Cocaine Confidential

by Clarkson, Wensley

  But Tony claims it is the consistent quality of his cocaine that makes him such a successful dealer on the island. ‘Too many dealers these days look at the short-term. They supply shit coke and then wonder why their customers stop using them. I know that as long as I can provide top quality cocaine then they will all come to me. It has to be consistent. If you sell them superb stuff one week and crap the next, then they start not to trust you and begin looking around for another dealer. It’s all common sense really. But you’d be amazed how few dealers understand those rules. Mind you, if they did then I’d have a lot less customers.’

  Tony’s businesslike attitude and back-story provides a fascinating insight into what has been called the ‘acceptable face of drug dealing’.

  Recently, Tony celebrated his fiftieth birthday with his young girlfriend, who was born on the island. ‘I toasted out loud all the rich clients who’ve made me who I am, especially that poor guy who died from an overdose of coke.

  ‘Hopefully my luck will stay intact and I’ll carry on for another ten years maybe and then retire to the English countryside and live the life of a country squire back home. I always insist I don’t miss England but maybe it would be better to get off this island once my career is over.’

  Tony has led a much more charmed life than most cocaine dealers. The reality of the ‘business’ is that it is a high-risk occupation with danger lurking around every corner.

  CHAPTER 8

  CARLOS AND JOSE

  Brazil’s efforts to clean up the streets of Rio in preparation for the World Cup and then the 2016 Olympics have been well documented. But this supposedly booming South American country has recently been dubbed the biggest single consumer of cocaine in the world after the United States.

  The Colombian cartels have used all their marketing and sales ‘skills’ to make big inroads into Brazil over the past decade. These days, getting a gram of cocaine on the streets of Rio is as easy as catching a bus. But being a coke dealer on the streets of this steaming metropolis is riddled with danger.

  Trigger-happy cops and armed gangsters ensure that most young coke dealers cannot expect to live much beyond thirty. ‘The police are heavy-handed and always looking for bribes,’ says dealer Carlos, who’s worked with his partner Jose in Rio for more than two years. ‘The criminals will just slit your throat and steal your cocaine if you give them half a chance.’

  Often, police anti-drugs raids cause so much resentment in Rio that they lead to open street battles between police and cocaine gangsters armed with machine guns, assault rifles and grenades. One hot close Rio night in 2012 twelve families were reportedly forced from their homes by gang members who wanted to use them as hideouts when they were being pursued by the police.

  But it’s all water off a duck’s back for Jose and Carlos, who most of the time act like extras off some bling, Brazilian version of TOWIE. They work as a pair because they feel it’s safer that way but admit their biggest problems come from criminals in the favelas (slums) that border all sides of Rio. These chilling characters each run their own lucrative cocaine ‘turf’. Carlos says: ‘We really do work hard to earn our living. It ain’t as easy as people might think ’cos there are a lot of bad people out there wanting to take a shot us. We try to tread carefully but the cocaine gangsters in the favelas shoot first and ask questions later if you step onto their territory without an invitation.’

  Carlos comes from a background inside the murky world of Brazilian cage fighting and only began dealing coke because the injuries he sustained during one fight meant he was not able to do a ‘normal job’. Jose has been involved in numerous types of smuggling in the past but decided to set up a small cocaine supply chain in Rio after nurturing a group of mainly middle-class friends, all of whom complained about the poor quality of the cocaine available in their neighbourhood.

  ‘I was fed up of being ripped off by dealers from the favela flogging me baking powder instead of the real thing,’ explained Jose. ‘So I set up my own cocaine business. That’s how I met Carlos.’ Both men are immensely proud that their product, they claim, is 90 per cent pure and insist that is why they’ve retained a vast customer base of more than 500 regulars, which earns each of them a salary of between £3,000 and £5,000 a week.

  I was introduced to these two likely lads of Rio’s cocaine game by an expat Brit called Johnny, who’s lived and played in Rio for more than thirty years. ‘These two are outrageous,’ Johnny told me. ‘They parade round town like gangsters off a rap video and don’t seem to care who knows what they’re up to. But then here in Rio most people break the law every day of their lives just to survive. Coke dealers are commonplace, so there are plenty more where these two came from.’

  My first meeting with Carlos and Jose was scheduled to be in a bar on the built-up city side of the phenomenally busy two-lane highway that separates the famous Ipanema Beach from Rio’s steaming metropolis. Johnny told me not to try and catch their eye as I watched everyone coming into the bar, the traffic screaming past just five yards away.

  ‘Wait for them to come up to us,’ said Johnny. ‘That’s the rule with this sort of character.’

  Johnny then explained how drug dealers in tourist areas are extra careful not to be spotted because they fear arrest from greedy cops, who then demand big bribes to release them from custody. ‘If they don’t pay up they often end up dead in a ditch some place. The cops call them vermin and no one ever dares challenge their authority.’

  Suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find myself facing a mixed-race man grinning maniacally down at me with a mouthful of gold-capped teeth.

  ‘I am Carlos.’

  Before I had a chance to react, the same man disappeared out of the door of the bar. I looked across at Johnny. ‘Don’t worry. He’s probably seen an undercover cop in here. We’ll go outside in a minute and they’ll pop up somewhere along the road.’

  Just then I caught the eye of a sinister-looking, pockmarked middle-aged man staring directly at me and wondered if he was the undercover cop. We quickly finished our beers and walked out of the bar. Johnny told me to stroll at a slow pace so the man we suspected was a ‘cop’ didn’t work out our connection with Carlos.

  ‘The cops here in Rio make a paltry salary but most of them treble it through blackmail and bribery,’ explained Johnny.

  As we strolled slowly up the sidewalk alongside the noisy highway, I spotted Carlos and another man I presumed to be Jose about thirty yards ahead of us. ‘Just keep following them at a distance. They’ll come to us when they’re ready.’

  Five minutes later we followed them down a side street and into a much smaller, rougher bar. It was obviously somewhere that Carlos and Jose felt safer in.

  Johnny bought four beers and we sat down. Jose was much smaller and stockier than his friend and he let Carlos do most of the talking. ‘So, you doin’ a book about coke?’ He grinned as Johnny translated for me. ‘You know one day cocaine will be bigger business than sugar here in Brazil.’ He laughed and I tried to smile to put him at ease.

  I asked Johnny to ask Carlos about his life as a coke dealer in one of the most dangerous cities in the world. ‘It pays well but I wake up every morning wondering if this will be the day my luck runs out. Here in Rio, all the coke is shipped in through the favelas. The traffickers up there run their own coke shops where people like us have to go to get our supplies.’ Carlos pauses and looks in the direction of one of the vast, sprawling favelas overlooking Rio in the distance. ‘It’s fuckin’ dangerous up there, man.’

  ‘Is it worth the risk?’ I asked Carlos as Jose looked on nodding thoughtfully.

  ‘What choice do we have? We both originally come from up there. There are no jobs waiting for us when we leave school. The only work is on the streets. We both started as lookouts for drug dealers when we were twelve years old.’

  The previous day I’d been up into one of the favelas on a fact-finding mission and discovered these hillside slums were like sel
f-contained, lawless societies where few people from the rest of Rio ever dared to tread. I’d seen the young lookouts with my own eyes. I’d visited a couple of coke barons who were barely out of their teens and I’d seen the young kids, who followed them around in the hope of any scrap of work. I’d been told you could hire a hitman in the favelas for $500. Only a few weeks earlier a drug dealer was gunned down by an assassin, well known to be a resident of that same favela. ‘But no one will ever tell the police who he was,’ one local told me.

  Back in this dark bar, just off Ipanema Beach, Carlos talked in matter-of-fact tones about how he and Jose always worked as a pair because they felt it was safer that way.

  ‘We watch each other’s backs. It’s important and we know the rules of the game inside out. Never show any weakness or fear and you stand more chance of survival. It’s as simple as that,’ said Carlos.

  Then he flashed a small gun tucked into his trouser belt as he explained: ‘We’re both armed all the time. If the other dealers thought we were not, then they’d shoot us down and steal our coke before we’d even left the favela.’

  Carlos then revealed that his own father had been shot dead in a feud between drug dealers when he was just nine years old. ‘It was a heavy time, especially for my mother. We all knew what my father did but we never talked openly about the risks he was taking every day of his life. I found his body outside our front door because his enemies had decided to make an example of him. I remember looking down at his corpse and shrugging my shoulders. It was just part of life for me.’

  After the murder of his own father, Carlos said he promised his mother he would not work in the drug trade. He explained: ‘My mother begged me not to do this job because she’s convinced that I will end up dead like my father. Maybe she’s right? But the way I look at it is that he made a big mistake and paid for it with his life. I don’t intend making the same sort of errors as he did. In any case, I plan to make a lot of money and then quit before I have a wife and family. I would never want my children to see my shot-up body.’

  Up to this point, Jose had barely uttered a word. Suddenly, he became talkative. ‘Carlos and me are like brothers. We watch each other’s back very carefully. He knows that if anyone hurts him I would hunt them down and I know he would do the same for me.’

  Jose paused and then looked across at Carlos. ‘We have chosen this path in life because it is the only way to get enough money together to leave the slums. Out here in the rich man’s world, I’d be told to get a proper job like everyone else but who is going to give a couple of slum kids a real job when there aren’t even enough jobs to go round for the people outside the favelas?’

  This time it is Carlos’s turn to nod in agreement with his partner’s words. ‘He’s right. We’re here now supplying coke to the rich folk because it is our only escape route.’

  But what about their safety?

  ‘Safety doesn’t exist. We just hope we stay lucky. Listen, the other day we supplied a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine to two fitness fanatics who own a gym next to the beach. They also run the doors at a couple of Rio nightclubs. So you could say they were well connected. Anyway, we turned up with the coke at their gym and they both pulled out guns and tried to steal all of our cocaine.’

  Jose interrupts his friend: ‘They thought they could get away with it because we were just a couple of kids. They thought they could scare us but we are always prepared for situations like this.’

  So what happened? I asked.

  Carlos laughs and slaps his friend on the back. ‘Jose was real clever. We acted scared and started to hand over the coke to them. Then one of them tried to come on to Jose. That’s when they dropped their guard and wham! I shot one of them in the balls and we ran for our lives but at least we still grabbed back the coke. Those guys won’t fuck with us again.’

  Carlos explained that no one would be foolish enough to chase them up into the favela. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s scary up there but it’s also our safety zone. If those guys had come after us, they’d have been gunned by our friends. No one can touch us from the outside, although the biggest dangers come from the people inside the favela.’

  My next question returned to the subject of the turf wars that always seem to accompany the sale of coke on the streets of any big city. What happens if someone starts trying to sell coke on your turf? I ask.

  Carlos laughed and said that even younger favela kids try to push them off their turf at least once a month. ‘It’s no big deal but these younger kids are pretty trigger happy, so you have to be careful not to upset them too much. Only last week a bunch of fifteen-year-olds turned up on the beach and tried to muscle us out of the way. They flashed their guns around and threatened to scare our customers unless we agreed to let them sell coke on our turf as well.’

  Jose agreed: ‘Yeah. Those young bastards actually thought we’d just say, “Sure, come and take over our business.” We’ve worked fucking hard to get where we are today. This is one of the most lucrative turfs in Ipanema. Why the hell would we give it up to a bunch of kids?’

  Carlos came in again: ‘It’s a real shame but I ended up having to make an example of one of those kids. I shot him in the leg and told him he was lucky I hadn’t killed him.’

  Jose claims his background in cage fighting means he has a fearsome reputation inside the favela where he still lives.

  ‘Everyone knows who I am in the favela, so every time I shoot someone it sends out a message to keep away from my business.’

  Carlos admits through gritted teeth it’s very difficult sometimes dealing with ‘spoilt white people’ who make up the majority of their customers in Ipanema. ‘Brazil is 95 per cent poor people and 5 per cent very rich. It’s not a nice place if you have no money but these people I deal with are very dismissive of the slum folk. It annoys me a lot. They should show us more respect.’

  Until recently Carlos was dating the teenage daughter of a very wealthy industrialist; she lived with her family in a penthouse flat overlooking Ipanema Beach.

  ‘I met her through dealing coke to her last boyfriend,’ explained Carlos. ‘I liked her a lot but we were so different. She had a driver take her everywhere and her father was so obsessed with knowing who she was hanging out with that he even hired a private eye to follow her. When he discovered she was going out with a drug dealer he went mental and threatened to cut off her allowance unless she finished with me. She dropped me immediately. Money always talks in the end, eh?’

  Both Carlos and Jose insist they are saving much of the money they’re earning from coke dealing. ‘We’re stashing it away in a secret place where no one can get to it. That money is going to help us get out of the favela. I’d like to travel to Europe, maybe even England, and meet people from different places. I have a cousin who lives in Paris. I’d like to stay with him.’

  Jose continued: ‘I just want to get myself a nice place in the country outside Rio and kick back and enjoy my life. Coke dealing is short term. In this business if you don’t get out young you either end up dead or hooked or both.’

  Johnny called me from Rio a few months after my meeting with Carlos and Jose to say that they’d both disappeared from their usual ‘turf’ in Ipanema. ‘I’ve been told they “disappeared” after stealing some coke that belonged to someone else,’ said Johnny, my man in Rio.

  There wasn’t even a hint of surprise or shock in his voice …

  PART THREE

  DEALERS/TRAFFICKERS/TRANSPORTERS – SPAIN

  Spain has long been regarded as the ‘Cocaine Marketplace’ of Europe. Closely linked by language and history to South and Central America, Spanish authorities have fought a long, hard battle against the coke barons with only limited success. True, there are major cocaine busts on the Iberian peninsular virtually every week but they represent a tiny amount of the cocaine travelling through Spain.

  It is estimated that 50 per cent of the cocaine consumed in Europe enters the continent via Spain.
In 2010, for example, 18 tons of the drug were seized in Spain, more than in all the other EU countries put together. However the nationalities of the cartels sending cocaine to Spain has changed in recent years. While many of the Colombian groups which dominated the trade in the 1980s still continue to operate, some even more deadly Mexican cartels have set up ‘branches’ in Spain to ensure their product gets a safe passage to Europe and beyond.

  In June 2012 a group of seventeen Colombian citizens, one Venezuelan and one Moroccan were arrested in Barcelona, Spain, following six months of intelligence work by detectives. They were accused of running a highly sophisticated cocaine trafficking gang operating out of Barcelona and Tarragona. Three and a half kilos of cocaine, €13,500 and six vehicles were seized during that police raid in the Catalan capital. The gang was led by a Colombian multimillionaire coke baron and functioned as an ‘enterprise’, complete with contact telephone lines, distribution network and a large circle of clients who could obtain shipments of cocaine at any time of the day or night.

  In a desperate attempt to stem the virtually non-stop tide of cocaine, Spanish law enforcement groups have reinforced inter-regional cooperation, as well as forging closer links with police forces in Latin America. While hiding cocaine in shipments of bananas and other fruit remains one of the favourite tactics used by traffickers, they often come up with novel ways to smuggle the drug. In the spring of 2013, for example, a pet Labrador dog was found to have packs of cocaine inside its body just before it was flown out of Spain.