Cocaine Confidential

by Clarkson, Wensley

  Tiggy says ‘things really kicked off’ on Ibiza after a British man was shot and seriously injured during a gunfight between UK cocaine gangs on the island a few days before he was held up. ‘It was heavy stuff and a definite sign of things to come,’ says Tiggy. Police later said the man had been the target of an attempted hit by a rival gang, which was supplying clubbers with cocaine and ecstasy. The victim himself was later acquitted of attempted murder by a court on the neighbouring island of Majorca.

  Two innocent teenage bystanders from Northern Ireland were hit by the hail of bullets during the same incident. Police later seized a rifle, bullets, machetes, knives and balaclavas at various addresses on Ibiza. Thirteen people in all – twelve Brits and a Moroccan – were arrested.

  Tiggy says he pulled back from Ibiza following the shootings, but returned two years later after being told by other coke dealers that ‘things had calmed down’. He explains: ‘The last thing we need is violence on the streets, man. Ibiza is supposed to be a chilled out, peace-loving place. That’s why so many Brits go there and that’s why I know I can make 75 per cent of my annual earnings by spending six-to-eight weeks there every summer.’

  Tiggy reckons the Ibiza police are well aware of the British coke dealers, who swoop onto the island during the peak travel months. ‘But they don’t mind us being there as long as we don’t go out on the streets. I have a hard core of about forty customers who travel to the island every summer and they all like to have some coke, so I don’t need to sell to strangers, which suits me fine ’cos it’s less risky.

  ‘The trouble with shootings like that earlier incident is that it puts the cops under pressure to round us all up when most of us are getting on with our business very low-key, like. I actually feel sorry for the cops when that sort of thing happens. They just want an easy life and then some trigger-happy dude goes and signposts what he is doing by spraying his Uzi in all directions. It’s out of order.’

  These days Tiggy is so relaxed about his stays on Ibiza that in the past two years he’s even taken his wife and young child with him and rented a detached villa. But, I ask, how do you get your supply of coke?

  ‘That’s the tricky bit. Obviously I can’t just plonk it in my backpack and bring it over from London. There’s a guy here who trafficks it from mainland Spain. He seems to be the main coke smuggler based on the island and I buy it direct from him.

  ‘It ends up costing me a little more than in the UK, but it’s worth it ’cos this guy never has any problems on the island ’cos he’s close to the cops. He said to me once that if I ever got arrested just call him and he would make sure I was freed within hours.

  ‘As long as I keep buying my coke from him then I am safe in the knowledge that he will provide the back-up if I have any aggro. I know that if I tried to buy my coke from a cheaper source on the island, this guy would cast me loose and I’d probably get nicked very quickly. It’s much better to deal with the main men, even if you have to pay a bit more for the product.’

  Tiggy charges 30 per cent more for his cocaine when he sells it to his customers on Ibiza rather than London. ‘I tell them it is a handling charge and they seem to accept it. Stupid fuckers. I actually think some of them really do presume I bring the coke over in my backpack.’

  Back in London, Tiggy says he has a hard core of a hundred regular customers who order an average of three grams of coke a week from him. He admits his mark-up is a minimum of £50 per gram, which means he’s making £1,500 a week minimum. ‘It’s good money but in Ibiza I am selling way more grams of coke a week for £130 a gram and making £80 profit per gram. You work that one out for yourself. When people get here they just want to unwind and get off their faces every day, which is very good for business.’

  Now in his mid-thirties, Tiggy says he is carefully saving at least half of his earnings from the cocaine trade every week. ‘I’ve already saved up enough money to buy a second home in the south of France. I know I can’t be in this business for the rest of my life but I reckon on another ten years and then I’ll be able to retire and really enjoy my life.’

  Tiggy says he never takes coke himself. ‘Best way. It means when the customers start complaining about the quality I simply tell them, “Sorry, I don’t do it”, so they can’t get on my case about it.’

  Tiggy admits the purity of the coke he supplies ‘varies enormously’. He explains: ‘As far as I am concerned this is a business and I will do just about anything to ensure I make maximum profits. Sure, the stuff is heavily cut but it still has enough real coke in it to work, otherwise I’d soon run out of customers.’

  But what does he mix with the cocaine to ‘stretch’ it out? ‘I can’t talk about that end of the business except to say that it is never anything dangerous. All coke is stepped on from the moment it leaves the jungle, man. By the time it gets over here, it’s been handled by at least half a dozen professionals and they all want to stretch the product out to maximise profits.’

  Tiggy claims one of his best clients in the UK and on Ibiza is a well-known member of the British aristocracy. ‘This guy is loaded. Some weeks he buys as much as 20 grams off me and last summer on Ibiza he put in orders for 50 grams a week. He always travels with at least three or four friends, so I guess they all get stuck in. But that dude had better watch out ’cos he’s gonna end up dead from a heart attack sooner rather than later if he’s not careful.’

  Tiggy is reluctant to talk in any detail about the guys above him in London, who sell him his supplies of coke. ‘It’s not like it is in Ibiza in that respect. I sometimes get it off different people, depending on what they have in stock. Most of these handlers like to get rid of the product very quickly after taking control of it. It’s obvious really because if the law catches them with massive amounts, then they’d cop a long sentence in prison. In any case they also like to turn it round quick because then they get their money back sooner.’

  But what sort of characters is he dealing with in London? ‘Oh, you’d be surprised by these suppliers. Often they’re middle-class characters living in the suburbs. One of the main men I use also runs an antique shop in one of the most expensive areas of London. It’s a good front for him and it enables him to launder his money more easily I guess.

  ‘It’s funny ’cos most normal people out there think that the coke game is full of nutters with shooters and South American accents. But in London that’s just not the case. Here it is considered a business and it is, most of the time, run exactly like that.’

  Tiggy has ambitions like so many in the cocaine game to retire, kick back and enjoy his life but, he admits, for the moment he is on a roll. ‘I love my job. I know how far to push my luck and I’ve never had a problem with any of the heavyweights I deal with. If I quit now, what the hell else could I do? No, I’m gonna stick at this game for the time being. I’m putting away a lot of money so hopefully when the day does come for me to quit, I’ll be able to enjoy a long, safe and happy retirement.’

  If the attitude of the Spanish police is anything to go by then Tiggy might well last a lot longer on Ibiza than the streets of Harlesden. Underpaid and understaffed, they are facing a round-the-clock struggle against the cocaine barons …

  CHAPTER 23

  INSPECTOR JUAN LORENZO

  In April 2013 Spanish authorities publicly announced they’d stepped up the fight against cocaine traffickers, who were shifting their tactics in order to retain their access to the lucrative European market. ‘We’re winning battles but it will be difficult to win the war,’ said Jose Antonio Rodriguez, head of the anti-cocaine squad of the narcotics unit of Spain’s national police force. ‘Traffickers have money on their side, a lack of scruples and can develop their activities without limit.’

  The Spanish government regularly vows their police will seize assets if they can prove ‘on the balance of probability’ that cocaine gangsters are living off the proceeds of their crimes. The Spanish police even pushed for the power to confiscate dirty money from b
ank accounts of major criminals involved with drugs, prostitution, money laundering, counterfeiting, smuggling and computer fraud. But the logistics of carrying out such preventative measures has so far proved beyond the Costa del Sol’s over-stretched Policía Nacional urban force. As veteran Marbella Detective Inspector Juan Lorenzo admitted to me: ‘These criminals don’t even hide their wealth, they flaunt it – especially the ladies of the family. Profit is the only thing that drives these people. And they are more than happy to have a few police officers in their pocket. Who knows when we’ll arrest them in the end?’

  But then it’s hardly a surprise that the police on the ground in the Costa del Sol have a different attitude towards the cocaine underworld, which exists on their doorstep. Detective Lorenzo admitted to me he simply didn’t have the manpower to investigate the cocaine gangsters properly. And as if to prove the point he pulled out the police file on one of the Costa del Sol’s most notorious unsolved killings – the shooting dead by a hitman of ex-Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson, in 1990. Fifty-eight-year-old Wilson – who’d got involved with cocaine trafficking – was gunned down in the garden of his own home overlooked by the mountains behind Marbella. But that file contained just two pieces of paper, even though we were speaking more than twenty years after Wilson’s murder. The detective explained: ‘We can’t waste our time on this sort of thing. If gangsters want to shoot their rivals dead that’s fine by us because it mean one less cocaine jefe [boss] out on the streets committing crimes.’

  Detective Inspector Lorenzo – a neat, tidy, stocky man in his early fifties with greying hair – has the air of being a bit set in his ways and no doubt coasting towards retirement when he reaches thirty hard years of being caught in the crossfire between cocaine gangsters.

  In his tiny office at the recently constructed Marbella Police Station, just off the old N340 coast road, Lorenzo – despite his apparent indifference – happily discussed Charlie Wilson’s cocaine-inspired killing.

  He just shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘We see this sort of killing here all the time and it is virtually impossible to find the guilty men.’

  ‘But,’ I asked, ‘d’you even ever have any suspects?’

  ‘In the case of Wilson I have some names but’ – he shrugged again – ‘in most of the other murders we never even get as far as suspects. You see, the families of the victims nearly always know who is behind these killings but they know that if they ever talk then they might be murdered as well.’

  Lorenzo said that ‘only luck’ ever resulted in any arrests connected to such gun-for-hire cocaine gangster killings. ‘Sometimes a shooter will get a dose of guilt and make a confession but sometimes we don’t even believe they’re telling the truth. I know of cocaine cartels who force people to confess to crimes they didn’t commit or face a gun to the head.’

  He continued: ‘It’s overwhelming for us. We have no chance to stop them because we don’t even know who they are most of the time.’ He paused. ‘There was a two-month period recently when I was called out to eight murders and I believe that seven of them were connected to the cocaine business. It is an epidemic. A lot of people here in Spain take coca and that provides the money that fuels these feuds and murders. Unless people stop taking it, things will get worse and worse.’

  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.

  CHAPTER 24

  THIN PHIL/GH, GIBRALTAR

  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.