SMUGGLER
An 8 x 50´ TV fiction series
Numerous films have featured migrants and their tragic journeys… but never before has there been a series featuring the glamorous, opulent lives of HUMAN SMUGGLERS, those men and women who, from their luxurious offices and mansions in different world capitals, direct and control the organizations that illegally transport migrants across different borders.
SMUGGLER is a fiction (but very much documented) series depicting the billionaire business behind immigration and the participation of governments using migrants as a form of political blackmail. It focuses on the criminal organizations and the personal lives of their members, particularly the powerful ones (referents are Succession, Narcos, Suburra), but also those at lower levels who make a modest living without ever getting to know who they work for.
SMUGGLER depicts the fierce struggle between two rival smuggling gangs to control the routes that transport migrants from Africa and Asia to the USA via Latin America, now that Europe is “full”. Both gangs operate through a net in the Middle East and Europe and -once the migrants arrive by boat or plane in Brazil- through their “partners” in Latin America.
The gang led by the young socialite OLIVIA MAYORCA works from the law firms she owns with her attractive husband, once a refugee himself, and her corrupt politician mother in Madrid and Mexico. Their rival organization is led by former Ethiopian general and mercenary MOSES MELESSE, whose luxurious headquarters are in Rome, Angola and Brazil.
SYNOPSIS
A new war breaks out, and new immigration routes are opened as thousands of people flee their war-torn countries in search of refuge in the USA. Olivia Mayorca and Moses Melesse start mobilizing the chain of people who work for their organizations in the countries alongside their routes: local “lieutenants”; recruiters; money collectors; border guides… One of these intermediaries is young and ambitious Marco Esposito, who works for Melesse’s gang. Now in jail for human smuggling, he’s visited and freed by a lawyer paid by Olivia Mayorca, who will use him as a spy on her new Latin American routes without suspecting Marco will turn into a sinister Rasputin to her family. When Melesse’s gang finds out Marco works for Mayorca, they send snipers to kill him, sometimes in the guise of businessmen or members of a diplomatic corps who’ll happen to have close ties with Olivia’s politician mother.
Defne Aydem, who recruits migrants for Melesse’s gang at an Istanbul market, is sent to Colombia to establish a route and to do away with Mayorca’s people there, including Esposito. However, she falls in love with him, and he discovers she is a radical Islamist passing terrorists off as asylum seekers. But one of the migrants, a woman who was a police inspector in her country, now migrating with her grandson, realizes some people in her group are not precisely migrants, and decides to take action. Information on the smuggling of terrorists reaches Olivia´s politician mother: a terror attack is scheduled. Only she knows that Russia is behind the apparently Islamist move… but attacks by Russia are what she needs to convince Colombia´s government to pass a decree that will benefit her daughter’s human smuggling gang.