Like so many before him, Freddie Star believed that the Costa del Sol would be the answer to all his problems. He’d even blamed his very public bust-up with his child’s mother Trudy as the main reason why he’d fled the UK. One of his closest friends told a journalist at the time, ‘Trudy is very bitter over Freddie and will not let go of this matter. Freddie reckons she can look after herself – his main concern is Donna and their new life together in Spain. He loves the idea that he is going into tax exile.’
But life is never simple with someone as madcap as Freddie Starr, and in the summer of 2002 the Costa del Sol marriage curse struck yet again when Freddie split from Donna. Within weeks, friends were saying that the comedian was on his last legs, a lonely figure chain-smoking, chewing gum and drinking too much coffee in the lounges of hotels near his house.
Life in Spain seemed to have proved a disaster for Freddie. Instead of headline-hitting TV appearances and top-of-the-bill shows, he was now having to make do with the occasional weekend dates in Blackpool and a short, low-budget theatre tour. The divorce from 31-year-old Donna was the last straw, or so it seemed.
As Freddie himself admitted in July 2002, ‘I was not ready for marriage again. I was carrying too much hurt around. We could see it wasn’t working after just three months. Neither of us was capable of giving the marriage a hundred per cent.’ Spain had even had the effect of making Freddie show a rarely acknowledged serious side. ‘I don’t give a toss. I’m giving myself another two years and then I’m retiring. Nothing is for ever.’
Now Freddie was rattling around in his large villa with only statues of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy for company. He rarely swam in the vast pool and never sunbathed. He didn’t drink and he didn’t play golf. But the comedian insisted at the time, ‘I’m happy living by myself. I stay in a lot of the time, working on scripts or watching sport on TV. I lead a very quiet life. I don’t miss the old days when I had a £2 million mansion, owned racehorses, a helicopter and several Rolls Royces. I just look back and think, “What a dickhead!”’
But in the crazy, mixed-up world of Freddie Starr, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Just a year after announcing his divorce from Donna the couple remarried. Freddie told one journalist, ‘I can’t live without her.’
He still lives in Spain, and people who have encountered him since he got back with Donna say he’s a new man. ‘Freddie was sinking fast just like so many older men in Spain whose marriages break up after moving here. But now they’re back together he’s got himself onto a TV series, he’s making stand-up appearances in carefully selected local clubs and bars, and he’s been out socialising again.’
But that same friend warned, ‘Freddie’s probably only got one more chance in life. Out here, the sun and the booze and other influences are a potent mix that so often ends in tragedy. I just hope Freddie has learned his lesson.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
PRINCE MISERABLE
Prince found himself a slave 2 the housing market in Spain
PRINCE MISERABLE
It’s the ultimate challenge for television’s incredibly popular House Doctor. How do you make improvements to a rock superstar’s house on the Costa del Sol that’s so over-the-top no one wants to buy it? Answer: you make it even more vulgar by putting all the owner’s personal possessions back into it.
Welcome to the extraordinary mansion that chart-topping musical eccentric Prince is so desperate to sell he’s splashed out more than a million dollars to try and improve it. Now friends say it’s close to rivalling Elton John’s Windsor palace as the most OTT celebrity property of all time.
When superstar Prince bought this mansion on the Costa del Sol he desperately hoped it would be the key to the future happiness of himself and pretty wife Mayte. But then the couple’s only child died of a rare disease just one week after birth. The stress and strain of losing their baby son soon had a devastating toll on the star’s marriage. Now Prince’s isolated dream home in the hills above Estepona has turned into a nightmare. He has dubbed it a ‘cursed house’ and vowed never to return. At one stage, the millionaire star even wanted to donate the vast property – called Adorna Tierra – to an orphanage because of the bad luck it had brought him.
The last straw came in 2003 when his views were obstructed by cranes being used to build yet more houses within a stone’s throw of his once-isolated home. ‘Prince went crazy, as he’d bought the house in the first place because it was so isolated; now there were cranes so high that anyone could take pictures of him in his garden,’ explained local estate agent Miguel Ferrer.
Prince’s difficulty in selling what his Florida-based agent rather quaintly describes as an ‘English-style mansion’ shows that even the richest of us can’t always cash in on the worldwide property boom. Two years ago the mansion was on the market for the equivalent of €7.5 million. When it failed to sell, the diminutive superstar was persuaded to reinstall his favourite purple grand piano, splash out €200,000 on a dining-room set complete with Prince insignias and even have his personal crest painted above the swimming pool to attract buyers. And then there was the €50,000 desk in the newly decorated ‘purple study’, plus the return of all his most glamorous snapshots to adorn the walls, not to mention a further €100,000 worth of redecoration. He has even thrown in his beloved purple BMW, which he personally had shipped over from Georgia six years ago.
‘This was all supposed to help sell the property quickly,’ says one Marbella estate agent who has been watching the proceedings with bemusement. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have worked. Let’s face it, the first thing that anyone with that kind of money will do is rip everything out and start all over again. The place looks more like a tacky furniture store in Blackpool than a classy mansion.’
To add insult to injury, Prince has even been persuaded to drop the price of the house to €5 million. ‘It seems that even one of the richest rock stars on earth has had to take a terrible tumble on the property market,’ added the agent.
Prince’s problems began when he splashed out €3.5 million to buy the mansion seven years ago. He even had a customised basement with special soundproofing built below his office so that he could ‘go down and scream his head off whenever he got stressed’. But then everything started to go wrong. ‘They hardly ever went out after losing the baby. They just wanted complete privacy and that was the beginning of the end of their marriage,’ explained Miguel Ferrer. ‘I know that Prince has only been in the property four times in seven years for a total of three weeks. Now he hates that house and reckons it has a curse on it.’
Meanwhile, Spanish-born ex-wife Mayte occasionally drops into the mansion for holidays as lawyers continue to negotiate the financial end of the couple’s four-year marriage. Prince is currently shelling out the equivalent of £15,000 a month on maintining the property and its permanent staff of five. In the past, Mayte has phoned staff at the mansion to tell them she is bringing lovers, including Tommy Lee – ex-husband of Pamela Anderson – over to Spain. Says a friend, ‘Prince and Mayte have long since gone their separate ways, but Prince still considers the home to have been somewhere special for both of them and he was distressed to think she’d bring any new lovers to the property. He considered it disrespectful.’
At one stage, Tommy Lee and Mayte were said to have become ‘very close’ after Pamela Anderson’s bad-boy ex agreed to produce an album for her in Los Angeles. The couple were even spotted openly caressing each other at an MTV party in LA. But the background to the Spanish mansion might explain why Prince was so reluctant to allow Mayte to cavort with Tommy Lee on the Costa del Sol. One Spanish associate of Prince explained, ‘They bought the house with the express intention of raising a family and living happily ever after away from the bright lights of Hollywood. It’s tragic that so much should go wrong for them.’
Says another local property expert, ‘It’s a classic scenario. The area is being overdeveloped and people are advised to try and buy the land in front of
their own properties if they want to avoid such problems. It’s a complete mess. Mayte loves the house because she was born in Spain, while Prince hates the place because it’s surrounded by building sites and he associates it with the loss of their child.’
Prince’s property representative Julisa Garcia explains to all prospective buyers that the rock superstar is so desperate to sell the house that he has set up a Spanish company to make the sale easier. From her office in Florida she tells interested parties, ‘It’s a fantastic house.’
As the agent’s details explain, ‘Adorna Tierra means ornament of earth. It is a very unique mansion that offers luxury, beauty and a lot of privacy.’ The mansion also consists of a thousand square metres of garden that cost €300,000 to landscape; a personalised beauty parlour and hairdressing salon; €150,000 worth of sound, TV and video systems, including a satellite dish with 250 channels; a gym; and a guard house for a round-the-clock security man. There’s also a climate-controlled Olympic-sized pool, a tennis court, the obligatory jacuzzi that fits eight people, plus a €500,000 security system, including video, cameras and radar-alarm beams across every border.
POSTSCRIPT
The Costa del Sol is a booming, thriving economy with sky-rocketing property prices accompanying a disturbing rise in crime. As thousands more Brits move into the area every month, the value of their assets rises, turning the entire area into rich pickings for ambitious criminals.
Yet the Andalusian sun will continue to shine down, the waves of the blue Mediterranean will always crash against the beautiful golden sandy beaches, and it will long continue as the ultimate dream destination for so many British residents. Where else can you still get a drinkable bottle of Rioja for around €4.50 (£3) a bottle? Television channels back in Britain provide a constant diet of ‘getting away from it all’ programmes that simply feed the desire to escape to the sun.
Buying a house on the Costa del Sol is now a better investment than anything back in the UK; it can also provide a lucrative additional income from a whole variety of sources, as well as the perfect retreat for any self-confessed ducker and diver. The key is some lateral thinking when it comes to putting that home to work. It is quite remarkable how many people are prepared to fork out a small fortune to rent a ‘special’ holiday home.
House prices have tripled in the past five years; that’s faster than anywhere else in mainland Europe. Even on those Brookside-style estates with identical houses that have swamped the areas behind the overcrowded tourist hotspots like Marbella, Estepona and Fuengirola, a relatively modest three-bedroom house can set you back £300,000.
Demand for luxurious properties on the edge of the Mediterranean is booming as never before, partly thanks to the strength of the pound against the euro. Alcohol, food and petrol remain cheaper in mainland Spain, and even the local health service is a lot more impressive than anything on offer back in the UK.
Some have plumped for buying a finca in the hills behind the Costa del Sol. There are now so many Brits in these areas that it has become known as the Cotswolds of Spain. The trouble is that most end up sweating blood and tears before getting their properties fully renovated, often by greedy rip-off builders who usually turn out to be unscrupulous fellow Brits. The last family I knew who did this are still waiting to move into their dream holiday home four years after buying it.
Most houses on the Costa del Sol are no more than one hour’s drive from Malaga Airport, and the motorways of southern Spain are wonderfully empty of vehicles once you get out of the big cities. They are so new that a lot of the locals still prefer sticking to the more familiar B roads. Malaga has more flights to and from the UK than any other city in Europe. These days many people buy one-way tickets at short notice from bucket shops at Malaga Airport. Even standbys work if you’re travelling alone or in a pair. One can fly to or from Malaga for as little as £20 – less than the cost of a rail ticket from London to Brighton.
So the cold, hard reality is that the Costa del Crime will continue to grow. ‘It would take a world war to slow down development here,’ says one who should know. But perhaps those who have been tempted to set up home here will now have a more realistic idea of what to expect.
APPENDIX 1
Some of the high-profile murders of Britons on the Costa del Crime in recent years
Gangland enforcer Scott Bradfield, 28: battered to death, cut up and stuffed into two trunks near Torremolinos in November 2001. His body was left in an exposed position as a warning to other criminals on the Costa del Sol.
Northern Ireland-born Michael McGuinness, 36: found bound and gagged in the boot of his car in Malaga in August 2000. He had earlier been kidnapped at gunpoint from his apartment in Mijas on the Costa del Sol.
Retired British businessman Eric Robinson: killed by a drug-addict burglar at his home near Marbella in January 2000.
British estate agent Irene Mulvihill: found murdered in June 2001 in the garden of her £300,000 home in Mijas, where she lived with her husband and daughter.
Tourist Richard Winter: battered to death with a hammer on the marble floor of his Torremolinos apartment in November 1997.
Robin Lewis, 43, originally from Enfield, Middlesex: shot and then set alight at the side of a motorway on the Costa del Sol in April 1997. Police believe Lewis had double-crossed a Columbian drug cartel.
Tory councillor’s musician daughter Susan Kendrick, 32: found dead in a remote ravine near Estepona in October 1995. She had been sexually assaulted.
Gerald McDonald: killed when gunmen shot a hail of bullets into a pub in Fuengirola in July 1996. Three others were injured.
Bar owner George Hansford: murdered and mutilated before being chopped into five pieces at his villa on the Costa del Sol in February 1995.
Wife of businessman Jeremy Lowndes: beaten to death by her husband at their Costa del Sol villa. Lowndes was jailed for nine years in June 1994.
APPENDIX 2
Fifty things you probably never knew about the Costa del Crime
1 Half a million British tourists visit the Costa del Sol each summer.
2 250,000 Brits now live on the Costa del Sol.
3 Of those 250,000, substantially more than half are men.
4 There are estimated to be more than a hundred brothels in the Malaga province.
5 There are a total of 25,000 bars and nightclubs on the Costa del Sol.
6 There are 300 beaches.
7 In 2003, more than 500 people were arrested by Spanish police for having sex on beaches.
8 It is estimated that, out of the 150,000 single Brits travelling to the Costa del Sol each year, more than 10,000 will come back with sexually transmitted diseases.
9 More than 350,000 Germans will also visit this summer.
10 At least 30 contract killings are carried out in the province of Malaga each year.
11 Drug barons finance legitimate business in the Costa del Sol to the tune of half a billion pounds each year.
12 More than 100,000 golfers visit the Costa del Sol each year.
13 There are more than 50 golf courses on the coast.
14 There are more than 20,000 hotels.
15 Puerto Banus has more hookers than any other resort, with an estimated 2,000 working girls.
16 The city of Malaga provides the cheapest sex, with rates as low as £30 for 30 minutes.
17 One Marbella private-investigations agency specialises in sending hookers in to ‘test’ husbands suspected of adultery by their wives.
18 Fuengirola and Torremolinos are estimated to contain a total of 35,000 gay British men and women.
19 British golfers are the most generous tippers at the strip clubs of Puerto Banus.
20 Benalmadena has the lowest-per-capita income Brits on the coast.
21 The latest craze at one Estepona golf course is naked play.
22 More Guinness is consumed on the Costa del Sol than in the whole of London.
23 Spanish residents on the Costa del Sol make up le
ss than half the total population.
24 It is estimated that a total of 10,000 women on the coast work as part-time hookers to supplement their income.
25 STD clinics along the Costa del Sol are filled to bursting point throughout the busy summer months.
26 There are estimated to be more than 5,000 swingers – mainly British, German and Spanish – on the Costa del Sol.
27 More internet sex lines are operated here than from any other area in Europe.
28 At least 200 men and women couples work as joint hookers offering voyeurs the chance to watch them have sex for £100 per hour.
29 There were at least 5,000 breast-implant operations carried out at clinics on the Costa del Sol last year.
30 And at least 2,500 penis implants.
31 More than a hundred sex dungeons exist on the Costa del Sol.
32 Spanish porn videos are said to be the most explicit in Europe thanks to relaxed local laws.
33 The fastest-growing sex market on the Costa del Sol is for handsome single men to service businesswomen.
34 The sex industry here is said to employ a total of 40,000 people.
35 There are more blonde women under the age of 30 on the Costa del Sol than in any other area of Europe.
36 The area has an average of more than 300 days of sunshine every year.
37 There are more Rolls Royces on the Costa del Sol than anywhere else other than Los Angeles.
38 More Viagra is sold per head of population on the Costa del Sol than anywhere else in Europe.
39 French and German naturists make up more than 70 per cent of all the nudists who visit the Costa del Sol.
40 Hookers spend an estimated £100,000 each month advertising their services in local newspapers and on the internet.
41 One legendary Marbella hooker called Candice claims to have serviced 30 men and 10 women in one day.
Costa Del Crime Page 17