How the seizure of Europe's largest heroin shipment created bloody fallout throughout the world—and sparked still-raging political corruption scandals in Turkey, Greece, and the Middle East
Illustrations by Owen Freeman
On April 28, 2014, a fishing trawler intercepted an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, a day after the tanker had left Dubai for Greece. Three men climbed aboard the tanker and spent the night packing hundreds of small sacks of heroin, weighing at least two metric tons in total, into its ballast boxes. After they finished, two of the men sailed back to the coast. One stayed behind. He carried a handgun and ordered the tanker’s crew to keep sailing.