Cocaine Confidential

by Clarkson, Wensley

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication Page

  PROLOGUE

  INTRODUCTION

  COCAINE THROUGH THE AGES

  PART ONE: FARMERS, PRODUCERS, WHOLESALERS – CENTRAL AMERICA

  CHAPTER 1: STEVE

  CHAPTER 2: THE CAMPO

  CHAPTER 3: MIGUEL

  CHAPTER 4: DONNY

  PART TWO: SMUGGLERS/HANDLERS/DEALERS – CARIBBEAN/BRAZIL

  CHAPTER 5: JEZ

  CHAPTER 6: CHRIS

  CHAPTER 7: TONY

  CHAPTER 8: CARLOS AND JOSE

  PART THREE: DEALERS/TRAFFICKERS/TRANSPORTERS – SPAIN

  CHAPTER 9: GALICIA

  CHAPTER 10: CADIZ

  CHAPTER 11: COSTA DEL SOL

  CHAPTER 12: RONNIE

  CHAPTER 13: STAN

  CHAPTER 14: MICKY

  CHAPTER 15: LUIS

  CHAPTER 16: DENISE AND JANE

  CHAPTER 17: MARK

  CHAPTER 18: SLY

  CHAPTER 19: FRANKIE

  CHAPTER 20: JODY

  CHAPTER 21: PATRICK

  CHAPTER 22: TIGGY

  CHAPTER 23: INSPECTOR JUAN LORENZO

  CHAPTER 24: THIN PHIL/GH, GIBRALTAR

  PART FOUR: THE UK’S COCAINE WARS

  CHAPTER 25: HJ

  CHAPTER 26: JOEY

  CHAPTER 27: BECKI

  CHAPTER 28: KEN

  CHAPTER 29: STEVE

  CHAPTER 30: PETE

  CHAPTER 31: BERNIE AND SERGI

  CHAPTER 32: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 33: ROBERT

  PART FIVE: THE NEW FRONTIERS

  CHAPTER 34: MARCO

  CHAPTER 35: ALFONSO

  CHAPTER 36: GEOFFREY

  CHAPTER 37: UKRAINE

  CHAPTER 38: MOLDOVA

  PART SIX: MULES

  CHAPTER 39: HONEY

  PART SEVEN: THE FUTURE – COCA NEGRA AKA BLACK COCAINE

  CHAPTER 40

  EPILOGUE: SAN CRISTÓBAL, VENEZUELA, SEPTEMBER 2012

  AFTERWORD

  TEN BIGGEST COCAINE BUSTS IN HISTORY

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  Seventh Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2014 Wensley Clarkson

  The moral right of Wensley Clarkson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  TPB ISBN 978 1 84866 327 5

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 84866 328 2

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  WENSLEY CLARKSON is one of Britain’s most knowledgeable writers when it comes to the criminal underworld. His books – published in more than thirty countries – have sold in excess of one and a half million copies. He has also written movie screenplays and made numerous TV documentaries in the UK, US and Spain.

  www.wensleyclarkson.com

  Two thousand escudos of silver

  They will give for his head alone

  Many would win the prize

  But nobody can succeed

  Only a comrade could.

  — Old South American proverb

  To Tommy, who spent a lifetime in ‘the business’

  PROLOGUE

  Cocaine: A colorless or white crystalline alkaloid, C17H21NO4, extracted from coca leaves, sometimes used in medicine as a local anesthetic especially for the eyes, nose, or throat and widely used as an illicit drug for its euphoric and stimulating effects.

  — Dictionary definition

  MARBELLA, SPAIN, JUNE 2013

  He pulled the matt black Glock automatic out of the glove compartment of the rental car, pointed it straight at my head and then a broad smile came over his horribly scarred face. ‘This is my favourite toy. With this baby, no one fucks with me. I am the king.’ Jimmy’s grin exposed two gold front teeth and his piercing blue eyes glistened in the Marbella sunshine. The most frightening thing about having a gun shoved in your face, even jokingly, is looking at the shooter’s finger stroking the trigger.

  But I could hardly complain; Liverpool gangster Jimmy had taken time out to talk to me about the activities of his cocaine gang and the bloody clashes with his rivals on Spain’s notorious Costa del Crime. The British Boys had been given a right hammering by the Eastern Europeans in recent weeks.

  As I have discovered on numerous occasions while travelling the world to research this book, coke gangs murder their rivals because it’s part of their business. A well-publicised killing sends out a message to rivals not to overstep the mark. In a sense, it’s highly effective PR. And right in the middle of all this murder and mayhem are deadly, cold-blooded villains like Jimmy.

  Jimmy’s chilling attitude and the way he’s thrived in the all-year-round heat of southern Spain is indicative of the way cocaine gangsters have flourished over the past thirty-five years.

  Despite the introduction of an extradition treaty with the UK more than twenty years ago, British criminals still make southern Spain their base because it is easier to operate with impunity here than anywhere else in Europe. It also happens to be the gateway from Africa and South America, sources for 90 per cent of all the most in-demand drugs that flood into Europe every day.

  Jimmy operates on the twenty-five-mile strip of coastline between the seaside communities of Fuengirola and Marbella. Cocaine provides the majority of his income but then that’s hardly surprising since it is a multi-billion-dollar industry in Spain. However, these days there are vicious turf wars continually flaring up between coke criminals from the UK, South America, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. It all began back in the ‘Good Old Days’ of the 1970s and early 1980s when British villains fled to Spain to avoid extradition and discovered an underworld fuelled by the white powder.

  Muscular and physically extremely fit, Jimmy has the name of his Scottish former girlfriend tattooed on his left arm. His dark mop of hair contrasts alarmingly with the heavy lines on his 49-year-old face. And despite waving that gun at me earlier, he seemed to have an easygoing manner. Jimmy was equally comfortable speaking English and Spanish, yet he also talked about murdering people as if it was as normal as eating scrambled eggs for breakfast. If he hadn’t become a criminal, he told me, he’d probably have been an accountant. His own brother was one. Another brother back in Toxteth was a hitman, who occasionally flew over to Spain to carry out jobs for Jimmy’s gang.

  Jimmy lived in a penthouse apartment overlooking the picturesque, narrow cobbled streets of Marbella’s whitewashed old town. Even during Spain’s current property price meltdown, his flat had to be worth half a million pounds. Jimmy had at least one hundred grand’s worth of gold jewellery on his fingers, wrist and around his neck. He drove a succession of rented BMWs because, he explained, he liked to change cars every couple of weeks for ‘security reasons’. Jimmy claimed he’d been stabbed five times, which was why he often carried a gun. He had one six-inch scar running from just below his eye to his chin. It co
ntorted whenever he tried to make a point while talking.

  Jimmy had spent, he said, ten years of his life in prison and he insisted he’d rather commit suicide than ever go back to jail. He made a point of drawing the tip of his forefinger across his neck to emphasise his feelings. Then he lifted up his Ralph Lauren shirt to show me four scars across his stomach. One time, he explained to me in a very cool fashion, he lost four pints of blood and almost had his liver punctured. ‘They wanted me dead,’ he said. ‘Who?’ I asked calmly. ‘The fuckin’ Russians,’ he spat. ‘They’re evil. They never smile and everything is about business, business, business.’ Coming from a man so clearly dancing with the devil himself, it sounded a little hollow.

  Jimmy remained totally focused throughout our meeting. As we walked along the promenade near his home, his eyes darted about examining every single face going past us. Even as he chatted to me, he seemed to be constantly on the lookout, just in case ‘anyone tries to have a pop at me’.

  Back up at his penthouse a few minutes later, Jimmy’s new Romanian girlfriend Sasha turned up. She seemed flustered and worried about Jimmy and kept fussing around him. I could see he was getting irritable with her. Then suddenly he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her off to an adjoining room. Less than two minutes later, I heard her scream and then start sobbing. Jimmy reappeared rubbing his hands together almost gleefully. ‘That bitch was out all last night. If I find out who she is fuckin’ I’ll slit his throat.’ Moments later, he pulled out a clear plastic bag the size of a crisp packet filled with cocaine, which must have been worth £10,000 on the open market.

  ‘This stuff is the cause of everything, mate. Trouble is, I’m fuckin’ hooked on it,’ said Jimmy, as he roughly sprinkled out a fat, cigar-sized line of cocaine on the glass coffee table in front of him. Then he produced a pink see-through straw and noisily snorted the line up his nose in a split second.

  ‘Now,’ he said, sniffing noisily before taking a big intake of breath. ‘Where were we?’

  It was time to go before Jimmy started getting the ‘paranoid wobblies’ that would inevitably be sparked by such a massive snort of cocaine.

  Cocaine Confidential is littered with criminals like Jimmy, who’ve allowed the cocaine trade to rule their lives. As he said to me just before I left his penthouse: ‘Charlie has given me all this.’ Then he stopped for a moment to reflect. ‘Problem is, it’s also fuckin’ killin’ me and I don’t have a fuckin’ clue how to live without it.’

  INTRODUCTION

  Cocaine is renowned as the world’s most profitable recreational drug. Its power and influence has spread across the globe, providing an income for everyone from South American drug barons to lowly, cash-desperate ‘mules’ risking life and limb to smuggle it across borders. Cocaine underpins a vast criminal underworld with a dark and deadly side, fuelling a network of dealers, gangsters, drug barons, crooked cops and even terrorists using sex, intimidation, bribery and murder in their quest for huge profits.

  So who are the shadowy people behind cocaine? The coca farmers, the jungle sweat-shop workers, the coke barons, the smugglers, the suppliers, and, ultimately, the dealers who provide the world’s hundreds of millions of users? Why do so many people of all kinds have a connection to this deadly narcotic?

  The real story of cocaine is soaked in drama because in a relatively short time it has gone from being a miracle drug and promising commodity to an illicit substance at the centre of a massive, highly lucrative industry that helps keep a number of Third World countries financially afloat, despite being an outlawed narcotic. In fact cocaine is one of the few products grown, processed, exported and distributed entirely from the Third World. Its export value by itself is equivalent to at least half the world’s coffee trade. And that’s before it is broken down into ever smaller units for distribution: prices can eventually increase by over 300 per cent.

  From the thousands of peasant families who grow coca leaves to the billionaire drug barons directing much of its production, processing and trafficking, the cocaine business wields enormous economic, social and political power in Latin America. Apart from the corrupting influence of such huge sums of ‘narco-dollars’ on police and judicial systems, Congressmen are elected with cocaine funds, banks are sustained or broken by coke trafficking gangs and exchange rates fluctuate in sympathy with the state of some countries’ trade in cocaine.

  Cocaine is now snorted, smoked and injected by everyone from the infamous to the tragic: users claim it gives them confidence, alertness and business acumen. Others have labelled it a deadly drug that destroys people’s physical and mental health. The world’s law enforcers have struggled to cope with the tidal wave of cocaine flooding the globe over the past forty years. Unlike other class A narcotics, this notorious substance is used by the rich and powerful, as well as ordinary citizens. It occupies a unique place in the social strata of many societies, which makes it even harder to eradicate from our streets. As a result, the cocaine business continues to flourish.

  * * *

  In this book I will try and take you, the reader, on an authentic, nail-biting, roller-coaster ride through the full, face-on criminality of cocaine. All roads inevitably lead to this subculture; virtually every murder in the cocaine capitals around the globe has a link to the cartels who have made their fortunes out of the world’s most deadly narcotic.

  In order to unravel Cocaine Confidential, I’ve had to delve deep into the underworld at considerable personal risk. Yet many of the cocaine-connected villains I’ve come across during the course of my enquiries are mildly amused by my book, despite it giving away many of the tricks of their trade. They enjoy the kick of their world being featured in a widely published book, even though only their closest criminal associates would recognise their contributions. Some gangsters who were less concerned about me hiding their identity believe their exposure in this book will bring them even more respect in the cocaine badlands.

  Inevitably, I broke the writer’s golden rule of getting too close to some of my subjects on a number of occasions. I had a few threats from the relatives of one well-known coke baron when I was accused of pushing my luck in the name of research. It ended with a sinister phone call: ‘Stop stickin’ yer nose in our business.’ But that was it, thank God. As another, more friendly, villain later told me: ‘If they’d really been after you they would hardly have bothered to tell you first, would they?’

  Not everyone I’ve written about in Cocaine Confidential is wholly bad. These characters can be funny, vulnerable and even kind, and I’ve tried to provide a full insight into these people’s lives rather than just the predictable hard-hearted stuff. Many are street-smart survivors doing what they know best. Others are victims of circumstance, desperately trying to keep their heads above water.

  If you spend 300-plus nights a year ducking and diving around cocaine’s mean streets you inevitably see the world differently from people who have normal jobs and normal lives. You learn to survive by your instincts; you don’t trust many people; you don’t make light conversation because loose lips can sink ships; you spend each day thinking that your world may be shut down by a sneaky police informant, a jealous lover or an angry punter; you devise ways and means of keeping ahead of the game.

  I am fascinated by how criminals often seem to thrive so blatantly right under the noses of the police. I’ve been inside foreign prisons where conditions are appalling compared even to the oldest British jails. I’ve spent countless hours with killers, drug barons, pimps, child prostitution dealers, counterfeiters, conmen and the classic old-time-bank-robbers-turned-coke-dealers. I’ve even found myself sharing a beer and a joke with people responsible for the deaths of many people. This book doesn’t set out to answer any questions. It simply lays out the facts and asks you, the reader, to take a journey inside this frightening world.

  Naturally, many of the characters featured here would not have made it into this book if it had not been for my numerous contacts inside the underworld
and, of course, most would rather you did not know their real identity. So to all the ‘faces’ I’ve encountered and the ordinary, law-abiding folk who’ve also helped me, I say, ‘Thank you.’ Without them, this book would not have been possible.

  I’d also like to thank the good, law-abiding citizens of the countries I’ve highlighted here, who’ve endured many difficulties because of the power and influence of cocaine. Many of these nations are being torn apart by its pernincous presence.

  Most of the dialogue used here was drawn from actual interviews, some from documentary sources, while a few descriptions were reconstituted from the memory of others. There are no hidden agendas in these stories and I make no apology for the explicit sexual action and strong language, either.

  Ultimately, you are about to read a real-life story that twists and turns through the city streets, jungles, beaches and mountains of many of the world’s most pivotal cocaine countries. It’s been a fascinating journey, which I hope you’re going to enjoy and relish as much as I have.

  Just don’t say you haven’t been warned!

  Wensley Clarkson, 2014

  COCAINE THROUGH THE AGES

  While cocaine in its present form is a relatively recent innovation, the use of coca leaves – whether in rituals, to alleviate hunger, or to help cope with the challenges presented by living in the thin air of the Andes – has been an intrinsic part of indigenous South American culture for thousands of years. When chewed, coca, a natural anaesthetic, numbs the mouth and produces light-headedness. Brewed as a tea, the leaves make a milder stimulant than coffee. In recognition of its fiercely defended traditional functions, its cultivation remains licensed in many parts of the continent.

  Unlike other New World products such as tobacco and potatoes that were enthusiastically adopted by Europeans, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Western medicine settled on a popular use for the plant. However, in 1859 a Milanese doctor fresh from a spell in Peru where he’d been intrigued by the native use of coca, began to experiment on himself and was subsequently inspired to write a paper in which he described the effects. He identified a potential medical use – to treat ‘a furred tongue in the morning, flatulence, and whitening of the teeth’ – and other suggestions as to how it might be employed soon followed.