In a statement, Detective Sergeant Steve Lloyd of North Wales Police said, ‘We are pleased the families have got some sort of closure, although it’s obviously not the outcome we would have hoped for. We have no evidence to suggest the suspects have indeed robbed or murdered other Britons. But that is something the Spanish police will be looking into.’
The investigation has now been passed to three judges and is likely to take several months to complete. The trial of the two men is not expected to be heard until the end of 2004. As Anthony O’Malley’s brother Bernard succinctly put it, ‘Anthony and Linda were a real love match. The pair of them had their hearts set on a nice villa, away from the hustle and bustle of the tourist resorts. But that dream – and their lives – have been snatched away from them for a few thousand pounds.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
A SHADY SPANISH UNDERTAKING
Juan Lanzat Cubus
A SHADY SPANISH UNDERTAKING
While our boys were liberating Iraq in the early months of 2003, a group of British war heroes who helped fight off the worldwide threat to peace during WWII were being cruelly duped by a cold-hearted Costa del Sol undertaker in the resort of Benalmadena, who ran off with more than £40,000 of their money. The ex-servicemen’s association and their families had put the cash into a special fund so that, in the event of their deaths, funeral expenses would be automatically paid rather than creating financial problems for relatives back in the UK. Now many of them face being given the serviceman’s ultimate insult – a pauper’s funeral – because the fund to pay for their burial or cremation was stolen by smooth-talking Latino undertaker Juan Lanzat Cubus.
‘These people are war heroes. It’s scandalous,’ said local ex-servicemen’s association secretary Frank Voyce, who put £1,300 of his own money into the scheme. He believes Spanish conman Cubus is an evil man. Mr Voyce, 78, originally from Bedford, encouraged 29 members each to pay between £1,300 and £1,500 into a special fund that was to cover the cost of a coffin, hearse, death certificate, cemetery fees, a funeral service, two days of cold storage and flowers. Undertaker Cubus was even contractually obliged to contact relatives back in the UK. ‘The idea was to take the pressure off our relatives back in the UK so that when we died they wouldn’t be landed with the costs,’ explained Frank, who served with the Royal Fusiliers when they helped liberate Italy in 1945.
‘It seemed a splendid scheme and Señor Cubus even came to two of our dinner dances to meet us. He was charming and we never once doubted his sincerity. He even danced with two elderly ladies who were most taken by him. I just cannot believe that someone could be so cruel.’
The funeral of Winifred Carter-Humphries, 91 and the widow of a Navy petty officer, had to be paid for by her impoverished sister because Cubus had shut down his business and disappeared without paying back the servicemen and women who’d contributed to the special funeral fund. Winny’s sister Kate Bale, 86, whose own husband, Reginald, served in the army during WWII, said, ‘It’s been a really awful time. Not only has my sister died, but I’ve had to pay out almost £2,000 for Winny’s funeral, which was virtually all my savings. I live on a £310-a-month pension. It’s going to be very difficult to survive from now on. That man is a cruel, heartless fellow for taking all our money.’
Frank only stumbled upon the con when he tried to contact Cubus after Winny Carter-Humphries was struck down by a serious stroke in 2003 and it quickly became clear that it was unlikely she would ever recover so the Legion’s special fund would have to be used after her death. Frank explained, ‘Cubus’s office phone had been cut off so I went to Malaga and was stunned to discover that his office and showroom had been shut down. When I tried to find him, his family said he’d disappeared. Then I found his brother, who told us that he wasn’t to be trusted. Alarm bells immediately started ringing.’
At the shop and office in Malaga city centre’s Calle de Comedias where Cubus ran his company Funeria Malaguena, the new tenants said that fraudster Cubus had closed down his operation in December 2002 without even providing a forwarding address. One of the tenants said, ‘Juan owes a lot of people money and we don’t even know where he has gone.’
One man, José Cascido, who used to work for Cubus, said, ‘I am not surprised to hear that Cubus has deceived these people. He is a heartless man who owes money to many people. I hate him. He never paid me my last few months of salary and I will do anything to help the British Legion. I am suing Cubus myself in the courts later this year.’
Nobody knew where Cubus had gone, or how to find him. So I decided to track him down myself…
I located the evil swindler at his luxurious £400,000 detached home in one of Malaga’s smartest suburbs. A brand-new £18,000 Volkswagen was parked in the driveway. I confronted him. Cubus shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I have nothing to hide. I will meet Señor Voyce and talk to him. There has been a misunderstanding.’ Over the following few months I checked with Frank Voyce to see if he had ever heard from Cubus. Not even a phone call was received.
Later, when I again asked Cubus if he’d pay British Legion associated members back all their cash, the dishonest Spaniard said, ‘I still have to talk to Señor Voyce. I am sure we can sort this out. I have opened another funeral company in Malaga and we will honour our obligations to the ex-servicemen.’ And so, in the middle of our confrontation, I telephoned Frank. Cubus refused to take the phone and talk to him directly, but once again promised to call him later that same day.
But Frank was not afforded the courtesy of the promised phone call. ‘I never heard a word from him. We all know what his game is, and he is nothing more than a cheap conman who ought to be ashamed of himself.’
When I visited the location where Cubus claimed he’d opened a new office, there was no sign of a funeral company in the entire building. One office worker in the small block said, ‘I’ve never heard of this man, and there has never been a funeral company here.’
Even Cubus’s parents, Juan, 68, and Encarna, 66, who live in the isolated village of Casabermeja, 20 miles north of Malaga, say they have washed their hands of their son. ‘Juan appears here sometimes but he never tells us what he is doing and we don’t even have a telephone number for him,’ explained the father.
In the village, many locals know Juan Cubus by his reputation. They remember his involvement in another undertaker’s scam, which brought him to the attention of local police back in 2000. It seems the company he ran was pretending to cremate bodies but was, in fact, sending them to another province in Spain where they were destroyed at a much lower cost, leaving him with more profit. He would then present grieving relatives with a pot of ash.
One old friend and neighbour of the family in Casabermeja said, ‘Juan is the black sheep of the family. We all knew about his scam with the bodies a couple of years ago, but to take money from these old British servicemen is even more disgusting. We hope he never shows his face around here again.’
British Legion lawyer Eleanor Smith described Cubus as a ‘classic conman’. ‘I understand that Cubus was involved with the company that pretended to cremate the bodies and then sent them to Seville where they were destroyed at a much cheaper cost to the company, giving them more profit. They simply gave the grieving relatives a pot of ash. It was a classic con which appalled many people here in Malaga.’
At the time of writing, Cubus continues to live comfortably in his luxury home, while Frank Voyce and the rest of his ex-servicemen colleagues live in dread about how they will cope with the next member’s death.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MASTER CRIMINAL LENNY
Marbella, where Lenny still finances the ‘occasional’ drugs deal
MASTER CRIMINAL LENNY
The antics of Britain’s major criminals on the Costa del Sol have had more than their fair share of coverage, but it’s worth introducing you to Lenny. His story is a classic tale that shows why the sunny shores of southern Spain have attracted so much scum over the years. Forget extradition tre
aties and so-called amnesties: Lenny’s survival on the mean streets of the Costa del Crime is testament to the bizarre lifestyle led by so many ex-pats who live on the other side of the law. How they’ve continued to thrive is anyone’s guess.
Lenny, as he proudly says, ‘floated over’ to Spain in the early 1980s. His career as a reckless young armed robber on the streets of south-east London had landed him with a seven-year stretch in Parkhurst. ‘By the time I’d got out I’d done a lot of thinking, and I knew I had to get out of the smoke,’ says Lenny. ‘A few of me old mates had bought property out on the Costa del Sol so I thought, “Why not?” I had a few bob stashed away, and the missus was up for it.’
Lenny has this habit of making everything sound very spontaneous. In truth, he knew exactly what he was doing. His main criminal financier had already told him that armed robberies were a thing of the past and drugs were now where all the money was to be earned. ‘Like most villains at that time, I was strictly anti-drugs. I thought they was evil, but a man’s got to earn a living somehow, and this backer said he had a hundred grand to put into a dead-cert drugs deal. So I got involved.’
Armed with his overnight bag and a Spanish dictionary, Lenny flew into Malaga and set himself up as a drugs middleman. His first £100,000 deal for a big shipment of cannabis from Morocco bought in a 500 per cent profit for Lenny’s backer, and he personally skimmed a £50,000 commission. ‘Back then that was good money,’ says Lenny today. ‘I knew what side my bread was buttered, so I reinvested that dosh in a side shipment of puff. Came out two hundred grand richer within a month. I was up and running.’
At first, Lenny insists, he only dealt in cannabis. ‘I steered well clear of charley, because the Spanish Old Bill were coming down like a ton of bricks on anyone caught with the stuff. They didn’t seem so bothered about puff.’
Within 18 months of arriving in Spain, Lenny was living in a plush five-bedroom villa in the mountains behind Estepona, complete with swimming pool and two Rottweilers. ‘The missus was pregnant with our first kid. Life was sweet. I had the right contacts to keep pulling in the puff deals. But then some bastard went and ruined it all for me.
‘I’d rented a house down near the beach for three months and we used the garage as a base to run bails of puff from the high-powered inflatable motorboats I had bringing the produce over from Morocco. It was a piece of cake. They’d drop the bails off on the beach and we’d turn up in four-by-fours and load them all up. I had half a dozen locals working for me. They got good wedge from me and seemed happy. Then it turned out the house I was renting was next door to a villa owned by a Madrid police chief. Bit of bad luck, really. The copper who took me in to Marbella nick said the only reason I got nicked was because the Madrid copper had a load of bodyguards in case of terrorist attacks and one of them had spotted what we was up to.’
It was then, according to Lenny, that he first came upon an old Spanish police tradition. ‘There I was, under arrest, looking at a long stretch when a copper there, who I had never seen before and was unconnected to the case, gets up, closes the door and suggests that for fifty grand I could get released without charge. “Witnesses can go missing, señor,” he says. “Files can get lost. It’s easily done, but we need to come to some kind of arrangement.” Well, I didn’t need to hear any more. I got on to my money man, we made a delivery to that copper’s Swiss bank account and, hey presto, I’m back out on the streets.’
Lenny says that, from that moment on, he made sure to have Costa del Sol police officers in his pocket so as to avoid any future ‘problems’. ‘It was costing me a fucking packet so I had to start bringing in shipments of the heavy stuff because the profits were much bigger.’ By ‘heavy stuff’ Lenny was referring to cocaine and heroin. ‘I was soon locked into a big-time set-up. But I treated it like a business. I kept the books very carefully. I never flashed my cash around too much because I knew I was constantly being looked at by the Spanish and British Old Bill. I had to keep my nose clean.’
By the mid-1980s, Lenny reckons he was raking in more than half a million pounds a year on drug deals alone. ‘Then I started investing in property all along the coast. It was a fucking goldmine. I was living the good life but trying to keep a low profile just in case I came a cropper.’
In a desperate bid to launder his ever-increasing annual fortune, Lenny even bought himself a brothel on the outskirts of Torremolinos. ‘I had to have a business to sink the money into. I got a mate to hire in the girls who used to run clubs in Soho. You know what? They said it was the happiest brothel on the Costa del Sol because I didn’t care if none of the girls serviced any fellas. I just wanted them to be in the main bar supping at drinks so that when the law came in for a snoop they’d think I’d sunk all my dosh into this venture. I even paid the girls a good wedge just for being there. They’d never had it so good. You wouldn’t believe the number of girls who wanted to work in that place!’
But then Lenny fell foul of the Spanish mafia and was forced to hand the brothel over to a local family who had a monopoly on the local sex trade. ‘They was right pissed off that a Brit had muscled in on what they considered to be their rightful business. Things got a bit heavy for a while. A few Molotov cocktails were chucked through my front window, if you know what I mean. In the end it was more trouble than it was worth, so I cut and run. Same Spanish fuckers are running the place to this day. It’s a pity really, because all the girls were happy as pie when I was in charge.’
In the late-1980s, Lenny says he got involved in a drugs-smuggling ring headed by notorious Great Train robber Charlie Wilson. ‘Charlie was a fucking smooth operator. He knew all the right people here, in the UK and in South America. It was the nearest thing to a proper criminal corporation I’ve ever been involved in. We all had ranks within the Firm and Charlie looked on me as one of his most trusted captains. It was a classic, old-fashioned operation.’
Soon Lenny was personally managing the smuggling of more than a million pounds’ worth of drugs – cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy – every week. ‘It was vast. There was more than fifty employees and I was copping fifty grand each week.’
But the good times didn’t last that long. In April 1990, a criminal rival paid two hitmen to kill Charlie Wilson in the garden of his house near Marbella; the entire criminal enterprise collapsed virtually overnight. ‘The British and Spanish law were all over us like flies. We couldn’t move out of our homes without a shadow. It was a fucking nightmare. I’ll never understand why Charlie was topped. They reckoned he’d grassed up some Amsterdam-based crim, but Charlie was renowned as a quiet man. He never talked about anyone out of turn. It just wasn’t his style.’
With his vast weekly salary reduced virtually overnight to nothing, Lenny then found himself having to grease a lot of palms to avoid being grassed up by other criminals to the police. ‘It cost me a fortune. I had to sell my house just to pay off all the right fellas to avoid being nicked. It was like a house of cards tumbling down and everyone knew I’d been connected to Charlie’s operation. The pressure was really being piled on me from all directions.’
For the next 18 months, Lenny kept a low profile as many of his one-time criminal associates got themselves arrested or killed. ‘It was like the night of the long knives in every sense of the word. I can’t deny I was scared. Every time I went out in my motor I took long-winded routes just to make sure anyone following would lose me. I never dealt in bank accounts. Everything was in cash and there wasn’t much of that floating around either because I had to keep my nose completely clean.’
Eventually, Lenny used a secret nest egg of cash that he’d kept with an accountant in Gibraltar for a rainy day. ‘I just had enough for a small house out in the sticks for me, the wife and our two sons. I wanted to keep well away from the action from now on. I also had enough cash left over to invest in one decent-sized puff deal.’
By this time, Spanish, British and US drug enforcement agencies were concentrating all their efforts on Class-A substanc
es like cocaine and heroin. ‘The Spanish cops were now totally uninterested in puff, but there was still a big demand for it on the Costa del Sol, so I took one big punt. It worked and I started easing myself gently back into the business.’
But by the late-1990s, the price of all drugs had plummeted so badly that Lenny started dealing in cocaine once again ‘because the produce was much smaller and easier to handle’. He explained the logistics to me. ‘Half a million quids’ worth of charley barely fills a suitcase, while the same amount of puff requires a bloody boat for transportation. I was back in the frame but I really didn’t have much choice.’
These days, Lenny is back living in a big detached house on the outskirts of Marbella, but insists that he only finances ‘occasional’ drug deals. ‘I’ve learned my lesson and I try to keep one step removed from the heavy brigade these days. There’s always a demand for a financial backer like me, but the art is in avoiding all direct contact with the handlers.’
Lenny is now in his early 50s. He admits he will probably never earn an honest living. ‘That’s just the way it is for me. I keep reading in the papers about these evil drugs barons who live it up on the Costa del Sol. Well, I can tell you, I’m one of them but I’m not a truly bad person. Is it really any worse than selling cigarettes or alcohol? I don’t think so. Do you?’
CHAPTER NINE
SLAVE GIRL
Terrified Tracy Rose is still too traumatised by her ordal to be identified
SLAVE GIRL
Costa Del Crime Page 5