Ciudad del Este ("City of the East") is an essential stopping point on any tour of the world's most infamous places. Built by the late Paraguayan dictator General Alfredo Stroessner on the Paraná River—which runs through the dense jungles of the Triple Frontera border region shared by Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina—it is the capital of the illegal businesses on which Paraguay thrives. The city's reputation for corruption and violence is derived from its place as the center of smuggling operations that send electronics, cigarettes, tires, stolen cars, pirated DVDs, marijuana, cocaine, and weapons across South America. A large amount of the illicit commerce on which Ciudad del Este depends moves through the hands of a tight-knit Lebanese Shiite community of approximately 30,000 people who live and work on both sides of the Brazilian and Paraguayan border and send millions of dollars home to Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon, leading to allegations that the city supports what one former U.S. Treasury Department official has described as "a rich marriage of drugs and terror." I was eager to witness this union firsthand, but also glad that I would not be going there alone.
"Everything illegal goes on in Paraguay. It's heaven on earth," says Uncle Myron, my favorite travel companion, as we get ready to board our connecting flight to Ciudad del Este. In his blue checked shirt, tan slacks, and oversize dark aviator glasses, he looks more like a Miami Beach retiree than a world-class operator. The soft woolen cap that obscures the upper part of his face is made by Borsalino. He has run large-scale gambling operations in New York City, the backcountry of Nigeria, and nearly every country in South America, and he knows the dark places of your hometown better than you do.
Myron's father was a famous gangster from the old days in Newark, an associate of Meyer Lansky, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, Genovese family boss Gerry Catena, and Abner "Longy" Zwillman, the powerful Jewish mob boss allied with Murder Incorporated. When he died of a heart attack in 1963, Myron's father left his younger son the family slot-machine business and a strong desire to follow his father into a shadowy, sometimes violent world that worked on the basis of handshakes and trust. In the 1980s, Myron was the slot-machine king of New York City, helping to put hundreds of thousands of illegal slot machines on the streets before he was convicted on charges of interstate transportation of gambling machines, money laundering, and copyright violation and remanded for two years to the federal penitentiary at Allenwood, Pennsylvania.
Myron's lifelong closeness to the destructive and terrifying brutality that can be part of his profession is balanced by his natural curiosity about people and his affection for the pavement artists, hard-luck cases, and other stray characters he collects with the promiscuity of a Balzac or a Dickens. He speaks bits and pieces of nine languages, his two favorites being Spanish and Yiddish. His favorite saying in Spanish is "El diablo sabe mas por viejo que por diablo"—"The devil knows more because he's old than because he's the devil." A Yiddish maxim he often quotes is "Ziss greena tzu arein az vy aroys gekimmen"—"It's easier to go into something than to get out of it." A fistful of gold amulets and charms jangles around his neck, including the Hebrew letters for chai (meaning "life" and also signifying luck), and the Hamsa (a hand-shaped amulet that offers protection from the evil eye).
