How Sebastian Marset Became South America's Most Wanted Drug Trafficker and a Pro Soccer Player

"Socalj" for Borderland Beat

From a Washington Post Investigative Series by Kevin Sieff

Sebastián Marset, it turned out, was among the most important drug traffickers in South America, and one of the key figures behind a surge of cocaine arriving in Western Europe, according to Latin American, U.S. and European investigators.

Instead of hiding from authorities, he had used his fortune to purchase and sponsor soccer teams across Latin America and in Europe. U.S. and South American investigators would learn that he was using those teams to help launder millions in drug proceeds.

Along the way, Marset, now 33, deployed his power and wealth to fulfill a boyhood dream: He inserted himself into the starting lineups.

Sebastián Marset played on several professional soccer teams over a period of years. 

This story about Marset’s narco empire and his quixotic search for soccer glory is based on thousands of pages of internal documents provided by Paraguayan, Uruguayan and Bolivian police, wiretap transcripts obtained by The Washington Post, hundreds of Marset’s text messages as well as interviews with officials on three continents. Many of the officials — along with Marset’s associates, teammates, coaches, friends and former neighbors in Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia — spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing security concerns.

Marset’s odyssey reads like a transnational caper, bordering on the absurd. But it is a startling window into the level of impunity at the nexus of Latin American public life and the lower rungs of professional soccer, enabling drug traffickers to wield enormous influence in both worlds. Years after a global manhunt for him began, Marset remains at large.

His ascent was lightning fast, by age 28, according to a Paraguayan criminal indictment, Marset was moving cocaine and suitcases of cash across South America in a fleet of private jets. By 31, he had made more than $1 billion, authorities estimate. He placed stamps on his drug shipments that read “The King of the South,” the moniker he was trying to cultivate. He issued orders to deputies operating in four countries: where to put the cash, whom to pay off, how to hide the cocaine under packages of cookies or soybeans. He killed his enemies with no remorse, soliciting advice on how to disappear their bodies, according to his text messages, which were obtained and aggregated by the Paraguayan attorney general’s office.

Marset took breaks to play professional soccer — first at Capiatá — where he adopted the same assertive tone as when he coordinated drug shipments, imagining himself the midfield conductor, even as he struggled to keep up with his teammates. He paid $10,000 in cash to wear the No. 10 jersey, worn by Pelé, Maradona and Messi. When he shoved opposing players to the ground, referees failed to blow their whistles. Marset flashed a thousand-watt smile.

His rise coincided with the explosion in cocaine trafficking from South America to Europe. It was Marset who would help perfect that route, dispatching tons of drugs from Uruguayan ports to Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, investigators say, forging ties with existing cartels around the world.

Building that empire and laundering its proceeds would bring Marset into contact with some of the continent’s most powerful politicians. Those ties were explicit: He borrowed a Paraguayan senator’s plane, he was caught trafficking drugs with the uncle of a Paraguayan president, and one of his lawyers secured meetings with top Uruguayan officials to secure his release from prison. Some of his most valuable connections, though, were in professional soccer.

Soccer & Cartel Ties

The link between drug trafficking and soccer is almost as old as the U.S. drug war. Money spent on the sport is untraceable in much of Latin America. Player contracts, transfer fees, ticket proceeds, merchandise sales — almost all of it can be fudged, according to experts on money laundering, so that cocaine money used to fund a team is magically turned into soccer — and therefore clean — profits.

“The legitimization of illicit funds was done through sports,” the Paraguayan prosecutor’s office wrote in a 500-page internal investigation into Marset obtained by The Post.

It was more than that. Soccer in Latin America is the bedrock of power and politics. For a drug kingpin, running a soccer team, even in a lower league, translates criminal power into public power.

In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug kingpin, bankrolled his hometown soccer club, Atlético Nacional, turning it into one of Latin America’s best teams. When he was detained in 1991, he flew in famous players to play on the prison soccer field. In the early 2000s, Tirso Martínez, an associate of Mexican drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, spent the millions he earned moving drugs to purchase several Mexican soccer teams. Martínez’s nickname was revealed after he was arrested and extradited to the United States in 2015: “El Futbolista.”

But Marset is the first major drug trafficker to use his status and wealth not only to bankroll professional soccer teams but to play on them. Some of his games were held just miles from where he had deposited the bodies of his cartel rivals, based on the descriptions in his text messages. Depending on whom you believe, his athletic career was either a sophisticated strategy to conceal his identity, or an attempt to fulfill an unrealized dream.

Asked which it was, Marset’s lawyer, Santiago Moratorio, laughed in his office in Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital.

“He always wanted to be a soccer player,” he said.

As U.S. and South American authorities chased Marset across the continent, to the Middle East and to Europe, he was always one step ahead, vanishing only to reappear on another professional soccer field, often using a new false identity. He was able to bribe his way out of a Dubai prison as U.S. officials — who came to see Marset as a threat to public institutions across Latin America — watched in frustration. He left a trail of high-profile murders in his wake, authorities allege, including Paraguay’s anti-corruption prosecutor, gunned down on his honeymoon at a Colombian beach resort.

As he ran from authorities, Marset left voice notes and video messages, often mocking the officials who trailed him.

“I’m too smart for you,” he said in one video message last August. The camera was tightly framed around his face. He wore a gold chain and a neat beard.

“If you want, keep hunting me, but I’m telling you that I’m far away.”

Authorities knew they were unlikely to catch Marset in the middle of a cocaine bust. So they adapted their investigation to its target: They began scouring professional soccer stadiums.

Background

Marset was born in Piedras Blancas, a neighborhood of small split-level homes on the outskirts of Montevideo. Uruguay had long considered itself the “Switzerland of South America,” with among the lowest crime rates on the continent. But in Piedras Blancas, as Marset entered his teenage years, young men suddenly appeared selling and trafficking drugs. Homicides ticked up.

He was a top student at school, a skinny, whip-smart kid who liked to stand in front of the room and lecture his classmates as if he were the teacher. As he got older, though, he became single-minded about his goal: He wanted to be a professional soccer player. He and his friends played in the street, constructing makeshift goals out of stones. They used markers to sketch numbers on the back of their T-shirts because they couldn’t afford uniforms.

Marset’s dream of soccer stardom was, at least in part, about money. He worked at a gas station and blew his salary on a David Beckham Adidas track jacket. He went to nightclubs frequented by girls from wealthier neighborhoods. Friends said they sometimes spotted him walking home alone because he couldn’t afford bus fare from downtown Montevideo.

After high school, he started playing semi-professional soccer in Montevideo’s intermediate division. It became clear quickly that Marset would not go further. He wasn’t fast enough. His touch was mediocre, his passes wayward.

Marset’s first interactions with Montevideo’s criminal underworld were minor. In 2009, at 18, he was arrested for possession of stolen goods and, a year later, at 19, for possession of narcotics, according to Uruguayan court records. But he made it clear that he was willing to take on more risk. When he was 22, Marset accepted a job receiving a shipment of marijuana scheduled to arrive in rural Uruguay on a small plane from Paraguay, according to Uruguayan police. It was normally an assignment for a team of men, but the traffickers by then trusted him to receive the shipment alone.

He waited on a farm not far from Uruguay’s northern border with Brazil, standing next to his black Chevrolet Cruze. 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.

Marset was sentenced to 5 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 (PCC) 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 Shipments

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Self Paid Soccer Star

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 doing donuts, 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.

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?

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.

Galeano was a Paraguayan senator and tobacco baron. He had close ties to the country’s most influential politician, former president Cartes, who was put on the U.S. sanctions list for “rampant corruption.” Cartes was effectively still running portions of the country.

Both men had used soccer for political and financial gain — and worked in Paraguay’s National Congress to keep sports teams exempt from money-laundering legislation. Cartes funneled tens of millions of dollars to one of the country’s biggest soccer clubs, Libertad, and Galeano threw millions at Deportivo Capiatá, according to government records. 

Roughly $1.3 million of Galeano’s investment in the team appears to have come from cocaine trafficking, Paraguay’s attorney general would later argue.

When he arrived in 2021, Marset began bankrolling improvements: new physical therapy beds, televisions, better food in the cafeteria. It was enough to win over his teammates. Though he wasn’t formally listed as the team’s owner, he poured drug money into Capiatá, investigators say, and siphoned a portion of its revenue.

The deal was even sweeter than that: Marset also bought himself a spot on the squad.

But the team’s coach, Nuñez, a former player on the Paraguayan World Cup team, was not impressed.

“I had the obligation to win or else they would fire me,” said Nuñez, who initially planned to keep Marset on the bench. “But it wasn’t the same for him. He was just having fun.”

There seemed to be only one person, investigators said, who could have brought Marset to Capiatá: Galeano. Paraguayan prosecutors found that Marset had been using the private jet of Galeano’s company to ferry his associates. Prosecutors also identified property deals between Galeano and Marset’s cartel. They would later indict the Senator.

“Erico Galeano Segovia was at the service of the transnational criminal organization, dedicated to the international trafficking of cocaine,” the attorney general’s office wrote this year. The case has yet to go to trial.

Marset initially seemed unconcerned that his soccer career at Capiatá might raise his profile with authorities. He allowed the team to publish his name on its roster before games each week.

But by the end of May 2021, Marset learned that narcotics officers were trying to find him. It appears he was tipped off by high-level contacts in the Paraguayan government, investigators said.

He stopped going to practice at Capiatá. His name was abruptly taken off the team’s roster. When players passed his empty locker, they asked if anyone had heard from him. No one had. It would not be his last time playing professional soccer while on the run. Capiatá was only the beginning, proof of what he could get away with.

As the manhunt for Marset grew, he doubled down on his double life as a professional player. He attempted to expand his soccer empire to Europe; he appeared on the starting lineups of new teams in new countries.

It seemed a foolish approach to evading arrest, the kind of arrogance that was destined to backfire. Except it didn’t.

Discovered by the DEA

Undercover agents ducked into a squat brick house in a residential neighborhood. The building, secretly rented by the DEA 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.

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.

Laundering Soccer Players

He would sell his Paraguayan players to teams in Europe. 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.

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

Parguayan Prosecutor Assassinated

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 an Uruguayan journalist.

On the Run

Marset owned more than $18 million worth of real estate in Dubai, according to property records obtained by research group C4ADS and shared by news organizations E24 and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

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. 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.

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.

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.”

Interpol Red Notice

US and South American authorities assumed that by early 2022, Marset was still detained in Dubai, but he was a free man.

In February 2022, 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.”

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.

Bolivian Soccer

Marset had arrived in Santa Cruz 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, 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 an Uruguayan player on the Leones, Lucas Casavieja.

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.

Taunting Authorities

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.”

TV Interview

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. 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. 
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.

Last month, 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.

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

Sources Washington Post, Washington Post, BBC, Semana

Categories: south america