The Smuggler: Nury Televaldi

Recently, I met with a smuggler by the name of Nury Televaldi at a crowded sidewalk café in Lhasa, Tibet. Televaldi was a smuggler of drugs, jewels, people and other things. The outbreak completely changed the way of things tremendously. Televaldi began to get offers from people to help them flee from their cities. At this point he wasn't exactly questioning what they were fleeing from, but he did have an idea, it was an outbreak in their area and they did not want to get infected. He even says that they had a small outbreak in his former city, Kashi. He says that the government did not like this smuggling of people and put harder regulations on traveling and immigration. He says that the crackdown wasn't very efficient and actually made him pretty successful. He talked about how he used air travel to smuggle people, but usually the people were wealthy and could afford it. I asked him about the infected and being discovered on an airplane. He told me that he didn't let people fly unless they were uninfected or if they showed the mild signs of infection, otherwise they would have been caught. He begins to tell me a brief story about a businessman and his wife. He got them into Paris by air, but the man was infected and he told his wife to leave him inside the hotel room. The wife vanished along with someone else. He goes on and talks about people that vanish. He says they usually go with family and friends but for those who don't, they usually end up in the slums of wherever they are. I asked him if they created a myth about a cure for the infection in the west just to earn money. He denies it. We continue to talk a little bit about air smuggling and how they tightened restrictions in some countries after Flight 575. He explained how he snuck into different countries without resistance because he found loopholes in the system. I asked him if he saw many infected while smuggling and he said during the beginning he didn't, but eventually he began to. He said that they weren't very dangerous because they were already gagged and tied down. I usually just took their money and sent them on their way. He then remarked something about sea smuggling and how dangerous and difficult was. He said the problems of sea smuggling were that some infected could infect all of the other people on the ship. The sea smugglers however came up with some solutions and usually they either dumped the infected overboard in the middle of the ocean or dumped them on a deserted part of coast. He says how lucky he was that he never had to deal with that. He then tells me about a wealthy man who was transporting many infected in the back of a trailer to Kyrgyzstan. I wish I would have talked to him more about the infected he came in contact with, as well as talking about some more experiences of smuggling.