Cocaine Confidential

by Clarkson, Wensley

  Spain’s current severe unemployment and nationwide recession has helped the cocaine cartels and traffickers because it has pushed down the earning potential for the mules often used to smuggle cocaine on commercial flights and ferry crossings. In 2010 they could expect to be paid €4,000 for a twenty-minute run across the Strait of Gibraltar. Today that ‘fee’ has dropped to just €2,000, according to Spanish drug squad vets and cocaine gangsters I interviewed for this book.

  So, South and Central American cocaine traffickers and cartels continue to flourish having built up close relationships with the Spanish underworld over the past forty years. Much of that cocaine arrives via the isolated north-west region of Galicia, which has been the biggest point of entry for cocaine in Europe for much of that time.

  CHAPTER 9

  GALICIA

  Cocaine gangsters call Galicia ‘The Coast of Death’ because of the shootings and sudden disappearances that are commonplace in this desolate corner of Spain. For many years it has been more like a lawless territory straight out of the Wild West which has virtually been left to run itself – with chilling results. The local people have a long history of smuggling everything from tobacco to alcohol along their ragged coastline. Not surprisingly, many of them now specialise in transporting shipments of cocaine from sea to land, taking a 30 per cent cut before handing the drogas on to traffickers for distribution to Europe and beyond.

  This ‘secret industry’ has brought phenomenal wealth to what was until recently the country’s poorest region. The numerous coves and beaches of the rias – estuaries – make perfect landing places for smugglers. Boats known as planeadoras – commonly used by local mussel farmers – make contact with bigger vessels out at sea at night. It’s claimed that even today police, local government officials and prosecutors form part of a cocaine chain of command along Galicia’s entire coastline.

  Modern legend has it that onetime Galician coke baron Laureano Oubina once stormed into a police station, complaining that an expected cargo of cocaine had failed to materialise, and demanding to know where it was. It’s said that the ‘missing’ shipment was returned to him the following day.

  But these days, Galician drug smuggling clans such as the Oubinas and another family called the Charlines have gradually had their power base eroded by much more deadly South American gangsters with even more ruthless methods. These Latin gangs have re-emerged in the area following a police clampdown on the north-western coast over the past decade. One Spanish cocaine criminal explained: ‘The South Americans used to pay the Galicians to operate all the smuggling out of this area but then the police infiltrated their ranks and it got very difficult to operate for a few years. So the Latin Americans decided to run their own trafficking groups only using Galicians they could trust. It has now given them a much more powerful base here.’

  One Spanish police source told me that for just €3,000 a Colombian professional hitman based permanently in Spain has been hired to ‘deal with’ non-cooperative locals. It’s reckoned in recent years, these type of guns-for-hire have murdered numerous Galicians and uncooperative officials in the north-west province.

  Colombian assassins have also been known to ‘ice’ local Galician cocaine gangsters just for the sake of three or four kilograms of cocaine that’s gone missing. ‘Sometimes the Colombians do it purely as a way to send a message to the locals not to fuck them about,’ said one Galician-based British coke trafficker. ‘It’s heavy up here. It’s an isolated corner of the country and these sorts of gangsters can do just about anything they want without interference from the police.’

  Other European countries have accused Spain of being inefficient in their battle to overcome the cocaine ‘industry’ on their doorstep. Tens of thousands of people are arrested for drug offences every year, but critics say Spanish police focus on street dealers and big bosses, while allowing middle-level traffickers to escape.

  So, it seems, these days the South Americans in Galicia are going from strength to strength, thanks to their superb organisational skills and their supreme ability to launder the proceeds of cocaine. Latin American gangs wash cocaine cash through corrupt bureaux de changes, couriers and complex electronic money transfers between accounts. Spanish law enforcement authorities recently managed to uncover a paper trail which showed that between 2001 and 2004, £50 million was known to have been laundered in Spain and then filtered through solely to the notorious Cali cartel in Colombia. There are at least half a dozen other cartels operating exactly the same system in Galicia, so it seems safe to assume that many hundreds of millions of pounds of cocaine cash is being laundered at any one time.

  Funerals of relatively young men who dared to take on the Colombians and paid for it with their lives in Galicia are sadly becoming more commonplace. A classic example is the Feijóo cousins. In December 2005 Ricardo Feijóo, 35, and his cousin, Angel, 25, were kidnapped in front of Ricardo’s wife by men who didn’t even bother to hide their faces. A week earlier their warehouse, which contained a 14-metre speedboat equipped with two 300hp engines, had been burnt out. The boat – which was capable of outrunning police launches – had been used for rendezvous off the coast with trawlers or container ships that smuggle the cocaine across the Atlantic from Latin America.

  The cousins’ charred corpses were eventually discovered at an abandoned mill-house down an isolated country track. The killers had burnt their car and slipped across the border into Portugal shortly after the double slaying.

  ‘They kidnapped [the victims], they interrogated them, they tortured them and then they killed them,’ said local police commissioner Jaime Iglesias, head of a police unit dealing with the increasingly violent drug gangs in Galicia.

  The death of the Feijóo cousins followed shortly after Ramón Outeda was shot in daylight as he opened his front door in the same fishing village of Cambados. Three other local traffickers had also been found shot in different parts of Galicia over the previous year. Another was kidnapped and his body never recovered. ‘The killers are normally Latin Americans or others who live in Madrid or abroad, especially Colombians,’ said one local law enforcement officer, with an intimate knowledge of the cocaine smuggling in Galicia.

  Ironically, police victories over the traditional Galician smuggling families in recent years had left a void now filled by young, hot-blooded traffickers who settle scores in a vicious manner. ‘The new generation is a lot more violent and soulless … they have different values from the old patriarchs,’ explained one local law enforcement officer.

  So with the older generation of Galician smugglers struggling to control their empires from jail cells, numerous small groups of criminals are offering their services for smuggling cocaine into Galicia.

  It’s a combustible mix, which has understandably installed in the local people a genuine fear of falling foul of the cocaine gangsters. This stops them from cooperating with police and prevents others raising their voices in protest against the new breed of local and Colombian traffickers. ‘It’s a world within a world and you enter it at great personal risk,’ said one British cocaine gangster.

  SAMMY

  In the middle of all Galicia’s murderous, cocaine-fuelled chaos, a small vacuum has emerged which has allowed a couple of hard-nosed British gangs to muscle into the area in recent years, despite the Colombians’ rule of iron. That’s where Sammy, from Leeds, comes in. His survival in this deadly corner of Spain is a miracle in itself.

  Sammy and I met during one of his rare trips south to the Costa del Sol, where I was introduced to him by a cocaine gangster called Chet. Sammy’s career as a reckless young armed robber in the UK had landed him with a long stretch in maximum security prison back in the 1990s. ‘When I finished my probation I grabbed me passport and took the first flight here,’ he told me. ‘I’d met this Spanish drug dealer inside prison who told me that Galicia was the place to be, not the Costa del bloody Sol where all the Flash Harrys are snorting too much of the product and treading on each other�
��s toes. This is where the stuff comes in. This is the real place to be if you want to earn big money out of cocaine.’

  Sammy likes to make everything sound very easy but in reality he has had to work extremely hard to get a toehold on Galicia’s ‘Coast of Death’. ‘Brits like me stick out like a sore thumb up here,’ he said. ‘The Latins don’t like northern Europeans and when I first turned up most of them thought I was an undercover copper.’ But, explained Sammy, this actually worked to his advantage. ‘You see, no one tried to have a pop at me like they would have if they’d just thought I was some villain from Leeds, which is what I am. They all left me alone and that gave me time to start building up contacts.’

  And ‘contacts’ are the key to getting anywhere when it comes to the cocaine market in Galicia. Sammy continued: ‘I sold myself to the heavy boys here by explaining that I had good connections back in the UK as well as in all the Spanish resorts popular with the Brits. They were using middlemen to handle the sales of cocaine. But when I came along they realised they could supply it direct to me.’

  Sammy said that drug running in Galicia is ‘strictly for the pro’s’. He explained: ‘The reason I am here is that the product can be purchased cheaper here than anywhere else in Europe because this is where the good stuff lands. But in order to pay those low prices you have to factor in bigger risks. That’s why so many villains prefer to let the coke travel through here first and pay a premium at its next stop. But they’re the mugs in my opinion. I’m probably making 30 per cent more out of a shipment than the gangsters who won’t touch it until the coke has either got to southern Spain or Amsterdam.’

  Today Sammy runs a gang of six other Brits and lives in a quiet village inland from Galicia’s notorious coastal drop-off points for the huge shipments of cocaine brought in by fishing boats every week. However, Sammy and his men have had a few close shaves along the way. He explained: ‘The Spanish and the South Americans round here are as hard as nails. They shoot first and ask questions later. One time about a hundred grand’s worth of coke went missing from a shipment I picked up on a beach. But when I went back to the local guy responsible for the delivery he pulled a gun on me for daring to suggest he’d stolen the product.

  ‘It turned out that he was worried that if word got back to his bosses, he’d be made an example of so he’d tried to stitch me up instead. Then a few days later this same bloke and five of his mates burst into my house and tied up my wife and kid. Then they came and found me in a bar in a nearby village and demanded that I retract all my accusations or they’d slit my kid’s throat. It was heavy stuff because where I come from you never involve the family of a criminal but round here all those rules mean jack shit.’

  However, Sammy eventually ‘sorted out’ that situation in his own inimitable style. ‘I walked out of that bar with those blokes and pulled an AK-47 out of the boot of my Mercedes and threatened to spray it around a bit so they’d have to do a very nimble tap dance. Then I told them to release my family immediately. They climbed down completely. My wife and kid were freed unharmed and from that moment on I had the utmost respect from all the gangsters round these parts.’

  These days, Sammy stays very much in the shadows while his gang deals directly day-to-day with the local cocaine smugglers and their Colombian bosses. Sammy’s operation usually involves vans packed with cocaine, which are either driven south to the Costa del Sol or north up through France or Holland, then across the Channel and into the UK. Sammy reckons on splitting €200,000 between himself and his small ‘firm’ every month. ‘It’s good money and if I keep my nose clean it’ll provide me with a half-decent pension.’

  Sammy owns a sprawling farmhouse overlooking a sweeping valley filled with pine trees, complete with swimming pool and two Dobermanns. ‘Life is good for me at the moment but I’m always on my guard. The characters running all the cocaine coming in here by fishing boat from South America are fuckin’ dangerous. I know only too well that they’d grass me up to get rid of me if they felt I was threatening them in any way. I know a lot of Brits and Paddies who’ve turned up here and been literally run out of town.’

  Sammy says he actually likes it when Spanish police attempt one of their regular crackdowns in the area. ‘I don’t mind the cops getting involved because it makes it a bit safer for me because a lot of the really heavy, psycho-criminal types usually disappear to other cocaine havens which makes life a lot more peaceful for the likes of me.’

  Sammy says that the days when coke barons ride into town armed to the teeth, threatening to shoot and maim anyone who crosses them may soon disappear. ‘It’s still going on here big-time, but it’s well organised and low-key because only the real professional operators bring coke in through Galicia these days.’

  Meanwhile, other less notorious areas of Spain have – in recent years – also become popular drop-off points for cocaine.

  CHAPTER 10

  CADIZ

  Trapped between an appalling recession and record 36 per cent youth unemployment, the people of Cadiz province in Spain’s Andalusia region have increasingly turned to cocaine trafficking to pay their rent and feed their kids, according to data released by Spanish authorities recently. The province of Cadiz faces Morocco across the Atlantic Ocean, as well as Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on Moroccan soil just east of the Strait of Gibraltar. No wonder Cadiz province’s rugged Atlantic coastline has become a popular transit point. From here, cocaine can easily be shipped overland by truck to Portugal, France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands.

  Significantly, 693 out of a national total of 2,134 properties seized from drug traffickers in 2010 were located in Cadiz. It is the only Spanish province with a special anti-narcotics magistrates division and three public prosecutors fighting the drug lords. One of the most popular drop-off points for shipments of cocaine is the sleepy, under-used port of Barbate, population 23,000. There were 300 drug trafficking convictions there alone in 2011.

  No wonder Barbate has attracted a number of ‘connected’ foreigners keen to cash in on its undoubted potential.

  HANS

  With even higher unemployment than the national average, Barbate is littered with abandoned fishing boats decaying in the town’s rundown port area. Yet many young people drive around in new cars or motorcycles and sport flashy gold chains, suggesting there is plenty of ‘black work’ for those prepared to risk prison. Hans is a Dutch national who runs a cocaine ‘import/export’ business from a tiny pueblo, near Barbate.

  Just 30 kilometres of water separates Barbate from Morocco, the world’s main producer of hashish. But it is the cocaine – which often travels across the same narrow Strait of Gibraltar – that brings the most cash into Barbate. ‘This place would have turned into a ghost town if it hadn’t been for cocaine,’ says Hans. ‘All the old-fashioned businesses closed down long ago. Now all you have is a few boutiques selling luxury designer goods for throwaway prices. Most of them are making a loss but survive because they are perfect businesses to launder money through.’

  Cocaine is usually smuggled across the Strait of Gibraltar on fishing vessels, often alongside other ‘shipments’, including illegal immigrants. Other loads of cocaine come in through articulated lorries carrying vegetables or textiles, which arrive at the understaffed ferry port from one of the twice-daily sailings from Tangier, in Morocco.

  ‘Everyone here knows that cocaine keeps Barbate afloat. It’s not in anyone’s interests to change that either,’ explains Hans.

  Back in May 2011, badly paid police in Barbate pinned a poster to the wall of their main police station which said They owe us April, referring to the late payment of their salaries. It was, says Hans, like music to the ears of the cocaine traffickers. ‘Poorly paid police are easier to bribe, naturally, and when we heard they hadn’t even got their salaries, well, we all smiled.’

  Other legitimate local businessmen were outraged by the failure to pay the police. One Barbate hotel owner said: ‘This was potentially a very dangerous
situation because many officers would be tempted to take bribes from local cocaine traffickers to look the other way when shipments of cocaine came through the port. By not paying them it felt as if the authorities were saying, “Let the drug barons pay them instead.”’

  The police were eventually given their back-pay after a national outcry. But Barbate’s prospects don’t seem any brighter. Victim of both the long-term death of the fishing industry that had previously sustained the town’s economy, and the catastrophic effect of the financial crisis on local government’s budget, its proximity to North Africa offers a golden opportunity for smugglers to bring narcotics into the country virtually unhindered.

  Hans first arrived in the area in 2001, when he was hired through a criminal associate to help a runaway European gangster find an isolated home where he would be safe from authorities. ‘I stumbled on this coastline and thought it was a gem of a place immediately. I found this guy a house and we became quite friendly, and I eventually rented myself a villa in the same village. He asked me to work on a few “jobs” with him and they mainly involved smuggling coke.’

  When that runaway criminal was eventually arrested and extradited back to his home country, Hans did a deal through the man’s lawyer to take over his ‘cocaine distribution business’. Hans explains: ‘It was perfect. I agreed to pay this guy 33 per cent of everything I earned. He then handed over his contacts and even threw in his smuggling yacht so I could simply continue the trafficking he’d been running from here.’

  Hans was eventually introduced to the other criminal’s Colombian cartel man in Madrid and managed to set up a deal to ‘handle’ regular cocaine shipments into Barbate. ‘It’s turned into a very cool job,’ says Hans. ‘Often I don’t even handle the coke myself. It’s just in transit. I organise the next stage of the transport on behalf of the Colombians. They’re happy because it helps them cut out the old-style local gangsters, who’re always trying to rip them off.’