A deal was hammered out between the women and their supplier in which he provided not only the cocaine but also a list of big-usage customers on the Costa del Sol. ‘It made sense for all of us. He couldn’t be bothered to go out and deliver the coke so we agreed a 50 per cent cut of the profit from every gram we sold. His customers were buying huge quantities virtually every week and they all liked the fact we were not a couple of fast-talking kids driving flashy cars.’
That was a year earlier. By the time I caught up with Jane and Denise they’d ‘bedded in’ so well in their new careers that their supplier even allowed them to develop some of their own smaller customers. ‘This game is all about word of mouth. Someone likes the quality of your product and they recommend you to others and it soon escalates, just so long as you supply decent cocaine,’ said Jane, in a very businesslike manner.
Both women talked about their success as coke dealers as if it were a perfectly normal business. ‘We now have a reputation for supplying good quality product. That counts for a lot out here because so many people take it that they tend to know when they are being conned into buying rubbish,’ explained Denise.
Jane went on: ‘No doubt our housewifely friends back home in suburbia would be horrified at what we’re doing but actually dealing in cocaine in the right circles can be quite civilised, if you stick to certain rules. We always travel together to a deal or a sale and we never give credit.’
‘Look, we’re just a couple of old girls trying to make a living,’ Denise pointed out. ‘We don’t rip people off and we don’t water down the cocaine like so many other dealers do round here. That makes us trustworthy in the eyes of the customers.’
And in recent months, Denise and Jane have noticed a number of new women customers dialling up their ‘services’. Jane explains: ‘It’s not that surprising because a lot of women don’t feel safe dealing with flashy little wideboys flogging them coke in a clandestine meeting in a car park or a petrol station forecourt. They feel a lot safer buying their coke off other women. They trust us more. They don’t think they’ll be ripped off and, even more importantly, they know they’re safe with us.’
The two women currently have a client base of around fifty regulars: ‘These customers usually buy our coke at least once a week. One client is a 93-year-old man, who is a real gentleman. He says that snorting the occasional line makes him feel young again. If it makes him feel good about himself, what’s the harm in that?’
Jane and Denise also admit they quite enjoy the ‘naughtiness’ of drug dealing. ‘We both led rather straight, dull lives up until now and are no doubt considered a pair of rather ordinary middle-aged women, but why shouldn’t we do this if we want to?’ says Denise. ‘Besides that, neither of our [former] husbands is supporting us with any money, so we had little choice in the matter really.’
Denise and Jane say they try to avoid selling cocaine to criminals. ‘It’s better to stick to “normal” people as they’re known in the trade. Selling to crooks is a mug’s game because it often leads to a gang trying to take over your business.’
Denise says that besides travelling together for safety, they also stick to certain other ‘house rules’. She says: ‘We vary the drop-off points all the time. But the main thing is not to let customers visit us at our home. That would be asking for trouble.’
Instead they meet in local cafes, on beaches or in their car if it is after dark. ‘It’s always got to be a clean job. In and out. The customer doesn’t really want to hang about for a chat, so we keep it moving pretty fast.’
As a result, the two women believe they have earned themselves a ‘decent reputation’. Jane explained: ‘We just seem to be trusted more than most dealers. I think it also helps that we don’t use coke ourselves. It has no appeal to us whatsoever and I love being able to tell the customers we don’t do it whenever they complain about the quality or quantity we have sold them.
‘In any case, it’s best to be sober and straight when out dealing, as you never know what lies around the corner. You have to be alert at all times.’
With her clipped accent and penchant for elegant clothing, it’s hard to imagine Denise’s life could have turned upside down so dramatically. ‘I thought I had it all when I was married but I’ve learned you should never count your cookies, eh? If my parents were still alive God knows what they’d think of my life now. My dad was a teacher and my mum never travelled outside the small town where she was born.’
Denise and Jane’s story is typical of how cocaine can affect people’s lives in places like the Costa del Sol. ‘Surviving out here is a nightmare,’ Denise asserted. ‘There are virtually no jobs. Spain is in the middle of a deep recession. Many expats want to sell their homes and move back to the UK but they can’t. No wonder people like us get sucked into a criminal life, eh?’
Jane added: ‘People are really desperate down here. They seem prepared to do anything to earn some money and it will only get worse before it gets better.’
Meanwhile Jane and Denise hesitantly accept that they are now, in effect, criminals and if they’re caught by police, they will almost certainly end up serving prison sentences.
Jane shrugged her shoulders: ‘We’re both trapped in the drugs world now as it’s the easiest money either of us is ever likely to make. But that doesn’t make it right. We watch all those “dream in the sun” type TV programmes and they never seem to mention the downside to living in places like this. It’s tough. More often than not you have few friends and no relatives to turn to. That’s when you get desperate and make the wrong sort of decisions.
‘A few weeks ago, one of our punters went all violent on us because he believed we’d sold him some rubbish coke. Then in the middle of shouting at us, he suddenly had some kind of fit, vomited and then collapsed on the floor. It was horrible. We didn’t know if he was about to die on us and we were slipping all over his vomit.
‘The weird thing is there was a moment when we both looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders as if to say, “Let’s just leave him there.” He’d been so rude and threatening to us, why should we care?’
Denise continued: ‘But underneath it we’re not hardened criminals and we couldn’t turn our backs on him. It would have been completely wrong. So we helped him to his feet and drove him to the local hospital, even though he’d been threatening to kill us a few minutes earlier. He was so embarrassed when he later rang us up and thanked us for saving his life.
‘After it all happened, I turned to Jane and we both wondered if maybe our coke had done that to him. It wasn’t a good feeling and, quite frankly, it also shows that we’re not really emotionally equipped for this sort of enterprise in the long term.’
Both women say they’re waiting for other work opportunities to come along and then they will quit the cocaine world and rebuild their lives. ‘We know in our heart of hearts that this isn’t really “us” and unless we get out sooner rather than later something bad is sure to happen,’ says Denise.
Jane added: ‘This might surprise you but we’re both trying to save as much money as possible so we can get ourselves back home to England. We miss it terribly, despite all the domestic problems that brought us here in the first place. But for the moment, we have to continue being drug dealers, otherwise we will not even survive.’
She continued: ‘It’s strange to think about it, but I’d imagine this is the sort of dilemma many criminals find themselves in. You know you’re taking enormous risks and that one day everything will blow up in your face but the money is so good you can’t just walk away from it. I guess the skill is in recognising when to get out and stick to it. Let’s hope we make it, eh?’
Just down the road from where Jane and Denise sell their drugs is a place that sums up how cocaine has attracted so many opportunists to this stretch of Spain’s southern coastline.
CHAPTER 17
MARK
One of the most startling things about the cocaine trade on the Costa del Sol is the sh
eer number of people who set themselves up as coke dealers without any real knowledge of the terrain. It appears that dozens of hyped-up, overactive coke addicts take this ‘career route’ in order to continue feeding their addiction. They scrape together a living in places like Fuengirola – a poor man’s Marbella – sandwiched between the more ‘glamorous’ parts of this coastline and Málaga airport.
At one large Fuengirola supermarket just off the main N340 coastal route – known to many as the ‘road of death’ because of the large number of car crashes that occur on it – low-level British criminals sit and sip coffee and brandy in the cafe while negotiating the purchase of small loads of cocaine to sell in the surrounding streets. The first time I walked into this unlikely drug den, I noticed every single voice in the canteen was English and male. Many were waiting for their girlfriends and wives to do the weekly shop, while they sat wheeler-dealing with other villains.
I was introduced to this – the most notorious gangland cafe on the entire coastline – by a London gangster called Mark. He’d promised me I could buy a ‘big lump of decent cocaine’ through one of the dodgy looking Brits who’ve turned this place into a sunshine version of the fictional Winchester Club, from the hit TV show Minder.
When I met Mark beforehand in the supermarket car park, he warned me, ‘No one will deal with you as a first-time customer, but once you turn up a few times, they’ll offer you some white stuff. I guarantee it.’
Mark was right. It took just two more visits to the cafe over the following couple of days before I hit the cocaine jackpot, thanks to a Scottish man in his fifties called Gerry. ‘I can get you a package. Not been bashed or watered down in any way,’ he told me.
‘How quickly can I get it?’
‘A shipment like that takes a week to deliver.’
‘I only want the best quality, mate.’
‘One thousand euros. Seven-fifty up front. The rest on delivery,’ replied Gerry, completely ignoring my last remark.
I said I’d get back to him.
My visit to that supermarket cafe confirmed what many criminals had been telling me – that the Costa del Sol’s lower-level cocaine business continues to thrive right under the noses of the police and hundreds of thousands of tourists.
I didn’t follow up on my request for cocaine from Gerry but I bumped into him a few weeks later in a notorious villains’ bar on the promenade in front of the beach at Fuengirola. When I apologised for not getting back to him he said coolly, ‘Don’t worry about it, pal. I had an order for ten times that amount the next day, so it went right out of my mind.’
My original Fuengirola contact, Mark, said even he’d been surprised at just how easy it was to buy relatively large quantities of cocaine since he’d arrived in southern Spain three years earlier. ‘There’s such a crazy mix of different nationalities here and they’re all chasing the same stuff: cocaine. I came out here with a couple of mates planning to run a bit of puff but the prices dipped so badly that I switched to coke in order to survive.’
Mark continued: ‘The key to all this is the contacts you have back in Britain ’cos the last thing you want to do is try to sell it openly out here. The local dealers will slit yer throat within hours. If you’ve got the right contacts back home then you can set up all sorts of things out here. But you have to be a bit careful because there are even some nasty Brits out here who think they have the right to a cut of anything you move across the border. It’s like protection money in a sense and they will try and force you to pay it but you just have to take a risk and tell them to fuck off otherwise they’ll suck you dry.’
Mark, who comes from Gloucester originally, says he tries to avoid packing a gun ‘unless I can help it’ but claims he always carries a knife under the front seat of his car ‘just in case’. He explained: ‘I run a team of three dealers, which is sensible. Keep it small and then the psychos stay away from you. But once you start getting too big for yer boots, someone will always come after you.’
Mark’s other ‘work’ includes chasing up cocaine debts incurred by some of the very same smalltime hoods using that canteen to find cocaine to buy. ‘It’s easy money because you never go through with any threats. The other day me and the lads had to pay this businessman a visit at his villa in Calahonda because he owed a dealer ten grand for some personal. Well, I can tell you that within an hour of us turning up at his house, this fella had paid up. We didn’t need to do anything violent. We just told him we’d been sent to get his debt repaid and he got the message loud and clear.’
Mark reckons that such violent responses, though, are the basis of so many problems on the Costa del Sol. ‘I never like resorting to violence if I can help it because once you do that, you’re stuck with no other threat to throw at people. That’s when the killings happen. It all gets out of control and when that happens anything might occur and more and more people are going to get topped as a result.’
In Mark’s view Fuengirola is more dangerous than anywhere back in Britain: ‘Villains do what the fuck they want most of the time here and the cops haven’t the time or the money to chase ’em. There are some faces out here who virtually run the coast. They are untouchable as far as gangsters and the police are concerned.’
Mark paints a picture of a society twisted out of shape by cocaine and its pernicious influence across so many aspects of life in the Mediterranean sunshine.
‘This place is so dodgy,’ he insists. ‘If you upset the wrong person you can end up in a wooden box. I’ve started avoiding certain bars now because there are so many cokehead gangsters waiting for a chance to have a pop at you. It’s fuckin’ frightening.’
Mark concedes, however, that he and many other younger British gangsters are trapped in Spain. ‘Trouble is, it’s much easier to be a crim out here but that’s attracted too many people making it hard to earn decent money. To be honest it would be even more pricey to move back to Britain. It’s a no-win situation. I’m hoping I can ride it out here because having the sea and the sunshine is a lot more pleasant than anything on offer back home.’
It’s those foreign, often Eastern European criminals, who pose the biggest threat to low-level British cocaine criminals like Mark. ‘They’re the dangerous ones,’ he says.
CHAPTER 18
SLY
So who exactly are these foreign criminals labelled as ‘psychos’ by the Brit-pack coke barons on the Costa del Sol? While researching this book I met a Romanian gangster called Sly, who proved the very point the British villains were making. Sly, 32, had married a British woman called Val – who was thirty years his senior – some years earlier. Ironically, that helped him to stay in Spain, although Romania’s recent accession to the EU has since made that irrelevant.
Sly provided a chilling insight into the cocaine wars in southern Spain. ‘In Romania life is cheap,’ said Sly in a very relaxed manner. ‘You kill to survive. It’s no big deal. Spain is like paradise compared with my home country but if people here cross me I will not hesitate to kill them.’
Sly looked and acted in an extremely agitated and paranoid manner and his narrow, piercing blue eyes seemed to bore holes into me as he spoke. Yet in the middle of telling me about some truly most horrific incidents, Sly would suddenly start giggling. Then he’d nudge Val and kiss her full on the lips almost as if he was seeking her approval for everything, even the most evil acts of criminality he was describing. No doubt Sly would have stabbed me in the back as soon as look at me if I crossed him, but there was this weird, playful side to him, almost as if he’d never grown up. I later found out he’d spent much of his childhood in an orphanage.
Sly told me in calm, clinical terms what he did to his cocaine enemies if they ever come after him. ‘I slit their throat like this,’ he said smiling as he did the traditional finger movement across my neck. It was truly chilling.
Sly said: ‘Where I come from revenge is always in the air. You must not show your weaknesses to your enemies – ever. Listen. I like the English
. I am married to an English lady but they are too old-fashioned. They don’t really want to hurt people and we know that, so we take over their cocaine businesses and run them out of town. It’s that easy.’
Sly was constantly puffing himself up in front of his wife. It was as if he needed to make sure she knew she should never cross him. ‘Sure, we torture our enemies if we need certain information. Sometimes you have no choice. Last month I had a problem with this Bulgarian who was trying to set up a cocaine business on my territory. As soon as I heard what was happening, three of us went to find him. We took him to the mountains and left him out in the sun to dry.’
I didn’t dare ask exactly what he meant by that but it sounded ominous. But that wasn’t all. Sly continued: ‘We had trouble with the Chinese a while back. They’re crazy mother-fuckers and we knew we would have to kill one of them to send out a message, so we kidnapped three of them from a brothel in Estepona and took them to an apartment.
‘The Chinese are so weird. None of them seemed scared, even when I started burning one guy’s eyelids. So I got my man Igor to cut him up a bit. Then we left him to bleed by the side of the carretera [main road]. It was a message to the other Chinese to stay out of our affairs. To keep away from us. I think it must be working because they have been very quiet since.’
Just then Sly put his hand into his jacket pocket. I hesitated for a minute, dreading what he might be about to pull out. It turned out to be a tiny cosh. He handed it to me. ‘Feel that. It is steel. I can break a man’s jaw with one hit.’
He was right. This small three-inch weapon weighed a lot and yet it was no bigger than my middle finger. Sly took the cosh back from me and sat there stroking it in an almost phallic fashion. ‘This is my favourite weapon. It does lots of things for me. It gets me places. It scares and hurts people.’
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