I then remembered an anecdote Leff had told me just a few hours earlier up in the mountains about how he and Fara had to shoot a man in the leg as a warning to a rival gang not to invade their hash farm.
‘Yes, but what’s the point in waiting for them?’ I ask Si.
‘It’s up to you, old son. I told them not to fuck us around and now the silly bastards have got off their heads.’
‘But Leff is your contact,’ I asked. ‘I don’t want to upset him for that reason.’
‘Bollocks,’ says Si. ‘I haven’t done business with those two clowns in years. Let’s just fuck off.’
So we opt for the Straits of Gibraltar and head off at high speed in the Land Cruiser for the port of Tangier, three hours west of Ketama. Within an hour of setting off, a call from Leff comes through on my mobile. I look at the screen and listen to it ringing but decide not to answer.
Si laughs alongside me as we pick up speed on the first stretch of dual carriageway we have seen for more than a hundred miles. ‘Typical, greedy bastards,’ he says. ‘Serves ’em right. You know what they say? Don’t get high on your own supply.’
I listen to the message from Leff on my phone.
‘You motherfucker English asshole. We want money and if we don’t get it we will shoot your fuckin’ balls off. D’you understand? I will come and find you in London and rape your wife and kidnap your children if you do not pay us. I will call back in ten minutes. If you do not pick up the phone you are a dead man.’
The phone rings exactly ten minutes later. This time I pick it up and then switch it off immediately. I know full well we are probably two hours ahead of this hapless pair of Tangier dopehead gangsters.
Then Si announces: ‘They know we’re catching a ferry.’
‘Good point.’
‘Hope it leaves on time.’
The next time I switch on the phone again is when the ferry is pulling away from the port-side of Tangier’s newly built passenger terminal, as it sets sail for Algeciras. There are twenty-three messages from Leff awaiting my attention. Most of them feature threats to kill my wife, children, mother, father and promising to ‘hunt’ me down in London and throw my body in the River Thames. Sitting in the ship’s restaurant, Si listens to the messages with a broad grin on his face.
‘They fucked up. Not us. Leff will calm down. I’ll talk to him in a few days.’
Just then I look out of the porthole and notice a familiar looking flatbed truck travelling at high speed across the deserted car park in front of the ferry disembarkation spot. It screeches to a halt. I can just make out Leff and Fara jumping out and running to the water’s edge as the ferry steams slowly between the gap in the harbour wall while making its way out into the Strait of Gibraltar.
‘Stupid little bastards,’ says Si, drily. ‘They’ll calm down eventually. The one thing I learned about Moroccans when I was in jail was that they don’t hold grudges. In the end they’ll respect us for doing a runner. They’ve only got themselves to blame, haven’t they?’
I was tempted to ask Si whether he thought their threats to visit London and my family were serious but decided not to tempt fate.
As the ferry made its way slowly across one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, I flipped open my research notebook and began reading up on my next interviewee – a shadowy character called Zaid.
PART TWO
SPAIN – THE HASH FRONTIER
The market for hash continues to grow in Europe, where it’s reckoned that one in five adults have used marijuana or hashish. The European Union’s drug agency produced a 700-page report on the use and abuse of cannabis and established that more than 13 million hash smokers use the drug every month in Europe.
*
Just across a 7.7 nautical mile stretch of water from Morocco lies Spain, which has a hash consumption epidemic on its hands. The Spanish make more seizures of the drug than all other European countries put together but nothing, it seems, can stem the tide of hash flowing across the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco.
Vast shipments arrive from North Africa virtually every day and the traffickers are always coming up with new methods of smuggling. One of the latest techniques is for gangs to drop loads of hash fitted with radio-transmitting buoys into the Atlantic and have boats pick up the drugs.
In 2012, Spanish police arrested five members of a gang of drug traffickers on the Costa del Sol when 1,600 kilos of hashish was discovered in a house in an operation called ‘Sarco’. The investigation started at the end of the previous year when the police became aware of the group and started to identify its members. It was later alleged that the gang of several nationalities moved hash from Spain to Holland, Great Britain and Ireland.
In 2011, 840 kilos of hashish was intercepted on a yacht that had arrived in the port of Marbella from Morocco. The drug was disguised inside twenty-seven bales hidden between the cabin and different parts of the leisure craft. The raid was the culmination of a six-month investigation into the activities of a group of Spanish hash smugglers initially detected on the Costa del Sol. The gang transferred the drugs on the high seas and brought it ashore on different parts of the Málaga coastline. At the beginning of 2011, the group tried to acquire a powerful boat with high top speeds from the Spanish town of La Linea opposite Gibraltar, but the illicit operation failed after the boat was stopped two days after the sale for not having a licence.
Also in Marbella, two French citizens, a father-and-son hash trafficking ‘team’ were arrested in 2011. Fifty-two kilograms of hashish and €58,340 in cash plus false documents were recovered. The hash was found in a suitcase hidden under a staircase in a house rented by the two men.
A former councillor in the city of Ceuta, a Spanish territory that borders with Morocco, was arrested with 690 kilos of hash in a van he was driving as he was about to board a ferry to Algeciras in 2011. Police – who’d been tipped off – immediately searched his vehicle and located blocks of the drug, hidden in different parts of the vehicle.
The routes of entry of Moroccan hash into Spain are constantly changing due to the use of fast boats with longer ranges. Drug smugglers now reach Spanish provinces such as Huelva, Almería, Murcia and Valencia, where the number of seizures have multiplied in recent years. Large quantities have even been seized as far north as the Ebro river delta.
According to the Observatoire Français des Drogues et des Toxicomanies, Moroccan hash is also sent southward by truck to the Atlantic port of Agadir, to Casablanca and Essaouira, from where much of it is exported through northern Spain. But the favourite route remains smuggling hash in trucks and cars travelling on ferries leaving from the Moroccan Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla or from the port of Tangier.
*
Before Spain’s current crippling recession, it enjoyed a spectacular ten-year building boom, much of which was driven by ‘dirty (black) money’ spent by the hash barons. Criminals capitalised on the gold rush mentality that infected Spain in the 1990s and early part of the new century. House prices doubled in the ten years between 1997 and 2007. Unscrupulous local authorities even turned a blind eye to ‘front’ companies set up by gangsters and took backhanders to grant building licences.
Keen to hide the spoils from hash and other drug smuggling, as well as prostitution, extortion and human trafficking, gangsters channelled hundreds of millions into buying property. Meanwhile, police and judicial authorities were often overwhelmed by the scale and sophistication of criminal activities. On Spain’s Costa del Sol – where estate agents believed during the boom years they virtually had a licence to print money – anti-corruption magistrates found themselves dealing with scores of cases.
Just how much ‘dirty money’ entered Spain in the so-called boom years is impossible to say. But it is claimed that 40 per cent of all the €500 bills in existence are circulating in Spain. They are called ‘Bin Ladens’ because, like the terrorist who was the world’s most wanted man until his death, everyone knows what they look like bu
t few people have ever actually seen one. These €500 bills fill the envelopes in ‘black money’ property deals.
Southern Spain was clearly awash with hash and my next subject, Zaid, was one of the biggest names in the business.
CHAPTER 4
ZAID
With Leff and Fara left far behind still fuming in Tangier, it was time to meet an altogether different character. Spanish-born hash baron Zaid was brought up in the port of Algeciras, which itself is only separated from Morocco by the Strait of Gibraltar. Zaid owns and runs a number of warehouses in the industrial area of the city.
After disembarking the ferry from Morocco, Si headed off to his Spanish home in Murcia, while I was met by Paco, one of Zaid’s men. We drive off in his car for a night-time rendezvous with the man himself. Although Paco speaks no English, I speak enough Spanish to manage a light conversation, which is punctuated by awkward silences as the vehicle heads through the rundown suburbs of Algeciras. As we near an industrial area, Paco drives around and around the same block of warehouses at least five times. He helpfully explains that this is done in order to make sure the police are not tailing him because he does not want to lead them to Zaid’s headquarters.
Eventually Paco parks the car and as a secondary safety measure we walk at least a quarter of a mile to a warehouse. The streets are badly lit and every time a car passes us, Paco carefully checks it out with a squint of his eyes.
Eventually we reach a big garage-type door with a smaller door built within it. Paco knocks twice. We enter to find ourselves in a warehouse about four times the size of a normal lock-up garage with an office attached to it. Five men are gathered around a small white Citroën with its rear tailgate open. The men glance up with menacing looks on their faces until they recognise Paco. One of the men turns and approaches us and introduces himself as Zaid. He’s short and stocky and walks like a weightlifter on steroids. He talks in quickfire Spanish that is quite hard for me to understand.
Zaid has only agreed to meet me because he is the brother-in-law of a lawyer I know in Málaga. Without this introduction, he tells me, he wouldn’t come near me. He considers journalists – Periodistas – to be ‘the enemy’. He immediately tells me how the newspapers exaggerate stories about drugs, which in turn then puts more pressure on Spain’s Policia National and Guardia Civil to arrest hash barons like himself. It is clear this sort of ‘behaviour’ infuriates Zaid. He says – like so many hash gangsters – that his drugs are doing no harm to anyone. I guess it’s his way of dealing with the ‘business’ he is in.
Meanwhile the high-pitched screeching noise of a speed drill reminds us that the rest of his gang are unscrewing the inside covers of the Citroën’s tailgate. They then start loading small brick-shaped packs of clingfilm-wrapped hash into all available crevices of the Citroën.
Zaid explains that this shipment of hash is due to go cross-country up to Madrid where one of the city’s busiest drug dealers has a Rolodex filled with customers ready and waiting for the latest batch of high quality ‘product’.
Zaid beckons us over to the back of the Citroën as his men continue packing the car with drugs in a meticulous and measured manner. Zaid picks up one of the clingfilm bricks and squeezes it gently then offers me the chance to do the same. It feels rock hard at first but then there is a certain amount of give in it when I try a second time. ‘See? Just a few seconds of your body heat and it becomes softer,’ explains Zaid.
He tells me this one brick of hash is worth €40,000 in Madrid. He declines to tell me exactly what he is selling it on for but I presume it was probably in the region of 50 per cent of that value. Zaid in turn would have bought it from his Moroccan connection for probably 50 per cent of that price.
I discreetly count the number of hash bricks being hidden into that little Citroën and there are at least fifty. That means this car is about to transport drugs worth well in excess of €1 million to Zaid … It seems incredible that such a small vehicle can be used to transport such a valuable shipment. But then again, it is clear that it is at this point the hash starts to make huge amounts of money for those prepared to finance its shipments. In a sense, the ones who take the real risks – the people in that Citroën – are nothing more than mules. Zaid says the two men in the car will get €3,000 each for driving the hash up to Madrid. Like any big business, it is the money-men who stand to make the most profits. They are risking not themselves but their cash and that seems a more valuable commodity than human lives in the secret underworld of hash.
Zaid goes on to explain the costs and complications involved in getting the hash from the coastline of southern Spain to the cities of Europe. He is careful to point out that he has nothing to do with the Moroccan end of the operation, but he openly talks about who needs to be bribed to get the hash out of North Africa.
There are different methods of transport into Europe, but there is one main route from Tangier and the Rif Mountains beyond: across that already familiar stretch of water called the Strait of Gibraltar. The real players in this game deal in huge quantities and run sophisticated operations. Zaid even tells a chilling anecdote about how a gang of Dutch criminals tried to set up their own smuggling ‘hub’ in Ketama and ended up with their throats cut.
‘These guys just didn’t get it,’ explains Zaid. ‘They thought by cutting out the Moroccan transporters, they could cut their costs and make even bigger profits but they are the ones who got cut. It’s madness to try and do business inside Morocco. Leave it to the locals, I say.’
Zaid openly admits that he himself comes from a family of Moroccans who immigrated to Spain three generations earlier. ‘Look, even I who am part Moroccan know it is dangerous to step on their tails. Of course, I have used my family connections to set up a supply route. But I have been very careful not to put any Moroccans out of business during that process.’
But Zaid knows all the pitfalls when it comes to the hash business. He says he has dealt with everyone from the Brit gangsters – ‘fair and strong’ – to the Balkan underworld – ‘evil and cold’ – and he claims that a few years ago he found himself doing business with a shady bunch of Moroccans who turned out to be Al-Qaeda terrorists trying to raise cash to buy weapons.
Zaid explained: ‘It was just before 9/11 so Al-Qaeda were more open about their activities and they had a cell of Moroccans working for them out of Tangier. The idea was that a bunch of Moroccan gangsters put up 50 per cent and Al-Qaeda the other 50 per cent and they shared the profits. But my friends the Moroccans said the Al-Qaeda boys were a nightmare to deal with. They didn’t understand the complex nature of hash smuggling and expected their profits to come pouring in virtually before the first shipment reached Spain. Then one of them accused the Moroccan gangsters of ripping them off and it ended in one guy dying and two being badly injured. From that moment on, no one in Morocco would agree to do business with Al-Qaeda. Eventually they set up their own supply route from one ‘friendly’ hash farm on the other side of the Rif Mountains and transported the hash by road into Tunisia, where it was shipped across the Mediterranean to Italy.’
But Zaid says that after 9/11 Al-Qaeda’s hash-producing farm was raided by one of the area’s most powerful drug lords. After a two-day gunfight, Al-Qaeda retreated back across the border into Algeria, where it is believed they set up another hash farm. Zaid says that the way the local gangsters ran Al-Qaeda out of the Rif Mountains has become part of Ketama folklore. ‘The Moroccans are very proud of getting rid of the terrorists,’ explains Zaid. ‘They feel they showed great loyalty to their country although what they really did was take the pressure off their own activities because the Americans are always pressurising the Moroccan government to close down the hash fields in the Rif Mountains.’
Back in that Algeciras warehouse, Zaid’s men continue using their power tools to screw back the door linings of the little Citroën hatchback before it heads off up to Madrid. Zaid inspects the car after the operation is completed and claps two of his men on t
he back, congratulating them for a job well done. Now more relaxed, Zaid’s voice softens as he talks about his career as a hash baron.
‘I don’t deal in coke or anything else like heroin or crack because I know the prison sentences are much higher if you’re caught,’ he explained before I even asked. However, Zaid claims that even the hash trade is suffering from the worldwide recession, which has hit especially hard in Spain. ‘It’s certainly true that up until about five years ago the profits on each shipment of hash were much greater. It’s a strange situation because the demand, especially here in Spain, remains very high although people have less money so it will slow down eventually. But the costs involved in smuggling it from Morocco are increasing by the month. Today, we have to build in all sorts of expenses, which simply didn’t exist a few years ago.’
Zaid was open about nearly all aspects of his criminal enterprise but was rather more reluctant when it came to discussing his family and how his ‘career’ affected them. ‘I have a wife and two children. I’m a regular sort of guy in many ways. I pick my kids up from school some days. I take them to the beach. We go on vacations together. My wife knows that I am involved in a risky business. That is all she needs to know. It’s important to remember that if I shared my knowledge with her then that would endanger her life because there are a lot of bad people in this game and they would stop at nothing to find out more about my operation.’
Zaid bear-hugs his two men before they drive off in the Citroën for the six-hour journey to Madrid with that shipment of €1 million worth of hash hidden in the vehicle. Before they leave the warehouse, Zaid and two other men check that it is clear in the street. Zaid then waves them off into the darkness for a trip that will personally earn him many tens of thousands of euros.
Hash Page 5