Costa Del Crime

by Wensley Clarkson

  PART TWO

  COSTA DEL SEX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE GIGOLO

  Steady, ladies, Deano Saunders is available at reasonable rates

  THE GIGOLO

  Everyone stopped dead in their tracks as handsome 22-year-old Deano Saunders walked into a busy Marbella bar on the arm of a beautiful blonde older woman. Within seconds, a menacing character with a bulldog neck stepped forward and whispered something in the woman’s ear. Deano and his date left the premises immediately. ‘I heard later he had a gun and would have used it if we hadn’t left – the situation was that heavy,’ Deano later recalled. ‘He turned out to be her husband’s best mate.’

  But it’s all in a day’s work for Deano from Essex, who makes a fortune working as a professional gigolo on the Costa del Crime. Mind you, it’s hardly surprising that the well-spoken Psychology graduate has had some close shaves since he started being paid to sleep with women – virtually all British – in the sunshine of Southern Spain.

  Deano admits that the incident in the bar did scare him, although his client ‘was definitely hoping her hubby would come in. She wanted to make him jealous. I suppose I was lucky it was his best friend rather than the actual husband in that bar. Afterwards, I heard she was married to one of the most notorious drug barons on the entire Costa del Sol. I was lucky to get out of there alive! But at least she paid me £400 for just being on her arm.’

  That was just one of many dodgy encounters experienced by Deano. ‘Another time I was with a married English woman in her late thirties and her husband insisted on watching us have sex together. Then he suddenly gets up and disappears into another room. I carried on making love to his wife but started to get worried when the husband didn’t come back. The woman then kept looking at the door as if she was expecting someone to burst in, so I started to panic because I didn’t know what he was up to. Maybe he was going to come back out and attack us. In the end I called out to my bodyguard Chris who was outside, and he immediately started banging on the door. It was a heavy scene: I’d heard of guys who like to watch other men having sex with their wives before beating them to a pulp. I jumped up, grabbed my clothes and, still naked, rushed out of the apartment.’

  But there are some unexpected bonuses to the job. Recently, Deano was hired by a middle-of-the-road TV actress. ‘I would never reveal who she was,’ he explained, ‘but she’s on the telly all the time in a well-known soap. I couldn’t believe it when she turned up. She said she hadn’t had sex for months and wanted a really wild night out. First we went out for dinner – she paid, naturally – then it was back to her hotel for a night of passionate lovemaking. She ended up paying me €600 and said I was worth every penny!’

  Deano believes the demand for gigolos will increase ‘as women get more career minded. There’s always been prostitution for men because men always want sex, but now women are wanting their share as their lives become more busy. Also, women seem much lonelier, especially if their marriage isn’t going well. A lot of them just want the company, and the sex often takes second place to that.’

  Deano even concedes that he has come close to falling in love with a couple of his clients since he arrived on the Costa del Sol in 2002. ‘The thing is that these women are often extremely attractive, rich and very amusing company, so it’s hardly surprising that I’ve found many of them genuinely attractive.’

  He also reckons that being a gigolo has helped him become much more relaxed in the company of women. ‘I’m the furthest from what you would expect of a gigolo. I’m not pushy. I was never the type to chat up girls in clubs, but now I’ve got more confidence than I’ve ever had before. I actually believe in myself and my abilities to satisfy a woman.’

  Deano first got the idea to work as a gigolo when he was propositioned by an older woman in a bar in Marbella soon after arriving in Spain. ‘I was still with my girlfriend at the time – we were virtually engaged to be married – so I turned this woman down. But she slipped me her phone number, and when me and my girlfriend split up a few weeks later I called the woman up and agreed to sleep with her for money. It didn’t seem such a big deal.’

  Ninety per cent of his clients are English women, mainly rich divorcees all with one thing in common – a desire for the company of a younger man. And he insists that ‘The sex is never a problem for me because I’m a randy sort of guy and up for anything, within reason. But you definitely need a good sense of humour in this game. The most important thing is to supply the women with exactly what they want. I always go on a date with an open mind.’

  Deano says that the most popular request from his women clients is for oral sex. ‘It seems that not many husbands bother to do this for their wives, but I’m more than happy to oblige. Why should men expect it from their wives but not give it to them back?’ When Deano first started his job, he met another gigolo who gave him advice on certain aspects of his career. ‘He told me to make sure I kept a note of all the clients’ details in case there were any problems, and always to sort out the money before the sex. Now I always carry a pepper spray, but that’s more to protect me from the husbands than the women themselves!’

  The Costa del Crime has certainly provided Deano – as it has so many people featured in this book – with some quick-hit financial rewards. ‘One woman wanted me to take photos of her and me in bed together,’ Deano revealed, ‘because it really turned her and her boyfriend on. That particular woman initially paid me €50 for meeting her plus €100 for sex; then she paid another €400 for me to stay the night – six hours – with her in bed. I’ve now put my rates up to €250 an hour plus €600 for the night, and I’ve even got a website, www.essexboys.com. The most I’ve ever earned from one women was €4,000. She paid for all our entertainment and meals, plus she gave me €600 for clothes during our week together, and then there were the payments for the sex. It was outrageous – she didn’t even want to make love all that often. I suppose you could call her my sugar mummy. She was a very nice-looking English divorcee aged 39 with a silver Mercedes. I went to her villa to sleep with her. She used her husband’s credit card to pay for my clothes. She even wanted to know about me as a person. She was interested in what I did, my girlfriends. She’s now become one of my regulars and we keep in touch. I’ve even seen her out with her husband and friends, although I’m always careful to pretend I don’t know her.’

  Deano then revealed a hilarious gigolo scenario featuring another ‘professional’ friend of his. ‘This Spanish guy who works with us, Antonio, had taken Viagra for an afternoon job (a wife who just wanted an hour in a hotel before her husband came home from golf) and the job had gone as planned, but he just couldn’t get rid of his erection. He went straight home and played solitaire [masturbated], but this didn’t help either. He used his belt to strap himself to his waist and walked to the bar to have a few drinks, hoping the alcohol would wear off the effects of the Viagra. He joined some friends, who were with a couple of girls at the time, but as he sat down his hard-on escaped from under his belt and, as he was wearing no underwear, poked out of the open fly of his trousers. The girls only caught a glimpse, but the friends who were sitting either side of him didn’t know what to say! He sat there all night with his shirt pulled over himself, drinking twice as fast as everyone else in the hope that it would just go away.’

  Like so many sex workers on the Costa del Sol, Deano leads two very separate lives. ‘I sometimes bump into my own friends while I’m out working,’ he explained, ‘and when I tell them the woman I was with paid me for my company they think it’s really cool. No one seems shocked or disgusted by what I do.’

  Deano plans eventually to retire from being a gigolo and write a book about his experiences. ‘But I’ll probably write it as a novel so that I can change the names. Some of the heavy characters out here wouldn’t be too pleased if I exposed their real identities.’ He has already written up one typical encounter from his early days on the game. Here it is:

 
; ‘Hi, I’m Deano.’

  ‘Er, hello, I’m Marie. You’re a little younger than I had expected, not that it really matters.’

  ‘You said on the phone you just wanted sex, no talking, no going out, so…’

  ‘Yes, yes. That’s why it doesn’t matter. Well, OK. Money, I suppose we discuss that first?’

  ‘Yeah. You have the hotel room for the night, so to keep me here for that long is €400, but that’s everything included.’

  ‘I can’t stay all night – my husband will be back from England in the early hours. What about two hours?’

  ‘Well, that’s €300 with everything.’

  ‘OK. So, sorry to ask this, but how does it work? What I mean to say is, if I’m not satisfied, if I don’t enjoy it or I don’t come, do I get anything back?’

  I really questioned my skills at that point and realised that the possibility of that hadn’t even crossed my mind until that very moment. So without trying to sound arrogant I replied, ‘Well, it hasn’t happened yet so I don’t know. But we can talk about it afterwards if you still feel the need.’

  She raised her eyebrows and bit her lower lip while looking me up and down; the smile that followed the sex indicated I had laid her worries to rest. She gave me €400, and I stayed with her for another five hours.

  On balance, Deano says, sleeping with women for money certainly beats living back in Essex. ‘I’d probably have a nice safe nine-to-five job by now, but here there’s always an element of excitement. I’ll get back to normality eventually – but for the moment I couldn’t be happier.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  PATRICK THE PIMP

  Patrick on the streets – ‘bitches’ not pictured

  PATRICK THE PIMP

  Patrick, in his well-polished Gucci loafers and neatly cut Armani suit, looks every inch the successful businessman. When you first meet him, the 30-year-old will tell you that he works in real estate. But beneath that charming, gold-toothed smile lies a cunning mind always on the lookout for the ultimate opportunity. As we walk up the narrow streets of the old centre of Marbella, his dark-brown eyes scan the faces and shapely bodies of every female who walks by.

  ‘I can’t help myself. I love women.’

  If you think they sound like the words of a romantic man with a healthy interest in the opposite sex, you couldn’t be more wrong: the ‘real estate’ in which Patrick specialises consists of apartments on the outskirts of Marbella occupied by some of the city’s most beautiful prostitutes. Patrick is a pimp, and it’s a career of which he is surprisingly open and proud. ‘They’re my bitches, and they don’t do nothing without my permission,’ he says without a hint of embarrassment. ‘They all love me and will do anything I say. That’s the way it’s always been.’

  Patrick has no doubt he’s hit pay dirt by setting himself up as a pimp on the Costa del Sol. ‘The girls come here from all over the world because there are so many rich men – and women – who want easy sex. I got English girls, Caribbean, South American, German, you name it. If you want something a little different like a trannie, I can put you in touch with the right people.’

  All the more remarkable is that Patrick’s girls really do seem to adore him. No doubt it might have something to do with the fact that he controls every aspect of their lives – they virtually cannot breath without his permission. The relationship between pimp and hooker might seem a curious one to somebody on the outside, but one of Patrick’s girls explains it quite succinctly: ‘I’m his bitch. He tells me what to do and I do it. I love him.’

  But why? ‘I can’t help myself, I just do,’ says an English girl called Lois from Bristol. ‘I don’t even accept that there’s something unhealthy about my relationship with Patrick. All the men he introduces me to are just business, but when I sleep with Patrick it means something. I love him and would do anything for him.’

  Another of Patrick’s girls is 28-year-old Beatrice, a well-educated former teacher from Buenos Aires. ‘I met Patrick in a bar on the seafront at Marbella. He bought me a drink and started chatting to me. He told me later he knew I’d make a good bitch because I come from a society where prostitution is not so disapproved of. I loved the way Patrick spoke to me. He made it all sound so normal, so easy, so natural. I was short of money, I needed a place to live and I didn’t want to go back to Buenos Aires because there was nothing for me there,’ explains Beatrice.

  Just then Patrick interrupts with a sly smile. ‘Tell them how nice I am, baby. How I look after you.’

  A warm glow comes to Beatrice’s face. ‘It’s true. I am proud to be Patrick’s bitch. He gives me such a good life, why should I complain? I don’t have to stand on any street corners, he pays for me to have health checks, and he’s always in the apartment when men come by so I know I’m safe. What more could I ask?’

  Patrick squeezes Beatrice’s hand gently and they look into each other’s eyes like a pair of young lovers. It’s bizarre. Trying to get to the core of this extraordinary relationship, I ask him, ‘If you love Beatrice so much, why do you let her sleep with so many other men?’

  Patrick looks completely unfazed. ‘That’s just work, man. It don’t mean nothing. My bitches know that I’m always there for them.’ Looking straight into Beatrice’s huge, saucer-like brown eyes, Patrick adds, ‘Do I treat you bad, baby?’

  Beatrice runs her hand up Patrick’s leg and leans across to kiss him on the lips. Then she turns to me. ‘I told you, I love him.’

  How much drugs play a part in this relationship is anyone’s guess, but the traditional form of control between pimp and hooker often revolves around narcotics. Patrick’s extraordinary career began back in his birthplace, Holland, more than ten years earlier when he started running errands for a group of pimps in Amsterdam. ‘But that place was too crowded, man. Some of the girls told me they were heading for Spain so I moved down here.’

  Now Patrick’s empire includes more than a dozen prostitutes, each in their own apartment. He reckons on making anything from €2,500 to €5,000 a week from the girls. On the day we met he was fixing up for six of his ‘bitches’ to entertain a visiting Arab sheikh who was staying at Marbella’s most expensive hotel. ‘This guy comes in once a year and his manager always calls me up to provide six of my best girls. They stay the weekend and he pays out €3,000 for each girl. That’s good bread, man.’

  Patrick looks on with a cold expression on his smooth-skinned face as Beatrice explains that 70 per cent of her customers don’t even want to make love. ‘They’re into S&M, role-playing, latex, watching me having lesbian sex. It’s really not so bad when you don’t actually have to fuck the customers.’

  Patrick then reels off the going rates for different forms of sex, like a second-hand-car salesman boasting about the prices of a whole range of vehicles. ‘Oral, €200; lesbian, €500; whips, €700; full sex, €300…’ He interrupts himself. ‘That’s for an hour, of course.’

  But does Patrick have a normal, secret family life he’s hiding from his bitches? It’s not something he likes talking about it in front of one of his allegedly beloved girls. Later though, away from Beatrice, he confided, ‘Sure, I got a wife and kids back in Holland. I don’t see them so often these days, but I send them a lot of money.’

  Patrick claims he rarely has problems with the local police. ‘They know the score. Just as long as I keep the girls off the streets, they’re happy. Sex is a big part of the attraction to tourists and foreign residents here, so they’re not going to ban it, are they?’

  He also claims that some of his best customers are British criminals who own houses on the Costa del Sol. ‘I know some very heavy dudes who come down here with their families; sometimes they want a bit of fun so they call me up.’ One notorious UK drugs baron recently contacted Patrick to provide a couple to make love in front of him and his wife. It was the perfect excuse for the pimp to mix work and pleasure. ‘I don’t normally join in, but on this occasion I got it together with one of my bitches in front of
this dude while he and his wife watched. It was fun and he paid more than €2,000. Then he paid me another thousand to fuck his wife while he watched. It was cool. A good night’s work.’

  I swear I notice a slight look of jealousy on Beatrice’s face as she listens to his sexual exploits. Patrick turns to her. ‘It was only work, babe.’

  Patrick prides himself on being a survivor, and insists he has a long-term plan to ease himself out of the business when the time is right. ‘I like it down here, but I know it won’t last for ever. Other cats will come in and start taking my bitches from me. That’s the way it is.’ He believes that the apartments he has bought over the past few years and then ‘lent’ to his bitches will bring in a big profit when the time comes to sell them. ‘I’m going to go into the real-estate market full time eventually. What I’m doing now is a young man’s game. You got to know when it’s time to move on, man.’

  Patrick never actually uses the word ‘pimp’ during our conversations, but Beatrice inadvertently makes it crystal clear where the line is drawn. She asks Patrick, ‘Can I go out to do some shopping later?’

  Patrick takes a deep, slightly impatient breath. ‘Not today, bitch. I got some clients for you.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR