A short, six-minute choreography, performed between 7:43 and 7:49 am, barely disturbed the great morning ballet of trucks and cranes at the port of Marseille, on the French Mediterranean coast. On February 27, 2020, amidst the hustle and bustle of unloading operations, container number TCLU 225611/3 was extracted from the port area through deft maneuvers coordinated between a straddle carrier and a semi-trailer, escaping the vigilance of foremen and digital monitoring alike. The truck's driver and his passenger hurried off with their precious cargo: over three tons of extra-pure cocaine, estimated value at least €215 million. The plan had gone ahead perfectly. Yet the couriers were unaware that the authorities had set a trap for them and were hot on their trail.

A tip-off from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the US federal agency in charge of the war on drugs, had put French police on the trail of this illicit cargo container, as it was being transported on the Alexis, a container ship flying the flag of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Owned by the French company CMA CGM, the vessel left the port of Houston, Texas, on January 26, 2020, destination Marseille. Several ports of call had been planned on its route, including a February 6 stopover in Costa Rica, where it was notably scheduled to pick up a container of banana puree, of which the country is a major world producer. A network of drug traffickers slipped cocaine into the container, concealed in a shipment purchased by Andros, the French fruit product giant.

Before Marseille, its last ports of call were in Italy: Livorno and Genoa. Here, in simultaneous stealth operations conducted in both ports, the Italian carabinieri entered the suspect container. They discovered 3.3 metric tons of cocaine, packaged and crammed into 90 sports bags. The illicit cargo was immediately seized and replaced with dummy "bricks," filled with flour and rigged with GPS trackers. The Marseille port traffickers took these decoys in the back of a Renault Master van to an empty villa in the nearby village of Saint-Mitre-les-Remparts, a stone's throw from the Berre lagoon.

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