Despite hundreds of applications, Barny failed to even get one job interview on the Costa del Sol. ‘I was willing to try anything but jobs were so thin on the ground out here and there was some prejudice against me because I had an English name. It meant I got dismissed by many possible employers before they even met me.’
After months of struggling in Spain, Barny came across an older Brit called Al, who knew some of Barny’s schoolfriends because he was their hash dealer. ‘I got talking to Al and he said that despite the recession the demand for hash was as big as ever. We both reckoned it was probably because it’s cheaper to smoke hash than drink alcohol, which kind of makes sense.
‘Anyway, he said he needed a “runner” to make deliveries to some of the urbanisations [estates] on the west side of Marbella and that he would pay me a basic salary if I worked for him every day of the week. By this time, my parents had gone and I had been sleeping on a friend’s floor. I jumped at the chance of any job, even an illegal one.
‘With my salary from Al the hash dealer, I could do a flat-share with two other old school friends. It was like a weight lifting from my shoulders. Thanks to the job with Al I could look forward to a proper future in Spain.’
Also, Barny admits that after his parents left Marbella, he found life a lot less stressful. ‘They’d been in such a meltdown after the recession started hitting hard that they were rowing all the time and the atmosphere at home had been crap. Quite frankly, I was glad to see the back of them.’
But then nine months after starting work as a ‘runner’ for Al, Barny’s life turned upside down when he got the news from London that his mother had been killed in a car crash. ‘I was completely numbed by what happened to Mum. I felt so detached by this time because they’d moved to the UK and yet I felt heartbroken all the same. I rushed back to London to console my dad but he was a broken man. He was also angry with me for not coming back with them in the first place. He was virtually blaming me for her death. Also I felt completely out of place with my relatives in London.’
Two weeks after his mother’s funeral, Barny took the decision to head back to Spain. ‘Sure I felt bad. It was as if I was abandoning my dad but nothing I said or did seemed to make him happy, so I convinced myself he’d be better off without me. It probably wasn’t true but it gave me an excuse to head back to Marbella.’
But by the time Barny returned to Spain, he found that hash dealer Al had replaced him with a new ‘runner’, a pretty brunette girl whom Al believed could keep his customers much happier than Barny did. ‘I guess I was pretty naive to think no one would try and nick my job with Al. The young people out here are all as desperate as me and this girl was very attractive so I could see why Al preferred her to me. But it was a terrible blow. I had no money to pay the rent on the flat-share. My mates were threatening to turf me out and it felt as if my life had gone backwards once again.’
That’s when Barny says he ‘reached rock bottom’. He explains: ‘I moved out of the flat-share. Well, actually they kicked me out and threw all my stuff out of the balcony onto the pavement below. I had nowhere to turn, so I started sleeping rough on the beaches near where I used to live. I’d eat scraps of food I found in dustbins outside restaurants and supermarkets. I slept in little coves on beaches I knew from my childhood but I had to keep moving because I was afraid of being arrested for vagrancy by the Policia National.’
Barny admits: ‘I was wandering around in a daze of depression and hopelessness. I simply didn’t know where to turn. I slept in doorways and beaches and even on benches but I was running out of options. I kept wondering if my dad was okay back home. I had no money so I found a phone box and called my dad cobro revertido [reverse charges]. When he heard it was me he refused to accept the call. I was so upset I started crying in the street. At that moment I felt like the loneliest person in the world. My family didn’t want me. My friends had tossed me out of the flat we shared. It had got so bad that when I passed old school friends in the street they’d turn their heads away and ignore me.’
Later that same evening, Barny met another older man who was also ‘on the road’. He explains: ‘This guy was English, from up north and he seemed a decent sort. We ended up deciding to put our heads down on a quiet strip of beach I knew from my childhood. Then, suddenly in the middle of the night I woke up after hearing a lot of movement in the darkness.
‘I didn’t open my eyes at first because I wanted to stay asleep for as long as possible. Then suddenly I felt someone on top of me. It was the man trying to rape me. I pushed him away but he was strong and got me in an arm lock and tried to make me kneel on the sand. I said I wasn’t gay but that seemed to make him even more angry. He ordered me to drop my trousers but I refused. Then he weakened his grip on my wrists for a split second and I lashed out at him and turned and kicked him incredibly hard in the balls. It was only then I realised he was completely naked.’
Barny continues: ‘I took off and ran and ran for at least a mile to make sure he couldn’t find me. I decided there and then I had to get my act together and get some money together. I thought about all the things I could do to earn a living and concluded that selling hash was probably the safest option. I knew where Al got his supplies from and I knew I had to be careful not to sell on his patch but it was my only option.’
Within a month Barny had a list of clients, thanks to his connections inside Marbella, and enough money to try and lead a ‘normal’ life.
Now, more than two years later, Barny says he’s desperate to move away from the hash business and try to make something of his life. But with the recession in Spain worsening by the month, there seems little chance of that.
He continues: ‘I’ve had a few near misses while working as a hash dealer but nothing particularly dangerous. Most of the people I deal to are good old-fashioned dopeheads, who wouldn’t harm a fly. I even bumped into Al not long after I set up business and he wished me well, just so long as I didn’t start flogging hashish in his area.’
The biggest problem, says Barny, is when the professional gangsters who supply the hash to him decide to suddenly up their charges or simply fob him off with substandard product. ‘That’s when it gets a bit dodgy. These guys are out and out criminals, unlike me. If I show weakness to them they try to bully me and exploit it. A couple of times I’ve had a gun pulled on me because I stood up to them. Funnily enough that is the best way to deal with them because then they at least show you a measure of respect.’
One of Barny’s most regular suppliers of hash is a local policeman. ‘This guy actually approached me through another customer,’ he says. ‘I thought he was pulling my leg at first then he explained that his police station confiscated literally tons of hash every year and it was supposed to be burned in an incinerator each month. But he said that it was never closely checked and it was easy to steal huge lumps without anyone noticing. I was obviously wary at first but this cop proved to be as good as gold when he turned up as promised at a pre-arranged rendezvous with a brick of the best hash I had ever come across!’
However, Barny remains convinced he is treading a dangerous path if he stays in the hash game for too long. ‘I’ve noticed that the dealers who are clever never stay in this profession for too long. They say that once you start thinking about stopping you should quit immediately because if your head goes, then you start making mistakes and once you do that you’re basically fucked and something bad will happen to you sooner or later.’
Barny mentions the case of another smalltime dealer working on the perimeter of Barny’s ‘territory’ who ended up getting ‘a very brutal lesson’. ‘This guy bought a load of hash off an Albanian who I have always managed to avoid, thank God. Anyway my mate didn’t have the full amount of cash required when he took a delivery of this guy’s hash but then the stupid idiot forgot to pay up when he next saw the Albanian. A few days later a man with a gun knocked on my mate’s door and when he answered he got the bullet – literally. He wasn’t killed but he
hasn’t had a job of any kind ever since.’
But the most harrowing anecdote of all from Barny came when he told how another young dealer he knows lost a shipment of hash that he was handling for a major criminal. ‘They tracked down this young dealer, smashed the front door down of his flat and when he said he couldn’t pay for the lost shipment they hauled him off to a gay brothel in Estepona and forced him to work off his debt. In the end the guy did a runner and the last I heard of him he was somewhere in northern Spain working for a really nasty gang of Colombians.’
So how is Barny ever going to escape the clutches of the hash trade? He explains: ‘I’ve saved up a lot of cash and when the moment is right I will make the move. I know it has to be sooner rather than later otherwise I could end up in the same shallow grave as a few of the other dealers round here.’
Barny’s story is both sad and revealing. He has used hash to survive but, ultimately, he is more a victim than a criminal and he longs for a life of normality and happiness like everyone else.
CHAPTER 8
INSIDE SPAIN’S ‘HASH CENTRAL’
Alhaurín de la Torre Penitentiary, near Málaga, on the Costa del Sol, is renowned as Spain’s most overcrowded prison with more than 2,000 inmates. It’s designed to house only 900 prisoners. It also happens to contain more hash offenders than probably any other jail in the world.
Attacks against prison guards and among the inmates are infrequent because the regime is relaxed in many ways. Many inmates have mobile phones and it’s said that all the staff are bribable, if the price is right.
However, my visit to Alhaurín coincided with the discovery of the body of a twenty-one-year-old prisoner in his cell, who’d swallowed more than a dozen capsules of hash. His cellmate reported that the youth was ill and lying on the cell floor. He died a short while later.
The dead man had only been in Alhaurín for forty-eight hours but he’d swallowed the hash while being transferred from Puerto III prison in Cadiz in order to make a court appearance in nearby Melilla. Word on the prison corridors was that the man had been given the hash to swallow by a guard.
Alhaurín prison is certainly a foul-smelling hole of a place. The waft of sweat, fear and loathing hits you in the face the moment you walk through the gates, despite the pungent aroma of disinfectant. Everything is off-white in colour, from the faces of the deadpan guards to the chipped walls and the yellowing metalwork of the gated doorways. It’s a strangely muted place, though, which is surprising because this imposing building houses some of the most dangerous drug gangsters in the world. And it’s all just a few kilometres from Europe’s number-one holiday destination.
Alhaurín itself sits on a flat plain beneath a vast mountain range, which is rumoured to contain numerous graves of dead drug smugglers and other criminals. It’s what they call a modular prison, which means that there are five different blocks that house different classifications of prisoners; perhaps more surprisingly, there is even a women’s block, although the men and women’s sections of this prison are not directly connected for obvious reasons.
One British criminal who spent many months in Alhaurín told me that the inmates reckoned the authorities deliberately house the women just within sight so that ‘we really suffer’. He said that it was possible to wave to the women in their cells and that sometimes inmates managed to form some kind of long-distance relationship but it all sounds very frustrating and simply adds to the dead, tinderbox atmosphere inside Alhaurín.
From a distance, the prison resembles a cluster of rundown, low-rise tower blocks, right slap-bang in the middle of a desolate rocky terrain looking down towards the sea and the mass of concrete that makes up the vastly overdeveloped Costa del Sol. When Alhaurín was first built, most of the coastal resorts were nothing more than fishing villages dotted along a picturesque, deserted coastline. Now the Costa del Sol looks like a sprawling mini-Rio de Janeiro dominated by bland tower blocks and depressing-looking estates of private holiday homes, jerry-built at high speed during the boom years of the 1990s. Many of them are empty and deserted since the Spanish recession started in 2007.
Inside Alhaurín, the grim-faced guards search all visitors in a casual, nonchalant manner, which belies the sort of security one would expect inside the biggest prison in the vast southern region of Andalucia. These ‘screws’ seem deadened by the sheer flatness of the atmosphere that pervades in this bland environment. They are poorly paid and it shows.
I was in Alhaurín to meet Billy, a notorious veteran British criminal based on the Costa del Sol. He’d been arrested a few weeks earlier while dropping off a shipment of hash at the home of another criminal who happened to be under police surveillance because he was suspected of being a major arms dealer, as well as a drug baron.
My visit inside Alhaurín was shrouded in secrecy because the only way I could get in was to pretend to be a friend of Billy. I’d actually interviewed him for a TV programme years earlier and kept in contact with him. A few weeks earlier he’d phoned from an illicit jailhouse mobile phone to say he’d been caught up in a police sting and reckoned he’d be in the prison for some months before his lawyer could get the courts to grant him bail. The legal system in Spain works in strange ways. Often a foreign criminal will be arrested, thrown in jail and told he will only be released to await trial if he can provide a certain amount of bail money. As Billy explained: ‘That can take months and months and it wears you down. In the end, you cough up the cash – usually fifteen to twenty grand, and you get released and then you fuck off out of there as quickly as possible.’
The Spanish authorities would never openly admit it, but there seems to be a deliberate policy at work here. If the criminal provides enough bail money he or she can then disappear, saving the system hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of euros in legal expenses and the cost of keeping that criminal in prison. As Billy explained: ‘It’s a lot cheaper to let me go as long as I leave the country than to sit there for twenty years soaking up all their cash. It makes sense in a way, doesn’t it?’
The ratio of guards inside Alhaurín to prisoners is 20 to 1, which seems quite good compared with some of the other prisons I have visited around the world. Incidents of attacks on warders are pretty uncommon, too. But it took the canny Billy to explain the significance of that. ‘The guards are no different from us, really. Most of them were rejected as policemen. They’re badly paid and quite resentful about it, so they often sympathise with us, which means most of them are open to a bit of bribery and corruption.’
Billy had access to a mobile phone whenever he liked and if that was ever confiscated, his cellmate Leon had three more hidden in their cell. Warders even brought in extra food for inmates if they were prepared to pay for it and there was a special annexed kitchen area near Billy’s cell where cordon bleu prisoners enjoyed cooking their favourite meals every evening. TV sets were even allowed in the cells.
‘It all helps keep things calm here,’ Billy said. ‘The guards are all right on the whole. No one seems to mind the backhanders from the inmates to them, although they’re not so keen on openly allowing drugs to be brought in.’ But Billy then added with a wry smile, ‘Mind you, I’ve had the best quality hash I’ve ever smoked here in Alhaurín. No one would dare sell bad stuff because we’re all in here together and we’d soon find out who cut it.’
Yet despite the supposedly relaxed atmosphere in Alhaurín, it’s not always a pleasant place to be in, by any means. ‘There are a lot of prisoners here who should be in mental institutions. The Spanish just don’t seem to accept that people do have psychological problems and prison is no place for them,’ Billy told me.
Before Billy turned up on the Costa del Sol twenty-five years ago, he was a London-based university-educated professional musician with great hopes of making it as a rock star. Then he got caught up in a £10,000 hash deal and decided to head to the Costa del Crime. ‘The guy I bought the drugs from got arrested and I knew it was only a matter of time before the pol
ice came after me. I’d heard that Spain was easy to operate in so I booked a flight, packed a bag and turned up here. I’ve never been back to the UK since.’
Billy quickly settled into the drugs, sex and booze lifestyle that dominates life for so many expats in southern Spain. ‘Dealing in big shipments of puff mainly was so easy out here back then. The cops were so badly paid they never even chased up cases,’ explained Billy. ‘They took the attitude that just as long as the criminals were only dealing in hash then they wouldn’t bother with them. In any case, all the cops I’ve ever met out here all love hash and I always made sure that my favourite policemen got as much as they wanted.’
So for the following twenty years Billy built up a hash empire run through his own gang in the resort of San Pedro, just a few kilometres west of Marbella. ‘Those were great days. I had a good crew working for me and I was making a fortune, spending it all on wine, women and song and even paid for my kids to go to private school. I had a top of the range Mercedes and a house bought for cash. I felt I was untouchable. And you know what? I was, in a sense. I dealt hash like a banker deals in stocks and shares. I was relaxed, confident and never had to get heavy with anyone. Most of the time, my team of lads did all the direct contact with the buyers, so I hardly ever had to get my hands dirty. It was a good system.’
Billy also made strong hash connections inside Morocco. ‘It was really civilised. I’d pop over to Tangier every six weeks or so, organise another shipment, pay over the cash and then get my people to meet the boats when they came in.’
Billy reckoned that for fifteen years the hash trade in southern Spain was ‘safer than working as an estate agent’. He explained: ‘I looked on myself as a professional businessman. My wife and kids thought that was what I was. The money was rolling in. There was never any violence and I was on top of the world. I felt almost invincible.’
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