Hash

by Clarkson, Wensley

  As Zaid is shutting the big double doors to the warehouse, he notices a vehicle parking up on the pavement about a hundred yards from the entrance to his building. He nods at his two associates and they lock up the doors while I watch them from inside the poky little office attached to the warehouse.

  Outside, Zaid strolls casually towards the vehicle parked further up the street. It is only then, as I continue watching from the office, that I notice there are two men sitting in the car.

  For the first time since I met Zaid earlier that evening, I feel a sense of danger and risk in the air. His two men who closed the doors remain silent and they urge me to keep quiet by putting forefingers to lips. So I am left with no option but to watch Zaid as he continues to walk towards the car with the two men in it.

  The man on the passenger side rolls down his window and Zaid leans in. There is an exchange of words. Then I catch a brief glimpse of Zaid getting an envelope out of the inside pocket of his jacket and passing it to the man in the car. Zaid then strolls casually back towards us.

  Three minutes later, he is back inside the warehouse.

  ‘Relax,’ says Zaid. ‘Two tame cops who needed paying. They come round here every week and sit there until I give them some money. We look after them, they look after us.’

  That night, Zaid and his men locked up the warehouse and insisted I accompany them to a lively local bar where beer and seafood was in plentiful supply. Zaid toasted me with a wry smile on his face. ‘Good luck with your book,’ he told me. ‘Just make sure you tell the truth.’

  For a few moments, it felt as if there was a threatening tone in his voice but there again I might have been imagining it.

  At the end of the evening, I tried to pay the bill for everyone but Zaid insisted it was down to him. Then I noticed the barman refusing any cash from Zaid … it seems that people like Zaid are not expected to pay for anything thanks to their reputation in the community.

  A few months later, I got a call from my lawyer friend in Málaga to say that Zaid had been shot dead by a hitman outside his own warehouse.

  What goes around comes around.

  CHAPTER 5

  KING OF THE COSTA DEL HASH

  Spain became a very popular destination for British criminals on the run following the collapse of the extradition treaty between the two countries in 1978. When the thieves behind London’s notorious 1983 £6 million Security Express robbery were spotted leading luxurious lives on the Costa del Sol it was even dubbed ‘The Costa del Crime’. It wasn’t until seven years later that Britain and Spain agreed a new extradition treaty when Spain joined the European Union.

  In 2000, the then British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, finalised a new fast-track extradition treaty with the Spanish authorities, but it did little to stem the tide of crime rolling across Spain.

  And still the Brits keep coming in. A seventy-five-year-old Briton was arrested by the Guardia Civil in 2011 on a yacht, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, which was found to be carrying 1,038 kilos of hashish worth €1.6 million on the drugs market.

  As it happens, my interest in the secret and lucrative world of hash had partly been fuelled by living in southern Spain between 2000 and 2007. Working on a number of books about real-life British criminals living in the sun, I’d found that for all their bravado about robbing banks and security vans in the 1970s and 1980s, the most successful ones virtually all made their biggest fortune from drugs.

  Some had even paid the ultimate price and lost their lives in pursuit of that elusive drugs ‘lottery win’ which they believed would enable them to quit crime altogether and enjoy a long and happy retirement.

  Take Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson: his underworld infamy came directly from that so-called Crime of the Century in 1963. But the £40,000 which each of the robbers ended up making from the raid was never going to be enough for these characters to give up crime. South Londoner Wilson was considered one of the masterminds of the GTR and even escaped from prison for more than two years in the middle of serving a thirty-year sentence for his role in the robbery.

  But when he finally got out in the mid-1980s, he found the underworld had changed beyond all recognition. Blaggings and robberies had been replaced by drugs as the main source of income for top level London villains. Charlie Wilson, ever the pragmatist, soon acknowledged that he needed to get a piece of the action from drugs sooner rather than later.

  So he moved down to southern Spain, the infamous Costa del Crime, and began financing and running some of the era’s most lucrative drugs deals. At first he kept strictly to hash because he knew, like so many others, that the sentences were much lighter than for cocaine. But the lure of the ‘white stuff’ proved too much to resist in the end and he set up a second ‘importation business’ from his home near Marbella, which dealt exclusively in coke. Meanwhile his hash runs continued to operate but on a much smaller scale.

  Wilson himself loathed hash as a recreational drug because of the way it seemed to dull your senses. Cocaine, on the other hand, improved one’s reactions and kept one feeling on top of the world. He even told one criminal associate: ‘Coke is the only drug that makes you a better operator. I love it!’

  Eventually, Wilson ‘transferred’ his hash business to a young south-east London villain who went by the initials ‘RP’ to all who knew him. RP was a classic wild card, a man with a criminal pedigree as long as a blagger’s arm and a reputation as a risk taker.

  Not long afterwards, in 1990, ex-train robber Wilson was shot dead by a hitman in the back garden of his luxury hacienda near Marbella following a clash with another British gang in a row about a cocaine shipment. The London underworld presumed that RP would step into Charlie’s shoes and take over his coke business.

  But RP surprised many of his gangster associates on the Costa del Crime and in London by side-stepping Charlie’s coke business and sticking to his drug of choice – hash. It was a clever move.

  As one Costa Brit explained: ‘All the coke boys were dropping like flies. They were either getting themselves topped like poor old Charlie or being banged up in prison, thanks to co-operation between the DEA and British and Spanish police, who were on a mission to rid the world of cocaine.’

  But, I was told, RP was the consummate survivor. He was the man to interview when it came to the hash trade on the Costa del Crime.

  *

  My mission to find ‘RP’ in southern Spain began with a criminal enforcer (debt collector) called Tall Tommy whom I’d known for many years on the Costa del Crime. He knew RP very well. Tall Tommy said many in the underworld admired how this man had managed to not only survive but thrive by sticking to hash smuggling only and ignoring all the heavier drugs and people smuggling, which many of the gangsters in southern Spain now specialise in.

  When I eventually made direct contact with RP through Tall Tommy, RP immediately put up a number of conditions before meeting me. The first one was to travel to a small port west of Marbella so RP could – in his words – ‘see where the fuck you’re comin’ from’. I agreed, not really knowing what I was about to let myself in for.

  So it was that a few hours later I found myself on RP’s high-powered speedboat close to the Strait of Gibraltar. RP’s £150,000 powerboat was kept in a sleepy little harbour well away from the flashy villains of Marbella and Puerto Banus. RP described it as ‘one of my few luxuries’. RP is proud of his wealth but insists he doesn’t flaunt it openly on the Costa del Crime, where he is one of the few remaining Brits still ‘active’ in the criminal sense of the word.

  RP told me he’d agreed to meet me only because of my own contacts in the London underworld, including one particular criminal who’d helped me with numerous book and TV projects during the previous twenty-five years and was ‘owed a favour’ by RP.

  ‘This is the life I always dreamed of as a kid, and I’m not going to throw it away like most of the old gangsters who pop up round these parts,’ shouts RP above the thudding noise of his twin outboar
d engines, while we chug gently out of the harbour entrance towards the choppy waters close to the resort of Estepona, a few miles up the coast from Marbella.

  ‘Hash is like most businesses,’ says RP. ‘It takes a while to get up and runnin’ but once you’ve cracked the right system you can make a fuckin’ fortune. It took me a while to get the right people after Charlie got done but now it all works like clockwork.’

  RP’s fortune is earned mainly through vast shipments of Moroccan hash that travel the lucrative route between southern Spain and the UK and the rest of Europe – via the so-called ‘drugs hub’ of Holland.

  ‘Holland is the key to my business. It’s like a massive filter for all the drugs that come up from southern Europe. But the great thing about hash is that the police and customs just aren’t that interested in it. Their priority is coke, heroin and ecstasy.’

  Yet again, it seemed that hash had unintentionally been allowed to flourish as a recreational drug because law enforcement in the West concentrated more on the more notorious harder narcotics.

  RP continues: ‘A lot of villains thought I’d missed a trick when I refused to get dragged into the coke game after Charlie got killed. Coke meant big profits with small quantities but it also meant dealing with psychotic Colombians, not to mention the arsehole Brits who put a hit on Charlie. I’d rather deal with a few nutty, sneaky Moroccans any day. The Colombians really believe the cocaine industry belongs to them and no ever gets away with fuckin’ them about. Far smarter for me to sidestep the whole coke game. It’s a decision I have never regretted.’

  But, admits RP, the risks when it comes to dealing in hash are just as deadly. ‘Look, it’s a simple equation. The smuggler who makes the most money is the one who takes the biggest risk, especially when shifting large quantities. I’ve got a reputation round these parts. Trouble is when you make a fortune, others start wondering if they can get a piece of it for themselves.’

  That, says RP, is why he is always prepared to ‘pull out the heavy brigade’ if any criminal rivals threaten his ‘business’.

  RP breathlessly recalled an incident in 2010 when a bunch of ‘killer Bulgarians’ tried to muscle in on his hash trade by forcing his Moroccan supplier to switch allegiances to them. ‘They put a shooter down my man’s throat and he nearly shat himself. I had to show strength by going in mob handed to see the Bulgarians and telling them to get lost. Luckily they backed off. It could have been a bloodbath.’

  That brings me to the sensitive subject of ‘losses’. I ask RP what happens if one of his smuggling teams lose a shipment as had happened to one contact of mine whose yacht sank off the coast of Majorca and who ended up with a price on his head because his criminal bosses held him personally responsible for that shipment.

  ‘Well,’ says RP, hesitating for the first time since we met. ‘That’s a tricky one because the shipment is the sole responsibility of that crew. If they lose it they have to repay me. That’s the rule of the game.’

  ‘Yes,’ I ask. ‘But if it was an accident would you still chase the guys who lost the shipment?’

  RP looks a little awkward before answering. ‘’Fraid so. It’s the law of the jungle. That crew is responsible. I would have put up tens of thousands of pounds for that shipment in the first place. It’s their job to look after the produce.’

  I hesitated for a moment then asked the hardest question of all: ‘Would you have a man killed if he lost your shipment and had no way of paying you back the money that it cost?’

  RP took a deep breath and nodded very slowly.

  ‘I’ll pass on that question if you don’t mind.’

  As the powerboat noisily tossed and crashed through the Mediterranean waves, RP pointed towards the imposing Rock of Gibraltar, probably in an attempt to change the subject. ‘There’s more villainy going on there than anywhere else. It’s a hotbed of crime,’ says RP. The crowded stretch of waterway between the Rock and Spain is policed by the UK’s Royal Navy and also the Gibraltar police, as well as the Spanish authorities. Caught smuggling in this stretch of water, and you’ll end up doing time on the Rock or in a stinking cell in the notorious Alhaurín Prison, in nearby Málaga.

  But then RP knows all about being locked up. Back in 1981 he got a five-year stretch for holding up a security van in a London suburb. Inside jail, RP – considered a rising young star back then – made friends with some of the old-time professional gangsters and through them made invaluable contacts for when he was released. It was those connections that led him to run ex-Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson’s hash business for him in the late 1980s.

  Even now, RP looks back on those days with a sense of genuine nostalgia. ‘It was like a breath of fresh air when I arrived in Spain. I was used to the police crawling all over us in south London but here the cops could be softened up with a few quid and maybe a gram of coke or a lump of hash. No wonder the British villains thrived out here back then.’

  In those early days after his arrival in Spain, RP travelled regularly to Morocco to keep close tabs on Charlie Wilson’s North African hash ‘partners’. Eventually Wilson signed the hash business over to RP to concentrate on the fat profits he was making from cocaine. RP’s career should have then come to an end when he got a two-year sentence after being arrested during a raid by police on a hash warehouse just outside Tangier. ‘But I managed to keep the hash business going while I was inside, so it was still there for me when I got out,’ he explains.

  That stretch in a prison in the Moroccan capital of Rabat also helped RP learn a smattering of Arabic, as well as fuelling his own taste for ‘smoke’.

  ‘I’d steered well clear of using hash until I ended up in that prison where I smoked what is still the best hash I have ever tried to this day,’ adds RP. He also admitted something that most hash barons refuse to concede: ‘Hash is not as harmless as all us villains try to make out. I got hooked inside jail and it took a lot of effort to get off it when I was released. It makes you lethargic and deadens your senses, which is something you don’t want happening in this game.’

  Just then, RP turns his boat sharply to the right and we crash through a couple of white horses with a bang. ‘What a life, eh,’ he says nonchalantly. ‘Sun, sea and plenty of dosh. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world.’

  A few minutes later, the vessel surges closer to the Spanish mainland just east of Gibraltar. RP points in the direction of a stretch of beach near a housing estate. RP says it is a popular landing spot for hash smugglers, where the drugs are collected in rubber inflatable dinghies and brought back to the beach to be loaded into vehicles. The gangs work differently though: some land the drugs, pack them into cars and leave car keys in various bars and restaurants for the next smuggling chain to move the drugs on. Others rent a nearby house with a good-sized garage and store the hash for a few days before moving it on to its next purchaser.

  ‘Deserted beaches in the middle of nowhere are no good because the police make a special point of keeping an eye on them,’ explains RP. ‘Much better to land the hash on beaches near houses. Makes more sense all round.’

  With that RP swings his powerboat back along the coastline and heads further eastwards towards the sleepy little harbour where he keeps the vessel. It’s so isolated that as we tie up the boat, the harbour is deserted.

  An hour later, RP and two of his henchmen drive me to one of those very same ‘landing strips’ on the beach where many of RP’s shipments have come into mainland Europe. We wander up the beach to a quiet chiringuito (beach bar) for a beer. RP’s henchmen prove to be an interesting pair because they’re father and son, although to look at them you’d think they were more like brothers. But we’ll hear more about them later.

  Halfway through the drink in the chiringuito, RP recalls how one of his Dutch ‘partners’ recently got himself killed after trying to muscle in on other criminals’ hash territory in Scandinavia. ‘I told him not to do it. But he was a typical Dutchman. Thought he knew best. They’re a
rrogant bastards. This fella got it in his head that the Swedes and Norwegians were particularly big fans of hash and convinced himself it was an untapped market. Silly sod. He didn’t realise the bloody Serbs had got there first.’

  He went on: ‘As soon as they heard from one of the Hell’s Angels gangs who sell hash over there that my mate was planning a big hash drop through Denmark, they came down on him like a ton of bricks. They waited until he left his flat in Amsterdam one night and a motorbike sped past with a shooter on the pillion seat. Bang. Bang. He was gone. Stick to what and whom you know best. That’s what I always say.’

  Just then RP took a mobile call outside the bar away from my earshot. He walked back in stern-faced and announced that he had to go and ‘sort out a problem’.

  As he shook my hand before getting into his brand new Range Rover, RP stopped for a few last words: ‘It’s a crap shoot out here. One day I’ll either retire with a fortune and live the rest of my life in peace and harmony or I’ll end up like poor old Charlie with a bullet in my head.’

  Then he hesitated and turned to his two henchmen and said: ‘You two have got quite a story to tell. Go and have a beer together and see what you can cook up.’

  The two henchmen looked a bit bewildered at first. Then RP barked: ‘Go on. He won’t bite you.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘These two know where all the bodies are buried.’ Then he turned back towards them. ‘Don’t you, boys?’ It turned out that RP was absolutely right.

  CHAPTER 6

  JEFF AND PAT – KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY

  RP’s two henchmen were not exactly keen on talking to me at first, so I told them all about myself and eventually they seemed satisfied and agreed to tell me their story.

  Jeff C, 58, was no stranger to the inside of a prison cell. Having absconded from the British justice system he was then arrested in 1995 and served three years in Spain for smuggling hash. He smokes hash every day of his life and outwardly promotes it whenever he has half a chance.