Cocaine Confidential

by Clarkson, Wensley

  Today, Hans describes his ‘job’ as: ‘Probably the nearest you could get to a safe career in this industry. Really, it’s true. I run a tight ship in every sense of the word and those around me, including the Colombians, know that my word is my bond. They don’t hassle me because I deliver everything on time and nothing ever goes missing.’

  Back in the small coastal village where Hans lives with his new wife and baby, neighbours know him as a ‘computer geek’ who sold his firm to one of the internet giants. ‘No one here has a clue what I am really involved in and I intend to keep it that way.’ He paused before continuing: ‘This area is ignored by tourists for ten months of the year because of the strong winds and storms that rage through here from the Atlantic. I like the sense of isolation I feel here. There simply aren’t enough people living here fulltime to bother taking an interest in you. It’s perfect.’

  CHAPTER 11

  COSTA DEL SOL

  To many, the Costa del Sol means rolling fields of olive trees, converted fincas and luscious, golden sandy beaches. It’s supposed to be the ideal of what a sunshine holiday resort area should be: lively, bustling, filled with happy-go-lucky folk minding their own business, motivated by a love of the good life and everything that money can buy. But lurking in among the whitewashed haciendas and towering apartment blocks are many of the biggest names in the cocaine underworld. They’re often multimillionaires who describe themselves as ‘businessmen’ and ‘property developers’, although most only deal strictly in cash.

  In the bright sunshine of today’s Costa del Sol it is sometimes difficult to appreciate that this entire area has been developed in less than half most people’s lifetimes. Sleepy coves with crystal clear water have been replaced by overcrowded beach bars featuring spivs, drug dealers and timeshare salesmen and the noise of people and cars seems to dominate the atmosphere at all times of the day and night. No wonder the pace of life here is frenetic and local people are suspicious and unfriendly until they know precisely what it is you want.

  Cocaine is the Costa del Sol’s second biggest industry after tourism. It’s not an easy statistic to handle, is it? Cocaine gangsters and tourism represent the gold rush for this area. And when drug barons spend their millions they help keep legitimate businesses afloat, especially in the thriving coastal resorts.

  Ever shrinking Spanish police recruitment in the region combined with officers’ assignments away from the usual criminal haunts have left the way clear for cocaine dealing, trafficking and consumption to thrive. Statistics from the Costa del Sol make worrying reading: of more than 600 criminal gangs examined, more than half dealt in cocaine, which means the big ‘firms’ are raking in millions of pounds every month.

  * * *

  ‘Fat Stan’ heaved his 22-stone frame up into the driver’s seat of his son’s Range Rover with great difficulty. He was more used to motoring around in his own vintage Roller, once owned by sixties crooner Max Bygraves. Then, as he impatiently checked the time on his gold Rolex, a man holding a gun equipped with a silencer strolled alongside him in the car park of Málaga Costa Del Sol Airport.

  Before ‘Fat Stan’ even had a chance to plead for his life, two shots rang out and his vast, blubbery body slumped against the dashboard. The shooter calmly walked to the nearest elevator and took it down to the arrivals car park without once looking back at the scene of carnage he’d just created.

  ‘Fat Stan’ – who’d once lived in a quiet village outside Dublin – was just one of numerous villains who have turned the Costa del Sol into the cocaine badlands of Europe. The police found his body slumped in the Range Rover only after complaints from air travellers about a swarm of flies inside the vehicle. Twenty-five miles west of the airport lies the community of Puerto Banus, probably the most outrageous example of how cocaine has torn a hole through the heart of Spain. Over the past twenty-five years it’s been home to more cocaine kingpins than anywhere else in the world.

  With a population of 35,000 fulltime residents, Puerto Banus has a disproportionately large number of mock villas with long driveways, immaculate high brick walls, sophisticated closed circuit TV, electronically operated gates and a couple of guard dogs roaming the grounds. One well-known villain called his Rottweilers ‘Brinks’ and ‘Mat’ after his most infamous criminal enterprise – he even had centrally heated kennels specially built for them.

  In the mid-1980s, multi-million-pound cocaine deals took over from security van robberies as the favoured source of income for many veteran UK gangsters who had sought refuge in Spain. As a result, dozens of money launderers and handlers of stolen property turned the Spanish coastline into their number one earner. Even when the UK government finally established a proper extradition treaty between the two countries in 1987, British villains – many who knew nothing could be proved against them in a court of law – stayed on.

  When I recently tried to talk to one cocaine baron and his wife through the electronically operated gates of their Puerto Banus villa, I was greeted by two Dobermanns (I didn’t catch their names) and a few terse words spoken through the crackling intercom as this man’s wife examined my face on the CCTV screen and then charmingly told me to ‘fuck off’.

  Only a few weeks earlier, so I was told, this same criminal had been down at one of his favourite pubs in Estepona port when a rival villain popped in for a pint. He was so infuriated to see the other man that he walked out to his Bentley, pulled a shotgun out of the boot and stomped back into the tavern where he proceeded to pepper the ceiling with pellets.

  Residents on this same criminal street still talk about the day one of his Dobermanns strayed into a neighbour’s garden and a string of angry complaints ensued. He also accosted one Spanish neighbour and accused him of being a ‘nark’ and threatened to ‘bury’ him. He never received any more complaints about the dogs.

  Living in the glorious Spanish sunshine certainly doesn’t guarantee a long and happy life if your business is cocaine, though. Only recently one wealthy car dealer who specialised in selling cars with hard-to-trace Belgian number plates to cocaine gangsters was found shot dead in his black BMW right slap bang in the middle of one of Marbella’s most desirable residential areas. It was rumoured that he’d double-crossed a Colombian after trying to muscle into the cocaine trafficking game.

  * * *

  I first uncovered the shady world of cocaine smuggling some years ago when I was in southern Spain researching a book about British road rage killer and underworld kingpin Kenneth Noye. At the time, I knew little about the so-called Costa del Crime, which runs from Málaga west along the coast past Fuengirola and Marbella to Estepona and beyond. When I tracked down some real-life villains for my book on Noye they painted an extraordinary picture of a society within a society where cocaine criminals and tame police existed together in their own twisted netherworld, operating according to their own rules. Flying into Málaga airport and then turning right at the motorway exit was the equivalent of driving into a vast, sun-soaked cocaine resort.

  Many of the ‘old-school’ British criminals I interviewed for this book switched from robbery to cocaine after hearing about the massive profits from other prisoners as they served out their sentences in the 1970s. They learned how the combined costs of the coca leaves, the chemicals and the cheap labour back in South America added up to less than £1,000 to produce a kilo of 100 per cent pure cocaine, which would be sold out of Colombia for £6,000. Once transported to northern Spain, it would then go on the wholesale market for as much as £60,000 a kilo.

  Moving from wholesaling to retailing guaranteed those astounding profits went even higher. After being cut a number of times by interim dealers to boost the weight and maintain the profit margin, the end product often contained no more than 15–20 per cent actual cocaine. ‘That was the sweetest aspect of all,’ one old-time robber explained to me many years later. ‘You could bash on it and turn a gram into four grams. What a business!’ So when those Brit villains did their sums they realised th
at by selling the coke for £60 a gram, with 1,000 grams to the kilo, all the deals running smoothly, the kilo purchased for £6,000 in Colombia could generate street sales in Europe of at least ten times that amount.

  ‘Finding the right supplier was the key,’ one gangster told me. ‘Without that source, none of it meant anything.’

  Back in the 1980s, the Medellín and Cali cartel men on the Costa del Crime were telling the British villains: ‘Don’t worry, my friend. We can get you all the cocaine you want, if you have the money.’

  The cartel was formed in early 1982 after the Colombian guerrilla movement M-19 (Movimiento 19 de Abril) kidnapped a cocaine tycoon’s sister. In response another group called MAS (Muerte a Secuestradores, Death to Kidnappers) was quickly set up by three rival cocaine barons called Jose Ochoa, Carlos Lehder and Pablo Escobar. Their alliance soon became known as the Medellín cartel. A cartel is a group of people who agree on things like commodity prices. ‘It’s a bit like General Motors, everything’s connected,’ explained one old hand from South America.

  When Colombian President Betancur tried to rid his country of cocaine exporters in 1985 after immense pressure from the Americans, the Medellín cartel simply switched its attention to Europe, which meant focusing on Spain and turning it into their cocaine gateway. Europe would provide a ripe, young market of wealthy upwardly mobile yuppies. Eurotrash and cocaine was as natural a combination as strawberries and cream.

  That’s when some of the ageing British gangsters already in southern Spain approached the cartels offering more security than the predominantly Spanish drug lords who were acting as middlemen for the South Americans at the time. They also offered the Colombians an entrée into the previously untapped UK market, which at that time was supplied with a relatively small amount of cocaine by a number of different gangs.

  Before this, the Colombians had preferred not to supply the British market directly from Spain because they knew that, as foreigners, they would stand out and be asking for trouble if they tried to open shop in the UK. Now they needed British ‘partners’ they could trust, facilitators who knew how to get the stuff into the UK safely and in much larger amounts than had been done in the past.

  For their part, the British villains in southern Spain back in the 1980s knew that once they had the UK end of the cocaine operation properly tied up, money would start pouring in.

  So, at an age when most men were contemplating a life of uninterrupted retirement, a small posse of greying British villains in Spain were chasing a piece of the Europe-wide multi-million-pound cocaine industry based in their backyard. The profits were potentially phenomenal. An investment of £20,000 in a shipment of cocaine would bring a return of £160,000. Usually, four investors worked together to buy 100 kilos at a time.

  At first, some of these Brit gangsters were happy to ‘buy into loads’. That meant making their living from partly financing other people’s deals and having virtually no direct contact with the actual drugs. In order to get the really big money, however, they knew they’d have to get their fingers dirty. They all knew cocaine was easier to transport than any other drug as well as kicking back much bigger profits in the long run.

  The Brits let it be known on the Costa del Sol that they were willing to pay cash upfront. Not long after this, one British vet got a call about a ton of cocaine hidden in a cave on the Costa Brava by a bunch of young wannabe gangsters. This bullish character organised a search party to drive up the coast and locate the drugs, steal them and then sell them through to the UK. The British gangsters also contacted associates back in the UK, whose teams of smugglers were renowned for transporting virtually anything across continents without problems. It was a good system, and for a couple of decades, it worked.

  ‘For more than twenty years it was a civilised industry,’ explained one old UK criminal based in Estepona, near Marbella. ‘Then things started to change and that’s when most of us realised it was time to pull back and head up into the hills for a safe and happy retirement.’

  These days, Spanish authorities are either powerless to prosecute or, in some cases, simply turn a blind eye to the often murderous behaviour of the cocaine gangsters on the Costa del Crime. Local police often take the attitude that, because the majority of cocaine shipments never stay in Spain for long, most of the violence between criminals is not worth their while investigating. Even when cocaine gangsters do get arrested, they know there are many ways to avoid jail. As one old timer says: ‘The trick is to get bail. About £10,000 normally does it. And once you’re out, you’re out for ever. New name, new apartment – and the world is your oyster once more.’

  But ironically it’s precisely this lawlessness that is troubling many of these older villains. Tucked away behind all the popular Costa del Crime resorts are many of the detached homes of the really big players, who enjoy a view of the Med, a decent pension and having a moan about the young hoods giving the coast a bad reputation. But they have a point; because every now and again there are chilling reminders of just how dangerous southern Spain can be if you upset the wrong people.

  In Marbella, in September 2007, gunmen lay in wait as their target parked his Mercedes, before riddling the vehicle with bullets. Two of the passengers were killed immediately; the third died later in hospital. The dead, all Colombians, were just another statistic among the gangland hits that plague the Costa del Sol. It later emerged that these Colombians were gunned down after swearing revenge on a rival gang and were about to spill blood in their ruthless pursuit of profits for their multi-million-pound cocaine business.

  As one old-time villain from London explained to me: ‘Everyone round here knows the Colombians are highly professional and completely ruthless. The only way to stop them is to kill them and that’s what happened when those three died. The trouble is it will never scare the Colombians away from Spain because they’ve got plenty more soldiers where that lot came from.’

  So, these days the Costa del Sol is dominated by a new breed of evil, cold-blooded cocaine gangsters, who take no prisoners. They shoot to kill in a way that has even terrified many of the most notorious old-time British hoods. Women, children and so-called ‘civilians’ are no longer off limits when it comes to revenge attacks.

  ‘We’re talkin’ about everyone from Russians to Swedes. They all want a piece of the cocaine action down here and there are no rules any more. It’s a deadly trade now and expect the amount of coke killings to go up and up,’ said the same retired British gangster.

  Today, there’s only a handful of those veteran villains brave enough to still retain a toehold in the Costa del Sol’s lethal cocaine business.

  CHAPTER 12

  RONNIE

  Driving along in his high-powered sports car just outside Puerto Banus, near Marbella, Ronnie – a veteran trafficker from south London – explains how it’s the smugglers who make the most money out of cocaine because its journey from South America is more closely monitored by authorities than ever before. Ronnie reckons he takes the biggest risks, especially when shifting large quantities of cocaine. These days, increasing amounts of it come up from West Africa through the ‘hashlands’ of Morocco, where Colombian coke barons often store their product without any apparent interference from Moroccan authorities.

  Back in the late 1970s, Ronnie served a lengthy term in prison for his role in one of Britain’s biggest ever armed robberies. After doing his time he was given a one-way plane ticket to Spain by a friend and switched careers from armed robbery to cocaine trafficking. Since then, Ronnie has lost three of his best friends to hitmen, after they fell out with the Colombians and Mexicans who control the flow of cocaine circulating the world looking for wealthy buyers. Ronnie considers himself a lucky man to still be alive.

  ‘I’ve seen some right monsters come and go in this game. It’s vicious out there. The trouble is there ain’t no respect no more. The money is huge but so are the risks. In some ways I wish coke didn’t exist and I was still sticking up banks in south L
ondon. It was a lot easier back then. You split the money up with yer team and you either stayed on yer toes or you got nicked and served a bit of bird. Either way you was a lot safer than you are today.’

  Ronnie admits that handling cocaine was the only decent ‘job’ he could get when he arrived on the Costa del Sol. ‘Sure, I started with a bit of puff but that’s even more aggro ’cos it takes up so much fuckin’ room compared to the white stuff.’

  But Ronnie wasn’t the only villain in southern Spain with plans to make millions from the coke trade. ‘That’s the problem. Everybody wants a pools win out of it. A lot of the young hoods coming in these days are trigger happy, coked-up kids with no consideration for others or their reputations.’

  Ronnie reckons he was lucky to get into the ‘coke game’ in the late 1980s. ‘Back then it was a much smaller, more tightly knit business. You dealt with one Spanish handler. You never saw the fuckin’ South Americans and your £50,000 investment was turned into £200,000 in a matter of days. It was as sweet as a nut and no one got too greedy, if you know what I mean.’

  Back in those days, lorries, vans and even cars were used by smugglers to transport cocaine up through Spain into France and then across the Channel. ‘We hardly ever got stopped. For about six or seven years it was like printing money. It was that easy,’ says Ronnie.

  But then, says Ronnie, a lot of ‘scuzzy villains’ started trying to get in on the cocaine trade in southern Spain. ‘That’s when the aggro really started,’ he recalled. ‘We had certain rules back then but they got thrown out the window. Soon the type of shooter you was carrying was more important than the quality of your product. Not good.’