homes to make extra cash, Amorim was seemingly flush. Villegas needed to know: How had his teammate found financial success while languishing in the lower rungs of professional soccer? He decided he would ask.

After practice, Villegas sidled up to Amorim on a bench next to the field.

“How did you do it, man?”

Amorim responded passionately, but obliquely — in surprisingly perfect Spanish for a Brazilian.

“It’s all about work. You need to work and work and work. You can’t ever give up,” Villegas recalled Amorim saying.

Villegas walked away from the conversation feeling inspired and a little confused.

“He never told me what he did to make the money,” Villegas later said in an interview. “And when I found out, it was a shock.”

Amorim was a pseudonym.

Marset had arrived in Santa Cruz — Bolivia’s financial capital — in late 2022, renovating a mansion in the center of the city, installing security cameras near the front entrance. He launched himself into the city’s elite circles. He spent time with a former Miss Bolivia and her husband. He sponsored events for Carnival, including an exhibition soccer game with powerful business executives. And most notably, he purchased the Leones del Torno, a team that played in the small town of El Torno, an hour outside the city.

Marset moved the team to Santa Cruz. He built a cutting-edge athletic training complex with a synthetic turf field at the end of a dirt road. He hired a former star player from the national team, Gualberto Mojica, to coach the team. And once again, he forced his way onto the starting lineup.

With law enforcement from across the Western Hemisphere looking for him, Marset had chosen not to hide in a remote outpost. He had come to Bolivia’s largest city — known as a sanctuary for drug proceeds, investigators say — certain that he could bribe authorities not to capture him.

For over a year, Marset appeared to be right; he expanded his real estate empire in Santa Cruz, either unnoticed or ignored.

On the soccer field, Marset wore the number 23, David Beckham’s number at Real Madrid and Galaxy. The name on the back of his blue jersey was only “Luis.” His skills had not improved.

“He wasn’t good,” said a Uruguayan player on the Leones, Lucas Casavieja.

“When I passed him the ball, a lot of the time he missed it,” said Villegas. “I got angry with him, like, ‘What are you doing?’”

In May 2023, Bolivian authorities got a call from the Paraguayan anti-narcotics police. The Paraguayans had tracked down Marset in Santa Cruz, and they needed the Bolivians to act.

The Bolivian police say they began surveilling Marset’s mansion. They flew a drone overhead. They posted officers around his tony neighborhood. Marset was hiding with his wife and four children, who were also using false names. He had managed to enroll one of his sons in the revered training program of Blooming, a soccer team in Bolivia’s first division.

Eventually, police held a planning session to announce the operation, dubbed “Leon 23” after Marset’s team and number. They planned to take down Marset’s entire network.

Dozens of officers got to his house on the morning of July 29, forcing their way inside. But Marset and his family were gone.

A manhunt commenced: 3,000 Bolivian police officers were dispatched. They placed 158 checkpoints across the country to keep Marset from escaping.

The police eventually arrested 39 people, including the Leones del Torno coach, two of Marset’s teammates and the team’s grounds manager. They seized the team’s soccer field, 35 properties, nine aircraft, 77 cars, 81 weapons and 1,315 head of livestock and poultry — a total of $27 million in assets.

Leones del Torno were suspended from Bolivia’s soccer federation. Former team officials could not be reached for comment.

Officials and neighbors in Santa Cruz would later tell The Post that Marset had fled days before the operation began. Neighbors reported seeing people loading trucks outside Marset’s home.

“The operation needed to be earlier,” Jhonny Aguilera, Bolivia’s deputy interior minister and former national police chief, said in an interview. “We know that in hindsight.”

Marset’s teammates and coach were charged with “criminal association.” Their interrogation interviews yielded little: He was merely “another player,” they said. “An investor” or a “businessman.”

But Bolivian officials said they were able to link Marset’s attraction to the Leones to two data points — his obsession with soccer and the more practical question of what to do with his drug proceeds.

“The objective was obviously to launder money,” Aguilera said of Marset’s investment in Leones del Torno.

IX

A few weeks after Marset’s disappearance, Jessica Echeverría, a lawyer in Santa Cruz with a large following on social media, received a message from a number she didn’t recognize.

When she opened it, there was a video with Marset’s face in the center of the frame. Echevarría pressed play. She heard Marset explain how he had been tipped off about the Bolivia operation.

“Thanks to the help of the director of the anti-narcotics police, I managed to leave,” Marset said in the video. “He told me that the minister had already issued an arrest warrant against me.”

A few weeks later, he sent out another video to local reporters. It was recorded from inside a car.

“I am too smart for you,” he said, taunting the Bolivian police. “It’s not to say that you are very stupid; it sounds a little better to say that I am just smarter.”

He threatened to reveal the corrupt Bolivian officials who had allowed him to live freely and escape unharmed: “If I open my mouth, it gets complicated.”

The question of where Marset was hiding became a parlor game among Latin American officials. At least a few starry-eyed fans also waited for him to reemerge, hoping he could be lured by one of his weaknesses.

“Between soccer and lovers, I am gripped by the hope that Don Marset will return,” crooned Bolivian singer Belén Ortiz in her song “King of the South.”

And then, in November, Marset gave a television interview.

An Uruguayan television anchor, Patricia Martín, said she had taken two helicopters to meet him — the first to a place that was “half jungle” and the second to a house in a clearing. Marset opened the door, she said; a soccer game was playing on the living room television. He wore a $1,100 Louis Vuitton green sweater and a gold watch and spoke vaguely about his ability to elude capture.

“I have people to do what I need to do,” he said.

Marset’s lawyer, Santiago Moratorio, who helped arrange the television appearance, wouldn’t say where it took place, or offer any hints about his client’s newest hiding place.

On Wednesday, after months of radio silence, Marset’s wife, Gianina García Troche, was detained at the Madrid airport in a joint operation of Interpol and the Spanish government. She had flown to Spain from Dubai, Uruguayan and Paraguayan officials said.

Moratorio said she wasn’t detained and insisted that she had turned herself in. “She was tired of running from a crime she didn’t commit,” he said.

Marset remains at large, the target of an ongoing manhunt, one of the most extensive in recent South American history.

Moratorio did share one detail from the visit he made with the journalist to Marset’s undisclosed location.

Before the television interview was recorded, Moratorio said, Marset issued one more order: Let’s play some soccer. His visitors, guards and associates formed two teams and the game kicked off.

This is the second of a two-part series. Click on this link to read the first part, “A double life: The cocaine kingpin who hid as a professional soccer player.”