Cocaine Confidential (19 page)

Lorenzo sounded deeply deflated by the cocaine gang wars raging on his doorstep. ‘Look, I work on my own most of the time. I have no back-up and little technical support. We just go through the motions to keep the pen-pushers happy. If Spain really wants to get rid of the cocaine criminals they need to flood this area with special investigators and literally sweep up all the bad guys and put them straight into prison.'

Lorenzo openly admits he prioritised domestic killings because ‘they involve families and are not premeditated. That makes them easier to solve and you feel sorry for the families. When a criminal is murdered by another criminal you don't feel much sympathy for anyone involved. It's sad but true.'

Lorenzo says he envies the support and technical help given to his British colleagues at Scotland Yard. ‘This is Spain. The wheels of justice turn very slowly here and often not at all.'

And even when arrests are made following a hitman killing, witnesses have a habit of mysteriously disappearing just before they are due to give evidence in court.

‘I have to be honest about this but maybe 75 per cent of the cases I investigate never even get to court because of reluctant witnesses and missing evidence.'

Lorenzo said all the cocaine killings on the coast were ‘crimes built out of hate, even though most gangsters probably looked on these murders as professional hits which are
a part of their “business”. It's pathetic that these criminals claim killing each other is not personal. No one in a civilised country should try to make this claim.'

Inspector Lorenzo said he's watched with horror as the cold-blooded violence linked to cocaine has spread up and down the Costa del Crime. But he seemed unwilling or at least unable to prevent it.

‘I am in a position where I just wait for the next murder involving the cocaine trade. It will come sooner rather than later, I can assure you of that. But if I tried to pull out all the unsolved cases and tried to re-examine them I'd never have time to work on any of the many current crimes that are committed here every day of the year and involve real victims for whom one can feel sorry.'

* * *

In the middle of all this cocaine-fuelled chaos on the Costa del Sol are a handful of reformed characters trying their hardest to clean up the crime-riddled streets. Ex-coke dealer Walter is a classic example. Now in his sixties, he'd run with a gang of cocaine dealers in the 1990s in Torremolinos and almost died during an argument with a rival gang. Now ‘cleaned up' and working for a local drug rehabilitation centre, Walter has earned the respect of many on this troubled stretch of coastline because he never takes sides. One cocaine gang member had told me to talk to Walter because he knew about it all from the inside looking out.

Walter's own girlfriend had died of a drugs overdose when they lived together in his native Bristol. He'd first come out
to Spain to escape the pain and heartbreak of losing her, but then got caught up with the ‘wrong crowd', and even ended up spending a year in Málaga's notorious Alhaurín prison.

On his release, Walter was approached by a gang in Torremolinos to be one of their street dealers. ‘Men of my age were in great demand back then because we didn't look as obvious as the young dealers,' explained Walter. But then an incident happened which changed the course of Walter's life.

‘It was my second night as a street dealer and this young girl came up to me and tried to score some coke off me,' he explained. ‘I was horrified 'cos she looked about thirteen. Seeing that girl immediately reminded me of what had happened to my girlfriend back in Bristol and I felt so ashamed that I'd allowed myself to be sucked back into it all. I quit on the spot and decided to turn all my negative experiences into something positive.'

Today Walter spends much of his time patrolling the streets of Torremolinos seeking out drug addicts and gangsters alike and trying to talk to them about their lives in the hope they might reconsider the paths they have taken. ‘I work in a shop in the day and then try to get out most nights. I know all the areas where the drugs are sold openly. It's the same places as when I was a street dealer.'

Walter is under no illusions about the cocaine epidemic on the Costa del Sol. ‘It's very dangerous here. A lot of the gangs rely on cocaine for nearly all their income and yet the price of coke has remained much the same for many years
and that's making the dealers even more protective of their turf, which in turn means more guns being fired.'

Walter says he's definitely noticed an increase in violent incidents between gangs. ‘These people are fighting for their lives, literally. They have no other way of surviving. Crime is definitely on the increase and gang violence is escalating at an alarming rate. The gap between rich and poor is getting bigger because the boom years are over and the sunshine that attracted so many people out here in the first place is no longer enough to make it such a paradise after all.'

In the nearby British enclave of Gibraltar, there are dozens of ruthless cocaine barons who care little for people like Walter. Their only priority is making money out of cocaine and they don't seem to care about the consequences of their actions.

It's reckoned that cocaine gangsters and cartels earn at least €10 billion (£8.4 million) annually from coke sales and associated business activities in Spain. Much of that cocaine, and the cash that is used to buy it, originates from the British tax haven of Gibraltar. The Rock (as it's known) is said to have more cocaine millionaires than any other single place on earth.

* * *

At half past eight, with the setting sun dipping below the sheer eastern cliff of the Rock of Gibraltar, a powerful inflatable surges through the waves. Trailing a worm of phosphorus from its outboard, the purring craft – the Spanish call them
planeadoras
 – loses speed and sashays slowly into Caleta bay just as another smaller speedboat appears, drawing foamy coils in the sea. A man in the inflatable throws at least a dozen watertight boxes into the other, smaller boat. The boxes, though bulky, are plainly not heavy.

The smaller boat then surges off towards the beach where three other men are waiting to pull the craft onto the sand and quickly load the boxes into a waiting van. Out in the bay, the inflatable's powerful engine spurts into life as it heads back across the Straits of Gibraltar towards Morocco, where another consignment of cocaine awaits collection.

Gibraltar is now used as a junction for cocaine from the Colombian cartels by many of Britain's most powerful criminals. The Spanish government reckons that Gibraltar's superbusy drug barons are importing billions of pounds' worth of cocaine each year right under the noses of this little piece of Britain on the armpit of the Mediterranean. Getting in and out of the Rock is so easy for many British criminals that they've helped turn Gibraltar into a virtually lawless society, where cash rules above all else.

One of the British villains who have popped in and out of the Rock in recent years is master criminal GH. While on the run from British police, GH spent many months on the Rock setting up cocaine deals while at the same time equipping his secret Spanish hideaway, seventy miles up the road, with household goods from the UK stores that dominate the Rock's main shopping street.

GH boasted that he'd never been asked to even show the photograph page of his false British passport during his numerous trips in and out of Gibraltar. ‘I was told never to drive a car onto the Rock because that would be more likely to be stopped and searched, so I walked through the border
checkpoint waving my UK passport without even having to show it,' he told me.

GH also rates Gibraltar as one of the easiest places from which to fly back into Britain when he has deals to do and people to see back on his old manors of east London and Essex. But even more disturbingly, GH claims he has set up a number of multi-million-pound cocaine deals in partnership with one of the Rock's most powerful criminals.

GH says he knew many years earlier from the days when he handled the takings from some of the UK's most audacious robberies of the last century that he could launder money with ease on Gibraltar. But GH's dodgy dealings on the Rock are only the tip of the iceberg. For some people believe Gibraltar is awash with more gangsters per square mile than Chicago in the thirties.

Further down the food chain are Gibraltarian characters like Thin Phil. His real first name is every bit as clichéd. He's a typical member of the Gibraltar mafia. He works as a runner for a major former north London drug baron now based on the Rock. Thin Phil and other runners can make up to £5,000 a week steering their inflatables across the ocean. His boss has numerous boats, crews, lock-ups to store drugs and dozens of people to load and unload his narcotics on both sides of the Straits.

The biggest earner used to be the hash available fourteen miles due south in Morocco, less than an hour across this busy but under-policed stretch of water. But these days a flotilla of speedboats and inflatables smuggle an even more valuable
commodity – cocaine. The biggest irony of all this is that while the British-run colony seems to be turning a blind eye to these multi-million-pound criminal enterprises, it is ‘the fuckin' Spanish' – as Thin Phil calls them – who are genuinely trying to crack down on Gibraltar's criminal tendencies.

Spanish police now use a powerful launch – the smugglers call it a turbo – to pursue drug couriers in their inflatables. And, naturally, they insist that Gibraltar's lawless reputation is yet more evidence that it should be permanently reunited with the Spanish mainland. In a community with only 30,000 inhabitants, nearly everyone on the Rock knows the men who work for the drugs barons. Their tinted-windowed cars thud rap music out of rattling speakers as they coast up and down the colony's tacky main street stuck in second gear. Yet they remain relatively untouched by authorities.

The irony behind the influx of British villains onto Gibraltar is that many of them are drawn to the rock from their whitewashed villas on the Costa del Sol by the very
Britishness
of the place. Back in 2000 the then Spanish premier José María Aznar handed UK prime minister Tony Blair a file on alleged criminal activity on the Rock which claimed that criminals – including at least six UK gangs – on Gibraltar had begun turning their hand to murder and kidnappings connected to their lucrative criminal enterprises, primarily cocaine.

Down at the Rock's Queensway Quay Marina, favourable mooring rates and luxurious amenities have encouraged many of the Costa del Sol's flashier villains to keep their yachts tied up in Gibraltar when they are not out sailing the
Med. Every now and again Gibraltar's UK-supported government is reminded by the big chiefs in Whitehall that they should crack down on the drug barons.

Then orders are issued to seize a few of the smugglers' favourite boats, the rigid inflatables. But, as happened a few years back, the owners of these craft (the drug barons never have legally proven ownership) usually erupt with indignation, tear into the Rock's beleaguered police force and cause maximum mayhem.

The result? A discreet pause and then the boats are given back and business carries on as usual. The Rock's authorities even introduced a law banning any further importation of rigid inflatables. Owners of such boats were ordered to show evidence they were used for bona fide purposes. ‘Now every inflatable owner has paperwork proving that he does boat trips for tourists,' says one Gibraltar regular. ‘The law was a waste of time but at least it shut Whitehall up.'

But the most important reason why so many British criminals use Gibraltar as a base for their dodgy enterprises is because the Rock is awash with funny money. Of the £3.5 billion floating around Gibraltar (30,000 population, 35,000 registered companies), more than half of it is reckoned to be the proceeds of illicit business dealings, tax avoidance, smuggling and drug trafficking.

In other words, cocaine criminals are good news for Gibraltar. As Thin Phil says: ‘This place can't survive without all the dodgy characters. We are the backbone of the place. If they get rid of us, they might as well hand it back to the Spanish.'

 

The UK has evolved into one of the most lucrative cocaine markets on the planet. Almost £10 billion worth of illegal drugs are sold in the country each year, and cocaine is the second most popular substance, after cannabis, with close to one million regular users. But in Britain, cocaine gets ‘stepped on' probably more than anywhere else in the world and prices vary from £30 to £100 per gram.

Consider this: cocaine can be purchased wholesale from Colombian cartels for around £1,500 a kilo. The same drug, cut and sold in London will fetch more than £100,000 a kilo. As one cocaine baron told me: ‘It's a fuckin' gold rush, mate. There's nothing like London when it comes to good, old-fashioned profit.'

Figures released by HM Revenue & Customs show that 3,120kg of cocaine was seized in the UK in 2012, an increase of more than 20 per cent over the previous four years. Yet at least 40,000kg of cocaine still manages to slip into the UK every year, despite supposedly this nation's supposedly ‘airtight' border controls.

But who are the characters behind this cocaine boom in the UK? And why has it thrived and become such an immensely popular narcotic among the general population?

Even in superficially civilised countries like the UK, crooked law enforcement officials play a vital role as far as cocaine barons are concerned. I've been told many times that for the right price, police, judges, even politicians can be ‘bought' in Britain to provide essential inside information and influence in the ‘right places' so that coke barons can keep one step ahead of the authorities.