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He waited on a farm not far from Uruguay’s northern border with Brazil, standing next to his black Chevrolet Cruz. What he didn’t know was that police had been tipped off. They arrived in the clearing where Marset was waiting. He immediately gave himself up to the two officers from the Brigada Antidrogas, the country’s elite anti-narcotics police.

Marset explained that he was a professional soccer player. He was shrewd and respectful, one of the agents recalled. Soon the officers would learn that the shipment of drugs wasn’t an amateur affair; the pilot was the uncle of Paraguay’s president at the time, Horacio Cartes.

The agents handcuffed Marset and took an improvised mug shot in their field office. One of the agents looked at the other when Marset was out of earshot.

“This guy is going to be a big problem for us someday,” he recalled saying. III

Marset was sentenced to five years in prison for drug trafficking. He was sent to Libertad, one of the country’s largest prisons, and placed in a section devoted to drug trafficking and organized crime.

It was there that he expanded his criminal contacts, investigators said. He got a job as a prison cleaner, which meant he could visit almost every cell in the block, chatting with inmates as he mopped. He met prominent international drug traffickers, including members of the Italian mafia and Brazilians from the increasingly influential First Capital Command gang. The men played soccer in the afternoons — fierce matches in the prison yard.

“He was lost for soccer,” said one prison guard.

Drug trafficking in South America was on the verge of a major shift. For years, the cocaine produced in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru was bound almost exclusively for the United States. Then, by the late 2000s, American pressure on drugs being smuggled to the United States forced traffickers to search for new markets and new routes.

Large drug shipments had rarely moved south, into Paraguay and Uruguay. But Montevideo, Marset’s hometown, had a port that dispatched massive quantities of commercial goods to Europe daily. For the traffickers, it was a nearly untapped source of revenue. And Marset realized that he was sitting right on top of it.

Images of Sebastián Marset's fake passports.

He was released from prison in 2018, at age 27. Within a few months, he was on his way to Paraguay to build the trafficking network he had begun to imagine in prison, investigators said. His connections to Brazilian and Italian organized crime appear to have laid the groundwork for his ascent. Marset began traveling under a false Bolivian passport, using the name Gabriel De Souza Beumer. It would be his first of multiple identities.

While most fugitive drug traffickers are circumspect when talking about their empires, Marset and his associates speak proudly of his ascent. Even his lawyer, Moratorio, wanted to emphasize his client’s skill set.

“Everyone leaves prison with contacts,” Moratorio said. “But it was also his own ability, and what he did when he got out, that got him to where he is now.” IV

By 2020, Paraguayan and U.S. authorities had noticed the increase in cocaine arriving in Paraguay from Bolivia, bound for Europe via Uruguay’s ports. Some of the shipments were stamped with an abbreviation officials had never seen before: PCU, which stood for Primer Cartel Uruguayo.

It was an obvious target for U.S. and Paraguayan investigators: Who was behind the new cocaine boom?

Paraguayan officials secured wiretaps on phones linked to the criminal network. They recruited spies among the drug traffickers. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration dispatched planes to photograph the clandestine airfields that were popping up across Paraguay. (Uruguayan Ministry of the Interior; iStock)

Within months, officials from both countries began hearing about a man at the center of the organization.

“A young Uruguayan man with his right arm tattooed” was the working description of the target as the investigation began, said one U.S. official.

“He was young but clearly powerful,” said a former senior Paraguayan official.

On wiretapped phone lines, his associates and employees referred to him only as “El Jefe Mayor”: “The Big Boss.” When he traveled, he sometimes disguised himself as a priest so authorities would be less likely to question him. He named his drug shipments using code words from the soccer world: “Maradona,” after the legendary Argentine player, and “Manchester,” after the English city with two famous Premier League teams.

When he felt threatened, he responded violently. He described the men he killed in flippant text messages illustrated with gory photos. The messages were later obtained by investigators.

“I shot him twice,” he wrote in a text. “It seems to me he dropped dead.”

“Do we have a place to disappear a body?” he asked a few weeks later. “Is it best to put it in acid?”

Of another victim’s body, he wrote: “That one was dumped in a field. It will be on the news in the next few days.”

Officials documented how the unnamed man and his organization moved enormous quantities of cocaine. They would dispatch small airplanes from Paraguay’s main commercial airport, and then the pilots would turn off their radar. They would secretly fly across the border to Bolivia, landing on remote farms in Chapare, the country’s coca-growing region, where traffickers would fill the planes with between one and two tons of cocaine.

Then the planes would return to Paraguay, landing at one of the clandestine airstrips that now peppered the northern part of the country. The cocaine was taken by trucks to container ships waiting on the Paraguay River, which flows through Paraguay to the mouth of the Atlantic Ocean. Traffickers knew that those ships were almost never inspected before arriving in Europe; the port of Montevideo had only one semi-functional scanner. Each planeload of cocaine was worth more than $20 million once offloaded in Belgium or the Netherlands.

Officials identified at least 13 private jets being used by the cartel. Four of them, investigators found, were exclusively used to move cash.

But officials struggled to learn the name of the man who was running the operation, the tattooed young Uruguayan. Nor did they know that when his voice disappeared from the wiretaps for stretches, it wasn’t always because he was off trafficking cocaine.

Often it was because he was in the middle of a professional soccer game. V

One rainy morning in early 2021, employees at Erico Galeano Stadium heard an engine revving in the gravel parking lot. When they got closer, they saw a silver Lamborghini speeding in tight circles, skidding across the surface.

The team’s security guard approached the car. The driver rolled down his window.

“I asked him, ‘Aren’t you worried about damaging your car?’” said the guard, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons. “And he just looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry. I have four more.’”

It was Marset. He extended his right hand, with a lion tattooed across the knuckles, and introduced himself as Deportivo Capiatá’s newest player.

Marset began attending daily practice sessions and posing for team photos, always in the center of the frame. He was like a kid who had sneaked onto the field to play with his heroes — exuberant but inept. He brought his wife and three young sons to watch him play; he wanted them to see a win. (Paraguay national police; Bolivian court documents; iStock)

He made a deal with his teammates. He would pay each of them several thousand dollars on top of their existing contracts for each victory. For many of the players, it was a life-changing sum. For Marset, who was living in a penthouse in the glittering Palacio de los Patos condominium, above a sauna and a 75-foot pool, it was nothing.

But Capiatá kept struggling, in part because of Marset’s performance. He botched passes, failed to track back to help his defenders and scuffed easy goal-scoring chances. As the team continued to lose, Capiatá officials recalled, one young player broke down in tears, having missed another chance at earning the bonus Marset had promised.

By then, Marset was attempting to balance his professional soccer career with a vibrant social life among the elite in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción. On April 11, 2021, he dispatched invitations across the city. They were in the form of fake boarding passes that said: “Birthday of Commander Sebastián Marset.”

It was his 30th birthday. The party was airplane-themed. A private jet was parked outside the venue. Attendees posed for photos behind the cutout of a plane that said “Emirates Marset.” The cake was five-tiered, with an edible airplane sitting on top.

The next day, he was back at practice. The players began wondering what investigators later would: Of all the teams in Paraguay, why had Marset arrived on theirs? VI

Deportivo Capiatá was the pride of an Asunción suburb. The team famously beat Boca Juniors, Latin America’s most celebrated club, in Argentina in 2014 — a huge underdog win. (Capiatá ultimately lost the second leg of the contest after a penalty shootout.)

For a time, Capiatá’s success was attributed to its powerful backer, Erico Galeano, whom the team’s stadium was named after.