The recent film Rosario has as one of its themes the Afro-Cuban religion known as palo mayombé, or palo for short. There was a time when I handled cases in Detroit; one of them involved a practitioner of palo. Every Miamian knows of santería and its struggle with local laws, “Pastor” Ernesto Pichardo’s journey to the Supreme Court and the seven syncretized gods known as orishas. But not everyone knows palo, the black to santería’s white. Fewer still know of the nganga.
A palero, that is, a practitoner, exhumes corpses and puts the beribboned bones into a black cauldron called an nganga. In this way, he is able to call on the spirits of the dead to do his bidding. The ground-up corpse bones are made into a powder used in these dark rituals.
This is a true story, a selection from Public Offender, a recounting of my time as a criminal defense lawyer in Miami. The owner-operator of a semitrailer was arrested after DEA agents found ten kilos of cocaine in a storage locker offloaded from his truck. It was a simple case until the prosecutors in Detroit superseded, that is, expanded the indictment to include the global Bank of Credit Commerce International scandal. A Hollywood movie focused on the Tampa branch of the case followed.
Years later, due to a connection that is still difficult to describe, I was asked to assist in writing an expert legal opinion which sought to explain how BCCI was able to do business in Saudi Arabia without a banking license and how it counted among its account holders several members of the royal family at a time when foreign bank operations were strictly prohibited by the Saudi Central Bank.
The answer was simple: these laws were “cosmetic.”
BCCI has nothing to do with the four AM events which took place on the federal courthouse steps on Lafayette Street in Detroit. It is said that the Prophet of Islam found statues of the orishas inside the Qaaba, broke them up and threw them out. I have found no Islamic mention of palo.