Costa Del Crime

by Wensley Clarkson

  Welcome to the Costa del Sol. Rolling fields of olive trees, converted fincas, golden beaches, glorious sunshine: it’s supposed to be the perfect holiday resort area. Lively and bustling, it is 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 among the whitewashed mansions and tower blocks are many of the biggest names in the criminal underworld. They are often multi-millionaires who describe themselves as ‘businessmen’ and ‘property developers’; they deal strictly in cash.

  Fat Stan, who once lived in a quiet village outside Dublin, was one of numerous villains who turned the Costa del Sol into the criminal badlands of Europe. Down the road from that airport lies Puerto Banus, perhaps the best example of where criminals have laid territorial stakes. For more than 25 years it has been home to many underworld kingpins.

  With a population of 35,000 full-time residents, Puerto Banus has a disproportionately large number of mock-Spanish villas with long driveways, immaculate high brick walls, sophisticated closed-circuit television, electronically operated gates and at least two guard dogs on duty. One well-known villain called his Rottweilers Brinks and Mat after his most infamous criminal enterprise, and even had centrally heated kennels specially built for them.

  In the mid-1980s, multi-million-pound drug deals took over from security-van robberies as the principal source of income for UK villains. Dozens of upwardly mobile drug barons, money launderers and handlers of stolen property turned the Spanish coastline into their number-one destination. Even when the UK government finally established a proper extradition treaty between the two countries, British villains who knew nothing could be proved against them stayed on.

  ‘In many ways these people crave the respectability of living in a good neighbourhood,’ says one retired British detective. ‘A lot of them send their children to expensive boarding schools back in the UK. They have the same domestic aspirations as the rest of us, but they make their fortunes by breaking the law.’

  At the other end of the criminal scale are the sex workers, lynchpins of the crime industry. They have turned the Costa del Sol into a place where anything goes, as many of the people interviewed for this book will testify. When I recently tried to talk to a brothel keeper called Bert and his wife through their electronically operated gates, I was greeted by two Dobermanns (I didn’t catch their names) and a few terse words spoken through the crackling intercom. Bert’s wife examined my face on her closed-circuit television screen, and then charmingly told me to ‘fuck off’. Maybe I should have been more cautious, since another criminal had told me that Bert was not averse to throwing his weight around if the mood took him. A few months earlier he’d been down at one of his favourite pubs in Estepona port when a rival villain popped in for a pint. Bert was so infuriated he walked out to his Rolls Royce, pulled a shotgun out of the boot and stomped back into the tavern where he peppered the ceiling with pellets. Residents on Bert’s street still talk about the day one of his Dobermanns strayed into a neighbour’s garden and a string of angry complaints ensued. Bert accosted the Spanish neighbour, accused him of being a ‘nark’ – or informer – and threatened to ‘bury’ him. He didn’t receive any more complaints about the dogs.

  Living in the glorious Spanish sunshine doesn’t guarantee a long and happy life if your business is crime. Only recently, a wealthy car dealer who specialised in selling cars with hard-to-trace Belgian number plates was found shot dead in his black BMW, slap bang in the middle of one of Marbella’s most desirable residential areas.

  Not all of the people featured in this book are on the wanted list, but many of them have thrived in the criminal atmosphere that has turned the Costa del Sol into a den of sex and crime. You are about to read stories that twist and turn through the mean streets, beaches and mountains that make up this extraordinary corner of Spain. It has been a fascinating journey, which I hope you are going to enjoy and relish as much as I have.

  Just don’t say you haven’t been warned…

  PART ONE

  COSTA DEL CRIME

  CHAPTER ONE

  EVIL PREDATOR

  Richard Baker

  EVIL PREDATOR

  It has long been said that British girls pack their G-string bikinis and leave their morals at home when they venture down to the Costa del Sol. Potential dangers are routinely ignored, so it is perhaps small wonder that a nasty character called Richard Baker found life in Spain so congenial. Let this story be a sobering warning to the tens of thousands of single women who fly into the province of Malaga on holiday each year.

  Richard Baker worked at numerous clubs and discos on the Costa del Sol, and is believed to have sexually assaulted more than a hundred victims. Baker started his career in Spain outside clubs, handing out leaflets promising cheap drinks. He later progressed to being a DJ. With his working hours stretching from early evening to 5 or 6am, Baker’s job was demanding. The pay was poor, but there were a number of hidden ‘perks’. As one of Baker’s pals on the Costa del Sol, a suntanned East Ender who calls himself Roberto, pointed out, ‘We have a wicked time out here. It’s like a supermarket for sex and drugs.’ Roberto was later interviewed by Scotland Yard officers investigating allegations against Baker. ‘All the girls who come here on holiday are always so pissed up they can barely remember anything the next morning,’ he told them. ‘That’s the way it is out here.’

  Baker liked using more than just alcohol to soften up his intended victims. He’d lure them into bars, buy them a drink and then, police believe, lace their cocktails with drugs. One of Baker’s favourite hunting grounds was the Paseo Maritimo, which runs the length of the seafront at Fuengirola. During the daytime this area is alive with souvenir shops, ice-cream parlours and restaurants. But late at night this family atmosphere is replaced by hoards of drunken Brits wobbling along the promenade. The sound of the Mediterranean lapping on the sandy beaches is drowned out by the blazing disco systems of numerous clubs and bars with names like Old Town, Tramps, the Beetle Bar, the London Underground and the London Pub.

  Baker liked to home in on women in such places. His speciality was chatting up girls in their late teens and early 20s who had come to Spain to forget about their mundane existences back in Britain. Jobs, boyfriends, family and responsibilities were pushed to the back of their minds as they went for it during frantic drinking binges on the seafront. By 11.30 most evenings, dozens of such young women were well on their way to oblivion.

  As these girls consumed more and more alcohol, their dancing usually became more and more uninhibited. Baker later told friends that he believed such women were ‘asking for it’. They were often plain girls who needed to be relaxed by alcohol before letting themselves go. Baker homed in on one girl after she clambered onto a tabletop, her tiny miniskirt riding high up her thighs. He watched as she and a friend gyrated on the table and even made gestures towards one another; legs apart and hips thrust forward, they performed an excruciating bump-and-grind routine, occasionally caressing them-selves and each other. As Baker’s latest unsuspecting target smoothed her hands over her breasts and hitched up her tiny Lycra skirt, he cheered her on from the dance floor. He didn’t care that the girl’s performance was tawdry and embarrassing; he had already identified her as his next victim.

  Eventually, driven by the need for another Bacardi and Coke, Baker’s target stopped dancing and approached the bar. That’s when he pounced. As she was paying for her drink, he appeared alongside her. She noticed him immediately thanks to his handsome, dark features, and grabbed him by the arm. ‘Hey, don’t I know you?’ Baker smiled and nodded in agreement, happy in the knowledge that this young woman was too drunk to know any better.

  He hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. But as he took her hand and led her to a dark corner of the club, he believed that she was out for a good time and he was about to ensure she would be unable to escape his clutches. In the dingy, badly lit booth where they sat squeezed up against each o
ther, she didn’t notice him drop a pill into her Barcardi and Coke.

  ‘Yeah, I know you,’ yelled Baker above the din. Formalities over, the young girl lunged at Baker and the two were soon entwined in a passionate kiss. It wasn’t until at least five minutes later that they came up for air. She took a huge gulp at her drink and their lips locked on each other once again.

  Within 30 minutes, sexual predator Richard Baker was helping his latest victim out of the club and towards his nearby apartment, confident that she would soon be barely conscious, and unable to remember what he was about to do…

  Baker was frequently out on the prowl for more victims. He specialised in clubs that were already packed. The strobe and ultraviolet lighting usually helped his modus operandi since many of his victims didn’t even manage to get a proper look at his facial features before he went in for the kill. Many girls later recalled how the heady combination of alcohol, sometimes recreational drugs and bizarre lighting often left them feeling off kilter. They were unable to grasp the grim reality of what they were about to let themselves in for by allowing Baker to chat them up.

  One of his favourite tricks was to approach a potential victim as they passed any of his favourite bars. He could even conjure up a plausible northern or Scottish accent just to make his target feel more at home. In any case, most of the girls were too drunk to pick up on any inconsistencies. Baker would often draw them in by explaining how he’d had some terrible bad luck. That would then make his young victims feel sympathy for him. He had his routine down pat. The girls usually believed him and that helped ease him on to stage two of his chilling rapist routine.

  Baker later told one friend on the Costa del Sol that the easiest girls were the teenagers who wanted to be treated like grown-ups away from the watchful eye of their parents. One night, he engaged a pretty 16-year-old in conversation as he was handing out flyers on the pavement outside one of Fuengirola’s most notorious nightclubs. As her two friends continued on into the club, Baker turned on all the charm and, combined with his obvious good looks, persuaded the young girl to meet him at another bar later that same night. He pointed out the location to the girl before she disappeared into the club to catch up with her friends.

  A couple of drinks later, the girl emerged and headed for the bar where Baker was waiting. Within an hour he’d spiked her drink and had sex with her on a nearby beach. So much for having a laugh Costa del Sol style.

  The unpleasant truth is that it is the Brits who have created the Costa culture of cheap drink, drugs and easy sex. Richard Baker was one of many who took full advantage of this. After more than three decades of British holidaymakers flooding into the area, even the locals hold their hands up in apathy. ‘It’s just the way it is out here,’ says one veteran British resident. ‘Of course Richard Baker was an appalling character, but in many ways we only have ourselves to blame for helping create such monsters.’

  One of Baker’s victims later recalled how she met the so-called DJ in a heaving Fuengirola club more than a year before his arrest for multiple rapes that took place back in the UK. Blonde and petite, she freely admits that until her encounter with Baker she enjoyed being the centre of attention. ‘I was the type of girl who loved being grabbed by men the moment I walked into a crowded bar. It seemed like fun, and it made me feel much better about myself.’

  The girl had spent the first few days of her holiday on the Costa del Sol with her best friend sitting round the pool at their hotel ‘so we could get a decent tan before we went out pulling’. They both already had a poor opinion of Spanish men ‘because they think English girls are easy’. No wonder it was so simple for Baker to chat her up when they first met.

  On that night, the girl and her friend had been drinking whisky and lemonade, and vodka and Red Bull. They were draining their glasses and about to leave for another club when Baker approached. ‘He looked gorgeous, and he was English so I trusted him immediately. He had the most amazing, penetrating eyes,’ she later recalled. In the background, the disco was still going at full throttle: ‘It’s raining men,’ went the song. ‘It’s raining men, hallelujah!’

  An hour later, with the oceanfront streets of Fuengirola resembling a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, the girl found herself hand in hand with Richard Baker. ‘He told me he knew a very nice little bar where we could sit and chat,’ she later recalled. ‘It sounded fine to me. I told my friend I’d see her back at the hotel.’

  A hundred yards further down the road, the girl started to feel dizzy. ‘I remember I looked across at him and he seemed to be smiling in my direction so I thought there couldn’t be anything wrong.’

  The next thing she remembered was waking up in Baker’s bed the next morning. ‘I was shocked, upset and burst into tears. He was sleeping next to me and didn’t wake up. I grabbed my clothes and let myself out of the apartment. Luckily I managed to hail a passing taxi, which took me back to the hotel. I sobbed all day. I’d never slept with a man on a one-night stand, and I couldn’t understand how I could get so out of control.’

  It was only when the girl saw Baker’s photo in the British press following his arrest in the UK that she realised she must have been one of his victims. ‘It all made sense. I just wish I’d never gone to the Costa del Sol in the first place. The worst thing is that I’m sure he’s not the only one doing that to girls on holiday.’

  Many of the dodgy characters like Richard Baker on the Costa del Sol treat the place as if it is some kind of loophole in reality. ‘These girls are on holiday. No one will know what they got up to back home, so what does it matter?’ says Tommy, who has lived in Spain for 15 years and claims to have slept with thousands of girls. But why do so many women go so crazy on the Costa del Sol? Some say it’s because they’re bored of their mundane lives back home. For 50 weeks of the year they plod on, numb with tedium. Their reward is a fortnight of complete and utter madness. But is it really as simple as that?

  Marie Stopes International recently revealed that demand for abortions in the UK rises sharply in August and September as young women return from holiday flings. Some say the hot climate on the Costa del Sol encourages the shedding of physical inhibitions. We wear fewer clothes, feel less constrained and more relaxed. And beaches are undoubtedly sexy places. But there’s nothing particularly romantic about what many girls get up to on Spain’s southern coast. Their behaviour suggests desperation: bored and disillusioned, these women seek solace in an uninhibited fantasy world. And it is a world where predators like Richard Baker thrive.

  On 20 May 1999, Baker, 34, was found guilty of sexual assaults on 12 women in England; following a series of rape allegations from female holidaymakers, British police handed to Spanish police files on numerous assaults committed by Baker while on the Costa del Sol. They believe Baker assaulted more than a hundred victims.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ETA TERRORIST

  Olaia Castresana

  ETA TERRORIST

  Attractive brunette Olaia Castresana loved little children and was training to be a kindergarten teacher, but her life ended up taking a very different course. In July 2001, at the age of 22, she blew herself up with her own bomb at a holiday apartment just one hour’s drive from the Costa del Sol, sending masonry and chunks of her upper body flying on to bathers in the swimming pool below her.

  Among the pimps, hookers, drug dealers and master criminals exists another, even more deadly threat on this popular slice of Spanish coastline: ETA terrorists. These people are not seedy ruffians living in squalid homes and sneaking around in the shadows. Terrorists such as Olaia openly pronounce themselves to be freedom fighters battling for a just cause. This young woman’s middle-class parents knew full well that she lived, breathed and ultimately died for her dream of a united independent Basque state, made up of seven provinces currently belonging to Spain and France. It is worth briefly explaining the complex web of emotion and history that has turned ETA into one of the most lethal terrorist organisations in Europe. They want ind
ependence for the Basque region of northern Spain and have sworn to fight until the death to get their way. Their threat is omnipresent and their most prized target is the tourist industry on the Costa del Sol.

  The story that detectives unravelled following Olaia’s death provides a chilling warning to all visitors and residents on the Costa del Sol. It emerged that she and her school sweetheart Anartz Oiarzabal, had worked hard during the week and planted bombs at the weekends and during their holidays. They were part of a new generation of ETA activists, born in a democratic Spain that long ago gave a measure of self-government to its Basque region in the north, and prepared to kill and die for an impossible dream. Olaia and her boyfriend her bombing partner, were brought up in the elegant northern seaside city of San Sebastian, where violent separatism and chic opulence live side by side.

  They learned their radical politics in their teens. Anartz, just one year older than his terrorist lover, and Olaia had been involved in separatist street fighting since they were 16 years of age. Both had respectable jobs – Anartz wore a suit and tie to his work at a funeral parlour. His parents were so wealthy that they owned the holiday apartment where Olaia was later to commit her final act of terrorism. Olaia’s mother Ana explained shortly after her daughter’s appalling death, ‘She always said she wanted her ashes scattered over the seven provinces. Freedom fighting was her life and if the wealthy tourists in the south got in her way then so be it.’ That calling had taken Olaia to the relatively quiet holiday town of Torrevieja, which lies to the east of the Malaga province. She had been briefed by her ETA bosses back in the north to contribute to the group’s campaign against tourist targets. It was a campaign which, just days before her death, saw a potentially lethal car bomb planted at Malaga Airport. That particular bomb was located before it could explode, but the alert that evacuated the airport caused travel chaos for tens of thousands of British tourists.