White tuna

This is part of my column in The Malta Independent, yesterday.

Do you ever get the feeling that men caught up in gangland activities are starring in an action crime film that spools through their own minds?

It’s almost as though they enjoy the trappings and subterfuge more than they enjoy the proceeds.

I thought about this the other day as I read news reports of those men staking out a village garage on some drugs revenge mission, wearing gloves and sitting on a gun in a van, and ending up dead.

That’s probably about as glamorous as it gets.

I thought about it again yesterday morning, when I heard about the Maltese lorry-driver who’s been busted by Sicilian police for trucking illegal drugs down to Malta for the Mazara del Vallo Mafia.

The code name they used when talking about cocaine 368 times over the telephone – you know, just in case the police were listening in, which they were – was ‘white tuna’.

It’s the white stuff they’re talking about, so obviously, they’re going to have to insert the word ‘white’ into the disguise to make it more ’disguisey’, like a fake moustache and a wig.

A gang of sensible woman criminals would have called their illegal goods ‘quilt covers’. Or fabric conditioner. Or even Fairy Liquid or sgrassatore pavimenti. The phone-tappers would have yawned themselves into a delirium of tedium. But our heroes, starring in their very own mental B movie, are damned if they’re going to do anything quite like that.

People might laugh, and call them skirts.

OK, so nobody would know – but they would. And imagine if the police swept in and the story broke in the news: code word Mastro Lindo. The embarrassment. The shame. How could they ever hold up their heads in gangland again? So ‘white tuna’ it is, then, even if it makes them look like idiots.