In the summer of 2019, Claudio Bozzo, chief operating officer of MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co, flew 4,000 miles from Geneva to Washington DC, for a meeting with US Customs and Border Protection. He’d been sent by MSC’s owner, a secretive 82-year-old billionaire named Gianluigi Aponte, to contain a crisis. A few months earlier, more than 100 agents had boarded one of MSC’s ships, the Gayane, as it slid into the Port of Philadelphia for what was supposed to be a quick stop on its way to Rotterdam.