Costa Del Crime

by Wensley Clarkson

  In August 2003, the main case against ten men was thrown out at London’s Southwark Crown Court after 414 days in court, with the judge denouncing the sting as ‘massively illegal’. But then Joe Wilkins, whose Houdini-like ability to evade jail has caused the underworld to suspect him of being an MI6 and police informant, was never one to do things by halves. This south Londoner with more front than Woolworths is rumoured to have played a role in the 1988 Gibraltar shootings in which three IRA members were gunned down by the SAS in cold blood. It is also rumoured that he was given a helping hand to flee prison so that he could specifically move to Spain and work as a major informer for the Old Bill, who’ve long been obsessed with nicking many of the villains still languishing in luxury on the Costa del Crime.

  At 6 feet 3 inches tall, Joe Wilkins was a handsome, larger-than-life character who favoured Michael Caine-style glasses and was even married for a time to the glamorous dancer Pearl Read who later modelled at the age of 56 in her bra as part of Age Concern’s 1998 advertising poster campaign. Back in 1972, Wilkins had been at the centre of the Soho turf wars, and was even shot at in his office by a rival gangster. He took two bullets in the chest but survived. In August 1987, British Customs intercepted a fishing boat called Danny Boy off the Sussex coast. On board were 30 sacks of Moroccan hashish worth £1.5 million. Joe Wilkins and several other men were nicked. He was eventually jailed for ten years for being the ‘heart and centre’ of the plot.

  It was then that Wilkins’s life story took its strangest twist. Despite his long criminal background, Wilkins was transferred to Ford open prison in Sussex soon after being sentenced. While in prison, he became involved in controversy over the 1989 Thames Television programme Death on the Rock about the SAS shootings in Gibraltar. A local woman, Carmen Proetta, who saw the shooting from her window, was one of those who challenged the official account. Wilkins claimed to the Sunday Times that he could discredit Mrs Proetta. The newspaper’s lawyer took a statement from him in prison. In return, Wilkins wanted money. The Sunday Times paid Wilkins’s sister £2,000; but his claims about Mrs Proetta were later shown to be false.

  In 1991, Wilkins walked out of Ford only to be rearrested and taken to Highpoint low-security prison. In January 1992, he was allowed out on an unaccompanied visit to his dentist in London, and fled to Spain. He was soon living openly in a villa in Estepona, slap bang in the middle of the Costa del Crime world of drugs smuggling and money laundering.

  It is alleged that Wilkins then became an agent provocateur in the discredited police operation in Gibraltar. In the early-1990s, the Foreign Office had become concerned over allegations that senior politicians in Gibraltar were involved with lucrative drugs- and tobacco-smuggling operations. Wilkins is said to have helped with the top-secret sting, making introductions and identifying leading smugglers. But no arrests were ever made.

  About the same time, an experienced Scotland Yard undercover officer suggested using the American technique of a ‘reverse sting’, in which the police set up a money-laundering front to reel in well-known criminals. The British version was codenamed Operation Cotton, and the first task of the undercover officer was to go to Spain and meet Joe Wilkins, who introduced him to Christopher Finch, 55, a leading lawyer in Gibraltar. Finch had been the Thames Television lawyer during the making of the Death on the Rock programme. In turn, Finch introduced the undercover cop to Plinio Bossino, 66, who ran bureau de change outlets in Gibraltar. What was said at those early meetings is now disputed, as the tapes of the conversation have been lost by Scotland Yard. Finch and Bossino solicited their criminal contacts to launder money through what appeared to be a Mayfair-based financial services company but which, in reality, was the front for the police sting. Dozens of people were eventually arrested.

  It was at the Southwark Crown Court trial in the summer of 2003 that Judge George Bathurst Norman described the operation as ‘massively illegal’ because British law does not allow entrapment. He ruled that Finch had been entrapped but Bossino had not. Charges against all the defendants were eventually dropped.

  Wilkins was even rumoured to have informed on master criminal Kenneth Noye, who went on the run after the 1996 M25 road-rage murder of Stephen Cameron. It is even said that Noye stayed at Wilkins’s villa. He was arrested shortly afterwards near Cadiz. But as one Costa del Sol source told me, ‘It would take a mighty brave man to grass up Noye and I don’t think Joe would have done it.’

  In his later years, Wilkins became persona non grata with the highly paranoid British criminal fraternity in Spain. A well-informed British underworld source in Spain told me, ‘If Joe was helping the spooks [MI6], that may explain why it was so easy for him to go on his toes [escape from prison] and why he lived so openly. The view is taken here that he was a grass.’

  Wilkins spent the rest of his life on the Costa del Crime. When questions were asked in parliament about why Joe Wilkins had not been extradited or deported from Spain, the Home Office consistently refused to comment.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  GIRLS’ NIGHT OUT

  The assistant to Mayor Checa

  GIRLS’ NIGHT OUT

  It’s not just murder, sex and mayhem on the Costa del Sol. This is the story of how a town full of long-suffering Costa del Sol wives hit back and created the ultimate girls’ night out – once a week. All the men in their entire town just inland from many of southern Spain’s most notorious resorts have been barred from going out after dark. And the town’s Mayor has even started fining them if they break the curfew because he wants to encourage men to stay at home every Thursday night to look after their children and clean their homes while their wives are given a free run of the town’s bars and nightclubs.

  ‘It might sound like a joke, but it’s deadly serious and we’re all determined to have a good time while our husbands are at home doing the cleaning and looking after the family,’ laughed one housewife as she toasted the new law that has given the womenfolk of the town a streak of independence they never realised existed.

  Javier Checa, Mayor of the Spanish town of Torredonjimeno (population 14,000), has created a law that bans men from the streets between 9pm and 2am. He believes many towns on the Costa del Sol will soon follow suit. Money from the fines imposed by Mayor Checa’s specially recruited team of women ‘enforcement officers’ is being put towards groups that deal with domestic violence and equality between the sexes. It is estimated that a quarter of all wives in Spain suffer some form of violence from their husbands. One expert explained, ‘Until recently, these incidents were rarely spoken about let alone prosecuted, and anything that helps bring this subject out in the open is important.’

  Says Mayor Checa, ‘We have to make men aware of the responsibilities they have in the home. They don’t just have a right to go out and drink beer with their friends, they also have to be a house husband.’

  The Mayor even wants to encourage more Brits and other northern Europeans to move into his town because ‘they have more respect for women and we can learn from them.’ He also believes it is essential that other towns on the Costa del Sol introduce similar laws. ‘I know that quite a few mayors along the coast are watching my scheme closely, so who knows which towns will adopt this next?’

  Local council chief Maria Teresa Castellano, 36, fully supports the Mayor’s new law. ‘The Mayor is highlighting a very serious problem and should be congratulated. I fully support this move. Spanish men have been allowed to believe they were in charge for too long. It is time they learned the truth about today’s world.’

  But some of the men of Torredonjimeno are angry with the Mayor’s new ruling. Farmer José Luis Jimenez says, ‘I don’t see that the Mayor can tell us when we should be able to go out for a beer. We have the right to do that if and when we want. He should mind his own business.’

  Mayor Checa started his male-free zone in the summer of 2003 and christened it ‘The Night of the Women’ in recognition of Spain’s domestic-violence problem. Checa believes hi
s initiative has fractured Spain’s traditional social norms and helped give a lifeline to many of the town’s female population, who have been under the thumb of their domineering husbands for centuries. Now every Thursday evening as the church bell tolls 9pm, at least half a dozen of Checa’s so-called ‘angels’ dressed like airline stewardesses start their patrols on the streets, carrying thick books of €3 tickets. The angels – led by beautiful brunette Lula Cobo – then spend five hours on the narrow lanes of Torredonjimeno enforcing this bizarre new law. ‘It’s a great law, which I am proud to enforce,’ explains 23-year-old Lula. ‘The men of this town have had it all their own way for too long and now it is the turn of the women to have a good time.’

  Housewife Christabel Argnos, 31, and her best friend Beatriz Gunez, 33, say they now always make a point of going out together on Thursday nights. ‘It’s a great law with a serious message for all the men of Spain who still live in the past,’ says Christabel. ‘Women have a right to go out and enjoy themselves as well. This is an old farming community and a lot of men still believe that a woman’s place is in the home. They cannot understand or accept that we have rights as well.’

  Some local men have tried to beat the ban by pretending that they are foreign or from other areas of Spain whenever they’re stopped by the ‘angels’. But Lula and her team of enforcers are well aware of their tricks. ‘We always insist they show us their identity cards, which show their home addresses. We are determined to enforce this law because it is very important.’

  Local businessman Paco Estrada found himself cornered by three of Mayor Checa’s angels and immediately paid his on-the-spot fine on a recent Thursday night. ‘This is a good law and I will remember never to go out in the town on a Thursday night in the future.’

  Meanwhile, Mayor Checa insists that the girls’ night out underpins a very serious message. ‘In Spain, only ten per cent of women work outside the home. Domestic violence is a huge problem. In this town alone, 142 women made complaints to the police about maltreatment – imagine how many didn’t. Nobody has ever spoken about women’s equality here before. Now there is a debate, thanks to the curfew.’ He says what he’d really like to do is send every man who breaks the curfew to prison. ‘But unfortunately the Spanish constitution does not allow that, so I have styled the fine as a “conscious donation”.’

  But not all women are in favour of the curfew. Teresa Jimenez, director of the local Women’s Insititute, says, ‘It is a retrograde step which, far from educating men about sharing responsibilities, helps to turn the notion of equality into a joke.’

  But many of the women of Torredonjimeno whole-heartedly support the Mayor’s brave step. Housewife Maria Fuentes says, ‘What’s the big deal? We’re all having a great time on Thursday nights now. And for the first time in my marriage, my husband José has even laid the dinner table and washed the dishes. Is that so bad?’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ROCK OF CRIME

  It’s criminally easy to get to Gibraltar from the Costa del Sol

  ROCK OF CRIME

  At 8.30pm, with the setting sun dipping below the sheer eastern cliff of the Rock of Gibraltar, a powerful inflatable surges through the waves. Trailing a worm of phosphoresce from its outboard, the purring craft – the Spanish call them planeadoras – loses speed and sashays slowly into the Caleta bay just as another smaller speedboat appears, drawing foamy coils in the sea. A man in the inflatable throws at least a dozen watertight boxes into the other, smaller boat. The boxes, though bulky, are plainly not heavy.

  The smaller boat then surges off towards the beach where three other men pull the craft onto the sand and quickly load the boxes into a waiting van. Out in the bay, the inflatable’s powerful engine thrusts into life as it heads back across the Straits of Gibraltar towards Morocco where another consignment of cocaine awaits collection.

  Welcome to the Costa del Crime’s classic drugs route. The Rock is now used as a junction for hash from Morocco and cocaine from the cartel in Columbia by many of Britain’s most powerful criminals. It is believed that Gibraltar’s super-busy drug barons are importing more than a billion pounds’ worth of narcotics each year right under the noses of officials on this little piece of Britain in the Mediterranean.

  Getting in and out of the Rock is so easy for many British criminals that they’ve helped turn Gibraltar into the money-laundering centre of the Mediterranean; it is a virtually lawless society built around a rapidly depleted Navy whose members spend more time brawling in seedy bars than defending queen and country. Top of the list of villains who have popped in and out of the Rock in recent years is master criminal Kenneth Noye. While on the run from British police for murdering a motorist in a road-rage attack in Kent in 1996, Noye spent many months on the Rock setting up drug deals and buying cheap electrical appliances for his home in a deserted Spanish retreat, 70 miles up the road.

  Noye boasted to one criminal associate that he’d never once been asked even to show the photograph in his false British passport during his numerous trips in and out of Gibraltar between 1996 and 1998. ‘Kenny was told to never drive a car onto the Rock because that would be more likely to be stopped and searched, so he’d walk through the border checkpoint waving his UK passport without even having to show it,’ one of Noye’s associates told me.

  Noye also reckoned Gibraltar was one of the easiest places to fly back into Britain from when he had deals to do and people to see back in his old manors of south-east London and Kent. But even more disturbingly, he managed to set up a number of multi-million-pound drug deals during a series of meetings with one of the Rock’s most powerful drug barons. ‘Those meetings on the Rock were an open secret. We all knew who Noye was, but the man he met runs the Rock and no one would dare upset him,’ says one local criminal, who visited Noye on a number of occasions while he was on the run in Spain back in the late-1990s.

  Kenny Noye also knew from the days back when he handled more than £20 million worth of gold bullion from the notorious Brinks Mat robbery at Heathrow in 1983 that he could convert currency into gold with ease in Gibraltar. But Noye’s dodgy dealings on the Rock are only the tip of the iceberg. Gibraltar is awash with more gangsters per square mile than Chicago in the 1930s.

  Thin Phil – a pseudonym, but his real first name is every bit as clichéd – is a typical member of the Gibraltar mafia. He works as a runner for a major former north-London drug baron now based on the Rock. Thin Phil and other runners can make up to £5,000 a week steering their inflatables across the ocean. His boss has numerous boats and crews, lock-ups to store drugs and dozens of people to load and unload his narcotics on both sides of the Straits.

  The biggest earner used to be the hash available 14 miles due south in Morocco. It’s a rich harvest of drugs less than an hour across a busy but underpoliced stretch of water. These days, however, that flotilla of speedboats and inflatables smuggles an even more valuable commodity – cocaine. The biggest irony of all this is that, while the British-run colony seems to be virtually turning a blind eye to these multi-million-pound criminal enterprises, it is ‘the fucking Spanish’ (as Thin Phil calls them) who are genuinely trying to crack down on this evil trade.

  Spanish police now use a powerful launch – the smugglers call it a turbo – to pursue the drugs couriers in their inflatables. And, naturally, they insist that Gibraltar’s lawless reputation is yet more evidence that it should be permanently reunited with the Spanish mainland. In a community with only 30,000 inhabitants, nearly everyone on the Rock knows the men who work for the drug barons. Their tinted-window cars thud rap music out of rattling speakers as they coast up and down the colony’s tacky high street stuck in second gear. Yet they remain relatively untouched by authorities.

  The irony behind the influx of British villains into Gibraltar is that many of them are drawn to the Rock from their whitewashed villas on the Costa del Sol by the very Britishness of the place. Back in 2000, Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar handed Tony Blair
a file on alleged criminal activity on the Rock, which claimed that criminals, including at least six UK firms, in Gibraltar had begun turning their hand to murder and kidnappings connected to their big-money criminal enterprises.

  Down at the Rock’s Queensway Quay Marina, favourable mooring rates and luxurious amenities have even persuaded some of the Costa del Sol’s flashier villains to keep their yachts there when they are not out sailing. Every now and again Gibraltar’s government is reminded by the big chiefs in Whitehall that they should crack down on the drug barons. Then orders are issued to seize a few of the smugglers’ favourite boats, the rigid inflatables. But, as happened a few years back, the owners of these crafts (the drug barons never have legally proven ownership) erupt, battle the police and cause a bit of mayhem.

  The result? A discreet pause and then the boats are given back and business carries on as usual. The Rock’s authorities even introduced a law banning any further importation of rigid inflatables. Owners of such boats were ordered to show evidence that they were used for bona fide purposes. ‘Now everyone who owns an inflatable has paperwork proving that he does boat trips for tourists,’ says one Gibraltar regular. ‘The law was a waste of time but at least it shut Whitehall up.’

  But the other important reason why so many British criminals use Gibraltar as a base for their dodgy enterprises is because the Rock is awash with funny money – forged currency and black cash from the proceeds of crime. Of the £3.5 billion floating around Gibraltar, more than half of it is reckoned to be the proceeds of illicit business dealings, smuggling and drug trafficking.