But then Billy got, by his own admission, ‘too big for my own fuckin’ boots’.
He told me his story. ‘I bought this club which was basically a brothel and reckoned it would make a nice little sideline and I’d be able to launder all my hash money through it.’
‘Clubs’ as they are known in Spain are bars with bedrooms attached, which get around the anti-prostitution laws because the girls who work in the clubs ‘rent’ the rooms. ‘The profit was in the drinks more than the sex,’ explained Billy. ‘You could charge ten times the normal amount for a beer and the girl had to pay you 25 per cent of her “fee” on top of that.’
But soon after purchasing the club and recruiting girls from as far afield as South America and eastern Europe, Billy was given a stark reminder of what being a criminal on the Costa del Sol had become. ‘These two Russians walked into the club and pulled me aside and said they wanted a share of it. I was stunned and told them to fuck off. I couldn’t believe they would have the bare-faced cheek to think they could lean on me.’
But that incident sparked off a vicious turf war. ‘The Russians proved to be complete nutters. They kidnapped my Bulgarian girlfriend and told me they’d slice her ear off if I didn’t let them take over control of the club. I was outraged. No one had ever tried to do this to me in all my years in Spain but times were changing.’
In the end, Billy paid a €100,000 ransom to the Russians and then hired three Romanian gangsters to ‘teach them a fuckin’ lesson’. He went on: ‘That whole thing cost me close to a quarter of a million euros. One of the Russians was shot dead and I had to start hiring security staff to protect me and look after the club at all times of the day and night. It was fuckin’ dreadful. I had to start arming myself around the clock and I ended up getting visits from three different gangs trying to get a piece of my club and drugs business off me.’
Billy says that today the foreign gangs are trying to run every single aspect of the criminal scene in southern Spain. ‘They try to control the girls, the drugs, the people smuggling, the counterfeiting. I knew it was getting dodgy but I couldn’t just close my operation down and retire to the Balearic Islands because I had mouths to feed and a business to run.’
Today, Billy recognises that he should have got out of the hash game then. Instead he ended up being arrested by the Spanish police when he delivered a shipment of hash to that arms dealer. ‘No one would have taken any notice of that gun dealer in the old days,’ he said. ‘But the police terrorism unit was on his tail because they reckoned he was supplying terrorists with arms. I walked straight into a trap.’
Billy says he deeply regrets not shutting down his operation earlier. ‘I knew all this was coming but like so many others I thought I was untouchable. I really believed that all these foreigners would shoot each other down and then it would just go back to the way it was all those years earlier.’
But Billy admits: ‘Being arrested was a blessing in disguise in a sense because I’m sure I would’ve been gunned down by one of those psycho foreigners in the end.’
Billy predicts it’s going to get even more deadly on the Costa del Sol. ‘I’ve heard of people being shot over a 500-euro debt. It’s got out of control and I can only see it getting worse.’
A few weeks after our interview, Billy slipped out of Spain following his release on bail from Alhaurín. Shortly afterwards, he called me to say he wouldn’t ever be back on the Costa del Sol. He was heading for South America. ‘That place is finished. It’s on the scrapheap and it’s about to implode. I reckon it’s going to get even more deadly out there. I’m going to scrape a living together somehow but drugs are now a thing of the past for me. I lost my club, my house, everything after I was arrested and now I have a chance to make a clean start a long way from all the madness.’
CHAPTER 9
EDDIE, A MEMBER OF THE FOREIGN ‘PACK’
It’s not just the Brits who have turned Spain into the criminal badlands of western Europe. Today it is estimated that the Spanish coastline is home to more than 20,000 foreign gangsters of some seventy nationalities, including the Russian Mafia and armed gangs from Albania, Kosovo and the former Soviet republics. In addition to drugs there is a flourishing trade in illegally imported tobacco and cigarettes, which are almost as profitable to foreign criminals in Spain as drugs but with minimal risks.
Younger, flashier, mainly eastern European gangsters have been gradually eroding the power of the traditional Spanish and British hash gangsters out on the Costa. Many of these characters are based full-time in Spain. They stay mainly in the background as fixers and organisers, often hiding behind legitimate businesses while arranging big hash consignments, as well as committing all sorts of other crimes.
Drug investigations take up 70 per cent of police work on Spain’s coastal regions. And according to Spanish officers, the typical hash baron these days is in his late twenties or thirties and often foreign. They are the sort of characters who’ll walk into a bar or club and shoot someone to send out a message to rivals. Don’t fuck with me.
These Spanish-based hash gangs use Uzis and even hire hitmen to send out a chilling message to anyone who dares to cross them. They often number fifteen to twenty hardcore members, some of whom may have grown up together. Violence can flare up when there is a ‘crossover’ such as a turf war or when a drugs consignment goes missing. These criminals often begin by investing in the burgeoning club scene and supplying synthetic drugs from Europe, especially Holland.
The vast number of drug busts in Spain underlines the role being played by foreign criminals. In recent years, gang bosses have cultivated their contacts in Spain and set up members of their own gangs to act as international go-betweens with hash smugglers. Those links with Spain have become even more sophisticated and their network of suppliers and distributors is often now second to none.
Many Irish drug gangsters fled their home country and headed for Spain after the authorities introduced the Proceeds of Crime legislation and set up the Criminal Assets Bureau following the shocking cold-blooded murder of Dublin journalist Veronica Guerin in the mid-1990s. One infamous suspect is rumoured to be operating in southern Spain as one of the biggest suppliers of hash in Europe to this day.
His emergence has come since the arrest in Spain of an even more powerful gangster who was born in Birmingham to Irish parents. After that arrest, the notorious villain became the Mr Big in Irish drug circles on the European mainland and he has spent the past three years moving between the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain.
Spanish police allege that sadistic Serbian hash gangsters operating in Spain’s capital, Madrid, gave a gruesome indication of the kind of brutality they were capable of when Sretko Kalinic, nicknamed The Butcher, along with others, tortured and killed a fellow gang member then turned him into a stew. After beating Milan Jurisic to death with a hammer, they skinned and boned him with a sharp knife before forcing his corpse through a meat grinder. Police say the gang made a macabre facemask from his skin, cooked his flesh and ate him for lunch. They disposed of his bones by tossing them into Madrid’s River Manzanares.
Kalinic confessed to the crime after being arrested in the Croatian capital Zagreb in 2011. It is believed that Jurisic, who was on the run after being convicted in his absence of assassinating Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003, incurred the wrath of his gang by stealing money from them. Another gang member, Luka Bojovic, who was also suspected to be involved in Djindjic’s murder (an accusation which he denies), was later arrested in Valencia, where inside Bojovic’s apartment police claim they discovered documentation that supported Kalinic’s spine-chilling confession.
*
Spain’s current recession has meant that more than two million workers lost their jobs in the four years up to 2012, bringing the jobless total above the 4 million mark. This leaves Spain with one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU at 21.9 per cent. Many of those unemployed end up working illegally in the drugs trade, often for ri
ch foreign gangsters like Eddie, who knows all the tricks of the trade.
I meet him in a darkened warehouse, in La Linea, southern Spain. Just a couple of kilometres across the bay lies the Rock of Gibraltar. Eddie is protected by heavily armed gang members and his identity is hidden by a vast hooded anorak and sunglasses, which makes him look a bit like a character out of South Park. Eddie explains the ins and outs of the hash business and how the global recession has affected business. We get an insight into the complexities of buying, distributing and selling large quantities of hashish and where the future of the business is heading on the Spanish mainland.
‘Like every business in Spain today, the costs have risen and the value of the produce – hash – has gone down,’ says Eddie, calmly. His accent has a hint of German and I later discover that he is Swiss born.
Eddie admits his grandfather was one of the first ever importers of cocaine into Europe from Colombia in the late 1950s. His says his father died when he fell from a yacht and drowned during a storm in the Bay of Biscay while smuggling a shipment of drugs from southern Spain to the UK.
Hash may be seen by many as harmless, but in Eddie’s twisted world it’s a ruthless business that has to be ‘protected’ with extreme acts of violence. He also pays the local police huge fees to ensure his business remains untouched. As he talks, Eddie’s ‘team’ clinically stow more than half a million euros’ worth of vacuum-packed hash into the underneath of a Mercedes van.
Eddie keeps thousands of euros in cash in a safe in his office so that he can dip into the money to pay bribes to Spanish police and local officials. He calls it ‘tax’ with a smile and he always factors in at least €10,000 in cash bribes for the really big hash shipments.
Eddie goes into his office, takes a bundle of notes out of his safe and counts out €1,000 in cash, puts it in his inside jacket pocket and explains: ‘I always have this money in case of problems. Then I can pay off a cop or a politician immediately. That way I own them.’
Eddie cracks open a bottle of vodka and starts speaking about his career in the secret world of hash. ‘It’s been a roller coaster ride, that’s for sure,’ he says with a smile. ‘But this is my life. This is my career and it will probably not change until the day I die.’
Eddie’s gang are mainly made up of Spanish guys he has worked with for years. ‘I may be a foreigner but we all go back a long way. It means I can trust them with my life. You have to have trust in this game or else you will end up dead or in prison.’
Eddie says that hash consumption in southern Spain has increased ten-fold in the past ten years. ‘The kids are bored and broke. Hash is cheaper than alcohol. Nearly every person under the age of thirty regularly smokes hash round here. It’s a way of life and that means there is constant demand for my product.’
Eddie’s ‘territory’ is a 150km section of Andalucia between La Linea and Seville. He explains: ‘It works like clockwork and the risks are low because my hash comes over from Morocco and goes straight out on the streets in this part of Spain. I sell to local “managers” who run their own gangs of dealers.’
Eddie believes the key to his success and safety is that he sells off all his shipments of hash within thirty-six hours of it arriving on Spanish soil. ‘I like to offload it very quickly. The less time it is in my possession, the better for me. I get it unloaded and then taken straight to my warehouse where it is distributed to various cities and towns round here immediately. That means there is only a very brief period of time when the police can catch me in possession of the hash. It all makes perfect sense.’
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Eddie. Five years ago he was shot in the arm by a Moroccan, who tried to rip him off by supplying less hash than promised. Eddie explains: ‘I was very angry that this guy ripped me off so I went to Tangier to see him. We had a row and he ended up shooting me in the arm. He was a lousy shot! It was no big deal and in the end he supplied the missing hash. I stopped working with him after that but at least I’d sent out a message that I was not to be fucked with. It was important because in this game your reputation is crucial and it stops people abusing your trust.’
Eddie showed me the scar from the bullet wound in his arm. ‘I call it my calling card now because whenever I want to make a point with another criminal I show them the wound and they understand that I will not be intimidated.’
As we knock back vodka shots and talk in his warehouse, the Mercedes van, which has just been packed with hash bricks around its suspension and under the floor at the back of the vehicle, fires up and three of Eddie’s gang head off to Cordoba to make a drop-off. ‘I only deal with local people. It’s much better that way. Whenever the British, Irish and eastern Europeans get involved it gets more complicated and risky. I stick to Spanish people. I trust them more.’
Eddie has only once fallen out with the local police – and that cost him a prison sentence when he was in his mid-twenties. ‘I know most of the policemen round here now. They leave me alone much of the time. I give them cash regularly to show my gratitude. But a few years ago a new deputy chief from outside this area came in and tried to crack down on people like me. It was a nightmare because all my old police contacts had to step back into the shadows and pretend they didn’t even know me.
‘As a result, the cops raided a warehouse I owned at the time and found fifty thousand euros’ worth of hash, which was waiting to be taken up to Seville. They arrested me on the spot. I knew there was nothing I could do to wriggle out of it so I pleaded guilty and got an eighteen-month sentence, although I got out after a year, so it wasn’t too bad.’
Like so many others involved in the hash trade in Spain, Eddie says that if he had been found in possession of that much cocaine he would have got a ten-year sentence. ‘Even the judge shrugged his shoulders when he sentenced me. It was as if he was saying that there were more important crimes being committed out there and I shouldn’t even have been arrested in the first place.’
Soon after Eddie was imprisoned the deputy police chief who caused him so many problems was transferred to another city. ‘Thank God things went back to normal.’
With that Eddie lifted his glass of neat vodka and made a toast: ‘To hash. Long may it continue …’
PART THREE
THE AMSTERDAM CONNECTION
I had so much cash flooding in, I didn’t know what to do with it.
– Nils, Dutch hash baron
*
Holland has been the gateway to the European drugs trade for almost fifty years. But as far as hash is concerned, Dutch police are fighting an uphill struggle because the majority of citizens in the country are said to believe it should be legalised. Yet despite cannabis being tolerated in so-called ‘hash cafes’ in the main cities, the hash gangs continue to thrive.
In the middle of 2012, a special police unit found 15,000kg of hash valued at €47 million in the Rotterdam harbour area inside two shipping containers originating from Morocco. Police arrested four suspects. The hash was destined for the Dutch and Belgian markets. Police also raided several houses and seized €100,000, a firearm and ammunition.
Yet whenever Amsterdam and hash is mentioned in the same breath, most people think of those same dinky little cannabis cafes where student stoners sit round puffing on joints. But because of its pivotal location, Holland is frequented by some of the most ruthless drug barons on earth.
Take Henk Orlando Rommy. Born in Paramaribo, on the former Dutch colony of Suriname on 4 March 1951, Rommy’s family eventually settled in Utrecht, The Netherlands’ fourth largest city. By the late 1970s, Rommy was involved in used cars and stolen antiques. In 1977 he was arrested and convicted for trying to fence stolen art, including a Rembrandt, and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
After his release from prison Rommy became heavily involved in trafficking hash to The Netherlands and Belgium. At one point he was arrested in Morocco and put on death row for eighteen months before being pardoned, allegedly because of t
he birthday of Moroccan King Hassan.
On Rommy’s release, he went straight back into the most lucrative business he knew – hash. Working closely with notorious Dutch crime boss Johan Verhoek, he became one of Europe’s most powerful drug dealers. When Rommy’s Moroccan hash connection dried up in 1992, he quickly found a new contact in Pakistan, and began trafficking hash from there instead.
Rommy then focused on the Canadian and British markets and in 1993 Dutch justice estimated his organisation had an annual turnover of $120 million. Rommy had mansions throughout The Netherlands and Spain. But as his newly acquired nickname ‘The Black Cobra’ suggested, he was also a very deadly character.
On 4 April 2003, Rommy was arrested in Holland and charged with importing 1,000 kilos of hashish from Spain. He was found guilty and sentenced to just one year in prison. Thanks to a shortage of cells, Rommy was eventually released three months early.
Rommy’s luck finally ran out when he was lured into a trap in Spain by America’s Drug Enforcement Agency. He was extradited from there to the US. On 30 September 2006 Rommy was found guilty and sentenced to twenty years in prison where he remains to this day.
But even Rommy’s activities pale into insignificance compared with the legendary Amsterdam-based Klaas Bruinsma. Reputed to have been the most powerful drug lord Europe has ever seen, he is known as ‘De Lange’ (‘The Tall One’) and also as ‘De Dominee’ (‘The Reverend’) because of his black clothing and his habit of lecturing others on the evils of drugs.
Bruinsma was born in Amsterdam and came from a middle-class background. While in high school, Bruinsma started using and selling hashish. When he was sixteen years old, he was arrested for the first time but then let go with just a warning.
Later he was expelled from school, and in 1974 he began working in drug trafficking full-time. Two years later, Bruinsma was arrested and convicted for smuggling hash. After his release from jail, he changed his identity to Frans van Arkel, aka ‘Lange Frans’ (‘Tall Frans’).
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