Photo by Raymond Zoller.

It takes about two hours by speedboat to cross the aquamarine Adriatic from the port city of Bar in Montenegro to the coastal city of Bari in Italy, shorter if your speedboat isn’t crammed tight with cartons of illegal cigarettes. For nearly a decade, approximately one billion cigarettes made the trip every month.

From 1994 to 2002, Swissman Franco Della Torre used a company based in Panama to negotiate an exclusive license deal to transfer 100,000 cases monthly from multinationals Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds and British American Tobacco. Armed with a cigarette license granted by Montenegro’s Prime Minister Milo Dukanovic, Della Torre partnered with Montenegro Tabak Transit (MTT), a state-run company established by two friends of Dukanovic’s. MTT, through a company named Zeta Trans, owned and operated a warehouse based in Bar where the Kents, Dunhills and Marlboros were then handed over to the local mafia headquartered nearby. With bases set up along the coast, the Neapolitan Camorra and the Sacra Corona Unita loaded their pilot speedboats, some nights as many as 70 boats, and shot across to Italy where the Western European black market awaited them.

While war ravaged neighboring Balkan infant-nations, Montenegro’s “transit tax” saw the country rake in $300 million annually. By the end of that decade, that total had ballooned to $700 million each year. At one point, profits from the illegal cigarette trade accounted for half of Montenegro’s GDP. An entire stream of contraband currency flowing into a parallel government budget that, in turn, filled the official state coffers.

Eventually, enterprising smugglers like Serb entrepreneur and associate of the late Slobodan Milosevic, Vladimir Bokan, and his Croatian partner Srecko Kestner could secure contracts directly with the cigarette companies themselves. Diplomatic immunity shielded government officials like former Montenegrin foreign minister Branko Perovic and current Prime Minister Dukanovic from ignominious ends, but it did not protect Bokan from the two gunmen who shot him ten times outside his house.

Tighter tobacco laws and revelations from smugglers-turned-informants amid increasingly fierce investigation loosened the trade’s grip on the region. But as Montenegro inches towards EU member state status and peacetime moves smuggling routes elsewhere, the nighttime tranquility of the Adriatic is occasionally interrupted by the sound of a speedboat.