In May 2014, as the Noor One was steering into the Suez Canal loaded with heroin, Marinakis was pivoting to politics. That month, he won a seat on Piraeus’s city council. He pushed the investor-friendly agenda of the center-right New Democracy party, which became Greece’s ruling party after elections in 2019. A collection of newspapers he purchased in 2017 lauded its leadership. Marinakis is close to the party’s president, Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and Mitsotakis’s sister, Dora Bakoyannis, the former mayor of Athens and mother of its current mayor. At Bakoyannis’s wedding in July 1998, Marinakis was best man.

As his clout continued to grow, Marinakis has emerged as a global financier to be reckoned with. In 2017, he bought the historic English soccer club Nottingham Forest for £50 million, even as he was under investigation for an Olympian-scale match-fixing scandal back in Greece, which involved an alleged bombing of a local bakery. Marinakis denies any wrongdoing, and the trial surrounding the scandal is still ongoing.

Marinakis also made allies in Beijing, which in 2016 acquired the port of Piraeus for a pittance as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, designed to further loop global trade flows through China. In Washington, he mounted another front of the international charm offensive, which culminated in a $1.7 billion merger in 2018 between his tanker fleet and Diamond S Shipping—a concern in which Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross’s private equity firm holds a large stake. Overnight, Marinakis presided over one of the largest tanker contingents on Earth.

Still, the main new hub of Marinakis’s sprawling commercial empire is the Persian Gulf. Over the last three years, his fleets have clinched successive tenders to handle transportation for Iraq’s new state oil company, Aissot—tenders in which Baghdad pays $23,000 per day for every ship it rents from Marinakis to transport its oil around the world.

But at just the time all this had been happening—the acquisition of soccer teams and the amassing of armadas and the clinching of lucrative oil contracts—authorities back in Piraeus were investigating Marinakis and three of his associates on claims they set up a criminal organization that financed the trafficking and sale of narcotics. Marinakis also denies these charges. His potential connection to the Noor One, if it is proved out in court, would mean that one of Greece’s most powerful men may have climbed to global prominence on the back of a titanic heroin deal. And if he had been in on the ground-floor planning for the Noor One deal, he managed to profit off the Noor One where so many others lost their fortunes or lives.

Marinakis’s alleged connection also invited the question of what he may have done over the years to quash evidence of his involvement. “Are any of the witnesses to Marinakis and the Noor One still alive?” asked the leader of a surging populist party in Greece’s Parliament in November 2019. The same month, a satirical news site ran the headline: “WITNESSES ARE GETTING THEMSELVES KILLED TO FRAME INNOCENT SHIPOWNER.”?

In a Piraeus courtroom, over the course of three years and hundreds of hours of testimony and cross-examination, hardly a witness or prosecutor or judge had ever spoken Marinakis’s name aloud. But outside the slow-moving legal inquiry into the Noor One deal, a new, even more damning story was told about Greece. A decade of austerity had just gutted the nation’s gross domestic product by a third and wreaked financial havoc on its working class. But its shipping magnates—Marinakis foremost among them—had just reaped greater profits than ever. This windfall came their way thanks to legislation passed under Greece’s 1967–74 military dictatorship that rewarded the country’s shipowners with minimal tax rates, and thanks to a political class that failed to punish them when, even at the height of the financial crisis, they continued to whisk those earnings offshore.

At no point during the last six years of open speculation into Marinakis’s connections to the Noor One has he suffered any sort of significant financial hit. On the contrary, his power and influence have only continued to grow—and in such a way as to make any lasting legal reckoning improbable. Inside Greece, Marinakis’s capital has proved too vast, and his connections to its political scions too entrenched, to hinder the cornering off of his empire. Outside Greece, it became difficult to believe that a man with enough credibility to buy soccer teams and oil tankers seemingly at will could ever be connected to the world of men like Zindashti.

At the center of Marinakis’s alleged connection to the Noor One operation is Aimilios Kotsonis, who had been employed as an executive at Marinakis’s soccer club, Olympiacos, within months of the tanker leaving Dubai. In August 2016, Kotsonis received a suspended 10-year prison sentence for having set up a Sharjah, UAE, front company in 2013 to absorb potential drug profits.* From the witness stand, Kotsonis identified himself as “Marinakis’s man in Dubai” and testified that Marinakis had been bankrolling his various ventures in the UAE.

The next link was Yiannousakis. Marinakis has never confirmed or denied knowing the man who now sits in prison for life on drug trafficking charges. But according to Yiannousakis, they were business partners. Yiannousakis claims that Marinakis came to visit him in Dubai the summer before the Noor One left for Greece; they convened at the Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai, together with the oil sheiks to whom Yiannousakis and Mohammed Diesel were selling contraband fuel. (Marinakis has never commented on whether this meeting happened—and hasn’t been compelled to offer testimony, in the absence of an official court case against him.)

Around the time of that alleged meeting, Greek investigators learned, Marinakis began wiring large sums of cash to Yiannousakis. In 2017, in a rare gesture of transparency, authorities in Dubai handed over the financial accounts of Yiannousakis’s Sharjah-registered oil agency to Greek prosecutors. They showed that in 2013 two transactions shifted nearly $1 million from Marinakis’s shipping firm to Yiannousakis’s brokerage. That same summer, a bunkering corporation in the same building as Marinakis’s shipping company, and whose legal representative was his cousin, dropped another $400,000 into Yiannousakis’s Dubai account. Months later, Marinakis’s personal lawyer—the general secretary of his shipping company, and the legal representative of two firms that had injected an additional $200,000 into Yiannousakis’s Dubai accounts—helped arrange the latter’s acquisition of the Noor One.

As evidence of these meetings and major cash infusions came in, an obvious question presented itself. If Marinakis knew Kotsonis and Yiannousakis, the two Greeks who seemed poised to profit most from the Noor One operation, did he also know about the operation itself?

A potential answer came from an entirely separate investigation. In May 2012, Greek intelligence services oversaw a three-month wiretapping of Greece’s soccer club owners and managers to collect evidence for the state’s investigation into alleged match-fixing. Marinakis was swept up in the surveillance net—as was a phone registered to Fataul Haque, the Pakistani identity Marinakis uses for some of his communications. (Spoken aloud, Fataul sounds like “he eats everything” in Greek.)

In 2016, a police officer tasked with transcribing hundreds of hours of these conversations and text messages caught something remarkable: In a random three-month window two years before the Noor One’s departure from Dubai, Marinakis repeatedly discussed the tanker and a big project then in the works.

In May 2012, the month Yiannousakis acquired the Noor One, Marinakis received a text from Kotsonis, his man in Dubai, explaining that a boat was ready, and that all Kotsonis needed was a “green light” to “get this thing started.”

Get what thing started? Over the ensuing months, Marinakis’s surveilled conversations were littered with cryptic references to “Iranian fishermen,” “a little job,” “a big company over there.” “Me with all this stuff.… Careful. I don’t want to be caught up in such things at all,” he told Kotsonis at one point. “This guy hasn’t passed his test up ’til now,” he informed an unidentified speaker at a later point. “We need guys who deliver when the weather’s bad.”?

In July 2016, 17 of the 33 defendants in the Noor One trial were acquitted on grounds that they had no idea the tanker was trafficking heroin. But the evidence collected over the past two years—the cash infusions, the meetings in Dubai, and the phone calls referencing big future plans—was enough to put a new question front and center. Why had Evangelos Marinakis taken such interest in Yiannousakis and his contraband ship??

In March 2018, the Piraeus prosecutor’s office launched an investigation against Marinakis and three of his associates, for allegedly running a criminal organization that bought, trafficked, and sold narcotics. Throughout the inquiry, Marinakis has denied any links to drug trafficking and claimed in a statement posted on his personal website that the allegations against him were politically motivated. “Members of the governing coalition have persistently targeted me,” he said.?

That investigation remains ongoing. Meanwhile, five of the men imprisoned in the 2016 trial are appealing their verdicts. Among them is Yiannousakis. To many observers in Greece, Yiannousakis’s appeal is what the country has been waiting six years for. If he was a front man, if he was working for someone more powerful, now is his time to start talking.

For security purposes, these new trials are held in the women’s quarters of Greece’s largest prison, which occupies a craggy mountainside overlooking Piraeus’s cemented coastlines. Over the last three years, as the Noor One’s murder toll ran into double digits and rumors of a more powerful financier churned, the gaggle of journalists who once covered the case has dwindled to a handful. It’s not unusual for Greek oligarchs to mitigate bad press coverage by purchasing a well-placed media outlet; in 2017, Marinakis bought two newspapers and a TV station. That year, as opinion polls concerning the upcoming parliamentary elections swung evermore in Mitsotakis’s favor, most Athenian dailies and TV stations relaxed their previously obsessive coverage of all things Noor One.

While the investigation against Marinakis, and the public furor surrounding it, have lapsed into something of a state of suspended animation, the machinery of Yiannousakis’s appeal grinds slowly on. Twice a month, the former oil broker struts down a Korydallos Prison hallway that is spattered with dog shit, into a bare courtroom mounted with an icon of Jesus on the cross. He wears a pair of aviator sunglasses and moves in a cloud of cologne. His double-breasted blazer rests over a banker’s collar. From his left hand, below a fat gold watch, purple worry beads protrude through his knuckles. Patches of his hair have fallen out.

Yiannousakis is in solitary confinement at Korydallos after stints in prisons across Greece. At all his prior stops in the system, he claims, other inmates have made attempts on his life. One such assailant “told me he’d slit my throat for giving up names,” Yiannousakis told me, referring to a knife wound he took a year earlier to the hip. In October 2017, Yiannousakis was temporarily admitted to Dafni psychiatric hospital, where he attempted to kill himself by smashing a bed plank into his forehead. At a September 16 hearing for his appeal, he entered the courtroom and sat alone in the back, as he has over the five-year course of the case.

In 2018, after he’d begun serving his life sentence, Yiannousakis didn’t just start offering up new details about the Noor One; he told an entirely new story. Contacts in jail had put him in possession of two cell phones and a direct line to Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, leader of the Syriza party’s right-wing Independent Greeks coalition partner, and a man who has never made any secret of his enmity toward Marinakis. Unaware that he was being recorded, during an interview with a Greek journalist, Yiannousakis swiftly upended everything that prosecutors believed they knew about the Noor One. He had never trafficked two tons of heroin into Europe, he said; there had been three.?

If true, the revelation did a lot more than make the biggest known shipment of heroin in Europe’s history even bigger. It raised the prospect that €70 million worth of drugs had been successfully delivered somewhere. Far from being a bust, the Noor One had profited someone. And according to Yiannousakis, that person was Marinakis. The place to look, he maintained, was Crete. As the Noor One was approaching the island on its way to Elefsina, he said, a smaller vessel had swung past it, picked up a ton of its heroin, then went up the Adriatic toward ports near Serbia. This ton belonged to Marinakis personally, Yiannousakis claimed.

As with so much of what Yiannousakis has said over the last six years, there were plenty of reasons to doubt this latest sensational allegation. Why hadn’t any of the Noor One’s crew ever mentioned handing heroin off to another ship? Yiannousakis pointed to two defendants who had died in prison: Of course their surviving colleagues hadn’t come forward with information to invite further retribution.

There were additional reasons to take his claims seriously. Witnesses interrogated in Istanbul years earlier had baffled authorities by also insisting that three—not two—tons of heroin had been trafficked into Europe, according to Turkish police documents unearthed by a journalist who asked not to be named. And inside the Noor One itself, a month after authorities claimed it had been searched, a handwritten note had been found referencing a curiously similar transaction to the one revealed by Yiannousakis. A white sheet of a paper dated May 26, 2014—a day when the Noor One was in the Suez Canal—reads: “Mister Giannousakis, I am waiting 450kg of powder. Please give us a date and a meeting point in South Crete. Please contact us. Master Jack.” Below the text, which is loopy but precise, there is the stamp of a ship called the Seychelles Prelude.

“The true owners of the Noor One are being hidden,” Katsoulis repeated three times in courtroom testimony.

Through his newspapers, Marinakis has countered that the Seychelles Prelude note is a forgery, citing the fact that the vessel was sailing near Liverpool at the time of the supposed transaction. But if the note is indeed a forgery, another fraught conundrum presents itself: Why was the fake document planted in the Noor One at all? On the face of things, it’s reasonable to infer that someone with knowledge of the tanker’s journey and cargo, weeks after Yiannousakis had already been arrested on drug trafficking charges, was attempting to yoke the entire heroin operation around his neck through a note packed with ludicrously incriminating information.

But the most intriguing piece of the puzzle in light of Yiannousakis’s new story was an episode at the Athens airport. Three months after the Noor One had reached Elefsina, the managing director of Marinakis’s shipping company flew from Fujairah City to Athens. Upon arrival, he was asked to open his suitcase. His luggage contained €622,000 in 500-bill notes.

Marinakis has told investigators that the cash came from a recalled wire transfer; legal authorities insist that it’s clear evidence of a money-laundering transaction. The dispute is at the heart of the ongoing investigation in Piraeus.

Meanwhile, the long-running Turkish inquiry into the Noor One has converged on the Greek case. Just months after he’d shocked the country with his new story, Yiannousakis mysteriously recanted it. Marinakis had nothing to do with the Noor One, he rushed to explain. The report of a third ton of heroin successfully trafficked through the Balkans had been a fabrication. And the culprit behind the whole affair was not Marinakis but Zindashti—the Iranian Kurd allegedly behind the assassinations of the Noor One’s other backers. As a result, in spring 2018 Athens issued a warrant for Zindashti’s arrest.

Across the Aegean, Turkish authorities appeared to comply. Early one morning that April, police ambushed Zindashti’s Istanbul villa, arresting him and nine others—four current or former police officers among them. The next Sunday, Marinakis publicly pronounced his innocence. “The arrest of Zindashti is a major blow to a game of many years,” one of his newspapers, To Vima, claimed in a bombastic English-language account.

This was self-satisfaction masquerading as vindication. Turkish prosecutors had never made any claim that Zindashti was the mastermind behind the Noor One. He was arrested for allegedly murdering the lawyer of a murdered Noor One funder. Either way, the Turkish action ultimately proved to be another dead end in the case. Zindashti spent less than six months in prison—and within hours of his release, he’d vanished from police observation.

Zindashti’s extensive criminal résumé counted for less, in the grand scheme of things, than his apparent ties to the inner circles of Turkish political power. Six months after his bizarre early release from prison, Zindashti’s face was plastered across the front page of the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet; he’d been photographed out to dinner with one of Erdo?an’s closest advisers, as well as a senior member of his party.

Less than a month after the photo’s publication, Ilhan Üngan, one of the last living Noor One funders, was shot twice in the head while walking along Istanbul’s seafront, weeks after his brother had told a state prosecutor that Zindashti would send gunmen after them. Three arrests followed; Zindashti was not among them. What had seemed a story about Ankara’s inability to stop a vendetta may just be something else: a window into the connections sluicing between Turkey’s authoritarian state and the Mediterranean criminal underworld.

Will the Noor One tell a similar story about Greece? The investigation into Marinakis might yield an answer—but in the meantime, the case has already morphed into a proxy conflict within the Greek political system.

For those on the left, Marinakis and the Noor One seemed to represent everything that they had voted Syriza into power in 2015 to destroy: above all, the interlocking directorates of power that conjoin political dynasties and oligarchic capital. Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, has continually played on developments in the case to bolster his following, in and out of power. In early 2019, when a photograph of then-Prime Minister Tsipras lounging on a yacht served as campaign-season ammunition for now-Prime Minister Mitsotakis, Tsipras fired back: “At least I wasn’t the one who was aboard Marinakis’s yacht—or aboard the Noor One. Nor is my best man someone who is awaiting trial for smuggling a couple tons of heroin.” (Tsipras was, as it happens, not speaking accurately: Marinakis is not awaiting trial but rather under state investigation; state prosecutors will only decide about launching a formal trial against the oligarch at the end of the inquiry.)?

For the sitting government’s antagonists on the right, meanwhile, the story surrounding the Noor One was a signature example of how Tsipras’s coalition would stop at nothing to weaponize Greece’s justice system against its enemies. Over the course of 2017, Defense Minister Kammenos delivered one parliamentary rant after another about the tanker, rattling off the names of the companies that had put cash into Yiannousakis’s accounts. The next summer, Kammenos sparked another media furor when he was photographed in Monaco alongside the prosecutor who had launched the investigation into Marinakis.

What about Marinakis himself? He denies any connection to the Noor One whatsoever. He likens himself instead to Socrates—a wise man condemned by a state that fails to appreciate his services. “In Greece’s long history one can find fitting role models,” he told a crowd at a ceremony in March 2019 to dedicate a statue of a Greek revolutionary. “Through its travails over the centuries, light always wins over dark and true heroes and benefactors finally take their rightful place in our history.”

Marinakis declined to be interviewed for this article. But Zindashti was willing to talk. For months, he wrote me emails from an undisclosed Middle Eastern country about his life, his friend Mohammed Diesel, and what he knew about the ship whose arrival on Greek shores, he insists, led to the murder of his daughter.

Zindashti never mentioned heroin trafficking or the murders he’s alleged to have ordered. But he was adamant about one thing: Yiannousakis, whom Zindashti only ever knew by the nickname “Makis,” wasn’t acting alone. Behind him was a Greek his friend Diesel called “Shishko”—Turkish for “fatso.”

“I used to hear often the name of Shishko when Shahid Ahmet [Diesel] and Mekish [Yiannousakis] were talking,” Zindashti told me. Zindashti said he met Shishko once, in March or April 2014, in the lobby of Dubai’s Hilton Jumeirah. It was a meeting about the Noor One, scheduled to depart weeks later. Yiannousakis confirmed this meeting for me, including the date when Zindashti said it happened, and its locale. However, Yiannousakis claimed not to know anyone who went by the name Shishko.

I sent Zindashti numerous images of large Greeks with beards, asking him to confirm if any depicted the man he knew as Shish­ko. The photo he sent back was the one of Marinakis. “I only remember him because he was really fat otherwise if he would be a normal man he probably wouldn’t get my attention,” he said. “I repeat, he was REALLY FAT.”?

Late last summer, I visited the Noor One. It can still be found in Elefsina, meters from where it came to rest six years and 17 deaths ago. It slumbers down an unlit dirt road in a lonely bay. The slip where the ship is now located is flanked on one side by cement stacks belching white smog; on the other is the tumbledown sanctuary where the ancient Athenians once celebrated their religious mystery rites. The march of rust and the lap of the sea are slowly eating away at its hull; the Noor One lists into the water, as though doing its best to disappear from sight entirely. It’s been recently put up for auction, with an asking price of €60,000—less than what it would fetch as scrap metal at the going rate. There are no buyers.