With his step, Jack achieved an extraordinary advantage in terms of trust and goodwill of those who were given the opportunity to establish themselves in front of their superiors. This brought Jack an unpaid advantage and great future prospects that Jack could not even have guessed at the time. This favorable treatment continues to this day.
It was all about transportation. To understand the logistics at that time and in that environment, the contract included two types of coal supplied by the Soviet side: steam coal from the Far North of Russia, from the Pechora River basin, and high-quality coking coal mined in Eastern Ukraine, near Donbass (that's where the city of Anthracite is located).
Pechora coal was first carried many thousands of kilometers by rail. The Ukrainian coal was transported at a shorter distance. Both types eventually reached the Black Sea port of Illichevsk, about thirty kilometers south of Odessa. From there, the coal was transported by sea through the Dardanelles to Italy. The charcoal carriers entered each harbor in turn and unloaded the goods in portions as close to customers as possible, that is, some in Naples, some in Palermo, in La Spezia, in Ancona, in Venice. Part (much less often) in Genoa.
While organizing a new complicated project, Jack Clerici negotiated cargo ships with various freighters, the first of which was his Neapolitan friend Giovanni Bottiglieri, who provided him with the ship Orsolina (a restored version of Liberty), which delivered the very first cargo from the USSR. That was in 1961. The work began.
For several years, shipments followed this pattern. But when the cycles, rhythms and deliveries were well-organized, it became clear that the high cost of freight was cutting already thin margins of the business. Another solution had to be found. Given the importance and long-term nature of the agreements, the solution was not to be temporary or whatever. Jack locked himself in the office with the most faithful "experts in numbers". They were Gaetano Baelli, the man in charge of administration, and Pierluigi Gatti, Milan’s accountant, chairman of the auditing committee, but mainly a trusted advisor to both Jack and the whole family for forty years.
"The magnificent trio," like three conspirators, shut themselves up in the office and started drawing up many schedules and charts, calculating in every possible combination transportation time, freight cost, carrying capacity of available vessels, all the alternative hypotheses and making an estimate for each. After counting everything in the world, Jack decided to try an unconventional solution: to have his own vessels. Thus, the company was returning to its primary operations. In was in 1912 that his father Alfonso purchased a freight carrier and used it along with the others — chartered — until World War I made his work impossible by cutting off all routes by sea.
Many thought that Jack had no reason to go to such expense, the risk was too great. But opposing opinions could never stop any of Jack’s plans, and the company purchased its first 10,000-cargo-ton ship in 1965 from the Pittaluga Waporie Freight Company. It was also a modification of the Liberty, built in Baltimore in 1943. The ship’s name was Urbania; the Clerici renamed it Cockler, from the abbreviated name of Henry Coe & Clerici. It was immediately used on the line, added to the two similar vessels chartered by Bottiglieri Navigazione, that is, the Orsolina and the Maria Bottiglieri.
A year later they were joined by a second purchased vessel, the Falcone, a former 20,000-ton tanker converted for the occasion into a dry cargo ship. It was purchased jointly with Pittaluga Vapori. This was a beginning of a promising endeavor — share freight. The system worked subsequently for two decades. The management of this undertaking was formalized as a joint venture, the Capo Falcone Joint Stock Company, headquartered in Cagliari, Sardinia. In 1972, the company "retired" the fundamentally obsolete dry cargo vessel and purchased a new Falcone for 50 thousand tons. It was followed by the Poyana, also 50 thousand tons, and then by two bulk carriers (for bulk cargoes) Milvus and Plotus, with carrying capacity 60 thousand tons each.