Epilogue ..................................................
T
he foreign traffickers who smuggled drugs from either Europe or Latin America to the United States using Cuba as a transit point abandoned the island after the revolution and relocated in other countries. Corsican Paul Mondolini left Cuba for Madrid in January 1960, returned to Havana at the beginning of the next month, and then quickly left again, this time for Mexico City. Mondolini later met up with his Canadian associate, Lucien Rivard, in Acapulco. The two drug lords continued making trips to Mexico for some years to come.1 Mondolini also maintained his heroin operations in France, as did Jean-Baptiste Croce and Ansan Bistoni, and his client networks in Mexico, Canada, and South America. He also joined a criminal organization run by Edouard Toudayan. Bistoni operated a processing laboratory near Cros-de-Cagnes, in France, and established a second facility, in partnership with Croce, in Corsica.2 By 1966, French drug traffickers had begun to base some of their operations in Madrid and Barcelona, and both Mondolini and Croce frequently traveled to Spain.3 On the other side of the Atlantic, the Corsican mafia now transported heroin from France to the United States via Argentina and Mexico.4 The Corsican traffickers also operated in reverse, sending cocaine from Buenos Aires to Europe.5 In 1967, more than seven years after he had last stood on Cuban soil, Mondolini was captured in France, indicted, and put on trial.6 Lucien Rivard, who owned a summer resort near Montreal, was captured and jailed in Canada in June 1964. He attempted to avoid extradition to the United States, where he faced charges of having imported heroin from Europe via Mexico and Canada. The Rivard case erupted into a political scandal when one of the assistants to the Canadian minister of justice was accused of attempted bribery on behalf of Rivard. The scandal broadened when the justice minister and a member of Parliament stepped down after admitting that they had failed to investigate the assistant’s actions. Further embarrassing the government, Rivard escaped from jail in March 1965 and remained
