Sanae De Boer

I had never been in the south of Italy.

I was immediately, I fell in love with the natural beauty of the place.

I was living on this beautiful hilltop village by the sea.

The people in the village was super welcoming to me.

And of course, it took a while also for me to kind of...

get to understand a little bit more about the local mafia clans, because it's understandable that people wouldn't be very ready to speak about it with me.

Also, another factor was my Italian was still very basic.

It took me quite some years to be able to read the papers and to be able to eventually start reporting on the subject and to go and speak to all kinds of people about it.

Right.

It was in the middle of the night.

It was such a shocking event.

Everybody came out of their houses.

Everybody was also very supportive of that family that was obviously heartbroken and shocked and very much afraid of what this was.

would mean, but it was very significant that I realized nobody was calling the police.

She never filed a police report.

Everybody helped to put out the fire.

And eventually she quit her job and she moved away, sadly enough, as well.

That is what Italian law enforcement has said for many years, early 2000s up until maybe 10 years ago.

They were definitely a very large factor in the cocaine smuggling all over the world.

And that's probably an Australian-Dutch connection as well there because it's in Holland, it's in Southern Holland and Belgium that most of the world's ecstasy is produced.