Four Venezuelans landed on May 30, 2019, in Grand Cayman, the largest of the Cayman Islands, carrying a shipment of gold valued at nearly four million dollars. They declared the cargo they had in the aircraft registered as YV2317, but not the “4 packages [containing $135,000] hidden in the plane’s interior paneling,” which were only discovered after an inspection by the authorities.
This oversight was enough for an investigation to be opened on the island involving all individuals on board. Although they were acquitted a year later, the judicial file—now obtained after nearly six months of searching through public records, transparency mechanisms, and information access laws in various countries—reveals clues, names, and connections linked to networks that have been increasingly involved in the illicit gold trafficking from Venezuela.
According to the accusation from Cayman Islands Public Ministry director Patrick Moran, messages, conversations, and traces were found on the phones of the pilots and passengers. This includes a photo on the device of Daniel Aguilar Feriozzi, a young man who was then 26 years old, who initially claimed ownership of the shipment due to inheritance. The image featured him alongside Marco Antonio Flores Moreno, a major player in the illegal gold trade in southern Bolívar state.
George Town
The aircraft left Venezuela on May 28, 2019, and arrived two days later in the Cayman Islands. This journey began in Puerto Ordaz, continued to Margarita Island, and concluded in George Town, the main city of Grand Cayman, with a stop in Punta Cana.
During interrogations, the crew confessed that they had met with Flores at this tourist center in the Dominican Republic, where “he had given them 4 bags of gold.” As if that revelation wasn’t enough, records from Owen Roberts International Airport, near George Town, confirm that Flores had landed there just two weeks earlier, on May 16, 2019, aboard the same aircraft, but in a previous flight that brought, according to those records, three bags containing 107 gold doré bars, valued at over two million dollars.
In both flights, they had to amend the declarations and invoices due to discrepancies between the declared amount of gold and the physical amount presented. Something didn’t add up even for the participants. “Some bars fell off the plane,” read texts in the Venezuelan group chats. This caught the attention of the Cayman Islands authorities, who alerted their British counterparts to intercept the Venezuelan gold, which had continued to its destination at London Heathrow Airport, ultimately heading to Switzerland.
Both flights, just two weeks apart, demonstrated the role that the Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory in the northwestern Caribbean, was assuming as a distribution hub for Venezuelan blood gold to international markets.
Lugano
The invoice chain for the shipment indicates that the gold left the Cayman Islands bound for Switzerland, registered under the Curaçao-based company Cupremeco, using the transportation and logistics services of a local firm. The latter, Byzantium International Ltd, was supposed to deliver the goods to the city of Lugano, in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, where the intermediary PMS (Precious Metals Services) is located, one of the agents on the official supplier list of Argor-Heraeus, the largest refinery in the world, which is only 20 kilometers away.
What the invoices did not mention was that the gold originated in Venezuela. This omission wasn’t unusual; according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Venezuela exports 75 tons of precious minerals annually, a figure exceeding Brazilian production (70 tons in 2024), but only 20% leaves the country via legal routes and mechanisms. The rest is controlled by a tangled web of opaque mafias that have taken hold in the country’s south, where the Orinoquia and Amazon overlap, including various irregular groups, including the Colombian guerrilla. The encroachment into the Guayanese jungle has even reinstated slavery practices victimizing indigenous ethnicities.
As few cases have documented, Marco Flores is involved in the route through the Cayman Islands. He is the same Marco Flores who was charged and sought by Brazil’s legal system in the so-called Hesperides Operation; the same one who was imprisoned in Venezuela for several months due to the Manos de Metal Operation. Despite this, he possesses the privilege and connections to later secure, in 2022, a gasoline station concession from Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Santa Elena de Uairén, on the southern border of Bolívar state with Brazil’s Roraima state.
Flores is no novice in these matters. Legal documents from Brazil, corresponding to case number 0000491-85.2019.4.01.4200 examined in the 4th Federal Criminal Court of Boa Vista, capital of Roraima, identify him as one of the ringleaders of binational smuggling. He also appears as an executive of USA D&D International INC, among other Florida companies. Thus, he is one of the lords of illegal precious minerals trade in Venezuela, and his name is ensconced in the blood gold saga.
On May 16, 2019, he reappeared in official documents. He then arrived in the Cayman Islands aboard the same aircraft YV2317 with 107 bars, valued at over two million dollars, and five other individuals, including Roger Rafael Rosas Ruiz, director of the Italo-Venezuelan Center of Guayana, and Wilson Jesús Aponte Marcano, “the casino man,” as referred to in the Cayman interrogations, for being well-known in the gambling underworld. The aircraft was owned by Airworld Corporation, a company registered in Caracas with the Capital District and Miranda State Registry under the name of his son, who shares the same name, Wilson Javier Aponte Gómez. A daughter of Aponte, Gabriela Aponte Gómez, also signed emails on behalf of Cupremeco, the previously mentioned Curaçao company.
Guayana
For years, Aponte owned the slot machines at the iconic Bingo de Las Mercedes, in southeastern Caracas, as recorded by the National Casinos Commission, from which he also obtained licenses to operate gambling halls in the southern region of the country. One such venue was the gaming room at Roraima Inn, a four-star hotel among the most renowned in Ciudad Guayana, the industrial and commercial hub of Bolívar state. Aponte was noted as the owner of the hall, alongside relatives like his brother, Javier Gregorio Aponte Marcano—the sole owner at present, according to the paperwork—and a cousin named Annasilia del Carmen Feriozzi Aponte, mother of Daniel Aguilar Feriozzi, the young man arrested, prosecuted, and acquitted in the Cayman Islands.
Wilson Aponte has managed several casinos in Venezuela, including the one at Hotel Roraima Inn in Puerto Ordaz. Credit: Instagram / casinororaima_
However, the fact that Marco Flores’s name stands out in this convoluted chain—along with those of the other involved Venezuelans—doesn’t mean that the connections hinted at by the judicial case in the Cayman Islands end with them. The case details reveal the hinge between local Guayana mafias and global trafficking networks.
Pulling at the thread reveals that the Curaçao-based company Cupremeco, which shipped the gold from the Cayman Islands, is owned by Italian Mario Pataro, another familiar face in the black market for minerals and linked to companies involved in money laundering. Along with his brothers, Francesco and Luciano, Mario Pataro was a shareholder in Aurea Trading International and Universe Gold, two companies involved in the 1994 Unigold Operation, which brought together authorities from Italy, Colombia, and Panama to uncover and dismantle sophisticated schemes by the Cali Cartel, which at the time had a complex structure to exchange cocaine for gold without needing to register banking transactions or mineral exports.
Miami
In 2016, Pataro had already sent illegal gold through Marco Flores’s companies. Two decades after being investigated for money laundering with Colombian cartels, and just three years prior to the Cayman Islands case, records show he sent Venezuelan gold to Switzerland from Curaçao.
Invoices and internal accounting records from Cupremeco, the Curaçao-based intermediary, reveal deposits of at least $45 million between 2017 and 2019 for American firms such as Moonlight Investments INC, USA D&D International INC, and Dazzling Eagle Holdings Limited, through which Marco Flores has passed, along with other partners. Among these operations stands out a file of seven deposits, obtained for this investigation, indicating that this firm associated with Flores received, between February and August 2016, transfers topping $2.8 million into a Bank of America account in Miami, from a Commerzbank agency in Lugano, Switzerland, instructed by the already mentioned PMS (Precious Metals Services). All transfers noted that it was an order from Cupremeco (“Order of Cupremeco NV – Curacao”).
Years later, the same individuals appeared in the Cayman Islands with a new shipment originally presented by a Dominican company called Inversiones Valkaria S.R.L., behind which are a couple named Fernández, Pablo and Sabrina, linked to Héctor Castellón, a US resident and partner in some of Mario Pataro’s businesses, who, in 2021, explained the ins and outs of these and other plunders in a Florida federal court.
“For different people to open large accounts at various refineries, a lot of paperwork is needed… So we decided to take another route. We decided to go through Mario [Pataro], and Mario does it through another company that delivers to Argor in Switzerland, for example,” Castellón testified before the Circuit Court Number 11 of Miami-Dade County, where he was called as a witness in the divorce proceedings of his partner, Mario Pataro.
What started as a dispute over asset separation and possible monetary compensation for Pataro’s spouse escalated into a lawsuit over organized crime, registered as Pataro vs. Castellón (number 1:22cv20866). Based on the RICO Act (an acronym for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), this legal action led to the exposure of a chain of operations involving shipments of Venezuelan gold. During the trial hearings, it was suggested that these maneuvers might have generated over $3 billion in profits.
This is how blood gold is legalized, and thus the gold from Guayana ended up trapped in the UK.
Londres
In June 2019, as soon as the precious gold shipment landed in London, British authorities confiscated it. Investigations quickly related this shipment to drug trafficking.
“Our investigation showed that this shipment was linked to drug cartels operating from South America, but we were able to prevent it from reaching its final destination thanks to established ties with overseas partners,” declared on March 21, 2023, by the British National Crime Agency (NCA), through Commander Andy Noyes. “Criminals are drawn to gold as a means of moving drug money due to its high value in relatively small quantities,” he concluded.
Since then, UK law enforcement agencies have remained tight-lipped about the case. Only in 2023 did it come to light that, after negotiating an agreement, they obtained a civil recovery order for over 80% of the treasure. “The remaining 20% will be returned to companies with financial interests in the gold,” they stated in a statement that did not specify whom they referred to. Although the NCA did not respond to a request for information regarding this return, Cayman Islands documents reveal that, behind the scenes, four companies were claiming the gold in the High Court of London, through a boutique law firm called Preiskel & Co LLP.
These include the Panamanian Daguiron S.A. and three others from Florida, such as the already mentioned Moonlight Investments Inc, USA D&D International Inc, and M&P Mining Equipment Supplies Inc, whose boards of directors feature Venezuelans like Mario Oswaldo Spagnolo, whose various accounts confirm to be Marco Flores’s father-in-law.
Neither Flores nor Pataro responded to multiple requests to clarify their roles in this scheme. Likewise, it wasn’t possible to obtain answers from Wilson Aponte in Guayana or Marco Briccola in Switzerland, the owner of PMS, the last link that left the gold at the refinery. Even executives from Argor-Heraeus were unresponsive to interview requests aimed at helping understand how they have received, laundered, and smelted blood gold, despite boasting on their website about having clear controls and policies regarding transparency, which “do not tolerate direct or indirect support to non-state armed groups,” nor “allow profit from, contribute to, assist, or facilitate torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment and forced labor.”
Gold is smelted, responsibilities are not. Yet a twist ended with the same gold traffickers from Venezuela, passing through the Cayman Islands and with a frustrated destination in Switzerland, claiming the seized loot in the UK.