Cocaine Confidential (16 page)

But, I asked, could you ever walk away from the gang as Val hoped? ‘Look, the gang is my life. I would not have anything if it were not for the gang. They are my only family.' Sly immediately noticed how crestfallen Val looked at that last remark so he tried to explain what he meant.

‘Look, you don't understand. There is no way out of the gang, except by dying,' explained Sly in a very matter-of-fact voice. ‘I cannot survive without them. Our souls are the
same. It's as simple as that.' Sly then explained it was his idea to bring the other gang members over to Spain. ‘I recognised that it was a safer place for us to work, rather than, say, London.'

‘Safer?' I asked.

‘Yes, the Spanish don't really care about people selling cocaine as long as it does not involve them.'

The one secret Sly refused to reveal was the name of his gang. ‘That's between us only. That way if we have any impostors we find out very quickly and dispose of them.'

But where do your supplies of cocaine come from?

‘Oh, I get it mostly from Romania,' said Sly.

I was surprised since Romania wasn't well known for its connections to cocaine.

‘My cousin. He runs the border road into Italy. Nothing can go down that road without his permission. He charges a “tax” to all the coke smugglers and they often pay him with drugs instead of cash. He then gets the cocaine smuggled over to me here.'

I was astounded because most of the cocaine going through countries such as Romania came from southern Spain in the first place. ‘Yeah. You're right, it does all come from Spain but who cares? The main thing is I get the coke very cheap and the mark-up here is very high. You know, the other day I sold a big deal to one old man, I think he came from London. He said that the coke seemed better than what he was used to. I was tempted to tell him it probably came from the same supplier.'

Suddenly, our interview is interrupted by a call on Sly's mobile. He fires off an initial reply to his caller before raising his voice further.

Val rolls her eyes and tries to laugh off the fact that Sly was making what, even in his machine-gun rattling Romanian, sounded very much like death threats to his caller.

‘It's tough out here,' she says, turning to me. ‘Everyone wants a piece of Sly. He has a terrible temper as you can see. If I can somehow get him to learn to control it then maybe we will have a chance of a happy, long marriage.'

I nodded slowly and managed to avoid giving her an honest answer.

Seconds later, Sly slammed his mobile down on the table next to him and said: ‘You have to leave now. I have some people coming here to see me and they are not people you should meet.'

It seemed as if Sly was at the centre of a classic turf war. In nearby Benalmádena, these sort of cocaine-fuelled battles were two a penny thanks to its reputation as the ‘armpit' of the Costa del Sol.

Cocaine on the Costa del Sol is not just about wealthy coke barons and their armies. There are numerous much more downmarket areas where many less wealthy people have created a demand for coke by turning it into the party drug of choice.

The residential areas of the scruffy resort of Benalmádena are dominated by crumbling tower blocks and rubbish strewn streets. Cocaine gangsters in Benalmádena tend to be much younger criminals and it's estimated that there are at least a dozen drugs gangs operating in the area. A lot of their time is spent fighting one another for control of the turf. Frankie has just turned twenty and hails from Newcastle originally, but his parents moved back to the north-east of England three years ago. He's been ducking and diving ever since.

‘I like it out here but it's hard at the moment,' said Frankie. He agreed to talk to me because his family had helped me
with a journalistic crime project a few years earlier. But, I asked Frankie, how was he surviving? ‘I run a little team, I s'pose you could call them a gang but that sounds like we're kids. But we're pro's and we make a good living. Simple as that.'

Cocaine is the main income for Frankie's gang. Their turf includes the notorious ‘24-hour square', a warren of ugly bars and alleyways in a concrete plaza that backs on to a McDonald's restaurant. Hundreds, and in the summer season, thousands, of mainly rowdy British tourists meet on Fridays and Saturday nights here and the police are constantly breaking up brawls, knife fights and thievery. ‘In 24-hour square we can make three grand a night at weekends in the winter and that triples in the summer holiday season,' said Frankie.

But with those sorts of profits from the sale of cocaine come high risks. Frankie claims he runs the only totally British gang in Benalmádena. ‘Most of the other Brits did a runner because the foreigners scared the shit out of them,' he explained.

Hard drugs like coke are easier to shift because they're sold in such small packets and they yield a much higher profit. But Frankie and his team are constantly under threat from outside gangs, who regularly try to take over Frankie's turf. In the twelve months before we spoke, he claims there had been three near-fatal incidents. ‘You have to show them you can't be pushed around or else they keep coming back. I carry a blade on me the whole time but sometimes when it
gets hairy out there I borrow a shooter off a mate of my dad's. I only flash it at people to make sure they know how serious I am and that usually does the trick.'

Two separate gangs of particularly violent Albanians had been trying to muscle in on 24-hour square in recent months and Frankie said he fully expected them back at any time. ‘They're fuckin' mad those Albanians. Last time they turned up and tried flogging coke right out in the open in front of all the bars I work out of. So I went and got three of my boys and we moved straight in on those Albanian fuckers. They were all armed but we caught them out in the open, so they couldn't pull out their weapons. I suppose we were lucky in a way.'

Frankie refused to reveal exactly what actually happened to his Albanian rivals because he is afraid of providing authorities with criminal evidence that might later be used against him, but it's clear he takes their threat very seriously. ‘The Brits have a bad reputation for bottling out of things round here and I have to keep doing certain things to make sure people like the Albanians know I mean business.'

Frankie says that there are so many jobless Brits in Benalmádena that a few of them have even offered him money to be allowed to join his gang. ‘These kids want to belong,' explained Frankie. ‘Most of them are just like me. Their mums and dads have fucked off back to Britain and they've stayed because it's the only home they know and they're prepared to do anything to survive. It's not a good situation but it means there's no shortage of recruits for me.'

But Frankie, a wise head on such young shoulders, predicts that more problems will occur as more and more of these disaffected young Brits decide to set up gangs of their own just as he had done. ‘It's going to happen for sure. Nobody's got any cash out here so they have to thieve and sell drugs to survive. The cocaine war is going to get even nastier when that happens.'

Frankie admits that to survive as a gangster on the Costa del Sol, the younger British criminals like himself are having to adapt to a ‘violence on demand' attitude. He explained: ‘Everyone's going to have to be tooled up to protect their turf soon and if you're not prepared to do that then you'll probably end up with a bullet in yer head. It's dog eat dog out there.'

Before Frankie and his contemporaries came onto the scene, most of the narcotics business in Benalmádena and neighbouring Torremolinos was run by big-time drug barons, who controlled the entire coastline between Málaga and Estepona. But all that started to fragment about five years ago because of the influx of eastern Europeans. ‘When I was a kid at school here, all the coke, E and puff was supplied by street dealers who were answerable to proper, serious criminal faces. But all that's changed. It's easy now to find a major supplier, organise your own transportation and run an operation off your own back. The biggest challenge is the territory. I had to pay good money for my turf at the square and no one is going to bully me off it.'

So with young high-flyers on the horizon, it promises to
get a lot more violent on the streets of Benalmádena. To all the aspiring, disaffected youngsters roaming the streets of this rundown resort, people like Frankie are heroes to be looked up to. But, typically, Frankie knows that sort of hero worship won't last long.

‘One day these same kids will be after what's mine and that's when the shooting begins,' explained Frankie, who walks with a limp after one rival gang member ran over his foot during a clash about drug territories. Frankie refused to talk about the incident, except to say, ‘I couldn't let that one go. I had to get him done in a similar way otherwise everyone round here would have started taking the piss out of me. That's the way it is in the world of drug dealing.'

Frankie still lives in the same rundown concrete high-rise apartment his parents abandoned three years earlier. He says the landlord still thinks his parents are living there. ‘I've kept up the rental payments and it suits me fine there. It's nothing flash, which is always better when you're in this game. The people who give it large all over the place are the ones who either end up six feet under in the mountains or down the local nick.'

Frankie shares the flat with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Donna, who comes from Darlington. Her parents went back to the UK a year earlier and she's brought herself up alone ever since. Frankie has some strong views on the way they were both abandoned, which shows that he's a lot more reflective than one might think at first. ‘I'm doing what I'm doing because they basically dumped me here. It's not a nice
thing to do and Donna's mum did it to her when she was even younger. No wonder I've had to resort to crime, eh?'

The living room in Frankie's flat is bare apart from the obligatory widescreen TV, which cost him a whopping two grand. ‘It's me only real luxury. I even drive around in a Ford Fiesta, so people don't think I'm up to no good.'

But Frankie did admit that he's putting all his money away so that one day he can go straight and live a ‘normal' life. ‘I don't want to do this for ever. I just want enough cash to be able to buy meself a nice house and settle down with Donna and have kids. I'll set up a business – a straight business – and try to make somethin' of my life. I knew this drug dealer fella when I was fifteen and he told me that you never spend longer than five years in this game because if you do, you'll get nicked or killed in the end.'

Meanwhile, Frankie admitted he was fighting other demons in the shape of a clear and obvious addiction to cocaine. ‘I love the fuckin' stuff and that's my weakness because all the cleverest people in this business don't take it. I was the same until about a year ago and then a mate of mine persuaded me to have a line and now I can't get enough of it. I'm fuckin' hooked and I hate myself for it in a way, but on the other hand it does help get me through the days and nights.'

Moments later, Frankie pulled out a sachet and expertly chopped himself a line of cocaine. It was interesting to note that his girlfriend Donna did not partake. Frankie later told me, ‘I'd never go out with a bird who was hooked on this shit.'

By the time I finally left Frankie's tatty apartment, I felt saddened by the sight of a young man on the edge of either dying from drug addiction or being gunned down in a fight about drugs turf. It struck me that he couldn't win either way. But how different this life might have turned out if his parents had not abandoned him when they left Benalmádena and headed back to the UK.

Up in the mountains behind the Costa del Sol resorts live a few characters who've deliberately stepped back from the limelight to try and live in safe, secluded retirement away from the hyped-up gunmen and vicious turf wars.

In an isolated villa on the edge of a quiet mountainside
pueblo
overlooking Málaga, lives Jody, a cocaine baroness with a fearsome reputation. Her fondness for cosmetic surgery has turned her from a once fresh-faced exotic dancer into a collagen version of Zsa Zsa Gabor. But behind her plastic smile lies a steely determination to win every battle. Jody's reputation spreads from California to London to southern Spain. She's personally ‘managed' the transport of tens of millions of dollars' worth of cocaine and her own coke habit almost led to the removal of part of her nose.

Now she lives alone in her hilltop home still fearful that the other drug barons she has crossed will one day seek revenge. There's something about Jody that reminds me of that burned-out actress recluse played by Gloria Swanson in the classic movie
Sunset Boulevard
.

‘I've dealt with the Mob in Vegas, the Mafia in New York
and the Cubans in Miami,' says Jody in a throaty, deadpan smoker's voice. ‘They all trusted me at one time or another but in the end coke sent them all crazy.'

These days, Jody is a virtual recluse in her whitewashed hacienda about thirty miles inland from the Costa del Sol. ‘There's only one road in and one road out of here,' she explains. ‘If anyone came looking for me, I'd know about it before they did. I bought this place especially because of that.'

Jody's only companions are two Irish Wolfhounds called King and Queen (they're both male) in a property surrounded by high white walls and an electronic gate system that seems more akin to Fort Knox.

‘I don't go out much any more,' she explains. ‘I did all my partying between my twenties and seventies. These days just putting the kettle on for a cup of tea is an effort. But I don't regret a thing about my life. Why should I?'

Jody reckons she's survived the deadlier aspects of the cocaine game because she's been extremely discreet about the ruthless drug barons she's worked with down the years. It's made her very guarded about her former life, which makes being interviewed by me a difficult process for her. ‘I find it hard to talk about what went on back in the bad old days. I saw things that no person should have to witness. I even pleaded with one Mafia guy not to kill my then boyfriend after he was suspected of being a police informant.