First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

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Copyright © 2014 Wensley Clarkson

The moral right of Wensley Clarkson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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TPB ISBN 978 1 84866 327 5

EBOOK ISBN 978 1 84866 328 2

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WENSLEY CLARKSON is one of Britain’s most knowledgeable writers when it comes to the criminal underworld. His books – published in more than thirty countries – have sold in excess of one and a half million copies. He has also written movie screenplays and made numerous TV documentaries in the UK, US and Spain.

www.wensleyclarkson.com

Two thousand escudos of silver

They will give for his head alone

Many would win the prize

But nobody can succeed

Only a comrade could.

— Old South American proverb

To Tommy, who spent a lifetime in ‘the business’

PROLOGUE

Cocaine: A colorless or white crystalline alkaloid, C_17H_21NO_4, extracted from coca leaves, sometimes used in medicine as a local anesthetic especially for the eyes, nose, or throat and widely used as an illicit drug for its euphoric and stimulating effects.

— Dictionary definition

MARBELLA, SPAIN, JUNE 2013

He pulled the matt black Glock automatic out of the glove compartment of the rental car, pointed it straight at my head and then a broad smile came over his horribly scarred face. ‘This is my favourite toy. With this baby, no one fucks with me. I am the king.’ Jimmy’s grin exposed two gold front teeth and his piercing blue eyes glistened in the Marbella sunshine. The most frightening thing about having a gun shoved in your face, even jokingly, is looking at the shooter’s finger stroking the trigger.

But I could hardly complain; Liverpool gangster Jimmy had taken time out to talk to me about the activities of his cocaine gang and the bloody clashes with his rivals on Spain’s notorious Costa del Crime. The British Boys had been given a right hammering by the Eastern Europeans in recent weeks.

As I have discovered on numerous occasions while travelling the world to research this book, coke gangs murder their rivals because it’s part of their business. A well-publicised killing sends out a message to rivals not to overstep the mark. In a sense, it’s highly effective PR. And right in the middle of all this murder and mayhem are deadly, cold-blooded villains like Jimmy.

Jimmy’s chilling attitude and the way he’s thrived in the all-year-round heat of southern Spain is indicative of the way cocaine gangsters have flourished over the past thirty-five years.

Despite the introduction of an extradition treaty with the UK more than twenty years ago, British criminals still make southern Spain their base because it is easier to operate with impunity here than anywhere else in Europe. It also happens to be the gateway from Africa and South America, sources for 90 per cent of all the most in-demand drugs that flood into Europe every day.

Jimmy operates on the twenty-five-mile strip of coastline between the seaside communities of Fuengirola and Marbella. Cocaine provides the majority of his income but then that’s hardly surprising since it is a multi-billion-dollar industry in Spain. However, these days there are vicious turf wars continually flaring up between coke criminals from the UK, South America, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. It all began back in the ‘Good Old Days’ of the 1970s and early 1980s when British villains fled to Spain to avoid extradition and discovered an underworld fuelled by the white powder.

Muscular and physically extremely fit, Jimmy has the name of his Scottish former girlfriend tattooed on his left arm. His dark mop of hair contrasts alarmingly with the heavy lines on his 49-year-old face. And despite waving that gun at me earlier, he seemed to have an easygoing manner. Jimmy was equally comfortable speaking English and Spanish, yet he also talked about murdering people as if it was as normal as eating scrambled eggs for breakfast. If he hadn’t become a criminal, he told me, he’d probably have been an accountant. His own brother was one. Another brother back in Toxteth was a hitman, who occasionally flew over to Spain to carry out jobs for Jimmy’s gang.

Jimmy lived in a penthouse apartment overlooking the picturesque, narrow cobbled streets of Marbella’s whitewashed old town. Even during Spain’s current property price meltdown, his flat had to be worth half a million pounds. Jimmy had at least one hundred grand’s worth of gold jewellery on his fingers, wrist and around his neck. He drove a succession of rented BMWs because, he explained, he liked to change cars every couple of weeks for ‘security reasons’. Jimmy claimed he’d been stabbed five times, which was why he often carried a gun. He had one six-inch scar running from just below his eye to his chin. It contorted whenever he tried to make a point while talking.

Jimmy had spent, he said, ten years of his life in prison and he insisted he’d rather commit suicide than ever go back to jail. He made a point of drawing the tip of his forefinger across his neck to emphasise his feelings. Then he lifted up his Ralph Lauren shirt to show me four scars across his stomach. One time, he explained to me in a very cool fashion, he lost four pints of blood and almost had his liver punctured. ‘They wanted me dead,’ he said. ‘Who?’ I asked calmly. ‘The fuckin’ Russians,’ he spat. ‘They’re evil. They never smile and everything is about business, business, business.’ Coming from a man so clearly dancing with the devil himself, it sounded a little hollow.

Jimmy remained totally focused throughout our meeting. As we walked along the promenade near his home, his eyes darted about examining every single face going past us. Even as he chatted to me, he seemed to be constantly on the lookout, just in case ‘anyone tries to have a pop at me’.

Back up at his penthouse a few minutes later, Jimmy’s new Romanian girlfriend Sasha turned up. She seemed flustered and worried about Jimmy and kept fussing around him. I could see he was getting irritable with her. Then suddenly he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her off to an adjoining room. Less than two minutes later, I heard her scream and then start sobbing. Jimmy reappeared rubbing his hands together almost gleefully. ‘That bitch was out all last night. If I find out who she is fuckin’ I’ll slit his throat.’ Moments later, he pulled out a clear plastic bag the size of a crisp packet filled with cocaine, which must have been worth £10,000 on the open market.

‘This stuff is the cause of everything, mate. Trouble is, I’m fuckin’ hooked on it,’ said Jimmy, as he roughly sprinkled out a fat, cigar-sized line of cocaine on the glass coffee table in front of him. Then he produced a pink see-through straw and noisily snorted the line up his nose in a split second.

‘Now,’ he said, sniffing noisily before taking a big intake of breath. ‘Where were we?’

It was time to go before Jimmy started getting the ‘paranoid wobblies’ that would inevitably be sparked by such a massive snort of cocaine.

Cocaine Confidential is littered with criminals like Jimmy, who’ve allowed the cocaine trade to rule their lives. As he said to me just before I left his penthouse: ‘Charlie has given me all this.’ Then he stopped for a moment to reflect. ‘Problem is, it’s also fuckin’ killin’ me and I don’t have a fuckin’ clue how to live without it.’

INTRODUCTION

Cocaine is renowned as the world’s most profitable recreational drug. Its power and influence has spread across the globe, providing an income for everyone from South American drug barons to lowly, cash-desperate ‘mules’ risking life and limb to smuggle it across borders. Cocaine underpins a vast criminal underworld with a dark and deadly side, fuelling a network of dealers, gangsters, drug barons, crooked cops and even terrorists using sex, intimidation, bribery and murder in their quest for huge profits.

So who are the shadowy people behind cocaine? The coca farmers, the jungle sweat-shop workers, the coke barons, the smugglers, the suppliers, and, ultimately, the dealers who provide the world’s hundreds of millions of users? Why do so many people of all kinds have a connection to this deadly narcotic?

The real story of cocaine is soaked in drama because in a relatively short time it has gone from being a miracle drug and promising commodity to an illicit substance at the centre of a massive, highly lucrative industry that helps keep a number of Third World countries financially afloat, despite being an outlawed narcotic. In fact cocaine is one of the few products grown, processed, exported and distributed entirely from the Third World. Its export value by itself is equivalent to at least half the world’s coffee trade. And that’s before it is broken down into ever smaller units for distribution: prices can eventually increase by over 300 per cent.

From the thousands of peasant families who grow coca leaves to the billionaire drug barons directing much of its production, processing and trafficking, the cocaine business wields enormous economic, social and political power in Latin America. Apart from the corrupting influence of such huge sums of ‘narco-dollars’ on police and judicial systems, Congressmen are elected with cocaine funds, banks are sustained or broken by coke trafficking gangs and exchange rates fluctuate in sympathy with the state of some countries’ trade in cocaine.

Cocaine is now snorted, smoked and injected by everyone from the infamous to the tragic: users claim it gives them confidence, alertness and business acumen. Others have labelled it a deadly drug that destroys people’s physical and mental health. The world’s law enforcers have struggled to cope with the tidal wave of cocaine flooding the globe over the past forty years. Unlike other class A narcotics, this notorious substance is used by the rich and powerful, as well as ordinary citizens. It occupies a unique place in the social strata of many societies, which makes it even harder to eradicate from our streets. As a result, the cocaine business continues to flourish.

* * *

In this book I will try and take you, the reader, on an authentic, nail-biting, roller-coaster ride through the full, face-on criminality of cocaine. All roads inevitably lead to this subculture; virtually every murder in the cocaine capitals around the globe has a link to the cartels who have made their fortunes out of the world’s most deadly narcotic.

In order to unravel Cocaine Confidential, I’ve had to delve deep into the underworld at considerable personal risk. Yet many of the cocaine-connected villains I’ve come across during the course of my enquiries are mildly amused by my book, despite it giving away many of the tricks of their trade. They enjoy the kick of their world being featured in a widely published book, even though only their closest criminal associates would recognise their contributions. Some gangsters who were less concerned about me hiding their identity believe their exposure in this book will bring them even more respect in the cocaine badlands.

Inevitably, I broke the writer’s golden rule of getting too close to some of my subjects on a number of occasions. I had a few threats from the relatives of one well-known coke baron when I was accused of pushing my luck in the name of research. It ended with a sinister phone call: ‘Stop stickin’ yer nose in our business.’ But that was it, thank God. As another, more friendly, villain later told me: ‘If they’d really been after you they would hardly have bothered to tell you first, would they?’

Not everyone I’ve written about in Cocaine Confidential is wholly bad. These characters can be funny, vulnerable and even kind, and I’ve tried to provide a full insight into these people’s lives rather than just the predictable hard-hearted stuff. Many are street-smart survivors doing what they know best. Others are victims of circumstance, desperately trying to keep their heads above water.

If you spend 300-plus nights a year ducking and diving around cocaine’s mean streets you inevitably see the world differently from people who have normal jobs and normal lives. You learn to survive by your instincts; you don’t trust many people; you don’t make light conversation because loose lips can sink ships; you spend each day thinking that your world may be shut down by a sneaky police informant, a jealous lover or an angry punter; you devise ways and means of keeping ahead of the game.

I am fascinated by how criminals often seem to thrive so blatantly right under the noses of the police. I’ve been inside foreign prisons where conditions are appalling compared even to the oldest British jails. I’ve spent countless hours with killers, drug barons, pimps, child prostitution dealers, counterfeiters, conmen and the classic old-time-bank-robbers-turned-coke-dealers. I’ve even found myself sharing a beer and a joke with people responsible for the deaths of many people. This book doesn’t set out to answer any questions. It simply lays out the facts and asks you, the reader, to take a journey inside this frightening world.

Naturally, many of the characters featured here would not have made it into this book if it had not been for my numerous contacts inside the underworld and, of course, most would rather you did not know their real identity. So to all the ‘faces’ I’ve encountered and the ordinary, law-abiding folk who’ve also helped me, I say, ‘Thank you.’ Without them, this book would not have been possible.

I’d also like to thank the good, law-abiding citizens of the countries I’ve highlighted here, who’ve endured many difficulties because of the power and influence of cocaine. Many of these nations are being torn apart by its pernincous presence.

Most of the dialogue used here was drawn from actual interviews, some from documentary sources, while a few descriptions were reconstituted from the memory of others. There are no hidden agendas in these stories and I make no apology for the explicit sexual action and strong language, either.

Ultimately, you are about to read a real-life story that twists and turns through the city streets, jungles, beaches and mountains of many of the world’s most pivotal cocaine countries. It’s been a fascinating journey, which I hope you’re going to enjoy and relish as much as I have.

Just don’t say you haven’t been warned!

Wensley Clarkson, 2014

COCAINE THROUGH THE AGES

While cocaine in its present form is a relatively recent innovation, the use of coca leaves – whether in rituals, to alleviate hunger, or to help cope with the challenges presented by living in the thin air of the Andes – has been an intrinsic part of indigenous South American culture for thousands of years. When chewed, coca, a natural anaesthetic, numbs the mouth and produces light-headedness. Brewed as a tea, the leaves make a milder stimulant than coffee. In recognition of its fiercely defended traditional functions, its cultivation remains licensed in many parts of the continent.

Unlike other New World products such as tobacco and potatoes that were enthusiastically adopted by Europeans, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Western medicine settled on a popular use for the plant. However, in 1859 a Milanese doctor fresh from a spell in Peru where he’d been intrigued by the native use of coca, began to experiment on himself and was subsequently inspired to write a paper in which he described the effects. He identified a potential medical use – to treat ‘a furred tongue in the morning, flatulence, and whitening of the teeth’ – and other suggestions as to how it might be employed soon followed.

Before long the American manufacturer Parke-Davis was selling cocaine in numerous incarnations, including cigarettes, powder, and even a cocaine mixture that could be injected directly into the user’s veins with a needle supplied with the drug. The drug was marketed as a product that would ‘supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent and render the sufferer insensitive to pain’. Its use grew exponentially – largely because it was increasingly viewed as a general stimulant rather than just as a medicinal good.

By the turn of the century, cocaine’s addictive qualities had helped it acquire a somewhat darker reputation. The subject of hysterical and lurid stories in the press, it was increasingly associated with prostitution and crime and became the repository for many of Middle America’s fears about its black population.

An increasingly hostile legal climate saw the banning of sales of the drug outright in many states as well as the implementation of various items of Federal legislation that culminated in the Harrison Act of 1914, which introduced significantly stricter legislative controls over the sale of the drug. These effectively made it illegal to use it for recreational purposes – and indeed outlawed many of its previous medical uses. It was later banned in the UK in 1920 amid reports of crazed soldiers in the First World War as well as a series of moral panics surrounding the death of dancers like Billie Carleton.

More than any other country, the US endeavoured to stamp out both the cultivation and abuse of the drug, but their efforts in the 1950s and 1960s saw little conspicuous reward; use of the narcotic continued to skyrocket, especially once the infamous cartels took control of the Colombian coke business and began to flood the market with unprecedented amounts of white powder. The excesses of the hedonistic seventies were typified by nightclubs such as the legendary New York club Studio 54, where customers snorted cocaine off table-tops in full view of other people. And recreational cocaine really took off in the UK in the early-to-mid-1980s. As a reporter on the London tabloids, I frequently visited nightclubs in pursuit of all sorts of stories, mainly about crime and celebrities. In those places, I found the drug’s use was rampant among the rich and famous. I remember watching men queuing up to snort a line in the lavatories of one well-known West End club. The attendant did nothing to prevent it and stood by in expectation of some big tips from the coke-sniffing clientele.

It was probably no coincidence that Ronald Reagan’s publicly lauded ‘war’ against Colombian cocaine was declared in the same decade. An eradication programme was launched in which billions of US taxpayers’ dollars were used to wipe out cocaine production by spraying chemicals on all Colombia’s coca fields and offering subsidies to farmers to grow other things. It was a lot easier said than done.

In fact, the US’s decision to target Colombia’s cocaine production created room for its neighbours step up their own coke production, which is why in 2012 Peru became the world’s number one producer of the drug. Cocaine had been closely linked to Peruvian history for almost as long as it has been in Colombia. In neighbouring Bolivia, production has also steadily risen since 1970. Bolivia has recently experienced a wave of coca nationalism, an explicit reaction against the repeated efforts of the US authorities to demonise the use, and combat the cultivation, of the leaf. Many Bolivians refuse to accept that cocaine is an illegal substance and they see its production as a vital part of the nation’s economy. Indeed it’s arguable that the financial survival of the eastern Andes as a whole remains dependent on the production of cocaine.

The US has sponsored efforts similar to those employed previously in Colombia to stamp out the cultivation of coca in the other South American countries. But their attempts to substitute other crops have met with equally limited success. Nothing else provides a comparable income.

The new market leader Peru exports about 60,000 tons of the drug a year, and Bolivia a further 50,000 tons. Brazil and Ecuador have also expanded their operations very rapidly in recent years and small plantations in other countries such as Panama, Venezuela and Argentina raise the total amount produced by South and Central Americans to at least 200,000 tons annually. It’s been calculated that the capacity for making illicit cocaine in the Andes is now 150 times the region’s peak capacity when the drug was a legal medical product at the start of the twentieth century.

Control of the trade itself still rests firmly in the hands of the Colombians. Their traffickers and coke barons finance much of the coca cultivation throughout the Amazon basin, and it is estimated that as much as 60 per cent of the continent’s cocaine output passes through the country’s borders to be refined. In recent years, the much-feared Colombian cocaine ‘cartels’ have substantially changed their operating methods, gradually dispersing into hundreds of streamlined entrepreneurial groups who are constantly on the lookout for new cocaine production ‘bases’. As one South American cocaine expert says, ‘Their power has been diluted but that has made them even more lethal in many ways because they are much more desperate for business.’

Right from the earliest days of the first big cocaine trafficking boom in the early 1970s, the Latin America countries that grew coca realised that the drug had the potential to provide the region with a lucrative homegrown product that could create a worldwide market. As a result, few foreigners were involved in the production of the drug and that has remained by and large the same to this day. It is without doubt these Andean historical roots that have also made the cocaine trade so difficult to infiltrate – and stamp out.

The coca plants themselves have always grown virtually everywhere in the moist tropical climate of the Andes in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Today, much of the upper Amazon is still dotted with plantations where steep terraces climb the mountainsides as high as 2,000 metres. Some stretch blatantly across the lowland plains, others are hidden in the forest. But the really good quality plants tend to come from areas not too high above sea level.

The leaves of the coca plant are processed in jungle laboratories using kerosene, methyl alcohol and sulphuric acid. The resulting powder is dried, cut into blocks and transferred to ports in Colombia and Venezuela, routinely these days, for shipment to the US, Europe and beyond.

The small growers at the start of the cocaine food chain – often indigenous people encouraged by shadowy South American criminals to expand their production in exchange for guns, machetes and clothing – rarely make much money. Pickers in the Amazon region might expect to receive £1 for a kilo of leaves.

A family unit processing the leaves is likely to make little more than £9 profit on each batch of 40 grams of cocaine paste, and assuming all goes well, can produce three batches a week.

Further up the scale are the carefully integrated operations in the eastern plains and jungles of Peru and Colombia, which can produce over 10 tons of cocaine a month. They can rely on a large labour force, a constant supply of chemicals, clandestine airstrips and enough weaponry to equip a small army.

Ever-higher mark-ups are introduced at every stage. A kilo of cocaine in Bogotá currently averages around $8,000 when sold in bulk. On delivery to the United States the price jumps to about $30,000 a kilo. In other countries it is higher. If the approximate value of South America’s cocaine export trade, before distribution, is $5 billion, the full commercial value (taking into account the fact that it will be ‘cut’ – i.e. its purity reduced by being mixed with extraneous substances – often by more than 50 per cent by the time it hits the streets) is over $25 billion.

These days, cocaine shipments from South America to the US (despite steadily declining cocaine usage statistics, the most powerful nation on earth remains the world’s leading consumer of the drug) are often transported through Mexico and Central America over land or by air via staging sites in northern Mexico. The cocaine is then broken down into smaller loads for smuggling in land vehicles across the US/Mexico border. Sixty-five per cent of cocaine enters the United States through Mexico, and the vast majority of the remainder enters via Florida.

The infamous Sinaloa and Zetas cartels, operating out of the north of Mexico, have something close to a stranglehold over the international cocaine trade as it passes through their territory. They exert ruthless control while at the same time outsourcing more routine tasks such as transportation, killings and vendettas to smaller local gangs, including the mafia-like families known as Maras. Their dominance, and the epic violence that has accompanied it, is believed to be another indirect result of America’s attacks on Colombian traffickers and their Caribbean air and sea routes. In other words, Mexico has been turned into the main hub for South American cocaine through no fault of its own.

Cocaine traffickers from Colombia and Mexico have now rebuilt and re-established an additional labyrinth of new smuggling routes throughout the Caribbean, the Bahamas island chain and South Florida. They often hire smugglers from Mexico or Central American countries to transport the drug. The traffickers use a variety of smuggling techniques to ensure cocaine gets to those lucrative US markets. These include airdrops in the Bahamas or off the coast of places like Puerto Rico, mid-ocean boat-to-boat transfers, and the commercial shipment of tons of cocaine through the port of Miami.

Bulk cargo ships are also often used to smuggle cocaine to staging sites in the western Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico area. These vessels are typically 150–250-foot coastal freighters, carrying an average cocaine load of approximately 2.5 tons. Commercial fishing vessels are also used for these smuggling operations. In other sea-lanes with a high volume of recreational traffic, smugglers use pleasure vessels, such as go-fast boats, identical to those used by the local population.

One recent development has been the use of sophisticated ‘narco-submarines’ to bring cocaine north from Colombia and Peru. Originally, such vessels were viewed as a quirky sideshow in the drug war. But now they’ve become faster, more seaworthy, and capable of carrying bigger loads of drugs than earlier models, according to narcotics enforcement officers in South and Central America.

Across the Atlantic, increasingly large shipments of cocaine continue to surge through Europe and the former Soviet Union as it emerges as the drug of choice for tens of millions.

Today cocaine not only generates luxurious houses, expensive cars and large property portfolios for criminals, it also fuels the construction industry, financial groups and other businesses that provide perfect cover for money laundering, which in turn encourages economic power to buy political influence and threaten democratic institutions.

But who are these shady underworld characters inhabiting the world of Cocaine Confidential?

Read on and you will find out …

PART ONE

FARMERS, PRODUCERS, WHOLESALERS – CENTRAL AMERICA

Cocaine’s traditional connections to South America have been well documented, but my research for this book has uncovered an area of Central America that has been secretly developed by Latin American gangsters who are plotting for it to eventually become a major producer of cocaine.

Central America is already the world’s latest cocaine transit hot-spot: up to 90 per cent of the South American coke bound for the US now passes through the region, predominantly the ‘northern triangle’ of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, before ending up in Mexico. These small, weak republics, many struggling with rocketing murder rates, endemic corruption and the baleful legacy of years of civil war, have been further destabilised as the powerful Mexican cartels have moved into vast amounts of territory over which their respective governments are too feeble and impoverished to exert any kind of meaningful control. In other words, they can’t even afford the police forces needed to catch the narcos. The consequences of this power vacuum are chilling. These countries of the northern triangle have suffered 33,000 homicides since 2010, the vast number of which have been perpetrated by the cocaine cartels and the maras – the vicious family groups who control so much of the movement of cocaine in the region.

But further south, in the Central American nation of Panama there is a quietly booming cocaine trade thriving thanks to huge shipments coming through the country en route for the US and Europe plus a discreetly nurtured cocaine ‘production line’, which has been allowed to expand without any apparent interference from authorities.

CHAPTER 1

STEVE

Panama City’s Casco Viejo – ‘Old Compound’ – embodies many of the contradictions that make visiting this settlement such a sensory overload. During the daytime the incredible noise made by the legions of construction vehicles that seem to swarm everywhere is an inescapable reminder of Panama’s burgeoning economy. After dark these shiny, destructive machines disappear. In their stead emerges a spectral city formed of shadows, crumbling colonial buildings, gaudy nightclubs and cobbled streets. It’s as if the Vienna of Orson Welles’ Third Man had been transported to the tropics.

And it’s here down a darkened alleyway in a damp-smelling dive bar called Corumba that I am talking to Steve Francis, a failed British rock guitarist turned cocaine baron, who a few hours earlier greeted me at the arrivals gate of Panama City’s chaotic Tocumen international airport after I touched down on a flight from New York.

‘Anything goes here,’ Steve warned me. ‘People will rip you off as soon as look at you. They like conning the gringos best of all. It’s a challenge. Just watch yer back.’

The 61-year-old Londoner has served time in prison in Spain for smuggling coke but he’s been in Panama for four years since authorities in Málaga, southern Spain, allowed him out of jail on bail on condition he left the country and never returned. With a price on his head after ripping off a couple of Russian coke barons on the Costa del Sol, Steve was happy to head west to seek out some old ‘friends’ in Panama.

Despite the worldwide recession, the Panamanian economy has expanded by nearly 50 per cent since 2005. The omnipresent canal itself – which dominates the western edge of Panama City – is undergoing a $5.25 billion expansion that is expected to double its capacity and generate even more economic growth. Wealthy tourists and investors are pouring in from both the US and South American states like Venezuela and Colombia, and are buying second homes and retirement properties all over Panama.

But behind this apparent boom, Panama continues to struggle with crime and poverty. ‘The slums in this city are worse than anything you will see anywhere else in Central and South America,’ explained Steve. ‘I had to pull out of a meeting only this morning because the area was swarming with cops after a shooting.’

In Panama City Steve introduced me to Ignacio, one-time-gang-member-turned-cocaine-fixer. Back in 2003, when he was seventeen and the head of a street gang, he prowled the west side of Casco Viejo. There were three other gangs back then. They mostly sold drugs, though robberies and murders were common too. One day Ignacio says he was selling one man some marijuana when he was shot four times with a pistol.

‘Now I just fix up shipments of coca,’ he said, showing me the scar of one bullet wound on his hand. ‘It’s a lot safer than selling on the streets, hombre.’

Steve, Ignacio and I talked further as we drank beer in a secluded corner of a dark bar. ‘Panama’s success is our success,’ said Ignacio. Steve agrees: ‘He’s right. This place is prime for cocaine shipments, production, you name it. Everyone thinks cocaine gangsters are part of Panama’s past. But they are all here.’

Taking another sip of his drink, Steve went on: ‘When I got out of prison in Spain, they gave me my passport and said I must leave the country or they would lock me up again. I came straight here because I’d already heard about the opportunities.’

Later, we supped a few cocktails at an exclusive rooftop bar, surrounded by chain-smoking members of the city’s fashionable elite. Ignacio explained more about his role as Panama City ‘cocaine fixer’. He said: ‘I line up the coca for people like my amigo here, Steve. A lot of guys come to me because they want to make some money turning the coke around quickly—’

Steve interrupted: ‘That’s what I like about Ignacio. We talk the same language. Always have done since the day we met, eh kiddo?’

Ignacio nodded and smiled. ‘Here in Panama City many people are struggling to find work, so it’s no big surprise that cocaine provides a lot of us with employment.’ Ignacio explained that ‘chunks’ of massive shipments of cocaine that come through Panama en route for the US and Europe and beyond are often used to ‘pay off’ police, customs and dock workers and that is where these ‘offcuts’ of cocaine come from.

Panama’s links to cocaine were first exposed to the world in the 1980s when the country’s then dictator General Manuel Noriega opened up his country to secret cocaine supply routes after accepting millions of dollars in bribes from Colombian coke barons, who needed a safe passage to the US for their product.

Ignacio explained: ‘Noriega showed his people that it was fine to make money out of coke. He sort of rubber stamped it as a drug of choice here and a way to make a living.’

Now back in a Panamanian jail where he’s expected to stay for the remainder of his life following a transfer back to his home country from France, General Noriega had been collaborating with America’s CIA for many years before his arrest. However, when his connections to the Colombian coke cartels were revealed, the US mounted their controversial invasion of Panama in December 1989. Noriega was eventually sentenced to thirty years in a Miami court before being extradited to Paris to face similar charges there. Then he was allowed back to Panama from France to serve out the remainder of his sentence.

A few years back, I met Noriega’s daughter Sandra – who was recently named as a diplomat with the Panamanian consulate in Miami — in Miami Beach through a Hollywood movie contact. She was working as a script consultant to film director Oliver Stone, who was planning a movie on her father at the time. Sandra insisted then that her father had done nothing wrong, despite the fact he’d just been jailed by US authorities on drug-running charges.

Meanwhile it’s claimed that Noriega has now been pushed into Panama’s past. ‘Noriega got greedy and he paid the price,’ said Ignacio.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Steve. ‘The future’s where it’s at. This is the place where the cocaine industry is going to boom. Just mark my words on this.’ Then he turned and pointed a finger at me. ‘I’m going to take you out into the campo [countryside] and show you something that’ll blow your mind, my old son.’

CHAPTER 2

THE CAMPO

While Colombia and Peru continue to produce the majority of the world’s cocaine – around 80 per cent of the whole planet’s supply – other smaller cocaine production lines are being set up all over South and Central America. In countries like Panama, ‘mom and pop’ coke shops, or ‘kitchens’, pepper the campo, churning out tons of the white stuff each year.

Down in the Amazonian basin around the border areas between Peru and Colombia, the cartels have developed a new strain of coca leaf that may well lead to cocaine production on a much larger scale right across South and Central America.

This new type of coca plant can be grown in dense, moist jungle areas rather than solely on the side of mountains like the original variety. In Panama, Steve tells me, the new strain of coca plant has led to the development of small cocaine production lines deep in the jungle. Unemployed locals are secretly growing it, picking the leaves and then selling them off to cocaine gangsters, who then finance the setting up of factories or labs near to where the coca leaves are grown.

I agreed to accompany Steve to the Panamanian campo to see one of these cocaine ‘factories’ for myself. We boarded a quick-hop two-prop plane at Panama City’s small Albrook municipal airport to begin the short journey to the sleepy resort of Bocas del Toro, which means, in English, ‘Mouth of the Bull’.

Initially, the noisy aircraft arced out over the Panama Canal and then the Pacific, before heading north-east over dense jungle. Before long I caught a glimpse of the sparkling green Caribbean Sea, followed by the archipelago’s nine islands, each a vivid patch of white sand and green forest, surrounded by a galaxy of tiny uninhabited islets. Bocas del Toro, a collection of brightly coloured buildings grouped round a busy harbour – some edging out to sea, perched precariously on stilts – hove into view before us.

As the plane swooped low over the jungle during our descent, Steve pointed out areas where he claimed there were the shallow graves of some of the victims of the coke trade, who pushed their luck and paid for it with their lives. Steve’s own life story reads like a potted history of the cocaine business over the last forty years, starting in London, then travelling to Spain followed by sojourns into the cocaine heartlands of South America, as well as numerous adventures in places as far afield as Africa and South East Asia.

The waves in Bocas del Toro – which lies close to Panama’s border with Costa Rica – draw an international surfing crowd, and the coral reefs seduce scuba divers, but many of the beaches remain deserted most of the year round, except for palm trees and lush mangroves. In other words, Bocas del Toro is a laid-back, fairly undeveloped Caribbean resort.

Steve and I stepped into the relentless Panamanian sunshine outside Bocas’ tiny shack of an airport a couple of minutes after the plane came to a halt. In a far corner of the airfield lay the charred fuselage of a plane that looked uncomfortably similar to the one I’d just arrived on from Panama City. It wasn’t a sight to engender confidence, and I was about to receive another shock.

Strolling down the short, muddy track to the main town, Steve revealed to me he’d hidden $100,000 worth of cocaine in his suitcase, which he was bringing back to Bocas ‘for a friend’. I was furious because he’d let me pay for his plane ticket as a ‘thank you’ for co-operating with me for this book. That made me legally responsible for his bag of cocaine. He laughed and said, ‘Chill out, my man. We got through without any hassle.’ Then he added, with a wink, ‘I made sure of that with a few bob to the right hombre.’

As we started walking up Bocas’ main street towards my hotel, the early golden sun rose over this quaint, low-key waterside community. The shiny tin rooftops glowed in the gentle morning light as the town struggled to awaken. Many people in these parts go to bed late and rise just before lunchtime.

Steve nodded at many of the locals as we continued wandering down Main Street. But I noticed that a lot of them squinted back closely at us, giving the impression Steve was perhaps not the most popular person in Bocas.

Within minutes of checking into my hotel and taking a quick, refreshing shower, I was back with Steve as he drove through the town and headed out into the jungle to the place where cocaine begins its tortuous journey into ostensibly law-abiding societies. Steve spoke perfect Spanish with a carefully cultivated Panamanian accent and used it to ensure we got through a police roadblock on the edge of Bocas with ease.

We eventually head off-road between a cluster of palm trees and down a muddy track leading deep into the jungle towards what Steve promises will be an illegal cocaine factory, where poorly paid country peasants begin the process of turning dried coca leaves into the most potent recreational drug known to mankind.

Coca plantations are a rarity in these parts. In fact, most hardened drug criminals reckoned – until recently – that coca simply couldn’t be grown anywhere in Central America. But, as Steve explains, ‘That’s utter bollocks. Sure, it’s a cottage industry up here compared with the South Americans, but that’s the way people like it in these parts. No one bothers these people, as long as they keep it small and discreet.’

Central America has long been a key link in the cocaine trafficking chain, with vast quantity of US-bound cocaine passing through the region. As Steve explains, ‘The locals watched all that coke travelling through their country and started wanting a piece of the action all for themselves. In any case, producing coke here makes it cheaper when it gets to the US and Europe because it doesn’t have to travel so far.’

It’s long been rumoured that FARC – the notorious Marxist guerrilla group from neighbouring Colombia – was financing the development of such plantations as a useful way to raise funds. But Steve dismisses that. ‘They wouldn’t dare. FARC has no influence round here. No, these plantations are private operations, which are kept strictly beneath the radar.’

However, despite Steve’s denials, it’s a matter of record that FARC’s self-styled 57th Front controls much of the border region between Colombia and Panama. This dense jungle region is known as the Darien Gap. The 57th Front has long been heavily involved in international cocaine trafficking and has close links with the Urabeños criminal group (which has also expanded its presence in Panama), runs cocaine to Mexican cartels and has been known to use Panama City to finalise vast cocaine deals.

Steve reckons all the rumours about FARC are ‘irritating to say the least’. He explains: ‘The last thing we need up here is counter-terrorism troops hacking their way through the jungle in pursuit of FARC. The great thing about this area is that it is virtually untouched. We want to keep it that way.’

Further south, in the remote jungle region of Chucurti, near the Caribbean coast and border between Panama and Colombia, other bigger plantations have been uncovered by law enforcement authorities in recent years. Steve reckons such raids were made with the tacit agreement of local coke barons, who’d decided to ‘give up’ a couple of plantations in the area on the basis that the authorities would then not bother looking further north for the bigger operations.

‘There’s a lot of give and take in this country,’ Steve says. ‘The army and police need to convince the Americans they’re taking the war against drugs seriously. It’s all good public relations and it ensures the coke factories round here are left in peace. Comprendo?’

Down in Churcuti, officials destroyed 4,495 coca plants in an area of approximately two hectares, in a highly publicised operation blazed across local TV news bulletins to show how hard the Panamanians are working in their fight against the evils of cocaine.

But here, according to Steve, in the dense, moist jungle a few miles inland from Bocas del Toro, is a coca-processing and cocaine-production laboratory, with the capacity to produce 30 kilograms of cocaine per month.

Steve says that a cartel of coke barons based in Panama City and the southern Caribbean port city of Colón finance much of the coca production in these parts. The expansive and inhospitable nature of the terrain makes it virtually impossible for Panamanian security forces to maintain any consistent presence. In other words, it’s a virtually lawless area.

‘Many of the cops have relatives who work in the coca business,’ says Steve. ‘They’ve seen how the coca plants have helped improved the lives of so many locals round these parts. The cops I meet in Bocas just shrug their shoulders and grin when you mention the coca fields out here in the jungle.’

He adds: ‘The irony of all this, is that if the Americans hadn’t been so good at forcing the Colombians to eradicate the coca fields then this new strain would never have been produced in the first place. Now it’s threatening to spread the production of cocaine across the world.’

Steve says he spends much of his time in Panama’s second city, Colón, where he admits having ‘two local partners’ in his current coke business. ‘They have to be locals obviously because nothing would get done without them and they know all the right palms to grease. It’s a tidy little business.’

Colón port area has long been rumoured to be a major hub for the narcotic as it travels up from South America towards the US. But Steve reckons Colón’s ‘role’ is the perfect camouflage for the home-grown cocaine industry, which is rife in nearby jungle areas.

Busts like the one in May 2013, when the Panamanian Coast Guard seized 2.5 tons of cocaine off the coast near Colón, all help take attention away from domestic cocaine production. That shipment of cocaine was impounded after coast guards intercepted a speedboat being driven by an armed Honduran man, who was immediately arrested. In the first six months of 2013, Panama’s security forces seized more than 8 tons of South American cocaine but as Steve explains, ‘That’s just a drop in the ocean compared to what gets through. But the authorities are only interested in these big transit shipments, which is perfect because it allows people like to me to continue their “business” unhindered.’

Steve and I started hiking along a vague jungle pathway and were soon enveloped in the thick forest. Our progress was regularly obstructed by fallen trees that loomed out of the ankle-deep water which covered the jungle floor and forced us into tricky and sometimes risky diversions around their vast and decaying bulk. Matters didn’t improve when the heavens opened and we were caught in torrential rain.

Eventually, after more than an hour, we came into a clearing where I recognised the unmistakable shape of coca leaves growing on small coca plants three to four foot high. There were masses of them. Steve explains how he paid a Colombian associate to smuggle some of the original seeds and plants up to him via the local port of Colón. ‘The cartels are trying to stop others from getting their hands on these new type of plants because they know that they will lose control of the market if grows [plantations] are set up beyond their reach.’

Steve recalls how one Colombian cartel sent three of its ‘representatives’ to Bocas del Toro to try and find out where local grows were located. ‘Someone in the town informed the Colombians and so they came here looking for the grows. We all knew these characters were in town and why. Then two local farmers lured them into the jungle promising to show them the grows and the Colombians were ambushed. Two of them were killed and one was allowed to go back to Colombia to give the cartel a message not to come back here ever again.

‘That was a year ago and the Colombians have so far kept away from here but I reckon they’re monitoring the situation and if they feel that production of cocaine here is getting too big, they’ll probably come back here and a war will break out. That’s why everyone growing coca round here likes to keep it small. The factories are never run for more than a few weeks then they are abandoned and set up elsewhere. That helps put the police off their scent but it also ensures the Colombians cannot be bothered to come up here, either.’

Steve’s deepest fear is that his territory will be invaded by the Colombian cartels, who in recent years have begun to disperse into smaller groups. ‘It’s better when the cartels stay big. Once they split off from each other there is a bigger chance they will come back here because these smaller groups want to take over the smaller grows and factories.’

But, as Steve explains, there is another motivation for the Colombians. ‘The eradication programme in their country is the most effective in South America. Now they’ve moved a lot of the production to Peru and they’re keen to develop new grows and factories elsewhere. That means the sort of set-ups we have here in Panama are ripe for them to take over.’

Only recently, says Steve, there was another ‘incident’ when six men in balaclavas and armed with Uzi machine guns turned up at a cocaine factory in the jungle not far from the very spot where we were now standing. ‘We don’t know who they were but they rounded up all the workers and then poured petrol over all of them and set them alight. Three of the workers died and all the locals suddenly stopped helping with the coca harvests and working in the cocaine factories overnight. They were terrified.’

Steve believes the men in the balaclavas were sent by coke traffickers from Panama City. ‘They wanted us to believe they were from Colombia but I heard later that they were off-duty cops hired by a gangster in Panama City, who’s planning to try and take over some of these grows in the near future. He’s just waiting for the right moment to swoop down here.’

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of all this, is how harmless the coca leaves actually look before they’re harvested. ‘That’s the beauty of it,’ says Steve, lovingly stroking a leaf on a coca plant. ‘This little green fella is helping make a lot of people rich and it’s even pulling the poor out of poverty.’

As I watch sackloads of coca leaves being deposited into a massive wooden makeshift bath deep in the Panamanian jungle, I noticed that some of the ‘workers’ include children no more than ten years old. ‘I told you it was a mom and pop industry,’ says Steve. ‘These kids are here helping their parents. They are in this together.’

Steve then introduces me to Hector and his wife Maria. ‘Hector here was penniless until he was persuaded to grow the coca,’ says Steve. Hector smiles as Steve continues: ‘D’you know, they couldn’t even afford to eat meat or fish more than once a week until the coca plants arrived here? Now their kids have proper clothes, they can afford to send them to a local school and even buy them books and other stuff for school.’

That, says Steve, is the dilemma when it comes to cocaine. ‘It might ruin people’s lives when they get hooked on it but people like Hector have had their lives transformed by coca. This is all about poverty, son,’ says Steve. ‘Once you eradicate that then coke and everything else will die but for the moment it’s a brilliant product that helps feed tens of millions of the poor and needy in this continent.’

As I watch Hector and his wife and kids happily emptying sack after sack of coca leaves into the makeshift bath in the cocaine factory, I realise that perhaps Steve has a point.

CHAPTER 3

MIGUEL

Next I am introduced to Miguel, who is running the cocaine laboratory in the jungle with his brother Gerardo on behalf of Steve. Miguel is wearing knee-high white Wellington boots and he steps into the giant bath filled with soggy coca leaves and begins stamping on them, squeezing the juices out as the leaves turn into a mushy mass.

Miguel has a team of coca pickers who deliver sackloads of leaves to him every day before he begins the process on behalf of his financial backer Steve, who expects – and no doubt demands – a fast turnaround of produce. Many like Steve are not afraid to use a gun to make their point of view absolutely clear.

The juice from the leaves is the key ingredient in cocaine. It contains the chemical that provides the high that makes the drug such an attractive, glamorous stimulant to so many people, from kids snorting lines in expensive clubs, right up to the rich and powerful men and women who like a hit before they make potentially earth-shatteringly crucial decisions. Yet it is here – in dirty, washed-out, mud-infested laboratories just like this – that the world’s most potent recreational narcotic begins its existence.

Steve is full of carefully thought-out predictions when it comes to cocaine. One day, he reckons, cocaine – along with all other recreational drugs – will be legal. ‘But neither of us will live to see that day, thank God,’ he says. ‘Then these sorts of labs will disappear and we’ll see slick, concrete buildings with proper production lines turning leaves into paste and then the finished product in a matter of hours. Trouble is, it won’t seem the same, will it? I like the fact this stuff comes from the jungle and that it gives the poor a chance to earn some real money for the first time in their lives.’

Steve suspects that Chinese chemists have supervised the construction of such factories, which now await the world’s decision to legalise cocaine. ‘They look on coke as a business just like I do,’ explained Steve. ‘Look, they’ve already started producing their own version of coke called Meow Meow. Trouble was, it wasn’t as good as coke. When that got outlawed as a legal high, do you think they closed their factories down? No way. They only pushed that stuff out there to test the market. Now they know they have to produce the real thing, cocaine, and that time will come very soon.’

Back in the rundown, tin-roofed laboratory near Bocas del Toro, Steve has carefully calculated his profits. With generous allowances made for the local consumption of coca leaves and losses during the conversion process, 250 hectares planted with coca would produce at least 2–3 tons of cocaine paste each year spread out over three harvests. ‘I haven’t got to that production rate yet but I aim to make it within the next couple of years, hopefully,’ added Steve.

Meanwhile, the Panamanian authorities, along with many others in South and Central America, continue to deny that there is any cocaine production on their territories. Steve explains: ‘It suits them all to deny it because the Americans would soon be swooping in here trying to destroy the harvests virtually overnight. Everyone knows that the Colombians squeezed billions out of the Americans in order to destroy their cocaine production, which in turn destroyed millions of people’s livelihoods. Everyone just wants to humour the Americans so they leave us all alone.’

* * *

Back in the steaming jungle heat, lab worker Miguel talks about his family and how he needs cocaine gangsters like Steve in order to make a living. He tells of his dream of one day leaving the Panamanian jungle and seeking an honest life in America. As Miguel continues his backbreaking work in the hot, airless shed, thunder and lightning strikes overhead and another tropical storm erupts. Soon the atmosphere is dominated by rain drops the size of golf balls rattling on the tin roof of the tiny shack.

A heap of fresh green leaves sits atop a canvas bag on the rickety table under the tarpaulin used to protect the operation from these same tropical rainstorms, which dominate most days at this time of year. The leaves are so fresh because the fields they were picked from are so close. Steve puts a razor-sharp machete in my hand and tells me to start chopping.

Over vigorous hacking, Steve further revealed farmer Miguel’s story. He’d learned his trade during eight years of service in a cocaine kitchen deep in the jungle in the borderlands further south between Panama and Colombia. One day Miguel happened to mention his skills to Steve when they met in a Bocas del Toro bar and eventually they set up what Steve describes as a ‘low-key’ cocaine conveyor belt together.

After the leaves were sufficiently minced, Steve translated as Miguel told me it was time to add the binding agent. Miguel pulled out a bag of cement, sprinkled it all over the chopped leaves, and began to knead the dough by hand. Coca leaves are bulky, which is why the first stage of processing usually occurs after the leaves are dried and takes place near the growing area.

Next came the pungent ammonia. Miguel shoved the bowl in my face and within seconds it felt like someone had poured a giant bottle of smelling salts into my brain. Miguel explained that recently there had been an attempt to do this whole process with water. But the organic cocaine market never took off because the leaves needed to soak in water for fifteen days, which was far too long. That’s why petrol was used, which cut down the waiting time substantially. With a flourish, Miguel dumped a whole bottle of super unleaded into the mix.

Then he poured in the hydrochloric acid and sodium bicarbonate. The acid, served as an extractor, turning the cocaine hydrochloride solid. The sodium bicarbonate increased the pH. After a short break, we peeled back the frilly pillowcase Miguel had used to cover the mixing bowl to find little white rocks magically formed in the pungent liquid.

Chemicals used in that final stage, usually ether and acetone, are expensive, scarce and, as a result of controls imposed during recent years, extremely difficult to obtain and transport without detection. But it is virtually impossible to restrict supplies of petrol, which are transported around areas like this to fuel outboard motors, generators and other equipment. In many areas where the cocaine trade has spilled over from Colombia, petrol sells at four times its official price.

‘It’s enough to put you off snorting a line, eh?’ says Steve. ‘This is back to basics, son. This is the reality of cocaine production. D’you know, I’ve dreamed of running my own coke factory since the first gram I sold back as a student in London in the early seventies. Yet here I am now and it’s all a bit of an anticlimax, if you know what I mean.’

Meanwhile Miguel plucked the cocaine out, rinsed it carefully and then dropped it into some foil before holding it next to a 60-watt bulb to ensure the final toxic juices evaporated. Then he calmly produced a lethal-looking army knife and started expertly smoothing and chopping the coke into its final, pearly white, 100 per cent pure state. The drug glows with an ethereal opalescence after being pressed into a rock-like form for travelling.

‘Go on. Have a bash at it,’ said Steve, almost proudly. I knew I had no choice when he handed me a crisp, brand new, rolled-up hundred-dollar bill. I leaned down and snorted.

Within moments, I was floating in a cocaine haze without a care in the world. It was easy to see how so many of the world’s citizens were now hooked on this narcotic. Unlike alcohol, it was possible to sound and act sober. My mind was suddenly filled with clarity and opinions which had remained dormant until this moment.

‘Makes you feel like a master of the fuckin’ universe, eh?’ said Steve.

I agreed and we began a long-winded and intense discussion about what happened to the coke once it left this rundown shack deep in the Panamanian jungle.

For seeing the primitive first stage of cocaine’s creation revealed little about the real underworld that delivers the drug to people across the globe.

The first significant stage in that process was to set up its transportation out of the rain forest and into mainstream society.

CHAPTER 4

DONNY

Colón, Panama’s second largest city, lies at the Caribbean end of the Panama Canal. Back in 1953, it was made into a free trade zone and is now one of the world’s biggest duty-free ports, which makes it the perfect transit point for much of the cocaine travelling up from South America.

In the centre of this bustling city port I meet cocaine handler Donny. He and his team are responsible for making sure the ‘product’ is sold on to the traffickers, who’ve bid the top price for the cocaine produced in that tin shack in the jungle, near Bocas del Toro.

Today, Donny’s ‘assignment’ is to ensure the mom and pop-produced coke is hidden in an oil tanker heading to Holland. ‘No one will ever find it,’ says Donny. ‘It will be like looking for an ant on a beach. Impossible.’ It’s at this point that cocaine starts to make really big money for those prepared to take the risk.

Donny reckons his ‘job’ is a lot safer than being the street dealer he once was. ‘Listen, man, I got stabbed, beaten up and even shot at when I worked the streets here in Colón. I hated every minute. I never knew what was going to happen to me. I went crazy inside my head. I started taking more and more coca just to try and kill the fear.’

Then he met Steve. ‘Steve had just arrived here from Spain and I sold him some big rocks, which he took back to Bocas to sell. I liked dealing with him because he was a professional, not the street vermin that I usually sold to. Anyway, Steve and I became friends. We talked a lot, especially when we were both snorting coca!

‘But seriously, he told me about his plans to produce his own cocaine and asked me if I would work as the handler for it. I jumped at the chance because it sounded a lot safer than dealing on the streets buying my coca from the loco Panamanian dudes, with death in their eyes.

‘Anyway, I had some relatives who worked at the port and I put the word around that they and their friends could make good money if they introduced me to some of the captains of the ships that come through here. Eventually, I got to know some of those captains and they agreed to let me stash the coke on their ships in exchange for a payment. We agreed that if the cops ever found the coke we would say they did not know about it.’

Donny says that in two years working as a handler in Colón there hasn’t been one bust by the police or customs involving any of the home-produced cocaine. ‘Sure, I have to pay the customs guys money not to look on certain ships. But so what? That’s part of the cost of dealing in coke. A shipment of coke the size of a small shopping bag is worth millions in Europe and the US. We make sure it is all wrapped tightly in plastic and smothered in hair conditioner to stop the dogs finding it.

‘Everyone here in Colón is poorly paid. Any chance to earn extra cash and they’re happy. The guys who hide the coca on the actual boats don’t care what it is. They just want to earn their money.’

But what about renegade cocaine barons trying to steal Donny and Steve’s produce? Donny says: ‘Maybe that would be a problem in Colombia or Mexico but here in Panama, so few people are aware that cocaine is actually produced here. As far as I know, we are the only ones here in Colón using the ships to transport new raw home-produced product.

‘Sure, there are shipments of coca that come through here from Colombia but that’s another side of the business, which I don’t wanna get involved in. Those Colombians are loco, man. They’re killers. It’s best not to go into business with them. Anyone who’s stupid enough to steal coca from the Colombians would pay for that with their life. Those guys are dangerous. You never cross them because they will kill you without hesitation.’

Donny rents a room in the centre of Colón to use as a ‘safe house’ for the cocaine when it arrives from Steve’s jungle coke factory. He explains: ‘You can’t just take the coca straight to a ship. You have to store it somewhere while you double-check all the arrangements. Then it is imperative you move it onto the ship very quickly just before departure, which is usually after the ship has cleared customs.

‘The other reason for dropping it on the ship at the last minute is that way you make sure that as few people as possible on the shore know what is going on. The captain and crew are no problem. It’s the guys working in the port, who could decide to inform the cops and then we’re in trouble.’

Donny makes it all sound like a highly sophisticated, carefully synchronised operation. ‘I pride myself on being a professional. Steve knows that and I am sure that’s why he pays me very well and I will always be loyal to him.’

But, I ask, what would happen if someone else came along and offered to double his money. ‘Hmmm. That is a difficult question to answer. Sure, I need to earn as much money as possible. I owe that to my family but …’ He hesitated. ‘I am not sure Steve would be very happy.’

Would he do something to stop you? I asked.

‘This is the underworld, my friend, and all the rules are different to the outside world. I guess Steve might decide to do something about me if I endangered his operation. That’s the way it goes. There was a guy doing what I do here a few years ago and he tried to push a rival out by informing on him to the police. This guy ended up shot in the head. You gotta be careful here, amigo.’

Donny believes that just as long as he stays working as a handler for Steve, he will enjoy a long and safe life. ‘It’s just Steve and me at this stage and that suits me fine. Steve is a gentleman who keeps to his word. He pays me well and I make sure that as few people as possible hear about our little business.’

Back at his home on the edge of Colón, Donny has a wife and two children. ‘They don’t know what I do. My wife thinks I work at the port, nothing more. That is important because I don’t want to put them in a position where they have to lie for me because that is unfair on them. I am the one doing this job and I take full and sole responsibility for what I do. End of story.’

PART TWO

SMUGGLERS/HANDLERS/DEALERS – CARIBBEAN/BRAZIL

The Caribbean has been turned back into one of the world’s major cocaine battlefields by the US-inspired crackdowns in Colombia and, more recently, Mexico, which have forced cocaine shipments to once again journey through the region. Coke traffic in the Caribbean is expected to increase further in the coming years, unless effective measures are implemented to curtail these latest smuggling operations.

Many describe the Caribbean as being ‘the vortex of the Americas’ because this region provides a bridge between North and South America. Its islands are easily accessible by sea and have excellent air links to the metropolitan cocaine markets such as New York, Miami, Toronto and London. In short the Caribbean is characterised as a ‘haven for smuggling’.

Besides Colombian and Mexican trafficking groups, other South American coke gangs from Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela have also once again started using Caribbean countries as transit points for their cocaine in recent years.

The majority of this cocaine flowing through the Caribbean arrives by sea via freighters, fishing vessels and yachts as well as other types of boats. In an attempt to avoid radar detection, cocaine smugglers also deploy go-fast or cigar boats. Made of lightweight fibreglass, they are extremely fast and highly manoeuvrable. Then there are the narco-subs, self-propelled semi-submarines capable of concealing 5 to 17 tons of illicit drugs. Although difficult to distinguish on the horizon, narco-subs are much more easily detectable by air patrol.

As a result, resilient traffickers have recently financed engineers to create the Narcotorpedo, a hollowed, submersible vessel resembling a torpedo towed by boat. If the mother vessel is ever successfully detected by coast guard officials, the Narcotorpedo is cut loose and – equipped with a floatable transmitter – is relatively easy to recover later.

The Caribbean nations of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana are among those now functioning as major crossroads for cocaine shipments headed to Europe and Africa. Island smugglers also capitalise on the inlets and rivers leading to the Atlantic between Venezuela and the north-west region of Guyana to transport cocaine. In the Eastern Caribbean, the smaller islands are being used as stepping-stones towards the bigger markets of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, both designated by the America’s Drug Enforcement Agency as ‘High Density Trafficking Areas’. Corruption at the highest levels, money laundering and related drug activities are playing a big role in helping get the shipments of cocaine through the ‘official channels’.

Cuba and the Bahamas have always been ideal drop-off points for cocaine. Over 4,000 keys spanning the 4,800 kilometres of Cuban coastline provide cover for speedboats, fishing vessels and light aircraft originating from Colombia, Venezuela and many Caribbean locations, often en route to southern Florida. Further north, local police rarely have sufficient manpower and resources to effectively patrol the vast spread of uninhabited islands and cays of the Bahamian archipelago, which are closer to the US mainland.

Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago have also over recent years emerged as major transit points for cocaine. The South American and Mexican cartels exploit the proximity of the islands to Venezuela in order to transport coke on to other Caribbean islands, where it is then moved to North America or across the Atlantic.

But there is a disturbing ‘spin-off’ caused by the cocaine gangs using the Caribbean as a drugs stop-off shop. Crime and gang violence have drastically increased in virtually every Caribbean country. The overall murder rate in the Caribbean stands at around 30 per 100,000 population, one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Some of the more heavily populated islands have transformed into narco war zones as local gangs expand their revenue-producing occupations to include kidnapping, human trafficking, firearms trafficking and organised crime.

Meanwhile, the South American cartels have employed dozens of carefully located ‘representatives’ discreetly working out of the smaller islands, where they oversee the exportation of the drug. These characters are so discreet that they melt into the background of local communities, thanks to carefully nurtured cover jobs.

However, I managed to track down one such character for a fascinating look inside this virtually unknown side of the cocaine trafficking business.

CHAPTER 5

JEZ

Jez, 58, is no stranger to the inside of a prison cell. He’s served time in the UK, US and Spain for coke smuggling but insists he has no other means of making money. These days he specialises in running the white stuff up from a small Caribbean island, either into Florida or across the Atlantic to southern Spain. He openly admits snorting coke every day of his life and outwardly promotes it in much the same way potheads sing the praises of cannabis.

‘This is my idea of paradise,’ he says. ‘Everything’s low key here. No one knows what I do for a living. They all think I’m running an upmarket bed and breakfast, which I am. But a B&B wouldn’t earn me the sort of money that coke does. In fact it helps me keep this business afloat.’

At home on this small Caribbean island, by his pool, Jez recalls the good old days, when he used to help smuggle massive quantities of coke from the Caribbean to Europe. ‘Those days are long gone ’cos the Yanks came down in full force on the Caribbean twenty years ago. The only reason I can run this outfit from here is because the Americans have now eased up on their monitoring operations because they believe the Caribbean has been closed off. They don’t seem to realise it’s in the middle of a comeback.’

Back in the mid-1990s, one of Jez’s’s regular ‘gigs’ was to organise a shipment over from Cali, Colombia, to Jamaica, where it would be hidden onboard a yacht and then sailed across the Atlantic and, eventually, all the way up the Thames to the middle of London.

‘Today, I’m just the linkman,’ he says. ‘The product comes in here usually on the same sort of yacht we used to cross the Atlantic all those years ago. But these days I simply organise the transfer of the coke to another boat or sometimes we use a quiet airstrip on the south of the island to fly the stuff up to Florida.’

Jez sometimes keeps an ounce of coke for himself as part of the deal and says, ‘That usually keeps me going for a bit.’ He admits he is hooked on the stuff. ‘I know, I know. It’s stupid to get high on your own supply but I’ve always been rather partial to a snort. I guess in some ways that’s what got me into this game in the first place.’

He continues: ‘I was working in a marketing company in London, going to work every day in a suit and tie but I was already hiding a coke habit. I hated the 9-to-5 life, so one day I got talking to my dealer and he put me in touch with an old-fashioned London villain, who started giving me some work as a dealer after I convinced him I had some great contacts. I had some rich mates and they were soon buying coke off me in big quantities.’

Jez soon got into the ‘transport game’ as he calls it and began making regular trips down to Spain to pick up shipments of cocaine. ‘I’d pick up the coke in a Ford Transit van and glide past customs at Dover without a care in the world. If anything, it was all too easy and I got too cocky then bang! I got nicked and ended up serving five years in prison.’

But inside prison in the UK, Jez soon made friends with a bunch of hardened south London villains, who asked him if he wanted to join their firm when he was released. ‘They had some very big ideas about cutting out the middle-man and going straight to the Colombians. God, how many times have I heard that one, eh? It’s a lot easier said than done.’

Jez agreed to base himself in southern Spain, from where he dealt directly with two of the Colombian cartels. ‘At first it was all very civilised,’ explained Jez. ‘Then a shipment of coke worth about £500,000 went missing. The Colombians went ballistic and blamed us and we pointed the finger at them. Trouble is, we both didn’t trust each other, so it was always going to end in tears.’

Within days of the feud flaring up, one of Jez’s team of Brits was shot dead in the street outside his house in south London. ‘The Colombians were then given the £500,000 to try and end the row,’ explains Jez.

‘A few weeks later we switched to another Colombian supplier for obvious reasons but when the old crew of Colombians found out we’d dumped them, they were so angry they got me nicked by the Spanish police after I’d picked up a load of Charlie from a yacht anchored in a small port on the Costa del Sol, near Gibraltar.’

Two years in Málaga’s notorious Alhaurín prison followed. And, as ever, this provided Jez with ‘a load more useful contacts’.

He remembers: ‘This time I got in with a bunch of Colombians who had a “vacancy” on this island and that’s how I ended up here.’

He continues: ‘It couldn’t be better here. I simply organise the transit of the shipments of coke and completely keep out of the day-to-day stuff. Sure, I’d be in big shit if one of my shipments went missing but I get paid a massive handling fee and the Colombians are, crossed fingers, extremely happy with me. They never show up here because their presence would be flagged up immediately, as it is a very small place.

‘I’ve managed to buy this house, start the B&B business and live comfortably without making anyone round here too suspicious. If I acted like the rich white man up on the hill, and blinged myself up and drove a flashy motor I’d soon be in trouble. Either the police would come knocking to demand a big bribe or one of the local lads would try and force me off the island, so they could take over my job.’

Twice a month, Jez charters a small yacht and takes it out into the Caribbean and picks up a shipment of cocaine, which he then brings ashore on the island. ‘It’s usually kept in a safe house for about a week. Then I charter the same yacht and sail back out into the Caribbean where the shipment is transferred to another vessel. The Colombians are happy because they feel this is a failsafe system as the most important thing when trafficking coke is to keep it on the move. By switching from one boat then back to the island before going out to another vessel it is creating a very difficult trail to follow.’

Jez has been living on the island for eight years now and he is convinced that his system is so airtight he could continue doing it ‘for many, many years to come’.

‘No one here knows what I do,’ he insists. ‘They all see me as some eccentric middle-aged English bloke with a small legitimate business and maybe a hand-out or two from my rich family back in the UK. I am incredibly careful not to talk to anyone about what I do. Even my current girlfriend – a local girl – has no idea what I am up to. I don’t even share the coke that I am given when each shipment passes through.

‘The key to survival in this game is obviously not to trust anyone else. If any of the locals knew what I was up to, they’d come up here when I am holding a shipment, slice my head off and steal the produce. D’you realise that just one shipment of coke is worth a lifetime of income to the people who live here? They could live like kings if they got hold of it. I know I have to watch my back.’

Behind Jez’s bravado are the eyes of a nervous man.

As he admits: ‘Living life in the fast lane with manic smugglers and trigger-happy Colombians is no laughing matter. I’m very lucky in a sense. There can’t be many people who do what I do and still keep their sanity, not to mention staying alive! Maybe one day a shipment will go missing and then the Colombians will come after me but I like to think I’ve served all the time I ever will serve and that this is the bit of luck I’ve been waiting all my life for.’

But ‘luck’ is something that few people who earn their living in the cocaine underworld can rely on. They prefer to keep their eyes peeled and not trust anyone. These men have become true legends in the cocaine business …

CHAPTER 6

CHRIS

Chris is one of those legends. He’s an American-born light aircraft pilot from Florida who has flown hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of coke from special pick-up points in the Caribbean to the US mainland, usually in nondescript twin-engined Cessna aircraft. Chris refers to the murders, the close shaves and the network of gangs behind the smuggling rings and how he’s survived them all with remarkable casualness. He claims he’s never had a snort of coke in his life and has no intention of ever doing so. Chris also says he once ‘helped’ America’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in exchange for immunity from prosecution but they then cut him loose because of the US’s obsession with prioritising terrorism.

Chris vividly describes the remote landing strips he’s used in the past and how even in ‘honest’ America, crooked policemen, politicians and farmers play a vital role in making sure cocaine gets onto the streets of every town and city.

‘My favourite time to fly is just before dawn, when I can speed down the runway without headlights and then simply disappear into the sky,’ says Chris. ‘That’s the bit I really like. Soaring high above the deserted islands of the Caribbean in a single-engine aircraft. Everything feels free and relaxed up there,’ he continues, pointing to the clear blue sky above us. ‘No one can get me. I am in charge of my own destiny. I like that time the best.’

Chris’s ‘job’ flying shipments for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels is a ‘top level’ post way above the usual coke-connected sidelines of dealing, packaging and trafficking in trucks. Often he’d deliver cocaine to a distributor in Central Florida and then head to a small Caribbean island airstrip with sports bags stuffed with millions of dollars, always keeping a couple of six-inch stacks of cash for himself. ‘I’d hand over the cash to whoever and then take off for home. That was always the nicest, most relaxing flight of all.’ Within hours, Chris was back at his home in Florida, stacking the twenties and fifties into the safe at the back of his garage.

But it’s not always plain sailing for Chris by any means. He explains: ‘The Mexican and Colombian distributors in Florida were constantly trying to cut costs by hiring immigrant truckers to haul the coke north. It used to really piss me off. I’d have flown in from somewhere and find myself handing tens of millions’ worth of coke over to some illiterate driver. I lived in constant fear that one of them would strike a deal with the Feds, who constantly monitored the freeways throughout Florida for traffickers.’

But Chris always takes special measures to try and avoid any problems. He’s become an expert at covering his tracks wherever possible. ‘I usually stay in a rundown motel at least twenty miles from the airstrip. I also avoid people, pay cash for everything. But if anybody asks, I usually say I’m delivering planes to rich folk.’

Ten years after President Reagan declared his ‘war on drugs’ in the mid-1980s, Chris got himself trained as a pilot after spotting a useful gap in the employment market. Initially, Chris went to a flying school in Central Florida for training in dealing with all the tricky weather conditions he knew he’d be facing. ‘I loved it the minute I got up there in skies. I just needed to find a lucrative way to make money from what I loved doing.’ He soon got to hear about the ‘cash business’, as he calls it.

‘At first I flew a bit of weed north from Florida to Connecticut. But it soon became clear that the big money only came with the white powder, so I switched allegiances. I knew full well that if I got arrested I’d get much longer jail time but, boy, the money was five times as much.’ Chris then took over some of the best coke routes from smoked-up Vietnam vets, who’d dominated the dope-on-planes business in the 1970s and 1980s.

During his ‘career’, Chris reckons he has piloted more than thirty different types of planes, and found himself in some pretty hairy situations. ‘Listen, over the years I been in this business, I’ve done some high-risk stuff like flying into northern Mexico, landing on ramshackle runways without any lights to guide me. Then there were flights through the Sierra Madre, where trigger-happy farmers galloped alongside my plane on horseback, shooting their pistols into the air. It sure is a wacky world out there.’

Chris denies being addicted to danger, but he definitely has a taste for the better things in life. ‘Look, I got a lifestyle to maintain here. That means taking a few risks. So what?’

Chris openly relishes the challenges of aerial smuggling and down the years has even devised ingenious ways to avoid detection: ‘Mostly it’s about flying as low as you dare to evade the radar, and then not worrying about where you put your wheels down. It’s all part of the job as far as I am concerned.’

Chris’s connections to the Mexican and Colombian cartels make him a highly trusted person within a very deadly environment. He says he’s seen one double-dealing villain shot dead in front of his very eyes after daring to steal a million dollars’ worth of coke from underneath the noses of the Colombians.

Chris flies anything up to 250 pounds of cocaine on most flights. He charges $400 per pound, which adds up to more than a $100,000 per trip, plus $5,000 expenses. Like all those involved in the cocaine game, Chris often worries that others will talk. But he admits it’s hard to resist the pull of yet another big payday. ‘I pride myself on my professionalism,’ says Chris. ‘This is my career and I don’t really want it all to end with me being put in prison.’

Chris is realistic enough to accept that for all the care he takes to avoid detection he’s been under close surveillance by the authorities and is fully aware that he’d be pressured to cooperate with the Feds if caught. ‘I know I’d have no choice but to refuse to disclose anything about the cartels because they would almost certainly retaliate against my family.’

Chris also realises that anything he’s told other traffickers is sure to be used against him by the Feds if they manage to ‘turn’ anyone in Chris’s ‘team’. He explains: ‘My biggest fear is that I’ll be sacrificed by an informant who knows only too well I won’t go after them in the same way that the cartels would.’

Chris was once arrested by the Feds, who wanted him to provide evidence against his cocaine bosses. ‘I strung them along for a while by feeding them with small bits of information which they thought was great but I knew would not help them prove anything against my people,’ he recalls. ‘Then they cut me loose without any explanation after the Twin Towers attack. It seemed they were told to drop all the less important drug investigations and prioritise terrorism. I understood why they did that but there was a period of time after that when I was very vulnerable. If any of my bosses had heard I’d even been talking to the Feds I would have been killed.’

Chris continues: ‘Luckily, it never slipped out and I just carried on flying as if nothing had happened but I still fear the day when someone hears that I was helping the Feds all those years ago.’

He knows only too well that if he was ever caught again, he’d also lose his house and his cash, as well as any aircraft registered in his name. ‘I’ll never make that mistake again. I’m gettin’ real close to the time when I can retire … I’ll miss the buzz but if I can get there without serving a prison sentence it will be the best result of all.’

But the Caribbean isn’t just a staging post in cocaine’s deadly journey around the globe. Its hot weather and golden beaches attract millions of tourists every year, and it’s perhaps not so surprising that cocaine dealers can make a huge annual ‘salary’ providing cocaine to some of the region’s rich, famous and wealthy visitors.

CHAPTER 7

TONY

Ex-public schoolboy Tony, originally from Hampshire, England, is proud of his job as a coke dealer on Barbados, even though he’d get at least ten years in prison if caught by the police. Tony’s lived in Barbados for more than twenty years. He says he prefers the island to his native England. He boasts how cocaine has provided him with a sizeable income since he arrived penniless in the Caribbean and spent the first three months sleeping on the floor of a friend’s apartment on the less fashionable east coast of the island.

‘I originally came here with aspirations to work in the hotel trade. Yawn yawn, eh?’ says Tony. ‘I soon realised there were more hotels than road signs here and decided I needed a more exciting career with better money. Cocaine dealing made perfect sense. There are a lot of rich and famous people here who need my services.

‘I first got into it when I did a temporary job as a hotel barman in a well-known upmarket resort. A few of my friends on the island did coke at the time and this rich customer asked me outright when I was serving at the bar if I could get him some. I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no but I got on the phone to my flatmate and he gave me a dealer’s number and within half an hour I’d made a tidy $100 profit out of the deal, which was more than I would have earned for two day’s work in that hotel.’

Tony goes on: ‘A few days later this same guy rang me again and said he wanted another eight ball [three and a third grams] that afternoon. I rang the same dealer and made another $100 and told my one and only customer that I was looking to expand my business and would appreciate any recommendations.

‘Well, I soon had a dozen of his friends on the phone to me putting in orders. I did a biggish deal with the dealer I knew but was very careful not to say I was dealing myself, as I knew that would piss him off.

‘What I really needed was to find a new supplier who would sell to me wholesale but I knew that the dealer I was using at that time was supplying top quality coke and that was why this guy and all his friends wanted my product.

‘I was lucky. I went back to the dealer and we agreed a bulk deal, which meant we both made a good mark-up. I knew I had to keep those early customers happy so they would spread the word.’

Tony’s next lucky break came when he got a call from the personal assistant of one of Hollywood’s most powerful movie executives, who happened to own a villa on the island. ‘This guy was A-List and his PA had heard about me from that first guy who originally bought off me in that hotel. His PA was completely paranoid about her boss being exposed, so I had to meet her in a local bar to pick up the cash for his order. Normally I don’t need cash in advance but she offered it so I agreed to a meeting to hand over the cash.

‘Well, I nearly fell off my chair when I looked inside a large envelope she passed me and realised it contained $20,000. This was serious stuff. So off I went, organised the coke and then met her back in the same bar and handed her back the same envelope with the coke inside it.’

Tony believes that part of his success in the early days was down to his posh English accent. ‘Back then people out here trusted an English voice more than they do today!’

Tony’s VIP movie mogul customer soon began ordering $20,000 worth of coke from him every time he was on the island. ‘I was expected to drop everything whenever I got a call from his PA but for that sort of money I was more than happy!’

Over the following ten years, Tony reckons he ended up delivering half of his cocaine to that same movie producer. ‘I travelled all over the world with coke for that man. He was insatiable. I have no idea to this day whether he did all the coke himself or whether he shared it out among his friends. But then I never actually met him!’

That particular ‘cash cow’ came to a sudden and dramatic end when Tony’s VIP customer died after a drug binge. ‘Wow. That was a pretty tricky time because he was found dead in his bathroom from a cocaine and alcohol overdose. In the end the cause of death was covered up for the sake of his family. I’ve been asked a couple of times if I felt guilty about what happened to him, but I don’t see it as my fault. He made a decision. He was rich enough to hire a doctor to get him off the booze and coke if he’d really wanted to.’

Unperturbed, Tony continued to build on his upmarket Barbados contacts and says that during the peak holiday season over Christmas time, he has 200 different customers each week. ‘I make an average $500 from each one of them so the money is incredible and the ironic thing is that quite a few of those customers know that I dealt all the coke to that guy who died but it doesn’t seem to bother them in the slightest.’

Tony claims that among his best customers at that time of year are many of the journalists who swamp the islands writing stories about all the celebrities who go on holiday there every winter. ‘It’s a bun fight but I get my business from both “ends”, so to speak; the journalists and the celebs. It couldn’t be better.’

Today, Tony still has numerous rich and sometimes high-profile clients and is sometimes flown across continents with special consignments of cocaine for his wealthier customers, whom he first made contact with on Barbados. ‘They’re all professional people, who need a discreet dealer who isn’t interested in who they are. I never ask awkward questions and I make a point of not trying to be their friends if I deal with them direct, but usually it’s through their assistants. It’s much better that way for me and them.’

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 self-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.

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.’

Today, Hans describes his ‘job’ as: ‘Probably the nearest you could get to a safe career in this industry. Really, it’s true. I run a tight ship in every sense of the word and those around me, including the Colombians, know that my word is my bond. They don’t hassle me because I deliver everything on time and nothing ever goes missing.’

Back in the small coastal village where Hans lives with his new wife and baby, neighbours know him as a ‘computer geek’ who sold his firm to one of the internet giants. ‘No one here has a clue what I am really involved in and I intend to keep it that way.’ He paused before continuing: ‘This area is ignored by tourists for ten months of the year because of the strong winds and storms that rage through here from the Atlantic. I like the sense of isolation I feel here. There simply aren’t enough people living here fulltime to bother taking an interest in you. It’s perfect.’

CHAPTER 11

COSTA DEL SOL

To many, the Costa del Sol means rolling fields of olive trees, converted fincas and luscious, golden sandy beaches. It’s supposed to be the ideal of what a sunshine holiday resort area should be: lively, bustling, filled with happy-go-lucky folk minding their own business, motivated by a love of the good life and everything that money can buy. But lurking in among the whitewashed haciendas and towering apartment blocks are many of the biggest names in the cocaine underworld. They’re often multimillionaires who describe themselves as ‘businessmen’ and ‘property developers’, although most only deal strictly in cash.

In the bright sunshine of today’s Costa del Sol it is sometimes difficult to appreciate that this entire area has been developed in less than half most people’s lifetimes. Sleepy coves with crystal clear water have been replaced by overcrowded beach bars featuring spivs, drug dealers and timeshare salesmen and the noise of people and cars seems to dominate the atmosphere at all times of the day and night. No wonder the pace of life here is frenetic and local people are suspicious and unfriendly until they know precisely what it is you want.

Cocaine is the Costa del Sol’s second biggest industry after tourism. It’s not an easy statistic to handle, is it? Cocaine gangsters and tourism represent the gold rush for this area. And when drug barons spend their millions they help keep legitimate businesses afloat, especially in the thriving coastal resorts.

Ever shrinking Spanish police recruitment in the region combined with officers’ assignments away from the usual criminal haunts have left the way clear for cocaine dealing, trafficking and consumption to thrive. Statistics from the Costa del Sol make worrying reading: of more than 600 criminal gangs examined, more than half dealt in cocaine, which means the big ‘firms’ are raking in millions of pounds every month.

* * *

‘Fat Stan’ heaved his 22-stone frame up into the driver’s seat of his son’s Range Rover with great difficulty. He was more used to motoring around in his own vintage Roller, once owned by sixties crooner Max Bygraves. Then, as he impatiently checked the time on his gold Rolex, a man holding a gun equipped with a silencer strolled alongside him in the car park of Málaga Costa Del Sol Airport.

Before ‘Fat Stan’ even had a chance to plead for his life, two shots rang out and his vast, blubbery body slumped against the dashboard. The shooter calmly walked to the nearest elevator and took it down to the arrivals car park without once looking back at the scene of carnage he’d just created.

‘Fat Stan’ – who’d once lived in a quiet village outside Dublin – was just one of numerous villains who have turned the Costa del Sol into the cocaine badlands of Europe. The police found his body slumped in the Range Rover only after complaints from air travellers about a swarm of flies inside the vehicle. Twenty-five miles west of the airport lies the community of Puerto Banus, probably the most outrageous example of how cocaine has torn a hole through the heart of Spain. Over the past twenty-five years it’s been home to more cocaine kingpins than anywhere else in the world.

With a population of 35,000 fulltime residents, Puerto Banus has a disproportionately large number of mock villas with long driveways, immaculate high brick walls, sophisticated closed circuit TV, electronically operated gates and a couple of guard dogs roaming the grounds. One well-known villain called his Rottweilers ‘Brinks’ and ‘Mat’ after his most infamous criminal enterprise – he even had centrally heated kennels specially built for them.

In the mid-1980s, multi-million-pound cocaine deals took over from security van robberies as the favoured source of income for many veteran UK gangsters who had sought refuge in Spain. As a result, dozens of money launderers and handlers of stolen property turned the Spanish coastline into their number one earner. Even when the UK government finally established a proper extradition treaty between the two countries in 1987, British villains – many who knew nothing could be proved against them in a court of law – stayed on.

When I recently tried to talk to one cocaine baron and his wife through the electronically operated gates of their Puerto Banus villa, I was greeted by two Dobermanns (I didn’t catch their names) and a few terse words spoken through the crackling intercom as this man’s wife examined my face on the CCTV screen and then charmingly told me to ‘fuck off’.

Only a few weeks earlier, so I was told, this same criminal had been down at one of his favourite pubs in Estepona port when a rival villain popped in for a pint. He was so infuriated to see the other man that he walked out to his Bentley, pulled a shotgun out of the boot and stomped back into the tavern where he proceeded to pepper the ceiling with pellets.

Residents on this same criminal street still talk about the day one of his Dobermanns strayed into a neighbour’s garden and a string of angry complaints ensued. He also accosted one Spanish neighbour and accused him of being a ‘nark’ and threatened to ‘bury’ him. He never received any more complaints about the dogs.

Living in the glorious Spanish sunshine certainly doesn’t guarantee a long and happy life if your business is cocaine, though. Only recently one wealthy car dealer who specialised in selling cars with hard-to-trace Belgian number plates to cocaine gangsters was found shot dead in his black BMW right slap bang in the middle of one of Marbella’s most desirable residential areas. It was rumoured that he’d double-crossed a Colombian after trying to muscle into the cocaine trafficking game.

* * *

I first uncovered the shady world of cocaine smuggling some years ago when I was in southern Spain researching a book about British road rage killer and underworld kingpin Kenneth Noye. At the time, I knew little about the so-called Costa del Crime, which runs from Málaga west along the coast past Fuengirola and Marbella to Estepona and beyond. When I tracked down some real-life villains for my book on Noye they painted an extraordinary picture of a society within a society where cocaine criminals and tame police existed together in their own twisted netherworld, operating according to their own rules. Flying into Málaga airport and then turning right at the motorway exit was the equivalent of driving into a vast, sun-soaked cocaine resort.

Many of the ‘old-school’ British criminals I interviewed for this book switched from robbery to cocaine after hearing about the massive profits from other prisoners as they served out their sentences in the 1970s. They learned how the combined costs of the coca leaves, the chemicals and the cheap labour back in South America added up to less than £1,000 to produce a kilo of 100 per cent pure cocaine, which would be sold out of Colombia for £6,000. Once transported to northern Spain, it would then go on the wholesale market for as much as £60,000 a kilo.

Moving from wholesaling to retailing guaranteed those astounding profits went even higher. After being cut a number of times by interim dealers to boost the weight and maintain the profit margin, the end product often contained no more than 15–20 per cent actual cocaine. ‘That was the sweetest aspect of all,’ one old-time robber explained to me many years later. ‘You could bash on it and turn a gram into four grams. What a business!’ So when those Brit villains did their sums they realised that by selling the coke for £60 a gram, with 1,000 grams to the kilo, all the deals running smoothly, the kilo purchased for £6,000 in Colombia could generate street sales in Europe of at least ten times that amount.

‘Finding the right supplier was the key,’ one gangster told me. ‘Without that source, none of it meant anything.’

Back in the 1980s, the Medellín and Cali cartel men on the Costa del Crime were telling the British villains: ‘Don’t worry, my friend. We can get you all the cocaine you want, if you have the money.’

The cartel was formed in early 1982 after the Colombian guerrilla movement M-19 (Movimiento 19 de Abril) kidnapped a cocaine tycoon’s sister. In response another group called MAS (Muerte a Secuestradores, Death to Kidnappers) was quickly set up by three rival cocaine barons called Jose Ochoa, Carlos Lehder and Pablo Escobar. Their alliance soon became known as the Medellín cartel. A cartel is a group of people who agree on things like commodity prices. ‘It’s a bit like General Motors, everything’s connected,’ explained one old hand from South America.

When Colombian President Betancur tried to rid his country of cocaine exporters in 1985 after immense pressure from the Americans, the Medellín cartel simply switched its attention to Europe, which meant focusing on Spain and turning it into their cocaine gateway. Europe would provide a ripe, young market of wealthy upwardly mobile yuppies. Eurotrash and cocaine was as natural a combination as strawberries and cream.

That’s when some of the ageing British gangsters already in southern Spain approached the cartels offering more security than the predominantly Spanish drug lords who were acting as middlemen for the South Americans at the time. They also offered the Colombians an entrée into the previously untapped UK market, which at that time was supplied with a relatively small amount of cocaine by a number of different gangs.

Before this, the Colombians had preferred not to supply the British market directly from Spain because they knew that, as foreigners, they would stand out and be asking for trouble if they tried to open shop in the UK. Now they needed British ‘partners’ they could trust, facilitators who knew how to get the stuff into the UK safely and in much larger amounts than had been done in the past.

For their part, the British villains in southern Spain back in the 1980s knew that once they had the UK end of the cocaine operation properly tied up, money would start pouring in.

So, at an age when most men were contemplating a life of uninterrupted retirement, a small posse of greying British villains in Spain were chasing a piece of the Europe-wide multi-million-pound cocaine industry based in their backyard. The profits were potentially phenomenal. An investment of £20,000 in a shipment of cocaine would bring a return of £160,000. Usually, four investors worked together to buy 100 kilos at a time.

At first, some of these Brit gangsters were happy to ‘buy into loads’. That meant making their living from partly financing other people’s deals and having virtually no direct contact with the actual drugs. In order to get the really big money, however, they knew they’d have to get their fingers dirty. They all knew cocaine was easier to transport than any other drug as well as kicking back much bigger profits in the long run.

The Brits let it be known on the Costa del Sol that they were willing to pay cash upfront. Not long after this, one British vet got a call about a ton of cocaine hidden in a cave on the Costa Brava by a bunch of young wannabe gangsters. This bullish character organised a search party to drive up the coast and locate the drugs, steal them and then sell them through to the UK. The British gangsters also contacted associates back in the UK, whose teams of smugglers were renowned for transporting virtually anything across continents without problems. It was a good system, and for a couple of decades, it worked.

‘For more than twenty years it was a civilised industry,’ explained one old UK criminal based in Estepona, near Marbella. ‘Then things started to change and that’s when most of us realised it was time to pull back and head up into the hills for a safe and happy retirement.’

These days, Spanish authorities are either powerless to prosecute or, in some cases, simply turn a blind eye to the often murderous behaviour of the cocaine gangsters on the Costa del Crime. Local police often take the attitude that, because the majority of cocaine shipments never stay in Spain for long, most of the violence between criminals is not worth their while investigating. Even when cocaine gangsters do get arrested, they know there are many ways to avoid jail. As one old timer says: ‘The trick is to get bail. About £10,000 normally does it. And once you’re out, you’re out for ever. New name, new apartment – and the world is your oyster once more.’

But ironically it’s precisely this lawlessness that is troubling many of these older villains. Tucked away behind all the popular Costa del Crime resorts are many of the detached homes of the really big players, who enjoy a view of the Med, a decent pension and having a moan about the young hoods giving the coast a bad reputation. But they have a point; because every now and again there are chilling reminders of just how dangerous southern Spain can be if you upset the wrong people.

In Marbella, in September 2007, gunmen lay in wait as their target parked his Mercedes, before riddling the vehicle with bullets. Two of the passengers were killed immediately; the third died later in hospital. The dead, all Colombians, were just another statistic among the gangland hits that plague the Costa del Sol. It later emerged that these Colombians were gunned down after swearing revenge on a rival gang and were about to spill blood in their ruthless pursuit of profits for their multi-million-pound cocaine business.

As one old-time villain from London explained to me: ‘Everyone round here knows the Colombians are highly professional and completely ruthless. The only way to stop them is to kill them and that’s what happened when those three died. The trouble is it will never scare the Colombians away from Spain because they’ve got plenty more soldiers where that lot came from.’

So, these days the Costa del Sol is dominated by a new breed of evil, cold-blooded cocaine gangsters, who take no prisoners. They shoot to kill in a way that has even terrified many of the most notorious old-time British hoods. Women, children and so-called ‘civilians’ are no longer off limits when it comes to revenge attacks.

‘We’re talkin’ about everyone from Russians to Swedes. They all want a piece of the cocaine action down here and there are no rules any more. It’s a deadly trade now and expect the amount of coke killings to go up and up,’ said the same retired British gangster.

Today, there’s only a handful of those veteran villains brave enough to still retain a toehold in the Costa del Sol’s lethal cocaine business.

CHAPTER 12

RONNIE

Driving along in his high-powered sports car just outside Puerto Banus, near Marbella, Ronnie – a veteran trafficker from south London – explains how it’s the smugglers who make the most money out of cocaine because its journey from South America is more closely monitored by authorities than ever before. Ronnie reckons he takes the biggest risks, especially when shifting large quantities of cocaine. These days, increasing amounts of it come up from West Africa through the ‘hashlands’ of Morocco, where Colombian coke barons often store their product without any apparent interference from Moroccan authorities.

Back in the late 1970s, Ronnie served a lengthy term in prison for his role in one of Britain’s biggest ever armed robberies. After doing his time he was given a one-way plane ticket to Spain by a friend and switched careers from armed robbery to cocaine trafficking. Since then, Ronnie has lost three of his best friends to hitmen, after they fell out with the Colombians and Mexicans who control the flow of cocaine circulating the world looking for wealthy buyers. Ronnie considers himself a lucky man to still be alive.

‘I’ve seen some right monsters come and go in this game. It’s vicious out there. The trouble is there ain’t no respect no more. The money is huge but so are the risks. In some ways I wish coke didn’t exist and I was still sticking up banks in south London. It was a lot easier back then. You split the money up with yer team and you either stayed on yer toes or you got nicked and served a bit of bird. Either way you was a lot safer than you are today.’

Ronnie admits that handling cocaine was the only decent ‘job’ he could get when he arrived on the Costa del Sol. ‘Sure, I started with a bit of puff but that’s even more aggro ’cos it takes up so much fuckin’ room compared to the white stuff.’

But Ronnie wasn’t the only villain in southern Spain with plans to make millions from the coke trade. ‘That’s the problem. Everybody wants a pools win out of it. A lot of the young hoods coming in these days are trigger happy, coked-up kids with no consideration for others or their reputations.’

Ronnie reckons he was lucky to get into the ‘coke game’ in the late 1980s. ‘Back then it was a much smaller, more tightly knit business. You dealt with one Spanish handler. You never saw the fuckin’ South Americans and your £50,000 investment was turned into £200,000 in a matter of days. It was as sweet as a nut and no one got too greedy, if you know what I mean.’

Back in those days, lorries, vans and even cars were used by smugglers to transport cocaine up through Spain into France and then across the Channel. ‘We hardly ever got stopped. For about six or seven years it was like printing money. It was that easy,’ says Ronnie.

But then, says Ronnie, a lot of ‘scuzzy villains’ started trying to get in on the cocaine trade in southern Spain. ‘That’s when the aggro really started,’ he recalled. ‘We had certain rules back then but they got thrown out the window. Soon the type of shooter you was carrying was more important than the quality of your product. Not good.’

At one stage in the mid-1990s, Ronnie claims he had to ‘do’ a couple of smalltime dealers on his manor near Puerto Banus, who were trying to muscle in on his coke trafficking business. ‘Stupid bastards tried to undercut my trafficking fees. I warned them to go away but they underestimated the strength in depth of my team.’

Ronnie declined to say if those smalltime smugglers were still alive today.

‘Let’s just say I never saw ’em again.’

Ronnie then deftly changes the subject by explaining to me how the coke travels from South America through the European hub of Rotterdam in Holland or via West Africa, where Colombians have started turning some poverty-stricken nations into their personal cocaine fiefdoms.

‘Back in the old days I got on fine with the Colombians and Mexicans but these days they tend to stay in the shadows. Mind you, we’re all a bit paranoid about police listening devices and stuff like that. It’s a Big Brother society we live in today, which means it’s quite tricky to make phone calls or write emails without someone, somewhere monitoring what you’re up to.’

Ronnie has nothing but praise for the Colombians, though. ‘They are polite, superbly well organised and extremely tough but they are decent, if you don’t upset ’em. In the old days you knew they wouldn’t rip you off as long as you didn’t rip them off, which is fair enough.

‘I’m not surprised they’ve started to use West Africa as a shipment point now, though. It’s been on the cards for years. Those countries need money from anyone and the Colombians know how to spread it all around and get full loyalty from the locals. They are past masters at it.’

But Ronnie’s main priority is the ‘coke business’ he runs from southern Spain. ‘Thank gawd the white stuff is still in demand. That’s part of the reason why this part of Spain remains an important stopping-off point for shipments of coke whatever route it takes to get into Europe.’

Ronnie reckons it’s unlikely he will retire ‘until the day I die’.

‘I like what I do and I consider myself to be the top professional. I’m a bit of workaholic I suppose. A lot of my mates from back in south London are the same. We like to earn money, not just to spend it but to feel we’re providing for our families. I guess that attitude was ingrained into us by our fathers.

‘I know I’m pushing my luck by staying here so long in this game but I can’t let go of the buzz, the excitement, that feeling you get when you pull off a half-decent deal. It’s indescribable. It’s like you’re on top of the world and you’re lookin’ down at all those ordinary folk who earn in ten years what you just made in one cocaine deal.

‘It’s a fuck sight better than takin’ drugs, me old son!’

CHAPTER 13

STAN

After word got out that I was working on a book that delved into the cocaine underworld of southern Spain, I was granted an audience with one of the most feared British gangsters of all time, who’s resided on the Costa del Sol for nearly thirty years.

We’ll call him Stan and I’ve had to change a few of the details about his back story to prevent many criminals involved in this area’s vicious cocaine wars from knowing precisely who I am talking about. Stan is a member of one of the UK’s most famous criminal families and he said he wanted to ‘get a few things straight’ for my book.

Stan might have been in his mid-sixties but he stood ramrod straight and spoke with a soft voice that seemed to underline his hardness in a twisted, chilling fashion. He wasn’t big by any means but he had the darkest eyes I have ever seen. They were matt black, with not a sparkle of emotion in them.

Stan said he’d ‘done business’ with all the main cocaine players on the Costa del Crime and I suspected he continued to operate with impunity along the entire coastline. Yet he seemed charming and relaxed as we spoke in a Spanish restaurant situated far away from the usual criminal haunts. Earlier he’d rolled into the car park driving a brand new Spanish registered Range Rover.

‘I don’t like those hooker joints full of coked-up villains,’ Stan told me. ‘I appreciate Spain for what it really is: a wonderful, diverse place full of easy-going pleasant people who enjoy a rich, good lifestyle compared to all the miserable sods back in Blighty.’

Stan’s low-key tone enables him to make even the most criminal of enterprises sound so normal. ‘Look, I ain’t no angel but I’ve run a very successful group of businesses down the years and a lot of people have got very rich off the back of me.’

Leaning forward, Stan looked at me long and hard for a few moments and then – just like the cocaine CEO that I knew he was – he tried to put me back at my ease. ‘Listen, I know where I come from. I know that certain things have had to be done to ensure my businesses continue but we live in troubled times now and we all need to be more sensible. There’s too much death and violence in the air in these parts. It’s got to stop.’

Only then did it dawn on me that Stan was hoping to use me to send out a message to his criminal rivals to stay calm and avoid the deadly cocaine wars this book was highlighting. I couldn’t help feeling it was all a bit too little too late for that. Stan must have read my mind because he went on: ‘I know you’re going to write about all the killings and the mischief and how it’s all down to coke. There’s no denying this place is a cesspit in that respect but we have to change the way we operate or else there won’t be any of us left.’

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that one. After all, what right did a multimillionaire hood whose fortune was based on massive shipments of cocaine have to complain about a state of affairs that he’d done so much to bring about himself? But I didn’t pick Stan up on that point. Instead I asked him about the current situation and who was suffering the most from the cocaine wars in southern Spain.

‘It’s the Brits who are taking the most knocks. No doubt about it. A lot of these characters are getting on in age now and most of us come from a time when business was business but you never overlapped into people’s normal lives. We considered ourselves soldiers.

‘If one of us got killed because of a deal that went pear-shaped, then that was the way it was. It’s a risk we’ve all taken down the years. Sure it’s sad when anyone dies but if you’re a soldier then you have to deal with that sort of stuff. But today it’s different – the up-and-coming youngsters are causing chaos and we’re all suffering as a result.’

Stan cited a classic example a couple of years ago when an Irish criminal and his family were targeted by a hit squad after a drugs deal went wrong. ‘That was fuckin’ outrageous,’ said Stan. ‘I heard this bloke was in trouble with a mob of eastern Europeans and they went after him, but to target his wife and kids as well. That’s out of order. What is the world coming to when that sort of thing happens?’

Stan wouldn’t say precisely what happened to the gangster and his family. ‘Let’s just say they were seriously punished and left Spain soon afterwards.’

Stan believes the foreign gangs are thriving in Spain because of the nation’s inefficient, understaffed police forces. ‘I hate to say it but the coppers are smarter back in the UK and that’s made it harder for those foreign bastards to get a toe-hold in places like London. The cops out here are fuckin’ useless. It’s worked to our advantage for years but now we’re paying the price for it.’ And none of this was said with even a hint of irony.

Stan told me all about what he calls ‘the real fuckin’ underworld’ that exists on the Costa del Sol. ‘When I first got here I found I could run everything from here with a lot less hassle. At first it was fine. Some of the foreigners popped up now and again but I made sure they realised I was running my own outfit and by and large they left me alone.’

Each cocaine shipment, explained Stan, required a ‘heavy investment of cash’. He said: ‘D’you know? The go-between on a coke deal usually takes 50 per cent up front for his merchandise. The boatmen rake off another €100 for every kilo shipped across the Strait of Gibraltar, and the cost of yachts, refrigerated lorries and villas raises the expenses even more.’

But Stan conceded that for his first ten years in Spain, the returns were enormous. ‘Back then my main connections for cocaine on the Costa del Sol were the Argentinians who transported the white powder down from the Andes and on to Spain via Buenos Aires,’ explains Stan. ‘They seemed a lot calmer than the fuckin’ Colombians.’

In those days, said Stan, ‘if someone crossed you then you took care of it, quietly and efficiently’. He explained: ‘The big gangs down here had perfected the old Mafia murder technique of coating their victim’s feet in cement and dropping them overboard about ten miles out to sea.’

There were other ‘methods’ too. ‘One suspected grass was invited out on a night run across the Strait [of Gibraltar]. He was in the cabin when we came down screamin’ that a Spanish patrol boat was on its way. We had him hide in a sleeping bag and pull it over his head. Then we just tied the top of the sleeping bag so he couldn’t fight his way out and chucked him overboard. It was like drowning a kitten.’

Even as recently as May 2010, the body of a man known by Stan was pulled up in the nets of a fishing trawler off the once thriving fishing village of Mijas. The decomposed corpse had been tied and gagged – with hands and feet missing – and was wrapped in plastic. The victim had also suffered a head injury and a broken nose. The corpse was only discovered because the line from a fishing boat’s anchor had twisted around the neck of the corpse after becoming entangled in the nets.

An autopsy confirmed that the body had been in the water for at least ten days, but failed to determine the exact cause of death other than suffocation. It was not known if this occurred before entry into the water, or was due to drowning. Police checked records and tested DNA samples as the body had no identifying features. Authorities simply described the man as middle aged, white and well built. But they admitted it had all the classic hallmarks of a gangland killing and police were convinced that the cocaine trade had claimed its latest victim.

Stan explained: ‘I knew him and we all were well aware that he’d taken the piss out of some other gangster in a bar, so it was only a matter of time before they got him. He should have kept a lower profile and just got on with his work but he got hooked on the bloody white stuff and started shootin’ his mouth off in all directions.’

Stan still looks back fondly on the 1990s when Spanish police failed to penetrate any of the British gangs because few of them ever hired any locals. ‘I recruited my blokes from the UK only. Much safer than risking the locals here.’

Often that meant relying on traditional family and social networks, which existed long before even the Krays and the Richardsons popularised the image of the flash Cockney gangster family.

Cocaine money in southern Spain used to be laundered through reinvestment in pubs, restaurants, clubs and even ‘car fronts’, otherwise known as open-air used motor lots. Criminals also dipped in and out of property deals, often working through legitimate nominees. One well-known Costa del Sol property dealer who owed £600,000 to a gangster on behalf of whom he’d bought a property was shot dead after failing to come up with the cash.

But, said Stan with a sigh, times have changed. ‘It’s harder to wash yer money these days. You used to be able to make a quick coke deal, buy a house for cash and turn it around for a healthy profit and no one was the wiser. But the recession here changed all the rules and now the law is constantly on the lookout for black money transactions.’

‘What’s the knock-on effect of that?’ I asked.

Stan narrowed his eyes. ‘There’s less money to be made out of cocaine because the costs are going up and up. That means villains are gettin’ too fuckin’ desperate and running round in circles. It’s not good.’

Stan continued: ‘The other thing is that no one wants to share the profits either. Do you know, the other day one of my oldest mates out here was almost topped just because some Bulgarian fucker decided he wouldn’t share the profits from a cocaine deal, even though they’d been doing that sort of business together for years.

‘It’s like a great big spider’s web and if you get caught up in it there is no escape. I’ve still got most people’s respect out here because my reputation is well known but I stay out of the “hot spots” deliberately. That’s why I’m meeting you here in an ordinary Spanish restaurant off the beaten track. Those mugs down in the port [Puerto Banus] are asking for trouble. They’re rubbin’ people’s noses in it and that’s when the trouble starts.’

So, I pressed, who is running the really big cocaine deals here now? Stan took one of his customary deep breaths. ‘You just wouldn’t believe some of the characters pulling the strings out here these days. There are these two fellas whose names appear in the papers all the time as Russian billionaire businessmen residents and they’re probably cleaning up two-thirds of all the “business” out here. It’s bloody outrageous but there’s no point taking them on because they’re more powerful than anyone you’ve ever come across.

‘These two Russians have got entire governments in their pockets. When the Spanish elected a new left-wing government a few years back, I presumed these two characters would quieten down a bit. Far from it. They just chucked some huge bucks in the direction of a few officials in the new government and next thing you know they’re back running things down here.’

Stan went on to tell me his fears for the future of the Costa del Sol. His face turned to granite as he explained: ‘The bloodbath here is going to get worse. These trigger-happy young hoods don’t seem to have a fear of death like we did. It’s all “live for today because we might be gone by tomorrow” stuff. But it’s stupid and short-sighted because the harder it is to operate, the less cocaine gets through, which means demand falls and in the end it could all collapse.’

The scariest thing about Stan was not his menacing smile or his shark-like eyes. No, it was the chilling way he sounded so in control of his emotions. He seemed to be saying he’d already stepped back from the bedlam and was going to watch the rest of the underworld obliterate itself.

Meanwhile, today’s Costa del Sol restaurants, bars and clubs are starting to close down as the nationwide recession bites even deeper. ‘A few years back this place was heaving. The sun was always shining in every sense of the word. These days, it feels like a doomed land filled with flat-broke Spaniards and trigger-happy foreigners. Not good.’

But, insisted Stan, it’s not just the ‘foreign lads’ who’re causing all the chaos on Spain’s southern coast. He revealed that some of these younger, flashier gangsters are the children of British expats.

‘It’s true,’ said Stan. ‘A lot of the more dangerous ones were born to expat families, who moved out to Spain during the past thirty years.

‘Says it all doesn’t it?’ he added with a shrug. ‘These kids have learned how to be villains from their dads but they don’t have that sense of community we all had when we were back in the Smoke when robberies were the game to be in. No, these kids have lost touch with reality in many ways, which makes them much more dangerous than their parents.’

He continued: ‘I’ve got one old mate out here, whose son started throwing his weight around and tried to start his own cocaine business under the nose of his old man, who was in the same “trade”. Well, it really kicked off when my mate discovered what was happening. They had a row, naturally, and the kid came out with a bloodied nose. But then what d’you think happened?

‘The fuckin’ kid came back and shoved a shooter up his own old man’s nostril. Then he panned it down and shot my mate in the foot as a warning. What was that all about, then? You don’t go round shootin’ yer own flesh and blood. It’s outrageous but it sums up how things are goin’ out here. It’s a madhouse and it ain’t gonna get any better.’

Stan revealed that some of the children of the expats have even gone into business with the Eastern European cocaine gangs, who have flooded the south coast of Spain in recent years. ‘These guys shoot other criminals to send out a message to rivals: “Don’t fuck with me.” They’re complete nutters,’ said Stan. ‘They don’t understand all the values and respect of the old-school gangsters.’

Today it is estimated that more than 30,000 foreign criminals earn their ‘income’ from cocaine on the Costa del Sol. They come from seventy countries, including Britain, Ireland, Russia, Colombia, Albania, Kosovo, Romania and many of the former Soviet republics.

Stan issued the following stark warning: ‘Crime thrives during recessions but the trouble is that there are all these desperate characters out there with no money and no idea how to work properly. They’re already starting to nick the cocaine off other operators. Soon, World War Three will break out. God help us.’

In the middle of all this, undercover UK police have been encouraged by their Spanish counterparts to monitor many of the deadly cocaine gangsters on the Costa del Sol. It can be a highly risky occupation.

CHAPTER 14

MICKY

For the past twenty years, Spanish police have allowed small units of British law enforcement officers to operate on the Costa del Sol, mainly because of the cocaine war that’s been raging here for so long. Spanish police say they’re happy to allow the British cops to work on their territory because it can be a useful deterrent to UK villains. As one Spanish detective told me recently: ‘We know very little about the bad people when they show up from Britain, so we need the British police to help us arrest them. Also, many of these criminal enterprises are linked between Spain and the UK, so offences have been committed in both countries.’

Usually, the UK cops are so effective at remaining undercover that their activities aren’t even acknowledged officially. But when they are exposed by criminals the lawless nature of the Costa del Sol can put them at terrible risk.

In January 2004, Detective Sergeant Paul Finnigan, 41, was knifed outside a restaurant in Fuengirola after he’d been transferred by Northamptonshire Police to the National Crime Squad to investigate a British-run cocaine ring based in the area. Fortunately he survived, but fellow British undercover cop Micky is convinced Finnigan was attacked as a warning to other undercover officers. ‘The villains here don’t want coppers from back home sticking their noses in their criminal activities. I reckon that’s probably why this guy was targeted,’ explained Micky.

Micky says cocaine trafficking accounts for 90 per cent of all the criminal enterprises investigated by the units of UK cops sent undercover in southern Spain. Micky, from east London, is a classic example of the type of hardened police detective, who is an expert at infiltrating the coastline between Málaga and Estepona. He recently completed his last ‘tour of duty’ in Spain during which he spent months on a surveillance operation, which targeted a ‘major world player in the cocaine game’. Micky explained: ‘It’s much riskier being out there watching villains in Spain because there’s none of the back-up we’re used to here at home. If any of these characters suss out they’re being watched, they can become very dangerous. They believe they can get away with violent stuff here that they would never try back in Britain.’

Micky says that there was another incident – which was kept out of the press – back in 2010. ‘Two of my colleagues were beaten to a pulp by a couple of weightlifters working as henchmen for one British drug baron after he found out he was being watched a couple of years back. As I say, out here anything goes.’

Micky is hardly what you might call a traditional looking British Bobby; he’s got long, shoulder length hair, a muscly, stocky body and a grey Robinson Crusoe beard that makes him look a lot older than his forty-two years. He explained: ‘My last job in Spain was to integrate myself into a gang of British criminals who were importing cocaine from South America and then paying runners to drive the drugs through Europe back to Britain. It was a very sophisticated operation, very slick and well organised. The guy who was running it was a hardened old-school gangster and I had to work my way into being trusted by them.’

Micky – who’s done a spot of boxing in his time – managed to get himself work as an enforcer for the gang. ‘Luckily I had the contacts back in the East End who vouched for me, so I was able to get into the gang with relative ease.’

But proving what the gang were up to was a different matter altogether. Micky explained: ‘This lot were mega-careful. Even their drug runners were followed by other members of the gang to make sure they weren’t police grasses. No one was trusted apart from the men right at the very top. I was taken on two or three debt collecting operations and had to actually threaten a couple of guys who hadn’t paid their drug debts. But this was chicken feed for our investigation because it didn’t prove anything against the coke baron running the operation, so I had to be patient and wait for the right type of evidence to materialise, which we could then use in a court of law.’

For the following six months, Micky ate, slept and drank with the drug gang and never once called his wife and three kids back in the East End, just in case his phone was being monitored by the gang, which would have put them at risk. ‘That was bloody hard on me and my family, but we simply couldn’t afford to risk my family being connected to me. These fellas were so careful I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were checking who I was calling. Some nights I’d collapse exhausted into the bed at my tiny apartment and wonder what the hell I was doing there. All I wanted was to be at home with my wife and kids back in the real world.’

But Micky kept going for a very good reason. He explained: ‘A nephew of mine died from a drugs overdose and it was so fuckin’ sad to see what that did to his family. These evil bastards who sell drugs have no idea what misery they’re causing to normal, law-abiding families. Every time I got close to quitting that job in Spain I thought of my nephew and realised I had to keep going.’

Micky was so careful about communicating with his police bosses back in London that he only used internet cafes to contact them. ‘And then I used a pen-name in case anyone back in London grassed me up to the villains I was working for in Spain. In this game, you can’t trust anyone, not even the detectives you work with day in, day out.’

Fully integrated into the drugs gang, Micky – based in Torremolinos – was told by the ‘boss’ that he had to travel to South America to provide protection for the gang while they met cocaine barons in Cali, Colombia. Micky explained: ‘It was the last thing I wanted because there was no way I could travel to another country with them as I couldn’t risk a problem with a false passport. But I didn’t want to duck out of the job either, because it would have been a goldmine of information and almost certainly would provide evidence to ensure they’d all go down for a very long time.’

In the end, Micky had no choice but to pretend he was seriously ill and cry off the Colombia trip. ‘They were right pissed off with me and started lookin’ at me like I wasn’t to be trusted. That’s a bad moment in any undercover copper’s life because it means people start asking questions and there’s a risk they might find out the truth.’

Within days, Micky’s police bosses pulled him out of Spain. ‘I was willing to carry on, but they said it was too risky. I was very disappointed because I genuinely wanted to nick this lot big-time. They were a bunch of evil bastards, who didn’t give a flyin’ fuck about anyone.’

Micky added: ‘What bugs me now is that no one will be able to infiltrate that gang again, which means they’ll carry on drug dealing and ruining people’s lives. This can be one hell of frustrating job at times. I just hope we get ’em one day.’

Shortly after arriving back from his final tour in Spain, Micky quit the police and set himself up as a freelance security consultant. He explained: ‘I truly loved the job but after what happened in Spain everything seemed a bit mundane. I couldn’t face going back to a 9-to-5 office dealing with domestic crimes and burglaries after what I’d been through.

‘In the end, I knew I had to make a fresh start away from the force. Some of my best mates are still in the job but it’s not for me any more. Maybe if I’d never gone to Spain in the first place then I’d still be happy aiming for thirty years’ service and a nice fat pension, but that’s just not the way it turned out.’

However, there are regular occasions when his previous career overlaps alarmingly with his new job. ‘The other day I was asked to quote on a really big surveillance job in Spain and I had to turn it down because if I bumped into any members of that coke gang I infiltrated I’d be in real trouble. I was also a bit worried it might be a trap set by that gang who might have found out what I had been up to. You can never be too careful.’

These days, Micky specialises in due diligence work mainly for corporate legal firms. ‘It’s a lot safer than being a copper in Spain and I get to go home most evenings and see my wife and kids.’

Meanwhile back in Spain, Micky says there are professional hitmen regularly working for the cocaine gangs. They are, it seems, permanently ‘on call’ to deal with any criminals who cross the drug barons.

CHAPTER 15

LUIS

There are dozens of ‘rub-outs’ on the Costa del Sol every year directly linked to the cocaine trade, so there’s plenty of work for a good hitman. Twenty years ago if you wanted someone bumped off there were only a handful of highly professional killers-for-hire available. Today, the number of shootings on the streets of southern Spain has reached almost epidemic proportions. Many blame it on the country’s crippling recession. ‘People need to earn money whatever it takes and there are hitmen out there underpricing cold-blooded murders just to get a “job”,’ one old British villain told me.

Many of these professional hits get little or no newspaper coverage. As one British journalist based in Spain explained, ‘One coke baron knocking off another doesn’t have the same news appeal as a beautiful brunette blasting her cheating husband to death.’

Even the Spanish police admit the situation has now got completely out of control. One detective based in Marbella told me: ‘Drugs – and especially cocaine – have brought with them many professional assassinations. Criminals often commission a contract killer for the smallest of reasons. It’s a very dangerous situation.’

Take hitman Luis. He’s half Spanish, half English and has been in ‘the business’ for twelve years and lives in a big modern house in the hills behind Málaga. No one other than his dear old mum and his wife and kids even know his real name – and that’s the way he intends to keep it. ‘I do the job clean and simple with no fuss,’ explains Luis in an impeccable English accent occasionally punctuated with the odd Spanish word. ‘That’s why people come to me when they have a problem.’

Setting up a meeting with Luis was not easy. Three times an arrangement was made though a ‘middleman’ for a rendezvous and on each occasion Luis failed to appear. Then one day, I got a call from a blocked number on my mobile. ‘Hi, I’m just driving past your place,’ a voice said. ‘Can I come in for a chat?’

I make it a rule never to invite criminals to my holiday home in Spain, for obvious reasons, but Luis had given me little choice. Knowing how unique his job within the cocaine business was, I gave him directions to my house and then met him at the top of the steps that lead down to my home on the outskirts of a small fishing village, 120 miles west of Málaga.

Luis turned out to be pretty unusual in many other ways, too. He could switch his English public school accent to perfect Spanish with chilling ease in what seemed like a nanosecond. He was also film-star handsome, dressed in designer shirt, jeans and shoes and exuded the confidence and magnetism of a movie star.

He didn’t drink alcohol or touch drugs, he said. Then he laughed because of course it is drugs, particularly cocaine, which provides him with most of his income. It soon emerged that Luis had an inside knowledge of many of the most deadly professional killings in southern Spain, although he refused to confirm which ones he had been personally involved in.

Luis talked in admiring terms about the hired gun who popped a French couple on a quiet street in Marbella some years previously. ‘That was probably one of the most perfect jobs,’ he explained. ‘They didn’t put a foot wrong.’ Luis recalled how the couple had turned police informants after a vicious turf war broke out between criminals running brothels and teams of coke dealers on the Costa del Sol. ‘I heard it cost twenty thousand euros for each person, which is a good deal for everyone concerned,’ he said calmly. The French couple were shot at point blank range outside their modern detached home only a few hundred yards from the local police station.

The victims had even earlier been telling people there was ‘a bullet out there with their names on it’ after they’d turned police informants. The cocaine ring they were connected to had connections to an American branch of the mafia in Detroit, as well as the Medellín cartel, in Colombia. So when the couple finally got rubbed out on their own doorstep at one in the morning, there wasn’t a lot of grieving.

‘That’s the thing about my business. The targets usually deserve to go,’ said Luis, as casually as if he was discussing the weather. ‘I try not to look on them as real people. It’s much easier that way.’

The Marbella police have never had anyone in the frame for the murder of the French couple. They even made it publicly clear they weren’t that bothered about the killing. ‘That’s typical of the police here,’ says Luis. ‘That’s why it’s so much easier to operate here than, say, in London or the States. The police are underpaid and overworked. One criminal wiping out another is of no real interest to them. They look more closely at domestic killings and stuff like that.’

He went on: ‘It turned out that couple had been double crossing their way up and down the Costa del Sol for months. They’d stolen coke from criminal associates, ripped-off call girls and even beat up one drug dealer. Some poor bastard had even bought a second-hand car off them only to have it confiscated by the police because it was stolen.’

Luis paused for a few moments.

‘You see? They were scum. They had it coming. Not that that is of any relevance when I am commissioned for a job.’

Luis doesn’t only ‘work’ in southern Spain. A lot of his jobs, he says, come from the US, UK and Germany. However, virtually all of them, he claims, are connected to cocaine. ‘Coke is where the really big money is. I always know, for example, that a target will have been properly researched by the Colombians. Nothing sloppy. The better the research the less likely there will be any problems. They go out of their way to ensure I know everything about a target. That way I don’t get any nasty surprises.’

Luis continued: ‘But the rules of the game are changing every day. These days my basic price is thirty thousand euros, unless I’m being asked to take out a big-time, high-profile character who’s got a lot of protection. Oh, and I always get paid in full, in advance, in cash. How else could I handle it, take a cheque?

‘There are other unwritten clauses that go into every contract. If I get arrested the person commissioning the hit takes care of all my legal costs plus my bail if I manage to get it. He’d also make sure I was comfortable in prison, that my wife and kids were looked after financially at home, as well as doing everything to try and get me out. Finally, when I finish my sentence, he would have a bundle of cash waiting for me. This is done to guarantee my silence. As long as all those obligations are taken care of, I’m not going to say a word to anyone. I’m certainly not going to land anyone in the shit. They’d soon finish me off.’

Luis says it’s not the risk of being caught for his crimes that bothers him, though. ‘There are other so-called pro’s out there killing people for five thousand euros each job. The trouble is you get what you pay for in this game and these cut-price operators all get caught in the end and then they start singing to the police. Let’s face it, a grandmother in Benalmádena who wants her husband killed after thirty years of abuse is going to end up hiring an amateur or an undercover cop. Then there are the numerous small-time hoods making out they can carry out hits for next to nothing. It all adds up to trouble.’

Luis believes he knows exactly what the future holds for him. ‘I’m planning to retire soon. Buy myself a nice little villa in northern Spain and start relaxing and enjoying my life.’ He pauses and nods his head slowly. ‘If I live that long …’

Back in the middle of the Costa del Sol, cocaine attracts other far less professional characters than Luis. Their connection to cocaine can be surprising, to say the least.

CHAPTER 16

DENISE AND JANE

When divorced grandmothers Denise and Jane decided to go on an adventure to the Costa del Sol they had no idea they’d end up selling cocaine on Spain’s most notorious coastline. ‘I didn’t even know what cocaine looked like until I got here,’ says Denise.

The two middle-aged housewives quit their safe, comfortable lives in the UK to set up home by the Mediterranean after both their marriages crumbled.

‘I’d had enough of Britain and decided to start afresh in Spain,’ explained Denise, 59, from the West Midlands. ‘I s’pose I was running away in a sense.’

But within months of arriving in southern Spain, Denise was ripped off by an unscrupulous estate agent and lost tens of thousands in a property deal. ‘I was left virtually penniless and about to be kicked out of my flat for not paying the rent. My life in a sunshine paradise had turned into a nightmare,’ she explained.

Then she met German-born Jane, 52, who’d just fled from a neglecting husband back in commuter-belt Dorking, Surrey. Explained Jane: ‘My husband and I found we had nothing in common after our children left home and one day I decided I couldn’t take any more of the boredom, so I wrote him a goodbye note and left the house with just a couple of suitcases.’

The two women first met in a bar near their homes on the coastal resort of Fuengirola and soon discovered that besides being stony broke, they also had five grandchildren between them. ‘We liked each other immediately so became instant friends,’ explained Jane. ‘We’d both suffered a lot of ups and down in our lives but agreed that we were determined to survive without the help of our husbands. And we also both agreed, there was no way we would ever go back to the UK.’

Added Denise: ‘We’d both tried “straight” jobs such as working in bars and stuff like that but the pay was dreadful and the hours appalling. I even tried telephone sales but it was commission only and some weeks I earned less than I was spending on petrol to drive to the office.’

Denise went on: ‘Jane suggested we should set up a cocaine business. I was shocked at first because I knew nothing about drugs. In fact I don’t think I’d ever done anything illegal in my entire life. Jane was the same but she’d had a brief fling with a drug dealer before we met and she knew how it all worked. She even knew how we’d get hold of the cocaine and the sort of money that could be made from it.’

Jane explained: ‘Most people wouldn’t have done what I was proposing. But we were both desperate and you have to understand that cocaine is as normal as a cup of tea out here. People take it openly and the Spanish themselves treat it as if it is no worse than alcohol.’

So the two grandmothers put together their own very unique ‘business plan’. Jane continued: ‘Obviously the two most important aspects are getting the product and having enough people to sell it to. I’d met a guy through my previous boyfriend who was a supplier, so we both took him out for a drink and picked his brains. He was astonished at first but then came round to the idea of supplying us because we were such unlikely drug dealers. He couldn’t believe we would ever be any threat to his business.’

And there lies the key to Jane and Denise’s coke business. Denise went on: ‘This guy Jane knew said he was sick of supplying cocaine to stupid, flash kids flagging up their activities to the police by being so obvious about what they did.’

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 sheer 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.’

Just then Sly demonstrated his love for his little ‘friend’ by thwacking the weapon into his palm in a series of flat, vicious blows. ‘See? It is most effective and yet when I pull it out people think it’s nothing. It’s good to surprise them, no?’

Sly said he didn’t hesitate to lash out at anybody who got in his way. ‘The other day, I had to use it on this Russian woman because she wouldn’t give me the phone number of another cocaine dealer I wanted to find,’ explained Sly. ‘The Russians are the worst. They don’t give a fuck and the women are even harder than the men. This bitch just looked at me like I was some piece of shit when I asked her nicely so I used this on her until she cooperated. And you know what? Afterwards she still spat in my face.’ Sly laughed then, almost as if the woman’s defiance had impressed him, despite his contempt for her.

Sly told me the same treatment was handed out to anyone – man, woman or child – who crossed him and his cocaine gang or even breached gang rules, especially their strict code of silence. It was clear that if people like Sly came after you, they’d stab you or shoot you for real. The scars and laceration marks on Sly’s own face and body were ample evidence of that.

Sly said that if an enemy survived a beating or a stabbing, he and his men would go after him again. ‘We don’t want people thinking we’re soft or scared. It’s important that your enemies know you will still come back to punish them further. That fear often stops them defying you any more.’

Sly himself confessed that back in Romania when he was a teenager he’d had to pass certain tests in order to become a member of a local street gang. ‘I was expected to stab a policeman in our town. The leader of our gang at the time chose the policeman they wanted to be hurt. I was given his name and the police station where he worked and then I went and found him.’

Sly continued: ‘I knew that it was a condition of my membership. When I asked them how I should hurt this policeman they just told me that a knife would be given to me and I would then have to go and find him and hurt him badly.’

I pressed Sly further about what then actually happened.

Sly hesitated for a few moments and I wondered if he was getting angry that I’d ignored an earlier pledge he’d made not to discuss this same incident. But then he took a deep breath, leaned down closer to me and began talking once more. ‘I was walking to the shop near where I lived at the time and this man came up to me in the middle of the street and handed me a plastic bag. In it was the knife. That was when I knew they were being serious and I would have to go through with the attack if I wanted to join the gang.’

There was another pause as Sly collected his thoughts. Then he continued: ‘I found the policeman as he was walking out of the police station and followed him for about five minutes until he was walking down an unlit street. I stabbed him in the back three times and then left him on the ground. I know he survived but he never worked as a policeman again and I discovered later that he had molested a little girl, so maybe that was part of the reason why I was asked to attack him.’

Considering the strict code of silence that exists, particularly between eastern European gangs, I was surprised at how open Sly had been. But I wanted to know more about his cocaine-related activities in Spain because that was key to my book.

So I turned to Sly’s British wife Val and pressed her in the hope she might be more open about the Romanians on the Costa del Sol. What she told me was horrifying. Val claimed that Sly had been the victim of a vicious rape as a twelve-year-old in the orphanage where he was brought up and ‘that turned him into a mean and nasty person’. Val insisted that despite this, Sly had many redeeming characteristics and that was why she’d married him, convinced she could change him into a normal human being. I had my doubts.

Val said that after that appalling abuse, Sly ‘grew up very fast’ and ran away from the orphanage and ended up living with a gang of kids in the slums of Bucharest. He even became one of the notorious ‘tunnel children’ who still live to this day in the sewers of the city.

‘Sly never had a chance,’ explained Val. ‘That doesn’t mean he should be forgiven for all the bad things he’s done, but it does tell you why he’s ended up being the person he is.’

The Romanian tunnel kids gang – featuring Sly and his friends – soon gained a notorious reputation within Bucharest’s criminal fraternity. Sly and his friends were literally living underground in a series of open sewers under the city. They specialised in brutal hit-and-run type crimes on local businesses and people. By the time the over-stretched police came on the scene, the gang would have long since disappeared back beneath the surface of the city.

Val said that Sly and the part of that gang back in Romania still worked together on the Costa del Sol. ‘Sly and his friends find it so hard to trust anyone other than each other. That’s how they have survived. He and two others came out here some years ago because he kept being arrested and put in prison in Romania and he’d had enough. The trouble is that Sly only knows one way to make money and that’s by committing crimes.’

Val admitted that no one knew all the gang’s secrets but at least by giving me some of the background to Sly’s development as a criminal, I could start to get a handle on why he was so cold-blooded out here in Spain’s cocaine-fuelled hinterlands. ‘There is a good person in there, I’m sure,’ said Val. ‘I’m going to help him escape this life and I know we’re going to end up having a better life together than he could possibly ever have had on his own.’

Val’s words sounded a tad hollow, but I was the last person to feel I had the right to shoot her down in flames on that one. I was learning about how characters like Sly ended up creating havoc in places like Spain. ‘It’s much easier for me out here,’ interrupted Sly who had reappeared halfway through my conversation with Val and now wanted to take over the interview once again.

But, I asked, could you ever walk away from the gang as Val hoped? ‘Look, the gang is my life. I would not have anything if it were not for the gang. They are my only family.’ Sly immediately noticed how crestfallen Val looked at that last remark so he tried to explain what he meant.

‘Look, you don’t understand. There is no way out of the gang, except by dying,’ explained Sly in a very matter-of-fact voice. ‘I cannot survive without them. Our souls are the same. It’s as simple as that.’ Sly then explained it was his idea to bring the other gang members over to Spain. ‘I recognised that it was a safer place for us to work, rather than, say, London.’

‘Safer?’ I asked.

‘Yes, the Spanish don’t really care about people selling cocaine as long as it does not involve them.’

The one secret Sly refused to reveal was the name of his gang. ‘That’s between us only. That way if we have any impostors we find out very quickly and dispose of them.’

But where do your supplies of cocaine come from?

‘Oh, I get it mostly from Romania,’ said Sly.

I was surprised since Romania wasn’t well known for its connections to cocaine.

‘My cousin. He runs the border road into Italy. Nothing can go down that road without his permission. He charges a “tax” to all the coke smugglers and they often pay him with drugs instead of cash. He then gets the cocaine smuggled over to me here.’

I was astounded because most of the cocaine going through countries such as Romania came from southern Spain in the first place. ‘Yeah. You’re right, it does all come from Spain but who cares? The main thing is I get the coke very cheap and the mark-up here is very high. You know, the other day I sold a big deal to one old man, I think he came from London. He said that the coke seemed better than what he was used to. I was tempted to tell him it probably came from the same supplier.’

Suddenly, our interview is interrupted by a call on Sly’s mobile. He fires off an initial reply to his caller before raising his voice further.

Val rolls her eyes and tries to laugh off the fact that Sly was making what, even in his machine-gun rattling Romanian, sounded very much like death threats to his caller.

‘It’s tough out here,’ she says, turning to me. ‘Everyone wants a piece of Sly. He has a terrible temper as you can see. If I can somehow get him to learn to control it then maybe we will have a chance of a happy, long marriage.’

I nodded slowly and managed to avoid giving her an honest answer.

Seconds later, Sly slammed his mobile down on the table next to him and said: ‘You have to leave now. I have some people coming here to see me and they are not people you should meet.’

It seemed as if Sly was at the centre of a classic turf war. In nearby Benalmádena, these sort of cocaine-fuelled battles were two a penny thanks to its reputation as the ‘armpit’ of the Costa del Sol.

CHAPTER 19

FRANKIE

Cocaine on the Costa del Sol is not just about wealthy coke barons and their armies. There are numerous much more downmarket areas where many less wealthy people have created a demand for coke by turning it into the party drug of choice.

The residential areas of the scruffy resort of Benalmádena are dominated by crumbling tower blocks and rubbish strewn streets. Cocaine gangsters in Benalmádena tend to be much younger criminals and it’s estimated that there are at least a dozen drugs gangs operating in the area. A lot of their time is spent fighting one another for control of the turf. Frankie has just turned twenty and hails from Newcastle originally, but his parents moved back to the north-east of England three years ago. He’s been ducking and diving ever since.

‘I like it out here but it’s hard at the moment,’ said Frankie. He agreed to talk to me because his family had helped me with a journalistic crime project a few years earlier. But, I asked Frankie, how was he surviving? ‘I run a little team, I s’pose you could call them a gang but that sounds like we’re kids. But we’re pro’s and we make a good living. Simple as that.’

Cocaine is the main income for Frankie’s gang. Their turf includes the notorious ‘24-hour square’, a warren of ugly bars and alleyways in a concrete plaza that backs on to a McDonald’s restaurant. Hundreds, and in the summer season, thousands, of mainly rowdy British tourists meet on Fridays and Saturday nights here and the police are constantly breaking up brawls, knife fights and thievery. ‘In 24-hour square we can make three grand a night at weekends in the winter and that triples in the summer holiday season,’ said Frankie.

But with those sorts of profits from the sale of cocaine come high risks. Frankie claims he runs the only totally British gang in Benalmádena. ‘Most of the other Brits did a runner because the foreigners scared the shit out of them,’ he explained.

Hard drugs like coke are easier to shift because they’re sold in such small packets and they yield a much higher profit. But Frankie and his team are constantly under threat from outside gangs, who regularly try to take over Frankie’s turf. In the twelve months before we spoke, he claims there had been three near-fatal incidents. ‘You have to show them you can’t be pushed around or else they keep coming back. I carry a blade on me the whole time but sometimes when it gets hairy out there I borrow a shooter off a mate of my dad’s. I only flash it at people to make sure they know how serious I am and that usually does the trick.’

Two separate gangs of particularly violent Albanians had been trying to muscle in on 24-hour square in recent months and Frankie said he fully expected them back at any time. ‘They’re fuckin’ mad those Albanians. Last time they turned up and tried flogging coke right out in the open in front of all the bars I work out of. So I went and got three of my boys and we moved straight in on those Albanian fuckers. They were all armed but we caught them out in the open, so they couldn’t pull out their weapons. I suppose we were lucky in a way.’

Frankie refused to reveal exactly what actually happened to his Albanian rivals because he is afraid of providing authorities with criminal evidence that might later be used against him, but it’s clear he takes their threat very seriously. ‘The Brits have a bad reputation for bottling out of things round here and I have to keep doing certain things to make sure people like the Albanians know I mean business.’

Frankie says that there are so many jobless Brits in Benalmádena that a few of them have even offered him money to be allowed to join his gang. ‘These kids want to belong,’ explained Frankie. ‘Most of them are just like me. Their mums and dads have fucked off back to Britain and they’ve stayed because it’s the only home they know and they’re prepared to do anything to survive. It’s not a good situation but it means there’s no shortage of recruits for me.’

But Frankie, a wise head on such young shoulders, predicts that more problems will occur as more and more of these disaffected young Brits decide to set up gangs of their own just as he had done. ‘It’s going to happen for sure. Nobody’s got any cash out here so they have to thieve and sell drugs to survive. The cocaine war is going to get even nastier when that happens.’

Frankie admits that to survive as a gangster on the Costa del Sol, the younger British criminals like himself are having to adapt to a ‘violence on demand’ attitude. He explained: ‘Everyone’s going to have to be tooled up to protect their turf soon and if you’re not prepared to do that then you’ll probably end up with a bullet in yer head. It’s dog eat dog out there.’

Before Frankie and his contemporaries came onto the scene, most of the narcotics business in Benalmádena and neighbouring Torremolinos was run by big-time drug barons, who controlled the entire coastline between Málaga and Estepona. But all that started to fragment about five years ago because of the influx of eastern Europeans. ‘When I was a kid at school here, all the coke, E and puff was supplied by street dealers who were answerable to proper, serious criminal faces. But all that’s changed. It’s easy now to find a major supplier, organise your own transportation and run an operation off your own back. The biggest challenge is the territory. I had to pay good money for my turf at the square and no one is going to bully me off it.’

So with young high-flyers on the horizon, it promises to get a lot more violent on the streets of Benalmádena. To all the aspiring, disaffected youngsters roaming the streets of this rundown resort, people like Frankie are heroes to be looked up to. But, typically, Frankie knows that sort of hero worship won’t last long.

‘One day these same kids will be after what’s mine and that’s when the shooting begins,’ explained Frankie, who walks with a limp after one rival gang member ran over his foot during a clash about drug territories. Frankie refused to talk about the incident, except to say, ‘I couldn’t let that one go. I had to get him done in a similar way otherwise everyone round here would have started taking the piss out of me. That’s the way it is in the world of drug dealing.’

Frankie still lives in the same rundown concrete high-rise apartment his parents abandoned three years earlier. He says the landlord still thinks his parents are living there. ‘I’ve kept up the rental payments and it suits me fine there. It’s nothing flash, which is always better when you’re in this game. The people who give it large all over the place are the ones who either end up six feet under in the mountains or down the local nick.’

Frankie shares the flat with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Donna, who comes from Darlington. Her parents went back to the UK a year earlier and she’s brought herself up alone ever since. Frankie has some strong views on the way they were both abandoned, which shows that he’s a lot more reflective than one might think at first. ‘I’m doing what I’m doing because they basically dumped me here. It’s not a nice thing to do and Donna’s mum did it to her when she was even younger. No wonder I’ve had to resort to crime, eh?’

The living room in Frankie’s flat is bare apart from the obligatory widescreen TV, which cost him a whopping two grand. ‘It’s me only real luxury. I even drive around in a Ford Fiesta, so people don’t think I’m up to no good.’

But Frankie did admit that he’s putting all his money away so that one day he can go straight and live a ‘normal’ life. ‘I don’t want to do this for ever. I just want enough cash to be able to buy meself a nice house and settle down with Donna and have kids. I’ll set up a business – a straight business – and try to make somethin’ of my life. I knew this drug dealer fella when I was fifteen and he told me that you never spend longer than five years in this game because if you do, you’ll get nicked or killed in the end.’

Meanwhile, Frankie admitted he was fighting other demons in the shape of a clear and obvious addiction to cocaine. ‘I love the fuckin’ stuff and that’s my weakness because all the cleverest people in this business don’t take it. I was the same until about a year ago and then a mate of mine persuaded me to have a line and now I can’t get enough of it. I’m fuckin’ hooked and I hate myself for it in a way, but on the other hand it does help get me through the days and nights.’

Moments later, Frankie pulled out a sachet and expertly chopped himself a line of cocaine. It was interesting to note that his girlfriend Donna did not partake. Frankie later told me, ‘I’d never go out with a bird who was hooked on this shit.’

By the time I finally left Frankie’s tatty apartment, I felt saddened by the sight of a young man on the edge of either dying from drug addiction or being gunned down in a fight about drugs turf. It struck me that he couldn’t win either way. But how different this life might have turned out if his parents had not abandoned him when they left Benalmádena and headed back to the UK.

Up in the mountains behind the Costa del Sol resorts live a few characters who’ve deliberately stepped back from the limelight to try and live in safe, secluded retirement away from the hyped-up gunmen and vicious turf wars.

CHAPTER 20

JODY

In an isolated villa on the edge of a quiet mountainside pueblo overlooking Málaga, lives Jody, a cocaine baroness with a fearsome reputation. Her fondness for cosmetic surgery has turned her from a once fresh-faced exotic dancer into a collagen version of Zsa Zsa Gabor. But behind her plastic smile lies a steely determination to win every battle. Jody’s reputation spreads from California to London to southern Spain. She’s personally ‘managed’ the transport of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine and her own coke habit almost led to the removal of part of her nose.

Now she lives alone in her hilltop home still fearful that the other drug barons she has crossed will one day seek revenge. There’s something about Jody that reminds me of that burned-out actress recluse played by Gloria Swanson in the classic movie Sunset Boulevard.

‘I’ve dealt with the Mob in Vegas, the Mafia in New York and the Cubans in Miami,’ says Jody in a throaty, deadpan smoker’s voice. ‘They all trusted me at one time or another but in the end coke sent them all crazy.’

These days, Jody is a virtual recluse in her whitewashed hacienda about thirty miles inland from the Costa del Sol. ‘There’s only one road in and one road out of here,’ she explains. ‘If anyone came looking for me, I’d know about it before they did. I bought this place especially because of that.’

Jody’s only companions are two Irish Wolfhounds called King and Queen (they’re both male) in a property surrounded by high white walls and an electronic gate system that seems more akin to Fort Knox.

‘I don’t go out much any more,’ she explains. ‘I did all my partying between my twenties and seventies. These days just putting the kettle on for a cup of tea is an effort. But I don’t regret a thing about my life. Why should I?’

Jody reckons she’s survived the deadlier aspects of the cocaine game because she’s been extremely discreet about the ruthless drug barons she’s worked with down the years. It’s made her very guarded about her former life, which makes being interviewed by me a difficult process for her. ‘I find it hard to talk about what went on back in the bad old days. I saw things that no person should have to witness. I even pleaded with one Mafia guy not to kill my then boyfriend after he was suspected of being a police informant.

‘In the end they ignored me, dragged him down to the basement and the last thing I remember hearing was his high-pitched scream followed by the firing of three bullets in fast succession. The bastards dragged his body onto the back of a truck before I even got a chance to say goodbye. And that is just one of many such incidents. I’m only scratching the surface.’

Jody first got involved in the cocaine business back in the late 1960s when her then boyfriend – a Cuban national based in Miami – started running coke from South America via Cuba on a light aircraft.

‘It was so easy back then. The coastguard and just about everyone else at that time was more worried about the Soviets firing missiles from Cuba than anything else. Coke was not high on any law enforcement agenda, so flying a few pounds in via an small municipal airport near Boca Raton was no big deal.’

Jody says at the time cocaine wasn’t given any priority by authorities. ‘They knew about its existence but it wasn’t until it started flooding in from Colombia in the mid-seventies that it began being treated like the Devil’s Candy.’

Jody claims that it was around that time that she flew with her then lover to Cali, Colombia, to meet with cocaine cartel members so that her boyfriend could arrange to buy a shipment. ‘They were a strange group of men. They seemed to think they could have sex with any woman who took their eye. I bumped into one of them in the corridor of the hotel where we were staying and he tried to rape me after I stopped to say goodnight.’

Shortly after this, Jody got involved in cocaine exportation with the Vegas Mob. She was even propositioned in a Las Vegas hotel elevator by Frank Sinatra. ‘I’d moved to Vegas to try my hand at being a croupier and met this heavy, connected guy with a mean Brooklyn accent. He’d just gambled and lost a small fortune on the roulette wheel right in front of me. It was only as he was trying to kiss me in the elevator I realised it was Sinatra! Well, within an hour I was in bed with him.

‘The following morning, he let one of his associates whisk me off with his two bodyguards in a stretched Mercedes to a warehouse in an abandoned construction site in the desert. It was very surreal. I thought we were heading to Palm Springs to meet up with Frank later but his associate just said he had a small errand to do.

‘Well, we walked into this place with two other bodyguards and there was all this coke carefully packed in small bricks. I have no idea to this day if Frank even knew that his guy was heavily into coke ’cos I never saw him take the stuff. Anyway, there was so much coke in that warehouse it was stacked up to the ceiling. I didn’t know it then because I wasn’t so worldly, but that was probably worth more money than all the hotels in Vegas put together.’

Within weeks, Jody had agreed to work for Sinatra’s associate as ‘the organiser for all his coke shipments’. She explained: ‘I never saw Sinatra again but this friend of his and me, we sort of hit it off. I was also good with figures and he reckoned he trusted me more than his own people, so I got down to work and we also had some fun together.’

Over the following five years, Jody believes she handled the transportation of at least $500 million worth of cocaine. ‘Funny thing is it costs virtually the same today as it did back then. I organised the airplane pick-ups, the trucks that smuggled it across borders, the couriers, the mules. I also acted as the supply lady for personal consumption for all sorts of gangsters. They seemed to trust a woman more than a man when it came to providing cocaine to snort. I guess it was much more daring back in those days.’

Jody says she even started running a lucrative sideline – a personalised cocaine delivery service – which helped introduce her to a vast array of celebrities and politicians, all of whom were heavy cocaine users. ‘I was acceptable in all types of places. People liked having me around because I was always carrying a load of coke in my handbag but also because I knew how to behave.’

Jody claims her cocaine encounters also endeared her to some very heavy characters. ‘I had this way with men. They liked the fact I could be both naughty and nice at the same time. I didn’t even take much coke back then. It never really appealed to me in the early days because it made me so manic and I didn’t need any more energy than I already had! But later I paid a heavy price for overusing it.’

Meanwhile Jody’s reputation as a superb organiser of the trafficking of cocaine was spreading fast across the US underworld. ‘It was the 1980s by this time and the amount of cocaine flowing into the States was incredible. I personally handled ten flights a week from the Caribbean into Nevada.’

But this coincided with the outbreak of the United States’ war on drugs, which meant that previously secure landing strips were now being monitored by law enforcement through radar installations. Jody explained: ‘Suddenly it got much harder to get the coke in here. The airstrips in the Caribbean were being watched as well and we had to start finding new routes to bring it in.’

So Jody was sent to meet a notorious drug trafficker in Mexico to see if there was an alternative air and sea route for the massive amounts of cocaine available to be brought in from Colombia. ‘This Mexican guy was razor sharp. He wanted a big chunk of our profits to allow the coke to come through his territory but he was guaranteeing it would get to the US unhindered. Again, the fact I was a woman seemed to make it easier to deal with such characters. They didn’t put on such a macho hardman act and some of them even tried to date me but ultimately they gave me some respect and I showed them I was as tough as they could ever be.’

Jody eventually moved to southern Spain to run the Costa del Sol end of the same Mexican’s cartel’s cocaine trafficking business. ‘It’s true I ended up working for the devil. Boy, they were determined characters. They’d decided that because Mexico was the transit point for all cocaine from South America, that gave them more power and influence than even the Colombians. They had a good point!

‘The Mexicans hated the South Americans who looked down on them as toothless peasants. Well, I can tell you the Mexicans take no prisoners. They’re ruthless beyond belief. They will smile at your face and then produce a gun from behind their backs and shoot you dead in an instant.’

For the following ten years, Jody ran the southern Spain end of the Mexican cartel’s European operation. ‘I earned a lot of money and I never had one problem with them but I was getting old and I didn’t want to keep watching my rear view for the rest of my life.’

That’s when Jody made a potentially risky decision. ‘I told the Mexicans I was out. I knew there was a risk they might kill me just to ensure I did not give away any of their secrets to the police or other cartels. At first they thought I was loco. But I insisted I had to leave. I’d had enough and I wanted some peace and quiet in my life.’

Incredibly, says Jody, the Mexicans paid her off with a retirement ‘bonus’ and wished her well. ‘It was a miracle when I look back on it. They almost always kill people who try to leave their organisation. I don’t actually know to this day why they spared me – but they did.’

Today, Jody claims she is happy in retirement watching so many of the trigger-happy cocaine barons on the nearby coastline killing each other. ‘It’s great up here. Sure, I still have to watch out for my security because of a few people I have crossed down the years but on the whole I am enjoying a long and peaceful retirement and long may it last.’

About a month before my interview with Jody, she was approached by the Mexicans to come out of retirement to run their business once again. ‘They offered me a huge amount of money but I said no and I think they respected me even more for sticking to my original pledge.’

Then she added: ‘Coke may still be growing as a business but the profits are being slashed and the murder rate associated with the drug is going up. Anyone going into coke thinking they will make a fortune these days is sadly deluded.’

And as a postscript, Jody mentioned how cocaine itself had almost killed her. ‘I kept off it a lot in the early days but when I started working for the Mexicans they gave me mountains of the stuff for free. I was such a fool. I got seriously hooked. I’d do ten grams a day and run around like a manic idiot most of the time, although I still somehow managed to run things smoothly for them. In the end, one of my best friends got me booked into a drug clinic and I quit for good. But not before I almost had to have an operation to rebuild part of my nose because it had been rotted right through by coke. See? Even wily old birds like me can make the biggest mistakes …’

But not everyone on the Costa del Sol is as keen as Jody to take a step back from the cocaine trade. It’s also home to some ruthless characters who use the drug to control others and make themselves a small fortune in the process.

CHAPTER 21

PATRICK

Patrick, in his well-polished Gucci loafers and sharply cut Armani suit, looks every inch the successful Costa del Sol businessman. He likes to describe himself as ‘working in real estate’. But behind the charming, diamond-toothed smile lies a cunning mind always on the lookout for a crooked cocaine deal and a pretty girl. As we walk up the narrow streets of Marbella’s old town, 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 that sounds like the words of a romantic man with a healthy interest in the opposite sex you couldn’t be more wrong because Patrick – in his mid-thirties – ‘runs’ a number of apartments on the outskirts of Marbella that are occupied by some of the city’s most beautiful prostitutes.

For Patrick is a cocaine dealer, who also does a bit of pimping on the side. Yet he’s surprisingly open and proud of his ‘dual career’. ‘They’re my bitches and they don’t do nothin’ without my permission,’ he says, without a hint of embarrassment. ‘They all love me and will do anythin’ I say. That’s the way it’s always been. I make sure they have a little blow when they want it. But I keep most of my coke to sell to my clients.’

Dutch-born Patrick has no doubt he’s hit pay dirt by setting himself up as a cocaine-dealing 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 and cocaine. I got English girls, Caribbean, South American, German, Eastern European, Russian, you name it. If you want somethin’ a little different like a tranny, I can put you in touch with the right people.’

All the more remarkable is that Patrick’s girls actually appear to adore him. No doubt it might have something to do with the fact that he controls every aspect of their lives and ‘feeds’ them enough cocaine to keep them happy – and thin. ‘Hey, coke is the perfect thing to help them keep their weight down and that’s good for business.’ The pimp–hooker relationship is steeped in mystery and to the casual outsider it must seem unfathomable. But as one of Patrick’s girls explains: ‘I’m his bitch. He tells me what to do and I do it. I love him. I will do anything for him.’

But why? ‘I can’t help myself, I just do everything he orders me to do,’ says another of Patrick’s ‘bitches’, an English girl called Louise 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 die for him.’

Another of Patrick’s girls is 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 could work for him because I come from a society where prostitution is not 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 there for me,’ explained 28-year-old 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. He gives me a good life so why should I complain? I don’t have to stand on any street corners. He pays for me to have health checks and he makes sure I’m safe. What more could I ask?’

Patrick squeezes Beatrice’s hand gently, they look into each other’s eyes like a pair of young lovers and then he slips her a sachet of cocaine. She gets up and totters off on her four-inch heels to the toilets. 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 other people?’

Patrick looks completely unfazed. ‘That’s just work, man. It don’t mean nothin’. My bitches know that I’m always there for them.’ Looking straight into Beatrice’s huge saucer-like brown eyes as she returns to the table, 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 slips him back the sachet of cocaine before turning to me sniffing and says, ‘See? I told you, I love him.’

Obviously the cocaine he just gave her also helps.

Patrick’s involvement in the sex and cocaine business began back in his birthplace, Amsterdam, more than ten years earlier when he was running errands for a group of pimps and drug dealers in the city. ‘But that place was too crowded, man. Some of the girls told me they were headin’ for Spain and I knew there was a lot of coke here as well, so I moved down.’

Today, Patrick’s ‘empire’ includes twelve prostitutes, rotated so that they each work twelve hours a day in one of Patrick’s rented apartments. He reckons to make anything from £2,500 to £5,000 a week from the girls. The coke business brings in the same again.

Patrick then reels off the going rates for different quality cocaine like a second-hand car salesman boasting about the prices of a whole range of vehicle models.

‘Top quality 99 per cent. Two hundred euros a gram … Medium. One twenty … Shit. Sixty …’

Then Patrick interrupts himself. ‘If they want bigger amounts I charge less.’

Patrick claims he rarely has problems with the local police. ‘They know the score. I drop them a few grams of coke or a few euros and they’re happy just so long as I don’t work the streets. It’s the same with the girls.’

Some of Patrick’s best customers are British criminals who own houses on the Costa del Sol. ‘I know some very heavy dudes from the UK who like the top quality stuff. Sometimes they hire one or two of the girls, too.’

One notorious UK criminal recently contacted Patrick to ask him to provide a couple of girls to sleep with him and his wife plus an ounce of cocaine.

‘That dude was wild, man. He snorted all the coke and had sex with his wife and my girls all night long. Wow, he is somethin’ else!’

Patrick prides himself on being a survivor and insists he has a long-term plan to ease himself out of both businesses ‘when the time is right’. He explains: ‘I like it down here, but I know it won’t last for ever. Other cats will come in and start takin’ my bitches and undercutting the price of my coke. That’s the way it goes.’

Patrick never actually uses the word ‘pimp’ during our conversations but it is girls like Beatrice who make 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 work for ya.’

Not all the characters operating on the shores of the Med are as hard-nosed as Patrick …

CHAPTER 22

TIGGY

On the infamous party island of Ibiza – regarded by many as the clubbing capital of the world – British cocaine gangsters have created their own mini-underworld, driven mainly by a huge demand for drugs from UK visitors during the busy summer months.

Coke dealer Tiggy hails from Harlesden, north-west London, but every summer for virtually the past ten years he has taken up residence in Ibiza. ‘I love Ibiza. But it’s had its bad moments. There was a period when it was right dodgy,’ says Tiggy. In the summer of 2006, Tiggy was held up three times at gunpoint by rival British drug gangsters trying to stop him selling his ‘product’ on what they see as ‘their’ territory.

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 bank 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.

Gibraltar is now used as a junction for cocaine from the Colombian cartels by many of Britain’s most powerful criminals. The Spanish government reckons that Gibraltar’s superbusy drug barons are importing billions of pounds’ worth of cocaine each year right under the noses of this little piece of Britain on the armpit of the Mediterranean. Getting in and out of the Rock is so easy for many British criminals that they’ve helped turn Gibraltar into a virtually lawless society, where cash rules above all else.

One of the British villains who have popped in and out of the Rock in recent years is master criminal GH. While on the run from British police, GH spent many months on the Rock setting up cocaine deals while at the same time equipping his secret Spanish hideaway, seventy miles up the road, with household goods from the UK stores that dominate the Rock’s main shopping street.

GH boasted that he’d never been asked to even show the photograph page of his false British passport during his numerous trips in and out of Gibraltar. ‘I was told never to drive a car onto the Rock because that would be more likely to be stopped and searched, so I walked through the border checkpoint waving my UK passport without even having to show it,’ he told me.

GH also rates Gibraltar as one of the easiest places from which to fly back into Britain when he has deals to do and people to see back on his old manors of east London and Essex. But even more disturbingly, GH claims he has set up a number of multi-million-pound cocaine deals in partnership with one of the Rock’s most powerful criminals.

GH says he knew many years earlier from the days when he handled the takings from some of the UK’s most audacious robberies of the last century that he could launder money with ease on Gibraltar. But GH’s dodgy dealings on the Rock are only the tip of the iceberg. For some people believe Gibraltar is awash with more gangsters per square mile than Chicago in the thirties.

Further down the food chain are Gibraltarian characters like Thin Phil. His real first name is every bit as clichéd. He’s a typical member of the Gibraltar mafia. He works as a runner for a major former north London drug baron now based on the Rock. Thin Phil and other runners can make up to £5,000 a week steering their inflatables across the ocean. His boss has numerous boats, crews, lock-ups to store drugs and dozens of people to load and unload his narcotics on both sides of the Straits.

The biggest earner used to be the hash available fourteen miles due south in Morocco, less than an hour across this busy but under-policed stretch of water. But these days a flotilla of speedboats and inflatables smuggle an even more valuable commodity – cocaine. The biggest irony of all this is that while the British-run colony seems to be turning a blind eye to these multi-million-pound criminal enterprises, it is ‘the fuckin’ Spanish’ – as Thin Phil calls them – who are genuinely trying to crack down on Gibraltar’s criminal tendencies.

Spanish police now use a powerful launch – the smugglers call it a turbo – to pursue drug couriers in their inflatables. And, naturally, they insist that Gibraltar’s lawless reputation is yet more evidence that it should be permanently reunited with the Spanish mainland. In a community with only 30,000 inhabitants, nearly everyone on the Rock knows the men who work for the drugs barons. Their tinted-windowed cars thud rap music out of rattling speakers as they coast up and down the colony’s tacky main street stuck in second gear. Yet they remain relatively untouched by authorities.

The irony behind the influx of British villains onto Gibraltar is that many of them are drawn to the rock from their whitewashed villas on the Costa del Sol by the very Britishness of the place. Back in 2000 the then Spanish premier José María Aznar handed UK prime minister Tony Blair a file on alleged criminal activity on the Rock which claimed that criminals – including at least six UK gangs – on Gibraltar had begun turning their hand to murder and kidnappings connected to their lucrative criminal enterprises, primarily cocaine.

Down at the Rock’s Queensway Quay Marina, favourable mooring rates and luxurious amenities have encouraged many of the Costa del Sol’s flashier villains to keep their yachts tied up in Gibraltar when they are not out sailing the Med. Every now and again Gibraltar’s UK-supported government is reminded by the big chiefs in Whitehall that they should crack down on the drug barons.

Then orders are issued to seize a few of the smugglers’ favourite boats, the rigid inflatables. But, as happened a few years back, the owners of these craft (the drug barons never have legally proven ownership) usually erupt with indignation, tear into the Rock’s beleaguered police force and cause maximum mayhem.

The result? A discreet pause and then the boats are given back and business carries on as usual. The Rock’s authorities even introduced a law banning any further importation of rigid inflatables. Owners of such boats were ordered to show evidence they were used for bona fide purposes. ‘Now every inflatable owner has paperwork proving that he does boat trips for tourists,’ says one Gibraltar regular. ‘The law was a waste of time but at least it shut Whitehall up.’

But the most important reason why so many British criminals use Gibraltar as a base for their dodgy enterprises is because the Rock is awash with funny money. Of the £3.5 billion floating around Gibraltar (30,000 population, 35,000 registered companies), more than half of it is reckoned to be the proceeds of illicit business dealings, tax avoidance, smuggling and drug trafficking.

In other words, cocaine criminals are good news for Gibraltar. As Thin Phil says: ‘This place can’t survive without all the dodgy characters. We are the backbone of the place. If they get rid of us, they might as well hand it back to the Spanish.’

PART FOUR

THE UK’S COCAINE WARS

The UK has evolved into one of the most lucrative cocaine markets on the planet. Almost £10 billion worth of illegal drugs are sold in the country each year, and cocaine is the second most popular substance, after cannabis, with close to one million regular users. But in Britain, cocaine gets ‘stepped on’ probably more than anywhere else in the world and prices vary from £30 to £100 per gram.

Consider this: cocaine can be purchased wholesale from Colombian cartels for around £1,500 a kilo. The same drug, cut and sold in London will fetch more than £100,000 a kilo. As one cocaine baron told me: ‘It’s a fuckin’ gold rush, mate. There’s nothing like London when it comes to good, old-fashioned profit.’

Figures released by HM Revenue & Customs show that 3,120kg of cocaine was seized in the UK in 2012, an increase of more than 20 per cent over the previous four years. Yet at least 40,000kg of cocaine still manages to slip into the UK every year, despite supposedly this nation’s supposedly ‘airtight’ border controls.

But who are the characters behind this cocaine boom in the UK? And why has it thrived and become such an immensely popular narcotic among the general population?

CHAPTER 25

HJ

Even in superficially civilised countries like the UK, crooked law enforcement officials play a vital role as far as cocaine barons are concerned. I’ve been told many times that for the right price, police, judges, even politicians can be ‘bought’ in Britain to provide essential inside information and influence in the ‘right places’ so that coke barons can keep one step ahead of the authorities.

Some cynics claim this is just a case of boasting criminals having a dig at their old enemies by pretending they are all ‘bent’. But my research into this book shows that for the right price there are officials in the UK who can be bribed. Former police officer ‘HJ’ sums it all up perfectly. I can’t even say which force he served with or his rank because it would give away his identity. HJ received a prison sentence in the UK for providing ‘help’ to some of the most powerful cocaine gangsters in Britain.

Tracking down ‘bent coppers’ inside the deadly world of cocaine is even harder than meeting the gangsters themselves. Not surprisingly, most of these characters are extremely reluctant to break cover. HJ only agreed to meet me because I was known to a number of his associates, who vouched for me.

However, no book about the criminal underworld of cocaine would be complete without speaking to characters like HJ to understand the complex nature of the cocaine ‘business’ and its immense power and influence. I’d also been told in advance that HJ was a down-to-earth, surprisingly open character prepared to talk about his ‘sins’ and how, ironically, it was cocaine itself which had sent him down such a duplicitous path in the first place.

Our first meeting took place in a quiet pub near HJ’s home in the Essex countryside. HJ had endured many years in prison as a ‘bent copper’ – which surely would have made him the ultimate target for many inmates. Yet he insisted he did not have any problems while serving his sentence. Maybe some of the powerful cocaine barons who’d paid him for information in the first place made sure he was protected?

‘No. It was nothing to do with them that I was left alone in prison,’ said HJ. ‘I’m just not the sort of person to rub people up the wrong way. I served my time and kept a low profile throughout and people seemed to respect me for it. Of course it wasn’t easy but I survived it and actually in some ways I learned a lot when I was inside. Not enough police officers take the time to understand the “enemy”. If they did, then maybe a lot more criminals would have a better impression of the police.’

But it was HJ’s encounters with some of the UK’s most powerful cocaine barons that interested me the most. How did these criminals trace him in the first place? I asked.

‘Oh, it was all very predictable, really,’ answered HJ. ‘I was dealing with these sorts of criminals virtually the whole time as part of various long-standing investigations into drug gangsters. But the first time I got “tempted” was when I nicked a couple of guys who were part of a big coke gang and one of them mentioned that his boss needed some information.’

HJ continued: ‘That first time I just laughed it off because I’d heard about guys like this offering bribes to cops many times before but I never actually thought they’d be stupid enough to actually try it. I wasn’t in the slightest bit bothered. Looking back on it, I brushed it off without a moment’s thought.’

But, unknown to most of his colleagues at the time, HJ had himself developed a serious cocaine habit since busting another drugs gang some years earlier. He explained: ‘I’d gone undercover for a while and that involved having to snort coke in order to be accepted into a circle of criminals. Trouble is I liked the stuff too much! It made me feel confident and positive and, quite frankly, for a while I actually think it improved my skills as a detective!

‘But cocaine addiction creeps up on you when you are least expecting it. You can easily go home at night, stop taking it until you’re next out with the lads. But the trouble is that once you start taking it outside party hours, it develops into something you really rely on in order to get through the day at work. And that’s what happened to me. I’d become a serious cokehead and it was impacting on every aspect of my life but back then I don’t think I realised it. I was in complete denial about the damage I was doing to myself.

‘I’d even found a coke dealer to buy my stuff from. He didn’t realise I was a copper. He was a decent bloke in many ways. Just doing a job like the rest of us, I guess. But I was starting to need more and more of it every day and soon it was costing me hundreds of pounds every week to maintain the habit. That’s when I got “vulnerable”, as they call it in the Force.’

The other not insignificant problem was that HJ’s modest police salary didn’t pay enough to cover his cocaine habit, as well as supporting his wife and two young children. ‘It was causing no end of problems at home. I hadn’t told my wife I was hooked on coke. She thought I was having an affair with someone at work and the atmosphere at home was awful. Our two little children obviously had no idea what was going on, but I was either high as a kite or in a bad temper from coke-comedown, so I wasn’t exactly being a loving father, either.’

Desperate to feed his coke habit and equally desperate to feed his wife and family, HJ contacted a criminal who’d once offered him ‘good money’ if he could help him with ‘a few favours’ after meeting him during a police raid on the gangster’s home in the Home Counties.

HJ recalled: ‘This guy was a big player in the cocaine trade and he liked to keep one step ahead of his friends and enemies. I knew what I was getting myself into but I was desperate to keep my family together. I felt I had no choice, even though it was all my fault in the first place.’

A meeting in the car park of a motorway service station followed. ‘This character had an appalling record for violence, including an attack on a policeman, but I was so deep in the hole by this time that I didn’t really care. I just wanted money and I would do pretty much anything to get it.’

Within weeks, HJ had been ‘pulled in hook, line and sinker’ by his new criminal paymaster. He explained: ‘It seemed like easy money at first. I’d trace a few car registrations then swap that info for an envelope with £500 in it. I actually convinced myself it wasn’t harming anyone particularly. What an idiot I was.’

But gradually those ‘favours’ began to stack up and the information required became more and more sensitive. ‘One time he wanted to know the details of a statement given against him by another criminal. I must have been mad to help him with that because it was obvious he would “sort out” the guy, who’d given evidence against him. I was effectively endangering this guy’s life just for a few bob. I look back on what I did with disgust at myself. How could I have been so ruthless and coldhearted? I’m shocked by it even now. But I suppose it was the cocaine addiction driving me on all the time. I liked to have at least a gram on me at all times. It made me feel I was in control. How twisted up is that?’

The same ‘Mister Big’ was also rumoured to have used firearms to ‘sort out’ his enemies. ‘He was charming to me but I could see the killer in his eyes every time we met. But I ignored it and put on a chummy voice just to keep him happy. Looking back on it, he was probably the coldest person I’ve ever met and I knew my own life would be in danger if I ever crossed him.’

But the same ‘Mister Big’ was so impressed with HJ’s information that he began proudly recommending HJ’s ‘services’ to other powerful criminal faces in the south-east of England. ‘That’s when the money really started flooding in,’ said HJ.

‘A whole load of other gangsters started wanting me to get them info and they began paying me in thousands instead of hundreds for much more sensitive, inside stuff. I started blowing even more on coke, which made me more and more greedy for the money. I was turning into a physical wreck, hardly able to operate on a day-to-day basis. I was only sleeping a couple of hours each night because I was so high on cocaine. I was a complete mess.’

HJ believes the cocaine he was snorting was effectively helping him ‘totally ignore’ the consequences of his actions. ‘I went into a state of cocaine-induced denial, I guess. I tried my hardest not to think about how the info was being used. It was pathetic really. I should have called a halt there and then but I needed the cash, which gave me the freedom to take as much coke as I wanted and provide for my family. For a while, it seemed like the perfect combination. But I knew it couldn’t go on for ever.’

HJ claims that at one stage being known in the criminal fraternity as a ‘bent copper’ helped him infiltrate some of the most powerful cocaine gangs. ‘I was a copper they could actually trust. They knew they had something over me so I wasn’t likely to get them nicked, which was completely true. At one stage I had the ear of some of the most notorious gangsters in the Home Counties. Sometimes they even provided me with small tips about rival criminals whenever they wanted people removed from the drugs business. I actually had a higher arrest record than virtually all my colleagues at the time.’

For the following two years, HJ provided more and more inside information to cocaine gangs. He explained: ‘And like any drug addict, I didn’t know how to stop. I should have recognised that the things I was being asked to do would eventually lead to me but I just stumbled along. I was checking bank accounts, phone records, police reports on known criminals. I accessed witness statements in big drug cases. It was crazy, irresponsible and highly dangerous. Many innocent people could have been harmed by this information leaking into the wrong hands.’

Then one of the UK’s biggest cocaine criminals began using HJ’s ‘services’. He explained: ‘I got a big payment of many thousands of pounds from this one gangster to find out some info about one of his rivals in the coke game. That information indirectly led to a shooting incident. No one was actually killed but the incident sparked a very thorough police investigation and that’s when my activities were finally flagged up.’

HJ recalled: ‘Looking back at it, I probably would have died of cocaine poisoning if that hadn’t have happened. I was taking four, sometimes even five grams of coke a day and trying to juggle my work as a detective with a young family, all of whom were sick of me coming home late at night drunk and coked out of my mind. In many ways, I was incredibly relieved when two officers came knocking on my door and said they knew what I’d been up to. I’d had enough of hiding everything from the people I love and from my colleagues. I needed help but up until that point I had been too scared to ask.’

Perhaps surprisingly, HJ claims that few of his colleagues criticised him after his double dealing corruption was exposed. ‘Sure, they were shocked. Look, I’d been a good copper with an excellent record even in the middle of taking bribes to provide criminals with info. Some officers I didn’t know personally refused to even give me the time of day. But instead of slagging me off, my closest colleagues genuinely tried to help me sort out the mess I was in and I will always be grateful to them for that. They seemed to recognise what my cocaine addiction had done to me.’

HJ was immediately booked into a clinic to get him off cocaine and alcohol while detectives mounted an in-depth investigation into his criminal activities and connections to some of the country’s most powerful cocaine trafficking gangs. ‘When they unravelled what I’d been up to, even I was surprised. Just like my coke addiction, I had let it creep up on me. I just hadn’t realised how many times I’d been bribed.’

Eventually, police investigators uncovered the full extent to which HJ had provided highly classified information to criminals. ‘I was shocked when I heard how many times I’d done it. It was completely out of control like my drug habit. The bribes had become a vital part of my income. I’d got so used to accepting an envelope crammed with notes that I’d started to consider it perfectly normal.’

HJ’s biggest priority after his arrest was to protect his family. ‘They were completely innocent and had no idea what I’d been up to. I was very lucky my wife stuck by me. I didn’t deserve it. But I’ll never forget the shame I felt when I sat her down and told her everything that had happened. I’d let everyone down. I can’t really ever forgive myself for doing that.’

But HJ’s problems were not over yet; his gangster ‘customers’ posed a real threat to his safety and that of his family. ‘Obviously, these criminals were worried I was going to name them, so I had to make a really hard choice: I could either spill the beans about who they were and get a lighter sentence or I could protect my family’s safety and just serve the longer sentence, which I knew the judge would give me for failing to fully cooperate with my colleagues.’

Even HJ’s former police workmates genuinely sympathised with his dilemma. ‘They all knew that my life and that of my family would be in danger if I provided the names of those criminals who’d bribed me. I didn’t want to protect them but I felt I had no choice.’

When HJ was given a ‘lengthy sentence’ he took it philosophically. He explained: ‘It sounded a long time when I heard the sentence but I knew they had to make an example of me. If that helps put any other young coppers off accepting a bribe then at least something good has come out of all this.

‘My main priority was to serve my sentence and then get out and be with my family once again. I got what I deserved. I have no complaints about the way I was treated by the police. I had broken the golden rule in every sense of the word. But the way I look at it is that I am lucky to be alive. If I hadn’t been busted as a bent copper, I might have ended dying from a cocaine overdose and then where would my family have been?’

HJ’s insight into the UK’s cocaine wars is unique: ‘I’ve met many of these characters. I have dealt with them first hand and I can tell you that none of the big players would hesitate to kill if someone got in their way. The only reason I survived is because I didn’t squeal on them.’

Today, HJ lives a quiet, reserved life in Middle England. His children are grown up. He works occasionally as a gardener and his wife has a fulltime job. ‘She’s stuck by me through thick and thin and proved beyond doubt that there is nothing more important in your life than your family.’

HJ added: ‘Cocaine undoubtedly drove me into criminality. I took it initially in order to infiltrate the gangsters and then bring them to justice. But coke got hold of me, turned me into an addict and then I made an appalling choice. It was all down to me. There is no one else to blame and now that I have finally worked that out, I am much more at peace with what I did.

‘I am back with my family in relative safety. I haven’t touched a drink in years, let alone been tempted to snort a line. I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones, though.’

But what about the characters who get sucked into the cocaine business when they have nowhere else to turn?

CHAPTER 26

JOEY

Joey doesn’t look like your average urban street criminal. He’s in his mid-fifties, vastly overweight and was once a well-known professional footballer with international caps to his name. But like so many sportsmen of yesteryear, Joey hit on hard times and now he works as a ‘runner’ for one of Manchester’s most ruthless coke barons.

‘I’m not proud of what I do but I need the money desperately,’ explains Joey, in a soft, nervous voice. ‘Being a professional footballer doesn’t really prepare you for the rest of your life and all the pitfalls which are out there.’

Joey tried his hand at coaching after retiring from the game back in the late 1980s. ‘But it didn’t work out and I got fired three times from successive clubs. That’s when football turned its back on me and I realised I had to stop relying on others to help me.’

The following ten years were, says Joey, ‘a complete disaster zone’. He recalled: ‘My wife left me. I lost touch with my two kids and I spent much of that time either sleeping on friends’ settees or snatching the odd night in a cheap hotel. I got a few low-paid jobs but they never lasted long. It was awful and in the end, not surprisingly, I couldn’t pull in any more favours.’

He went on: ‘I remember one night I was in a pub supping a pint paid for with my last ten bob and these two guys came in and recognised me from my playing days. I hoped they’d just buy me a drink and be on their way but they stopped and chatted with me. Turned out both men were supporters of the biggest club I ever played for and they were shocked when I told them I was broke and virtually homeless.’

He went on: ‘They were like so many others, who always presume you earn so much money from football you never have to work again. But it just wasn’t like that back in my day.’

The two men in the pub turned out to be relatives of one of Manchester’s most powerful criminals. ‘Obviously these two didn’t mention their background when I first met them but they assured me they had this rich and successful uncle, who might be able to put some work my way. Naturally, I was all ears.’

Within a couple of weeks, Joey was working fulltime as a ‘runner’ for their uncle, who turned out to be a ruthless cocaine baron. ‘I didn’t really have a choice. I needed to survive and, in any case, I wasn’t dealing in the stuff. I simply agreed to run errands for this guy and he said he’d pay me handsomely,’ recalled Joey. ‘I know he got a kick from having a football star working for him but, frankly, I didn’t care where the money came from as long as I earned some.’

Joey’s experiences working as a runner for a coke gang provide a fascinating insight into the way that cocaine has pervaded all aspects of British life.

‘Coke is the stuff that fuels so much in the underworld as far as I can tell,’ Joey told me. ‘Sure, a lot of villains do other “work” but it’s coke that seems to be the main earner. They call it white gold in these parts and I can see why.’

Joey describes himself as an oddball who doesn’t really fit into the underworld he is now part of.

‘For starters, I don’t do drugs. But I think that’s one of the reasons I got this job in the first place. The boss trusts me implicitly because he knows that, unlike most of his boys, I am not out of my head all the time. Alcohol is my poison of choice,’ Joey went on. ‘I like a pint or three but drugs are off my radar. They are evil.’

Joey said he’d witnessed shootings, torture and blatant intimidation of witnesses in court cases during the time he’d worked for ‘the boss’. He recalled: ‘Listen, I don’t really approve of a lot of what has been done but the victims are other criminals, so it’s the price they have to pay.’

Then there are the ‘civilians’ who find themselves indirectly linked to the cocaine wars in places like Manchester. ‘I’ve met judges, doctors, lawyers, the lot and they’re all hooked on coke,’ he asserted. ‘Before I started working for the boss, I thought only the poor and desperate took drugs, not the rich and powerful. It’s made me think differently about the whole question of drugs and whether they should be legalised. I mean, if everyone’s up to it then what’s the point in outlawing it?’

But Joey himself refuses to have anything to do with the actual drug: ‘As a runner for the boss I’m expected to do all his errands but I’d never sell coke to anyone. That’s always someone else’s job. I don’t want the responsibility of it. One time, I heard that the footballer son of a pro I played with in the early days was buying coke from one of my boss’s dealers. I went ballistic and asked him to stop his guy supplying the kid. He thought I was mad but at least he had the decency to stop flogging it to the lad after I had a word.’

Joey went on: ‘It’s such a waste for a footballer – or any top sportsman for that matter – to get hooked on drugs. One day I even went round and saw this same kid and tried to persuade him to stop taking coke altogether. It was a mad thing to do because the boss would have probably fired me and had me beaten up for going round there. But I was that angry. Luckily he never found out.’

Joey’s ‘duties’ as a runner range from picking up his boss’s kids from school to looking after his property empire – all paid for out of his multi-million-pound cocaine business.

‘This guy is loaded and the majority of his cash comes from cocaine. He left school at fourteen but he has a razor-sharp level of intelligence. In many ways he was better off not being a football star like I was, because it meant he could develop as an adult at a much faster pace.

‘I was scooped out of school at fifteen, fast-tracked into the first team and played my heart out for fifteen years before being dumped on the scrapheap in my early thirties. It destroyed my self-esteem and left me incapable of doing things for myself. The boss is the opposite. He taught himself everything but then he is always saying that “knowledge is power” and he’s right. I have little real knowledge and even less power.’

Joey’s insight into the world of the cocaine criminals also shows how the coke trade helps finance a vast range of ‘straight’ businesses.

He explained: ‘The boss reckons that one day he’ll ditch the coke business and concentrate on his property portfolio and other legitimate businesses that he’s been able to purchase with his drugs cash. That’s the dream for so many of these types of characters. They see themselves as breadwinners for the family. Many – like my boss – are workaholics determined to make their fortune by whatever means they can. In some ways their work ethic is admirable, even if the business of selling drugs is not.’

Joey reckons he’ll see out another five years as a runner for the Boss ‘if I’m lucky’. He explained: ‘I’m a bit old for this game, to put it mildly. The boss saved me from the scrapheap, so I am grateful to him but I also recognise that one day my time will come and I’ll have to walk away from all this.’

Others enjoy being immersed in this complex, deadly ‘business’ so much that their entire world revolves around cocaine.

CHAPTER 27

BECKI

Colombian ‘businesswoman’ Becki is based in London. She earns a fortune and lives a life of luxury, including renting a £5,000-a-week apartment. Oh, and there’s a limo driver to take her to £100-a-head restaurants, as well as regular shopping trips to all the classic designer-clothes stores in the West End. You see, Becki’s ‘job’ for the past decade has been to organise the supply of vast shipments of Colombia’s finest to many of the UK’s most hardened criminals. And that cocaine has undoubtedly helped turn London into the coke-snorting capital city of the world.

Becki’s transformation from a prim, naive teenage Colombian ‘cleaner’ who arrived in London 25 years ago into a manicured, sophisticated 44-year-old drug baroness perfectly reflects how the top end of the cocaine business can transform someone’s life. Becki insists to this day that she originally sought to escape Colombia because of its drugs and violence, without a hint of irony in her voice. She married a Brit shortly after arriving in London and told him she had serious ambitions to be a lawyer.

But instead Becki has risen through the ranks to become a mega-powerful Colombian cartel ‘representative’ in Europe. In the middle of all this, she even found time to marry for a second time, to a London-based Peruvian. The couple eventually had two children.

Becki’s ‘career’ within one of South America’s most powerful cocaine cartels began in late 1998 when she was arrested for shoplifting in London. While in prison awaiting trial, Becki was recruited by a Colombian inmate to work as a ‘mule’ for one of the cartels from her home city of Cali, then renowned as the world’s biggest single producer of cocaine. Desperate for money, Becki – who was eventually only fined for shop-lifting – agreed to start smuggling cocaine into the UK.

Then the following year – 1999 – Becki was arrested in possession of a suitcase packed with cocaine at Bogotá’s El Dorado airport. Many believe she was shopped by her second husband, who’d become very unhappy with his wife’s connections to the cocaine industry and her regular visits back and forth between the UK and Colombia.

However, Becki served just nine months in prison in Bogotá after her cocaine cartel bosses persuaded authorities to give her a light sentence. They were also greatly impressed she hadn’t informed on them.

Thanks to the British passport she got after her first marriage, Becki was soon back in London, where she began dating a debonair Colombian cartel boss, renowned for his short temper and predilection for gaudy velvet jackets and Stetsons.

Becki was quickly ‘promoted’ by the cartel chiefs to organise safe houses across London for illegal Colombian immigrants who were working on behalf of the cartel. Becki remained one step ahead of UK law enforcement by making sure her henchmen and teams of couriers moved to different addresses on virtually a weekly basis.

To those who met her at that time, Becki seemed a highly respectable member of the ever-growing Colombian community based in and around the Elephant and Castle area of south London. But it was reckoned that at least 20,000 illegal Colombians had slipped into the UK ‘underneath the radar’ over the previous five years. Many had arrived in London as tourists and then simply ‘disappeared’. Others – like Becki more than ten years earlier – had immediately sought out Brits to marry.

In the summer of 2007 Becki was promoted to recruiter and master smuggler for the Cali cartel. That earned her the elevated title of La Patrona or, in English, ‘the lady boss’. By this time Becki was said to be raking in a salary of at least £30,000 a month.

She purchased three properties in London and even splashed out £100,000 on a Bentley as a birthday present for her Colombian lover. But she never lived in those properties, preferring to earn more income by renting them out while she lived in that £5,000-a-month penthouse.

Becki – standing just a shade over five feet when not in a pair of her favourite strappy platform shoes – then ‘invested’ some of her fortune on the skills of a fashionable London cosmetic surgeon. She eventually spent many thousands of pounds on liposuction for her stomach and hips. She even had the wrinkles removed from under her eyes, and she couldn’t resist getting her breasts enlarged either.

My introduction to Becki came through a veteran British criminal who’d known Becki for most of the time she’d been in London. He told me: ‘She’s the real thing, mate. You’ll see it in her eyes. Cold as stone but she’s got balls that one, if you know what I mean.’

Becki insisted on meeting me in an expensive West End restaurant. She arrived with two ‘associates’ who then peeled off towards the bar after she’d spotted me at a table.

I had been surprised Becki had even agreed to talk to me on the phone, let alone meet me in plain sight of the whole of London. Within moments of sitting down I found out why. ‘I was intrigued to meet you because you wrote about one of my friends in another of your books,’ said Becki.

‘I could tell from the way you wrote about my friend that you actually knew something about this business. In any case, it’s better you get your facts right, so here I am.’

Becki opened her Gucci handbag and took out a gold-plated iPhone and tapped something out. Moments later, she showed me a clip of myself giving a TV interview. ‘I also studied your website and you have the right attitude. Most journalists and writers simply condemn people like me without trying to find out who we really are. But, you know? I’m just a businesswoman trying to make a good living for my family. I deal in a product that is in big demand. What is so wrong with that?’

For the next hour and a half, Becki and I covered everything from her commitment to family life to her hatred of taking cocaine, which she said she detested. ‘Listen, if I sold honey as a commodity that wouldn’t mean I’d necessarily like it myself. I think in many ways I am more able to understand the emotional aspects of cocaine as a product because I don’t take it. I step back from it and look on it purely as a business.’

Becki says she adores London and has no intention of ever returning to Colombia. ‘This is my home now. This is where I intend to stay. I like the British. They can laugh and they can cry. They understand the realities of this world much more than, say, the Americans.’

But, I ask, are you safe here? Does your ‘job’ make you a target for other cocaine gangsters? Becki looked into my eyes with a very serious expression on her face. ‘Safe? Of course I am safe. I do not do anything bad to other people. I operate within the company I represent. We do not steal from our competitors and we do not expect them to steal from us.’

Yes, I probe, but would you ‘take out’ an opponent if he was threatening your safety and your liberty? ‘Of course there are times when things have to be done to protect the business. But we are serious people, not cocaine-snorting gangsters like Tony Soprano. We know how to behave and how to get the best from our workforce.’

So why is Becki based in London? ‘Oh, I’m sure you know the answer to that one yourself,’ she replies. ‘The UK is now the biggest market in Europe for our product. You Brits take a lot of cocaine and we can get the highest prices right here in London. It is always best to have a representative in every country where our business is successful.’

Are there ever moments when Becki has to ‘take measures’ against her own staff?

‘Everything in this business is kept as low key as possible. We do not want to alert the wrong sort of people to our activities. That is the way it is. If there are problems we try to deal with those problems quietly and efficiently. If someone has to pay for their mistakes then that is done discreetly. Sure, we have to sometimes send out a message to others not to break our company rules but thankfully those incidents are very rare.’

Becki tried to switch the conversation to more mundane subjects, such as the high cost of living in London. ‘It costs a lot of money to live here and we have to factor in all those sorts of expenses when we are costing up our product for the UK and European markets. It’s so expensive here I sometimes wonder how anyone still has money to spend on our product! But then I found out long ago that products like ours take priority with most users. They usually always find a way to afford to buy some, however little they are earning.’

A few moments later, one of Becki’s muscle-bound associates – who’d been sitting at the bar watching us throughout lunch – appeared by her side and whispered something in her ear. Becki nodded and grimaced.

‘I’m sorry, it is time for me to go. I wish you well with your book but please make sure you represent my opinions accurately,’ she said very coolly.

‘Of course I will,’ I replied.

Within seconds, Becki had walked out of the restaurant and was getting into the back of a black chauffeur-driven Mercedes, which had been parked outside for the entire lunch. As it glided off into the busy Central London traffic, Becki turned and glanced in my direction. It looked a bit like a threatening grimace but then again it might have been nothing of the sort.

I gathered together the rest of Becki’s life history from veteran British criminal Georgie, who had introduced us in the first place. ‘She’s a tough nut, that one,’ said Georgie. ‘D’you know, they say she once had a bloke topped just for being rude to her boyfriend in a nightclub. This kid was another Colombian and he ended up in a dustbin on a council estate in Islington. She’s a heavyweight operator. No doubt about it.’

La Patrona Becki wasn’t answering her mobile phone when I tried to reach her the following day to thank her for coming to lunch with me.

Georgie later told me that the mobile she had used that day would have been thrown away and replaced every 24 hours as part of her attempt to ensure that law enforcement could not track her movements.

‘You’ll never hear from her again. She was playin’ with you but now she’s probably decided you’re a bit close to home, so she’s gonna avoid you like the plague from now on.’

A couple of weeks later, I saw La Patrona swaggering confidently down a small side street in Soho, central London. She was on the phone and smoking a cigarette at the same time. For a split second she looked up at me but her eyes tilted downwards almost immediately.

As Georgie would later tell me: ‘That’s the way it is with characters like Becki. You don’t exist to her any more. She’s got far more important fish to fry, old son.’

But what about the so-called ‘Cocaine Soldiers’, the characters who bring the product onto these shores?

CHAPTER 28

KEN

Ken is not your average UK cocaine trafficker by anyone’s standards. In the ‘real world’ he is a fisherman who works out of a small, under-used fishing port in the south of England. Trouble is, there isn’t much call for the sort of catches he used to pride himself on, so he ‘subsidises’ his income with a catch of cocaine at least once a month. And it’s not something he’s particularly proud of.

‘I come from a long line of fishermen,’ says Ken. ‘My great-grandfather died at sea in a storm. My boat was handed down to me by my dad and his dad had a similar one before him and my great-grandfather started this all before the beginning of the First World War. That’s how far back my fishing gene goes,’ says Ken. ‘They’d all turn in their graves if they knew how I made ends meet these days.’

Ken claims he’s transported ‘big loads’ of coke over the past ten years on behalf of a gang of British cocaine traffickers. The value of those shipments must be worth at least tens of millions of pounds but Ken’s share was a drop in the ocean in comparison.

‘I try not to think about the money those bastards are making thanks to me,’ says Ken. ‘I also try not to think about the damage drugs do to people but I feel as if I have no choice in the matter. Supporting my family is my main priority.’

Ken explains his monthly ‘pick-up’ of cocaine: ‘I get a call about three or four days before to say that it’s on and where I am to take the boat for the pick-up. It’s never the same spot twice. These guys are professionals and they know that the customs people are always trying to work out regular patterns, which might lead them to a drug haul.

‘Anyway, I usually get a bit twitchy after that first call because it’s a reality check in a sense. It means I’m about to risk my livelihood and my freedom in order to earn some much needed extra cash. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with in my head. I know I’m breaking the law and I never do that in the rest of my life. I am actually a very straight, law-abiding person.

‘D’you know, I don’t even drink, let alone take drugs when I am home. I hate taking risks with my health and I try to impress that upon my children because I want them to live a long and healthy life.

‘Anyway, usually, I get another mobile call confirming the arrangements for the pick-up about five or six hours before I set sail, as sometimes the weather can delay things. The pick-ups always happen in daylight because it’s much less suspicious than working at night when the customs people expect the bad people to be out getting up to no good.’

Ken sounds uncomfortable even speaking about his ‘other life’ as a cocaine smuggler. ‘I’m not proud of what I do. I wish there was some other way to support my family but there isn’t. Anyhow, I set sail solo from where my boat is kept. It’s a tiny vessel with a small wheelhouse and I sail her solo with no crew.’

Ken says he believes that many of his fellow fishermen at the port do similar drugs runs but these men rarely admit to each other what they are up to. ‘It’s better not to talk to people about all this. All it takes is one big mouth in the pub and the next thing you know the long arm of the law comes knocking.

‘I usually follow some scribbled-down map references given to me by the man at the other end of the phone. I never know exactly what to expect. It could be a buoy with a package attached to it or it might be a bigger vessel or even a small cargo ship. It varies and to be frank about it, I try my hardest not to look anyone in the eye as the exchange takes place.

‘I don’t want to know who these characters are and I’m sure they feel the same way about me. It’s never a very big package and it’s usually in a waterproof holdall, which I sling somewhere safe for the journey back home.’

Ken pauses for breath. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot: there are occasions when they drop it by mini-parachute. That’s a lot more hairy, I can tell you. I always feel a bit insecure when a small plane comes hurtling along about fifty feet above the water. There is something quite sinister about it and I always have this moment of wondering if I am sailing into a trap.’

He continues: ‘One time I got a call on my mobile after I’d got to the pick-up point to tell me the job was off. I was well pissed off but they paid me £2,000 anyway, so I didn’t complain.’

Ken says he’s never once been searched by law enforcement officials at sea. ‘I guess my activities are monitored regularly and I must have passed all the basic “tests” because they’ve never even tried to board my boat in all the years I’ve been doing this.’

The strip of southern coastline that Ken ‘fishes’ from is a traditional fishing area and he reckons that’s one of the main reasons why his activities have never flagged him up. ‘It’s also the main reason why I got approached to do this work in the first place.’

Ken believes his ‘straight’ approach to life has also made him more trusted by the coke traffickers he works for. ‘Yeah, at first they seemed a bit bemused by my attitude towards life but I reckon it made them feel more secure about me. I’ve heard of other fishermen round these parts who’ve got into taking cocaine themselves and then started shouting their mouths off. Not good.’

Once back on shore, Ken places the bag filled with cocaine in the garage of his home and waits for a knock on the door.

‘They’re very discreet. It’s always the same guy who comes round and he never shows up late at night. My wife thinks he’s a mate of mine who borrows some of my fishing tackle and that’s the way I intend to keep it.’

The same man hands Ken an envelope with his fee. He explained: ‘It’s usually £5,000. I know it’s not much considering the risks I take but it’s regular money and without it, I’d be in deep financial trouble.’

But how did a man with no criminal connections get involved in the cocaine business? ‘This is going to sound so stupid but I was painting the hull of my boat one afternoon and this bloke came up and engaged me in conversation. He didn’t give away any clues about what he was up to, except to say that he might have some “extra work” for me after I mentioned how hard it was to make a decent living from catching fish.

‘I thought nothing of it at first. Then the same guy appeared a week later and asked me if I was prepared to pick up a package, no questions asked. I was pretty fed up at the time. The overdraft at the bank was massive. I was in arrears on our mortgage repayments and I couldn’t even afford to get my car mended when it broke down. So I said okay. I remember thinking what an idiot I was at the time, but I gave this bloke my word I’d do it. He cleverly advanced me £2,000 then and there on the spot. I was astonished but I knew the moment he put that money in my hand that I needed to get more of where that came from.

‘The stupid thing is that the bloke could have been anyone; he might even have been a policeman trying to trap me. But I was so broke and so low at that time I would have accepted the money from just about anyone.’

Ken believes that the biggest risks come from the criminals he is dealing with. ‘All it needs is for the police to get hold of a mobile phone with my number on it and I could be in big trouble. It’s pretty obvious what I’ve been up to once they discover I am a fisherman with my own boat.’

But for the time being, Ken says, he intends to keep working for the traffickers. ‘Just so long as they don’t try and make me work more than once a month. That’s my golden rule and I reckon that’s part of the reason why I’ve never been nicked. I’ve told them straight that I won’t do it more than once a month and they seem to have accepted that.’

Meanwhile Ken continues to carefully cultivate the image of a hard-up fisherman going about his business. ‘I keep the boat looking scruffy. I drive a battered ten-year-old car and I make sure that no one gets a whiff of my extra “salary”.’

He goes on: ‘I can’t defend what I do but I do now sympathise more with the poor people who get caught up in the drugs world. There are fishermen all over the world struggling to make a living, so it’s not surprising that some of them succumb to temptation and do a bit of smuggling on the side, is it?’

It’s reckoned that ‘civilian’ coke smugglers like Ken are a lot more prevalent in the UK than we realise. He has a simple reaction when I put that to him: ‘Plucking a bag filled with cocaine off another boat is still probably the safest way to bring the stuff onto these shores. We’re an island and nothing will change that.’

But then Ken is not the only one to have been sucked into the cocaine smuggling game simply because he needed the money …

CHAPTER 29

STEVE

Like so many ex-servicemen, soldier Steve found himself jobless and drifting through life without any real direction after three ‘very lively’ tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then he and another war vet decided to set up an air transport business to move cocaine between Europe and the UK.

‘Basically, we were bored,’ says Steve. ‘We’d spent the best part of ten years on high alert in every sense of the word. It was all such an anticlimax to get back to the UK. The army just doesn’t prepare you for the “come down”. It’s intense and sends you spiralling into depression and hopelessness. We decided we had to do something exciting.’

The first step towards becoming a drugs trafficker was when Steve’s ‘partner’ splashed out £2,000 on flying lessons for both of them. Then they bought a single-engine aircraft with a £30,000 bank loan, knowing it would be perfect for transporting drugs from the Netherlands and France into the south-east of England.

‘Looking back on it, I must have been stark, staring mad,’ says Steve today. ‘But I had to find a way to earn a living and doing this seemed the answer because it combined a bit of adventure with making a few bob. My mate was more up for it than me, so I kind of got swept along by his enthusiasm.’

How had he made the first connection with someone in the cocaine ‘business’?

‘We’d met this cocaine dealer in my local pub and he said there was a real shortage of pilots and planes, so we set up a meeting with a middleman in London. We only met him for about ten minutes. He said he’d had us checked out and we were fine by him. I was amazed that he could be so certain about us since he hardly knew us.

‘Anyway, he called me three days later and said he’d be in touch with all the coordinates for our first pick-up. When I asked about payment he said “two hundred grand”. I gulped with amazement because it was even more money then we had hoped for. What neither of us realised was that they always pay you well the first time and then it’s downhill all the way.’

Steve and his fellow ex-soldier’s first assignment involved hiding ‘at least £5 million worth of cocaine’ in the wings of their light plane. ‘It was a right hairy journey because the weather was shit and we flew very low across the Channel to avoid being picked up by radar. But I have to admit that when we touched down back in Suffolk the feeling of excitement was overwhelming. It was the nearest thing to being back in Iraq and Afghanistan and I guess that was really what we were both looking for.’

That first cocaine deal netted the pair the promised £200,000 in cash from the gang. It only then emerged that the gangsters had urgently needed to find someone to complete the final leg of the cocaine’s journey from South America after their original pilot let them down. ‘I guess that’s why they paid so much that first time. We were chipper about the money, though. It was more than either of us had ever seen in our lives,’ explained Steve. ‘It all seemed so easy.’

Within a month, the pair had agreed to fly back across the Channel to pick up another shipment of cocaine. ‘But this time it was a much bigger amount,’ says Steve. ‘We suspected that first pick-up had been a bit of a test by the gangsters who hired us and now we were being put to work properly but we really didn’t care. They casually mentioned a fee of £500,000. We were gobsmacked. The money was out of this world.’

This time the two men took off in their light aircraft from a farmer’s field in Suffolk and headed across to Holland where they were instructed to land on a small airstrip before taxiing to a large warehouse on the edge of the runway.

‘Looking back on it, it was a bit of a voyage into the unknown. But we were used to that feeling in war zones and at least this didn’t seem nearly as dangerous. We hadn’t been told much about the people we were picking up the coke from and I remember turning to my partner [Steve refuses to name him] and saying, “What the fuck are we doing here, mate?” and then we both laughed nervously and thought about all that money which would be in our pockets within a few hours.’

As the plane taxied towards the warehouse after touching down, six men appeared from inside the building armed with Uzi machine guns. ‘That was the first sign that this really was a much heavier deal than that first run. D’you know? We’d never even seen anyone with a shooter on the first job.’

Within moments of turning off the plane’s engine, the six armed men had formed a ring around the aircraft. ‘It was as if they were saying to us that we couldn’t now leave until they decided it was time. It was a bit unnerving because it suddenly dawned on us that our lives were entirely in their hands. At least in a war zone we’d have been able to shoot our way out but we’d both decided not to carry guns. How stupid was that?’

Steve says the other really unnerving thing about the operation was that virtually no words were exchanged between the armed men and the two ex-servicemen. ‘I never quite worked out if that was because they didn’t speak much English or because they simply did not want to give anything away about themselves. But it made the atmosphere even more tense.’

Steve and his partner abided by the no-speaking rule and stepped to the side of the plane where they both lit up cigarettes and tried to look relaxed while the coke was packed onto the plane.

‘Not once did any of them ask us where was the best place to stash the coke but it soon became obvious that these guys were the real deal when it came to packing cocaine onto a small aircraft. They quickly found compartments I didn’t even know existed and the coke was carefully spread all over the aircraft. The guys were real professionals.’

Just one hour after landing at the isolated strip in Holland, the six armed men stepped back from the plane and nodded at Steve and his partner to take off. ‘It was weird but the moment they stepped back we realised they’d finished packing it all on board. So without so much as a smile or a word between us, we boarded and took off.’

The forty-minute flight was relatively uneventful. Steve explained: ‘We had all the coordinates for where to land and soon we spotted the roofs of a bunch of cars, which had been carefully parked on a field to help guide us in. My partner was at the controls and he got us down with relative ease.’

Steve continues: ‘The adrenalin rush when we landed safely was extraordinary. It looked as if everything had gone smoothly and now all we needed to do was make sure this lot unpacked all the coke and we’d get our £500,000. When my partner turned off the engine after we’d taxied to the far corner of the field, he turned to me and punched the air and said, “Yesssss!” We both laughed. It all seemed so easy.’

But, says Steve, that’s when things started to go badly wrong. ‘When we jumped off the plane, the villain we’d met earlier in London was there to greet us but he looked far from happy and told us that the guys in Holland had called him to say they thought we’d acted very suspiciously and that we should be searched for wires and to make sure we weren’t working for the cops.

‘I was outraged by these accusations and had a bit of an argument with the man from London. My partner tried to calm me down but this guy had really got up my nose. In the end my partner had to drag me away to a quiet corner of the field to try and make me see sense.

‘Then he whispered to me he thought they were trying to pull a fast one on us to avoid paying us all of the £500,000 fee. Well, that made me even more angry. But I realised there was nothing I could do until the coke had been unloaded. So I bit my lip and we both lit up fags and waited for the coke to be taken off the plane.’

As the setting sun began dipping behind the trees at the far end of the airfield, the gang announced they’d finished but that there was ‘a problem’. Steve explained: ‘My partner rolled his eyes and I took a long sigh because it was exactly as he’d predicted. They claimed the shipment was short. They said they weren’t necessarily accusing us of taking the coke, which was a relief, but they suspected the guys in Holland had double-crossed them.

‘Then another, much heavier-looking bloke walked out from the shadows and asked us why we hadn’t checked through the coke before it was put on the plane. We explained that this was not our job and no one had ever suggested we did it before. That didn’t go down too well. This heavyweight accused us of either stealing his coke or being ‘arseholes’. Either way, he said, we were only going to get paid £50,000 not £500,000. Well, I was livid and took a swing at the bloke and it was only thanks to my partner dragging me off him that we avoided a bloodbath.

‘My partner said we had no choice but to accept the deal and that we could “sort it out” later. I knew he was right: £50,000 was better than nothing but it really wasn’t a fair payment considering the vast amount of coke we’d just flown over from Holland.’

Steve understands now that their experience on what was only the pair’s second coke shipment was ‘a blessing in disguise’. He explained: ‘We both realised that smuggling coke was a mug’s game. You think you’re going to earn millions but the guys you’re dealing with will always ensure that doesn’t happen and if you argue with them then you have signed your own death warrant.

‘So we decided to step away from the coke business altogether after that. No doubt many people will wonder how the hell we could do that without endangering our own lives and our families’. Well, we both agreed to deliberately damage the airplane so it was unflyworthy. That made us completely useless in the eyes of the coke traffickers. Then my partner called them up and said he had cancer.

‘The amazing thing is that they accepted it all. I suspect they knew we’d cause them a lot more trouble than the usual pilots and they were already looking for a way to cut us loose. The last thing we heard from them was when the boss guy called up pretending to ask about my partner’s health but actually trying to give us a very unsubtle warning to watch our backs and keep our mouths shut. Well, I told him that I didn’t know who he was or why he’d even called us up and suggested it might be a wrong number. He was thrown by my response but we never heard from him again.

‘Shortly after that we sold the plane and got ourselves straight, normal jobs in the services industry. Life is a lot happier with less money and longer life expectancy, I can tell you! My advice to anyone out there tempted to earn some quick, big money by dealing or trafficking drugs is don’t bother. The main men – the real criminals – will always rip you off and then you’ll end up going back to them simply because it seems like the only way to make a living and because, like so many people, you are waiting for that golden payday when you will be given so much money you never have to work again.

‘Let me tell you now. That NEVER happens.’

So, it’s the cocaine barons in the UK who rule the business. No wonder, when you consider some of the measures they’re prepared to take in order to keep one step ahead of their rivals and the police …

CHAPTER 30

PETE

Coke barons in the UK regularly use the services of private eyes to try and discover what their criminal rivals are up to, as well as keeping an eye on the police.

Pete hails from North Wales originally and he believes that if his real identity were ever revealed he’d be killed by the cocaine criminals who regularly use his services. ‘When I’m dealing with these characters I have to run everything out of a mailbox address in London, so that my connection to them is impossible to prove at all times,’ explained Pete. He’s a former police detective who spent much of his career in the force exposing gangs of Merseyside-based drug smugglers. ‘Back then I was a bit of a green young copper and some of the things I stumbled upon came as quite a culture shock,’ said Pete, 41. ‘But I have to admit I loved the criminals’ attitude towards enjoying life to the full. They’re much more relaxed than the rest of us and I’ve always found that quite enchanting.’

Four years ago, bachelor Pete quit the police and headed down to London to set up shop as a ‘security consultant’. He explained: ‘I knew people on both sides of the law down here and they kept saying there was plenty of work for a good private eye because a lot of the coke gangs are always trying to spy on their rivals and the police. That’s how it is with many of the criminals here and I could see where the opportunities could come from.’

Pete discreetly put the word around to various contacts that he was available for ‘work’. ‘I knew the police wouldn’t try to shut me down if they had no idea what I was up to,’ explained Pete. ‘I was soon flooded with work. Most of it was from a couple of Essex-based cocaine gangs. I had no doubts about working for them because I knew that if I fell out with them I could always switch “sides” and blow the lid on their activities to the police.’

Pete is currently based in a rented apartment located close to the Tower of London, on the edge of London’s East End. It’s a modest place but he says it serves the purpose. ‘I have to keep a low profile. But I’ve never been one for possessions and owning property, so this situation suits me down to the ground.’

Recently, Pete was hired by ‘a very wealthy’ female cocaine gangster to spy on her husband whom she suspected of having an affair. ‘This woman just called me up out of the blue after hearing about me from some other criminals. She said she’d pay a very generous daily rate if I’d just shadow her old man for a few weeks to see what he was up to. At first I was a bit hesitant because I thought maybe she was using me to find him and then have him killed. But I decided that was up to her. It was no business of mine what she did with the information I supplied once I handed it over to her.’

Pete continued: ‘She insisted on meeting me in the car park of a McDonald’s in Wapping before I started the case. She turned up in a new Mercedes sports car, dripping in gold, heavily tanned with a peroxide rinse. She said she was scared that her husband might find out what she was up to but refused to tell me specifically what her husband did for a job. She just said in a very strong east London accent that her old man was a property speculator. I didn’t believe a word of it since I already knew she herself was high up in a big cocaine gang.

‘I had a bad feeling about it and was starting to hesitate about taking the job when she offered me £1,000 a day, so I went for it. Money speaks louder than words and I’ve been around for long enough to know how to follow someone without them knowing it, so I reckoned the risk was minimal. I guess the money she was paying me undoubtedly came from her cocaine business.’

For the following month, Pete shadowed his ‘target’ using all his police expertise. He explained: ‘Instead of following his car I often went in front. It’s very effective because no one studies the vehicles ahead of them. I soon discovered that the wife was perfectly right to be suspicious of her husband. For this guy didn’t just have a mistress, he had an insatiable appetite for sex. He was using some of London’s most notorious brothels virtually every day and he had three regular girls whom he’d set up in separate apartments in the suburbs. The guy was addicted to screwing.’

But when Pete reported back to the man’s wife what he’d seen there was an awkward response. ‘She went all quiet after I sat her down and told her. Instead of bursting into tears she just kept nodding her head slowly and saying, “Right.” I then asked her what she was going to do with the information I’d given her and she snapped back at me that it was “none of my fuckin’ business”. I started to get a bit worried then because in my game the last thing you want is an angry wife exposing your identity to a cheating husband, especially when they’re both criminals. I tried to explain nicely to her that she could not reveal my identity to anyone, let alone her hubby. But she then coolly turned to me and said, “I’m afraid he already knows all about you.”

‘“What?” I said to her.

‘She replied, “Turns out he was having me watched by one of his mates and they saw us in the car park when I first met you. He thought you and I were having a fling, so I had to come clean and tell him the truth.”’

Pete explained: ‘Well, my heart sank when I heard her. What a disaster. The husband might come after me, especially if he got paranoid that I’d seen any of his criminal activities, which I hadn’t. I then asked her if she’d told her hubby precisely what I’d seen him get up to. She ignored the question and only mentioned that he was very angry I’d been spying on him.

‘All she cared about was that he’d promised to drop all the women in the flats and not go to brothels any more.’

Pete went on: ‘I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he’d never change his ways because men just don’t do that on the whole, especially big-time villains. Now my main priority was to ease out of this job without being physically harmed by this woman’s associates or her gangster husband.’

Pete then decided, in his words, ‘to enter the Lion’s den’. He continued: ‘I reckoned it was safer to meet this character than try and run away from him. It was a gamble but it had to be done, so I phoned him up. He was outraged at first but once he’d calmed down we arranged to meet in a very public place, so that he couldn’t let his heavies loose on me.’

It turned out to be a clever move. ‘He was still very upset and called me a piece of scum, which seemed a bit rich coming from him! But then he grudgingly admitted being impressed I’d had the courage to meet him and we actually got on quite well. He even told me his missus had hired two other private investigators before me, who’d both fleeced her of money and done nothing. He seemed to find that quite funny.

‘I realised that this villain had so many contacts in the cocaine underworld that he could become an invaluable source of more work for me. We’ve stayed in touch ever since and he’s recommended me to a number of his associates.’

On another occasion, Pete was hired by the private secretary of a mega-wealthy prince from a foreign royal family living in Mayfair, who suspected one of his most senior advisers was dealing massive quantities of cocaine bought from a Russian coke baron based in London. Pete explained: ‘They thought this bloke was dealing drugs big-time and were very worried that if he was arrested by the police it could embarrass the royal family. They wanted me to get the evidence, so they could confront him and then quietly fire him before a scandal erupted.’

Pete spent two months shadowing the prince’s adviser mainly around central London. ‘The strange thing was that for the first six weeks he didn’t go near anyone who even vaguely looked like a drug supplier, let alone a Russian,’ says Pete. ‘I was about to recommend to the client that we end the surveillance operation when I saw my man walk into a bar in south London that was notorious for its criminal clientele. I was standing right by him when he met with a young-looking Russian type of man. He had quite gay mannerisms and I wondered if they were having a sexual relationship, even though the target was married with two children.

‘Then I saw this other man handing my target a sachet of something when they shook hands goodbye. I followed my target outside to where he’d parked his car in a side street. The moment he got in the vehicle, I watched him open up the sachet and take a massive snort of what was obviously cocaine. He did exactly the same thing the following three nights and it became clear that rather than being a drug dealer this man was using cocaine for his own personal consumption. That’s a different matter altogether and I told my client that instead of firing this man they should try and persuade him to get help for his addiction. That guy didn’t deserve to lose his job, he just needed to sort out his addiction problems, but I later heard that he got kicked out of his job anyway.’

Pete earns upwards of £100,000 a year working as a private eye and he loves the lifestyle. ‘I lead a quiet, simple life when I’m not working. I have a very nice girlfriend and love nothing more than a glass of Rioja and an early night when I’m off duty. I leave all the other sex ‘n’ drugs stuff to the type of characters who so often end up coming to me for help.’

But Pete is realistic about his future. He explained: ‘It’s getting more and more dangerous out here with cocaine gangsters flooding London from all over the world. That makes it more difficult for investigators like me to operate. I think the time will come when I’ll have to think about another career change, but for the moment I’m very happy with my life.’

That influx of foreign cocaine criminals into the UK is clearly moving the goalposts for many home-grown gangsters.

CHAPTER 31

BERNIE AND SERGI

In the Kent countryside, many old-school British gangsters run their cocaine gangs from isolated farmhouses and mansions with easy access to the Channel ports of Dover and Folkestone.

Bernie is one of the most familiar faces in the county and he told me that today’s up-and-coming young cocaine barons are in danger of turning the UK into an underworld no-go area.

‘It’s all got completely fuckin’ out of hand in recent years,’ explained Bernie, smoking a king-size cigar and supping a vodka and tonic. ‘The youngsters coming through the ranks now are complete and utter psychos. It’s bedlam out there and a lot of innocent people are being knocked off for no good reason. This country is turning into the Wild fuckin’ West.’

Bernie, now in his late sixties, believes he is one of the few ‘old chaps’ given any respect by the younger cocaine gangsters in the UK. ‘But that’s only ’cos I’ve got form,’ explained Bernie. And by ‘form’ he means he’s been in prison for killing a criminal rival and was also busted for running one of the UK’s biggest cocaine ‘corporations’ in the late 1990s.

Bernie insists that he’s free to move around the south coast of England without fear of retribution from rival gangsters. ‘In fact some of the so-called new boys come to me for advice,’ said Bernie between puffs on his fat cigar. ‘But a lot of my old mates are shit scared to be seen out and about in case they cop a bullet from this lot.’

He went on: ‘I’ve been in the coke game for thirty years and when I saw some of these foreign villains turning up here a few years back, I told my mates in the business to watch out because where they come from, life is cheap and they’ve had it hard. That makes them much colder and more inclined to shoot first and ask questions later, if you know what I mean.’

Bernie believes he occupies the ‘middle ground’ between the old and the new cocaine barons in the south-east of England.

‘There’s a couple of younger outfits working on my manor, so I went to see them and told them that I didn’t expect any of them to interfere with my operations and I’d keep out of their stuff. All the other old boys I know said I was barking mad but I reckon it’s paid off handsomely. I really do. I sat down with the youngsters and we came to an agreement. That’s all I ever wanted. What’s the point in havin’ a ruck? It don’t help no one, does it?’

When I met Bernie at his favourite pub overlooking a small south coast marina, he claimed he’d just come from a meeting with a man who represented one of the richest oligarchs in Russia. ‘He’s on the make like all the rest of them,’ explained Bernie, who was wearing a country gent outfit consisting of tweed jacket, checked trousers and brogues. Bernie had met the Russian billionaire’s ‘rep’ at a nearby safehouse, just up the road from the marina. ‘This bloke had ten bodyguards. Can you believe it? He wanted to invest some of his boss’s cash in the coke game and expected me to tell him about what sort of return he could get for his money. I get these type of characters coming to me all the time these days. I tend to avoid them unless they are real pro’s because they don’t really understand the risks. They just think it’s a way to make an easy buck. It’s not as simple as that.’

The bar we were talking in was decked out in garish, swirled wallpaper and looked as if it hadn’t had a lick of paint since back in the days when Bernie ‘invested’ in buying property in the London Docklands development during the reign of Margaret Thatcher.

As we were talking, a burned-out looking blonde woman in her late forties in tight jeans glanced across at Bernie and smiled. He winked back and then continued with his overview of the cocaine gang wars raging in south-east England. ‘It’s changing all the time. A lot of the older Brits have left England and retired to Thailand and Costa Rica and places like that because it’s too fuckin’ crowded here these days. Spain’s too near and it’s not cheap to live in any more.’

But how come, if that was the case, Bernie stayed here in the UK? ‘I’m above all these shoot-ups and shit like that. I’ve been bedded down here for so long I wouldn’t know how to survive anywhere else.’ And survival is the key word here. For Bernie seems to have an ability to duck and dive his way out of trouble.

He recalled: ‘About a year ago this bunch of Polish coke traffickers turned up in the village near me in Kent and started giving it large in all directions. They rented a farmhouse, a couple of Mercedes and a load of hookers and gave the impression they were made men. Then a gang of Russians I know vaguely got to hear about them.

‘Well, if there’s one thing the Russians don’t like it’s the Poles. They made it their business to run them out of town. These particular Russians employed a team of fruitcake Latvian ex-paratroopers as bodyguards and they charged up the driveway to the Poles’ farmhouse one night, sprayed it with bullets and then left a couple of firebombs behind for good measure. The Poles got the message and were never seen again.’

Bernie makes light of it all but there is a serious point to what he is saying. ‘I take the attitude that I can sit back and let them all wipe each other out. Then once the dust has settled maybe I’ll stroll back in and grab a few bob.’ Bernie says his main priority is to make sure his face doesn’t end up looking like he’s been in a car crash. ‘I’m what you might call a diplomat. I pride myself on not clashing with other villains. It just ain’t worth it.’

The following Saturday night I found myself in another of Bernie’s favourite watering holes, this time in the suburbs of south London. At least half a dozen of the customers reeked of criminality. Most of them were watching the footie on the telly in the corner of the Lounge Bar. Then, as evening drew in, they pulled out their sachets of coke and started getting hyped up.

‘They’re all it,’ said Bernie, as we sat in a corner of the bar. ‘That’s the biggest problem. No one can go out for a quiet pint no more. It’s gotta be a bottle of voddie and a packet of Charlie. No wonder there is such demand for the fuckin’ stuff. Everyone’s on it these days.’

As darkness fell and the chemicals kicked in, some of the villains flexed their muscles a bit and looked around to see who was watching them. The atmosphere in that pub in the south London suburbs was more akin to a scene from Goodfellas, with one particularly coked-up little character – who looked a bit like Joe Pesci – marching in and out of the gents virtually every two minutes to replenish his nostrils with white powder.

‘The only reason they don’t do it on the table is because you get one or two coppers in here as well,’ explained Bernie.

We were in this particular pub to meet Sergi, a ‘foreigner mate’ of Bernie’s who Bernie reckoned was a ‘a good example of a decent foreign operator, not like the rest of them’.

Sergi turned out to be a Ukrainian ‘businessman’ who’s lived in Kent for three years. He clearly adored Bernie and the two seemed close. ‘The trouble with you Brits is that you drink too much and you take too much cocaine,’ said Sergi.

Bernie, sitting next to him, laughed loudly. ‘I told you, didn’t I?’

Sergi continued: ‘Where I come from we can hold our drink and we don’t take drugs because then we are not in control.’

I soon discovered why Sergi was the only non-British man in the pub that night. It turned out that he employed half the gangsters in there to help him run his ‘businesses’.

He explained: ‘I like the Brits. I like your way of life. The loyalty. The humour. I don’t trust my countrymen, especially when they’re here in UK. They would kill you as soon as look at you if you had something they wanted.’

Sergi then went on to provide a revealing glance inside the foreign cocaine underworld in the south-east of England. ‘People like me see that there are way more opportunities here than in our home countries, so we come here. It is as simple as that.’

He went on: ‘You Brits think you live in such a civilised place with so little crime compared with other countries. Well, let me tell you here and now, it’s easier to run a cocaine business here than in my country. Less cops to bribe for starters!

‘You see, people have more money here and that means more opportunities for guys like me. But I am not a typical foreign criminal. I respect this country and I don’t want to turn it into a battlefield. I am afraid others are not as respectful as me.

‘Sure I sometimes have to make an example of my enemies. I don’t like doing it but in the long term it helps stop a lot of what I will call “unfortunate incidents”.’ Sergi refused to be drawn on exactly what ‘action’ he’d taken in the past, but suffice to say it must have resulted in someone being physically harmed.

Surely, I asked, the police are a problem? ‘As I said, the police cannot be bought so easily but’ – he shrugged – ‘there are some who will accept money.’

Sergi claims that one Kent detective asked if he could work for Sergi part-time while continuing to serve in the police. ‘I wasn’t surprised. He’d just got divorced and needed to earn more money in order to pay off his ex-wife. We all have these problems. But I was suspicious of this guy, so I turned down his offer. A few months later he helped bust another foreign gang. I had been right all along.’

Sergi believes the police can do little to stop the invasion of foreign criminals. ‘They don’t have the manpower or the resources to investigate every gang,’ explained Sergi. ‘It’s almost as if they’re happy for us to continue bringing money into the economy because it means a better life for a lot of people in this area. They need us here. It’s been like this for so long the whole place would collapse if criminals were not operating here.’

Both Bernie and Sergi claim many of the foreign cocaine gangs in the UK’s Home Counties are also involved in prostitution, robbery and fraud. ‘It’s not just cocaine. Sure the coke makes us most of our money but it brings with it other activities. I personally don’t like this. I want our streets to be clean and safe for our children and grandchildren to play on. Also, I want our banks to be good at not losing our money, eh?’ Sergi laughs and slaps his friend Bernie on the thigh.

They make an unlikely pair, but as I watched the interaction between them I realised that Bernie was probably working for Sergi these days, which kind of summed up the way that the UK’s criminal underworld has been changed by a lethal combination of cocaine and foreign criminals.

Further down the food chain are the old-fashioned cocaine dealers who have made a sizeable income from selling the drug to a select band of clients.

CHAPTER 32

TOMMY

Londoner Tommy, 59, has dealt cocaine for more than thirty years. He says he avoids snorting the drug himself but admits he has a serious hash habit. In his darkened basement flat near the bustling Portobello Road, in trendy Notting Hill, west London, Tommy carefully weighs out the cocaine that he always packs in special see-through plastic baggies with one twist, which have been his own unique calling card down the years. His customers include famous movie actors, TV stars, a couple of politicians and large numbers of London’s media set.

‘I’ve been in this game all my adult life. There aren’t many people who can say that,’ says Tommy, between drags on an enormous joint. ‘I grew up in the seventies when drugs were used far more openly than they are today. All my mates took [amphetamine] sulphate back then. It was like poor man’s coke. It burned your nose but you got a big kick out of it and, more importantly, it cost about ten quid a gram.’

Tommy was brought up in the Home Counties, went to a minor public school and was all set for a career in professional cricket until a car crash ended his sporting aspirations. ‘I had it all back then, or so I thought. I was being fast-tracked into Surrey Cricket Club. My teachers at school talked about me being a future England cap and I thought I was king of the world.

‘Then I was out with three mates one evening. We’d all got pissed up at a local pub and then scored some acid. The driver of the car was off his head when we all decided to go to Soho in the centre of London. Next thing I know we’re upside down on the side of a motorway and my hip is busted. That was the end of my life in a way. It would have all turned out very differently if that crash hasn’t happened.’

Tommy shrugs his shoulders and tries to smile as he recalls his childhood but it’s clear (like so many people in the coke trade) that he wishes his life had taken a different path. ‘I got no one to blame but myself. I should have picked myself up after that car crash and got myself a proper job and a family and all the other shit everyone is expected to get. But it just didn’t work out that way.’

Tommy’s personal consumption of drugs spiralled completely out of control in his late teens and early twenties. ‘I ended up on heroin, which is no laughing matter. I was a mess. My parents had thrown me out and some of the time I was actually living on the street.’

After being arrested for being drunk and disorderly in London’s Regents Park, Tommy tried to take a swipe at a policeman and ended up being charged with assault. A six-month jail term followed and that’s where his life took another ominous turn. ‘Like so many people, I met professional criminals inside and by the time I got out I had three offers of jobs as a dealer.

‘Back then drug dealers would usually supply everything from hash to heroin, so I ended up selling to a wide variety of people. Funnily enough, I even managed to stay off the heroin, although I soon got myself a serious coke habit.’

That’s when Tommy got his first taste of heavy criminality. ‘I snorted a whole load of coke that was supposed to be sold to people. So when the guy who supplied me the coke on credit came looking for his money, I was seriously short of cash. He gave me a month to pay up and then sent a couple of his friends round to see me. I got seriously smashed up by them and decided on the spot that I was going to stop dealing and give the “real” world a try. Anything had to be better than looking over my shoulder every five minutes.’

Tommy talked his way into a job as a trainee journalist on a local newspaper. ‘The money was crap but for the first time in my life I felt as if I was actually doing something worthwhile. I was reporting on drug dealers at the local magistrates, chasing ambulances, writing up murders and all sorts of stuff like that. It was fascinating and I reckoned I’d found my real calling at last.’

Then Tommy was appointed crime reporter by the paper. ‘That was a laugh when you consider my background. I actually had to take coppers out for drinks every week to try and extract stories from them. It made me realise for the first time that they were just ordinary people like me trying to make a living.’

But back in the 1970s, a large number of police officers were not averse to the occasional bribe. ‘It was a different game back then. For starters you always had to pay for all their drinks. Then my paper started paying some of the plain-clothes lot the occasional fifty quid for information. One copper even offered to check out car registration plates in exchange for £50. He did the same when it came to tracing ex-directory phone numbers.’

Tommy says his journalism career seemed to be in the ascendant when he got especially friendly with a Detective Superintendent who was in charge of the local CID.

‘This guy was outrageous. He was always helping himself to everything from cash to drugs from crimes. All his staff knew what he was up to and many of them wanted me to expose him, but my paper was too scared in case he sued them. In any case, back then bent coppers were so commonplace most people ignored what they were up to.’

Tommy admits he became especially close to this one rogue senior officer. ‘We were kindred spirits, or so he kept telling me. He even knew about my criminal record but promised not to tell anyone. Trouble is, he was reeling me in, just like he reeled in criminals and turned them into informants, I suppose. He knew he had something over me and that gave him power and influence.’

One day Tommy got a call from the rogue cop. ‘He said he had a brilliant story for me and insisted I met him in a pub way out in the Surrey countryside. I didn’t hesitate to agree to the meeting ’cos I thought he might have a big story for me. It was the biggest mistake of my life.’

Tommy continued: ‘When I got to the pub, he was waiting in his car outside and beckoned me in the vehicle for a chat. I still didn’t smell a rat.’

Inside the car, the rogue cop produced a small see-through package containing white powder. ‘Of course I knew what it was straight away but I was shocked that a senior policeman would be handling it openly in a pub car park. Sure, I knew this officer was a bit crooked but handling drugs in front of a reporter was another ballgame altogether. Then he told me there was much more where this came from. He wanted me to sell it to some of my mates. It was only then it dawned on me that he was trying to set me up as his personal coke dealer.

‘The stupid thing is I instantly agreed to do it. I knew loads of people who’d buy it off me and, quite frankly, I needed the money. I was earning about £20 a week as a reporter on that local paper and I could barely afford the rent on my bedsit.’

So Tommy’s long and undistinguished career as a coke dealer was relaunched. ‘For the first few months I managed to hold down my job on the paper as well but then I started getting high on my own supply and, predictably, I began not showing up at the paper for work and they soon fired me.’

Out on his own, Tommy told the rogue cop he could sell twice the amount of coke he was getting at the time. ‘I decided I might as well set up shop as a proper, fulltime coke dealer. It was perfect. I got myself a nice top-floor flat in a quiet street and I even had my own free supply of coke to snort.’

But Tommy knew that in the long term he needed to find another supplier. ‘I didn’t trust the cop. I actually reckoned he’d either start blackmailing me or he’d simply shop me. No one would have believed my word against that of a senior police officer. So I stopped dealing for him about six months after losing my job on the paper and went out on my own. He was furious but I made sure he realised I’d try and take him down with me if anything happened to me.’

Tommy then moved into central London and began work as a fulltime, independent cocaine dealer. ‘It was the early 1980s and cocaine was hitting the club scene with a vengeance. I knew lots of people in TV and journalism and I soon had them queuing round the block to buy my coke.’

Tommy devised certain ‘rules and regulations’ back then which he has kept to ever since. ‘I never agree to meet a punter in the street. They have to come to my flat. There are CCTV cameras everywhere these days. Also, out on the street all it takes is one keen young copper on the beat and I’m nicked. I move flats at least once a year because it’s not good to be in one place for too long. Neighbours start to wonder why so many people are going in and out of your flat. They bump into strangers in the hallway and it makes them nervous and then they start complaining to landlords and stuff like that. Much better to keep on the move.’

Tommy, though, admits he’s got much grumpier with the onset of middle age. ‘I used to like going out to clubs and stuff but I’d never be carrying coke because you’re a sitting duck in such places. Trouble is, I’d then end up with punters coming back to my flat and then I couldn’t get rid of them. I’d rather stay home these days and let ’em come to me. But now I encourage them to come in and out. No hanging around.’

Tommy says he’s never once come close to being arrested since going ‘solo’ as a dealer. ‘I am so fuckin’ careful who I deal with. My suppliers have changed down the years but I always go through a middleman, so I don’t even know who the main supplier is. Much better that way. It means my name isn’t known in criminal circles and I don’t know their names, either.’

Tommy has one other golden rule when it comes to his actual customers. ‘I never encourage real criminals to buy coke from me. It’s asking for trouble. My stuff is always very good quality compared to most people’s but the last thing I want is some trigger-happy thug with a criminal record popping round to my house for a baggy and then deciding to get greedy.’

Tommy occasionally meets some of his customers socially but says he prefers not to mix business with pleasure on the whole. ‘It’s a tricky relationship because you think you’re friends with these punters and then the next thing you know they’re ignoring you in the street in front of their wives or girlfriends because they don’t want them to know they’re on coke.’

These days Tommy spends most of his time inside his small rented apartment watching the cricket and the football on Sky TV. He says he now much prefers the mellow rush from a smoke of hash to the manic hit of a line of cocaine.

‘I learnt a lesson a long time ago about coke. It’s evil stuff. It pulls you in so badly that you don’t even realise you’re hooked when you are. And of course most of my regulars are professional people with serious careers yet they can operate on coke. You can get away with it but it’s still fucking you up. That makes it a bad drug in a sense because you don’t just take it to get high with your friends. You use it to get through the day and that is not good.’

Tommy manages to make his lifetime career as a coke dealer sound as ordinary as being a plumber or an electrician but surely, I ask, there must be a cocaine ‘Mister Big’ somewhere in the background despite his earlier protestations?

‘Of course I’ve met a few big players but I make it a rule never to buy directly from them. Sometimes they get a bit pissed off with my attitude but I insist that I will only buy my coke from a middleman for that very reason. I’m in the survival game and I’ve worked out a lot of the rules down the years. I make sure I never mix with them socially because otherwise, like that evil copper all those years ago, they’ll start owning me and that means I will have no control over when I want to work. I knew one dealer who was pressurised by a gang to keep selling fifty weeks of the year without a break. He was so scared he just did as they told him. That made him a money machine for the villains but a guy like that has no other life. I like to piss off on holiday sometimes without even telling my customers. It’s bloody funny when you get home to find all these nutty, desperate messages from punters going crazy ’cos they can’t get hold of me to score some coke.’

Unlike most of the other dealers I’ve interviewed for this book, Tommy says he ‘hasn’t got a clue’ when or if he will ever quit selling cocaine. ‘Like everyone in this game I dream about that day all the time but, you see, I’ve lasted so much longer than most people that I am tempted to just keep going until the day I die.

‘I like the freedom of my career. The fact I can kick back at home, watch the footie and the business comes to me without any real effort. There aren’t many people who can say that about their job, are there?’

Tommy seems to have worked out a simple way of operating that fits his needs like a glove. But there are also the part-timer dealers, the ones who lead a double life in pursuit of extra cash and a constant hit of cocaine …

CHAPTER 33

ROBERT

In London, at least a third of all cocaine dealers are holding down ‘civilian’ jobs while dabbling in selling coke to small, select bands of friends and work associates.

Take Robert. He’s a middle-of-the-road advertising executive in his mid-thirties, married with two children, and lives in a comfortable semi-detached house in the suburbs of south-west London.

‘I keep myself well under the radar,’ says Robert. ‘If my wife found out I was flogging coke on the side, she’d probably divorce me.’

So why does he do it then?

‘I’ve always liked a snort of coke since I was a teenager. But when I started working in advertising, I found that there were quite a few like-minded people in the business. Trouble was, a lot of these people were typical middle-class types in that they didn’t like getting their hands dirty actually dealing directly with what they perceived as horrible, evil drug dealers.

‘So muggsy me found myself increasingly being asked to go and pick up packets of grams for different people at work. It got on my nerves that I was the only one who didn’t seem to mind mixing with drug dealers. I was annoyed because if you’re gonna take drugs then you need to deal with the people who supply the stuff.

‘A lot of the cokeheads at work simply took it for granted that I’d always be the one to pick up their drugs for them, so I started to take a little “fee” out of each packet for myself. I reckoned it was the least I deserved for taking the risks that come with buying coke. I soon stopped having to buy any coke for myself and simply created a sachet of my own by taking some out of each of the other packets.

‘But in the end, so many people were asking me to be their delivery boy that I reckoned I’d be better off simply charging more for each gram I picked up. I called it a handling charge but it’s just the same as being a dealer, I guess.’

Eventually, Robert built up such a large database of ‘cocaine friends’ that he seriously thought about quitting his day job.

‘But then I stopped myself and thought it was much better to keep going in my proper career but top up my earnings through selling coke. That was some time before I met my wife and decided to start a family. It’s funny because I’d grown sick of waking up in a strange bed with a strange face next to me. But I was also too greedy to stop being a dealer just because I was thinking about settling down.’

At his own wedding, Robert claims he sold 30 grams of coke to various guests without his wife noticing. ‘I took a conscious decision not to tell her what I was up to. I guess I wanted to start afresh and I was afraid she might not want to marry me if she knew I was dealing coke on the side.’

It was around this time that Robert got called into a meeting with one of his bosses. ‘He started out by telling me he knew what I was up to. I swallowed hard and expected to be fired there and then but then this guy simply said I should have told him before because he needed me to buy him some coke as well!

‘I was suspicious to start with because I thought maybe he was trying to lure me into a trap but when he came back the following week and ordered twenty grams I realised he was the biggest office cokehead of all.’

These days Robert reckons his part-time coke dealing has actually helped his career. ‘You see, it’s given me an insight into my bosses, as well as my work contemporaries. I know something about them that they don’t want anyone else to know. Geddit?

‘I actually reckon I’m virtually unsackable at the moment because my boss must be shittin’ himself that I’d blow the whistle on his coke habit. I am so glad I wasn’t tempted to go fulltime, though. I’ve got the best of both worlds here and I’ve even managed to control my own coke habit.’

He explained: ‘Seeing your workmates off their heads is enough to put anyone off. A lot of these people I supply coke to are taking five, six grams a week. That’s an expensive habit. It’s not a party thing when you snort that amount. I even tried to dissuade one mate from doing any coke because he clearly couldn’t handle it and had a very addictive personality. But he got very angry and demanded that I keep selling him coke, so I shrugged my shoulders and took the money.’

Back at home in south-west London, Robert continues to hide his secret life as a coke dealer from his wife. ‘I know it’s not healthy but I just dare not say anything. I love my life as it is. Sometimes I get a gram and have a cracking night out with my workmates but it’s not something I want to do all the time.

‘The strange thing about coke is that many of the people who do it would never dream of breaking the law in any other way. It’s almost as if they have separated the reality from what they’re doing but then again I help them in that process because I am acting as a buffer between their safe middle-class lives and the drug dealer they never want to actually meet.’

Robert says he is extremely careful not to deal coke to anyone outside of his work and social circles. ‘I keep it small and many of my customers are rolling in money, so they buy large quantities of coke each time. I reckon I probably earn more money out of coke than a lot of fulltime dealers, who sell a gram here and a gram there.

‘One idiot at work almost landed me in it trying to impress some girl he knew by telling her I could get the best coke in London. I went crazy with him when she called me up out of the blue and asked on the phone if I could sell her some coke. I told this bloke never to do that again. I only deal with people I have actually met.

‘The funny thing was that when I was speaking to this guy my voice went very hard and nasty and I realised I was almost starting to behave like a real drug dealer. Oh well.’

Robert says the money he earns from selling coke has enabled him and his family to enjoy some ‘very special holidays’. He added: ‘I got myself a BMW estate the other day. It’s not as predictable as it sounds. Most of the middle-class dads round where I live own a BMW or an Audi so I should fit in. The funny thing is that my wife has never once asked me how we can afford all this stuff. She just presumes it comes out of my legitimate salary.’

Robert has worked at the same advertising agency now for ten years and he reckons that during that time he’s ‘probably doubled’ his earnings through coke dealing. ‘I like the combination of having a serious job and then picking up some extra cash on the side. I guess there’ll come a day when I’ll just hang up my mobile and make out the suppliers have all been murdered or disappeared and then continue my life as if the dealer stuff never actually happened. That’s the masterplan anyway. Who knows if I’ll get away with it?’

PART FIVE

THE NEW FRONTIERS

For centuries Africa has attracted the greedy, the ruthless, the kleptocratic and the cruel. They’ve come to plunder and loot, taking away everything from slaves to ivory, tin and diamonds. But now its west coast has fallen prey to a new strain of imperialism: it’s become a transit point and storeroom for much of the world’s cocaine.

It’s reckoned that at least £1 billion worth of cocaine is transported every year through West Africa, according to the latest United Nations estimates. The value of this illicit trade dwarfs entire economies and is corrupting some of the region’s more fragile states, many of whom are only just pulling out of decades of bitter civil wars.

Countries on the West African coast offer traffickers everything they need: proximity to Europe, a weakened state and administrative structure, a desperate citizenry and a hopelessly overworked, underpaid and corruptible police force. At least a third of Europe’s annual consumption of cocaine now transits via West Africa. As criminal networks swamp the region, many have renamed West Africa’s Gold Coast as the Coke Coast.

Ironically, just as Ronald Reagan’s ‘war on drugs’ changed the way the cartels operated back in the eighties, crackdowns by Spanish and European Union authorities during the past ten years have forced them to seek out new ‘landing points’ for their cocaine after it is shipped across the Atlantic. As a result, the power and influence of mainly Colombian and Mexican cartels can be felt all the way to the top of some West African governments.

Local gangsters – mainly financed by the South American cartels – have set up elaborate front companies, which ‘buy’ high-level protection for the business interests of their new South American partners. Most aren’t difficult to spot. In Accra, Ghana’s capital, BMWs, Mercedes and newly imported canary yellow Humvees stand out from the beaten and battered local taxis and horse-drawn carts. It’s a similar story in many of the region’s other nations, notably Senegal, Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone.

Until a decade ago, West Africa just didn’t appear on the British law enforcement’s radar when it came to monitoring cocaine trafficking. Now they’ve a host of suspects, many of whom are Latin American.

‘There are increasing signs of a permanent South American presence in the region of significant players,’ said one British official. ‘They often have residences in more than one West African country and they go where they’re needed.’

Yet there is another side to this; Latin American cocaine money has undoubtedly also helped build schools and has even created employment for tens of thousands of people in these often destitute nations.

Take the former Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau, one of the world’s poorest countries. It has the dubious distinction of being dubbed Africa’s first ‘Narco-state’.

At the heart of all this cocaine trafficking are G-B’s chain of islands, the Bijagos Archipelago, which are a smuggler’s haven. Their countless coves and inlets are ideal for loading contraband onto small boats for onward passage to Europe. The islands also contain illegal airstrips, where aircraft arrive packed with cocaine from South America.

As a result, G-B’s political and economic systems have been systematically infiltrated by the cocaine cartels, even sparking a sinister battle over control of the nation itself. Latin American drug barons were recently accused of using their power and influence to kill the president of G-B, Malam Bacai Sanha, who died in mysterious circumstances in Paris in 2012, almost sparking a civil war in the process.

As a result of the president’s sudden death, a race is now allegedly on for control of G-B. The choice is stark: the Latin American cartels or a new, free form of democracy, which could eventually mark the end of the South Americans’ shortlived influence in this volatile area of the world. However, if the cartels retain their power and influence there is a genuine fear that their evil influence will spread like a spider’s web across the entire continent.

Sadly, the signs are ominous that the Latin Americans will indeed outlast any hope of true democracy in G-B. One recent statement by a cocaine trafficker turned DEA informant claimed that new president Manuel Serifo Nhamadjo – head of the country’s latest transitional government – had offered to help smooth the arrival of those same drugs and arms. This was denied in the strongest terms by a spokesman for Nhamadjo, who insisted categorically that the president had had no contact with the traffickers.

On the streets of G-B, relatives of drug runners and police killed on the orders of the Colombian cartels claim their loved ones were gunned down in cold blood after crossing the cocaine traffickers. Former Colombian cartel member Juan Martinez says that the Colombians will not quit the tiny country because they have more financial resources than the entire G-B economy. He supported claims that South Americans have spread their influence through building schools and providing work to the population, who’d otherwise be destitute. In G-B itself the local media never mentions the Colombian presence openly for fear of upsetting their paymasters. There are even rumours the South Americans now own one of the biggest media outlets in the country.

However, Guinea-Bissau is not the only country in West Africa where Latin American cocaine traffickers have taken up residence.

Take Senegal’s Atlantic coastline, another favoured location for the cartels: in the summer of 2012, 1.2 tons of pure cocaine was found in a fishing boat near the town of M’Bour. Only three days later, a further 1.25 tons was seized from a cellar beneath a nearby villa. The drugs had a combined street value in Europe of about $225 million (£140 million) – or one quarter of Senegal’s entire national budget. Three Colombians and a Frenchwoman were arrested. None of those arrested has ever been charged or tried. Senegal’s Gendarmerie in Dakar have asserted that they remain behind bars ‘waiting for a trial’. But many suspected that the suspects had long since bought their freedom and disappeared.

Closely linked with all this cocaine smuggling is arms smuggling. Small arms proliferation has been recognised as one of the leading factors contributing to political instability in West Africa. Many veterans of the region’s various wars of independence are still in possession of their AK-47 assault rifles. As a result, the territory has often served as a weapons stockpile for the whole of Africa, including the rebels in Senegal’s Casamance region. It’s symptomatic of West Africa’s acute vulnerability, a vulnerability that’s compounded by endemic corruption. Smugglers can bribe their way out of jail, but also ‘buy’ the services of policemen, army officers and even politicians. Under such circumstances, effective law enforcement is virtually impossible.

Leopold Senghor airport in the Senegalese capital Dakar is one of the most popular departure points in West Africa for couriers taking cocaine to Europe. Yet seizures are rare. The going rate at the airport for bribing airport security to ignore half a kilo of cocaine – with a European street value of £15,000 – is about £3,000. Dakar’s nearby seaport has never chalked up a single major cocaine seizure, despite being one of the largest ports in the region.

The South American cartels also have serious plans to eventually transform West Africa from being a cocaine staging post into an operating base.

Raw coca – grown until very recently solely in South America – obviously has to be refined into pure cocaine. In the past this process usually occurred in South America. But recent seizures of crack cocaine in West Africa suggest that chemical processing is already starting to take place there.

Even more significantly, the cartels also have plans to cultivate their own raw coca plant in West Africa by setting up new coca plantations. The area’s climate had always been considered unsuitable for coca cultivation until the emergence of a new strain of coca plant originally developed to be grown in the moist jungle regions close to the Amazon – and which we’ve already seen growing in Panama. Many in Latin America believe that the new type of coca plant would thrive in West Africa.

Such ‘home produced’ cocaine would be a first for Africa. It is a potential goldmine for the cartels because it would cut out the most expensive part of their manufacturing process, which is the transportation of cocaine across the Atlantic Ocean.

One ex-trafficker told me the South Americans have already begun experimental ‘grows’ in isolated areas of West Africa as ‘pilot projects’.

So, with at least three so-called ‘narco-states’ in the region now said to be virtually under the control of the South American cartels, I talked to some of the gangsters involved in turning this area into such an important hub for cocaine.

CHAPTER 34

MARCO

Cocaine trafficker Marco – now based in Spain – told me he ‘ran’ six airliners across the Atlantic from South and Central America to West Africa during an eighteen-month period between 2009 and early 2011.

Before then, only light aircraft – often twin-engined Cessna 441s – would take off from transit points (usually in Venezuela) laden with cocaine produced in the rainforests of neighbouring Colombia and Peru. To extend their range, the planes were packed with plastic containers filled with aviation fuel.

These small aircraft then flew across the Atlantic, often with one crew member furiously pumping extra fuel into the engines. Having landed on a bush airstrip on the West African coast, the plane’s valuable cargo would be unloaded for onward trafficking to Europe.

But, says Marco, the cartels wanted bigger, better ways to transport their coke and they believed using larger planes would be far more financially viable. He explained: ‘In any case, more than half those light aircraft flights ended in disaster with pilots either crashing or ditching their planes because they were either loaded with too much or too little fuel.’

Marco went on: ‘So the cartels started buying up secondhand airliners. It made complete sense. The main attraction to the cartels is that there is no radar coverage over the ocean, meaning big aircraft can cross the Atlantic virtually undetected. The sky’s the limit.’

So ‘Air Cocaine’ was born. It was a remarkable development – even by the cartels’ standards – because of the distances involved and the complexity of flying big jets. A trip from Venezuela to West Africa is about 3,400 miles.

‘But they’re ludicrously cheap to buy second hand and actually create less suspicion than smaller craft,’ says Marco. ‘The pilots are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars just for one flight. They make more in a week than most pilots make in a year.’

Law enforcement agents first became aware of the Air Cocaine flights in November 2009, when a burned-out Boeing 727 was found in the desert in the African nation of Mali. Coke smugglers had flown it in from Venezuela, unloaded the aircraft and then torched it. As Marco explained: ‘That plane had only cost very little because the second-hand market for airliners is dead, so it was actually easier and cheaper for the cartel to destroy the plane than try and fly it back to South America. But now they’ve started keeping the airliners because they cause so much less suspicion than the small planes.’

The current global economic slump has left hundreds of cargo planes and airliners idle. A multiple-engine jet capable of crossing the Atlantic can often cost even less than £100,000. Law enforcement officials on both sides of the Atlantic also believe that the cartels fly Gulfstream executive jets, some of which are also used as transport by the cocaine barons themselves and then leased out by them to the traffickers. Marco explained: ‘The big names like to come in here now and again and they usually arrive unannounced on a Lear jet, which is then sent back to pick up coke in South America and then arrives back in West Africa to pick up the cartel chief for the flight home. These guys don’t like to waste any money if they can help it. The last time authorities even detained a Gulfstream heading for West Africa was back in 2007 as it tried to leave Venezuela, heading for Sierra Leone.

‘I worked for the Colombians as their rep in West Africa for eighteen months,’ says Marco. ‘Basically, my job was to ensure that the airfields where these aircraft landed were ready for arrivals. That involved carrying a lot of dollars around to bribe people with.

‘Often, I’d have to pay everyone from the local kids in the village to the cops in the nearest police station to ensure the planes were not disturbed. At one stage I had four different airfields in my pocket. The locals got so used to the planes coming in and out that they ignored them. The key thing for me was to prevent any interference with the flights.

‘I did have a problem with one local priest in Ghana, who labelled the flights as “devil planes”. But I tracked him down after he wrote a piece for the local paper. I then made a big donation to his church fund and I never heard another word of complaint after that.’

When one airliner was seized in Sierra Leone in July 2008 with 600kg of cocaine from South America, one of the pilots – a Russian named Konstantin Yaroshenko – was arrested. Later he claimed he was tortured by local police before being handed over to America’s DEA. The Russian foreign ministry later accused the US of ‘kidnapping’ Yaroshenko. Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, called his arrest an example of the US overstepping its bounds. Yaroshenko, who is currently serving a twenty-year sentence in the US, continues to maintain his innocence.

Few arrests have ever been made in relation to these Air Cocaine flights. ‘The quantity of cocaine distributed and the means employed to distribute it are extraordinary,’ prosecutors said during one extremely rare criminal case against a West African trafficker in South America. They warned of a conspiracy to ‘spread vast quantities of cocaine throughout the world by way of cargo aeroplanes’. But the case received little media coverage and the flights, meanwhile, are said to be continuing without interruption.

Marco says he arrived in West Africa just before the ‘breakthrough case’ which blew the lid on Air Cocaine. ‘The truth of the matter is that the case was chickenfeed. It was heard in South America during a court case against a Colombian cartel member, not in West Africa, so it had little effect on operations there.’

Marco then revealed the organisational skills which go into the Air Cocaine flights to and from West Africa. He explained: ‘I even used detailed spreadsheets to compute flight costs and distribute codebooks to conceal our plans. Special sketched maps of West Africa showing points where the coke could be safely delivered were always used at meetings in Colombia to plan coke drop-offs. Fuel and pilots were usually paid through wire transfers or suitcases filled with cash. I had to be on top of a lot of things at one time. One slip and we’d all be in trouble and if I’d let the Colombians down then they would probably have killed me.’

Marco was understandably reluctant to talk in any more detail about his ‘duties’ in West Africa for the Colombians but his role highlights the deft organisational skills that are helping the South Americans make such deadly inroads into the area.

Drug enforcement agents in the US see Air Cocaine as a throwback to the 1970s and ’80s, when pilots flew planes packed with coke freely between Colombia and numerous staging points near the US border. Back then, Mexican drug lords such as Amado Carrillo Fuentes, nicknamed the Lord of the Skies, dispatched jets with as much as 15 tonnes of cocaine from Colombia to northern Mexico. Better radar coverage in the US has now made it almost impossible to move cocaine into the States in such large aircraft.

The emergence of Venezuela as a popular transit point for South American cocaine is down to its late president Hugo Chávez’s decision in 2005 to sever ties with US law enforcement agencies. That immediately made it easier to store cocaine in staging sites on the Venezuelan coast. The Venezuelan military and police are alleged to this day to be making money by waving through such shipments.

While most of the cocaine going through West Africa is destined for Europe, there are even some shipments going on to New York through this newly established backdoor route into the US. Marco explained: ‘The traffickers are always looking for new ways into the States because it has got harder and harder to bring coke in via Mexico in the south. Delivering it via West Africa makes sense in some ways but it obviously adds a lot to the transport costs.’

One Colombian cartel is rumoured to be seriously considering building its own fully functioning airport to cope with the long-range airliners they frequently use to drop cocaine in West Africa. Marco explained: ‘I heard they wanted one big airport so they could land the flights in West Africa and then service the planes so they would be safe to make even more flights back to South America. It sort of sums up the power and influence they hold in the area.’

Marco said the short length of his ‘job’ in West Africa was deliberate. ‘The Colombians were very professional about it. They reckoned eighteen months was the maximum you should be out there before problems started occurring. They also believed it kept the locals more on their toes if they kept changing their personnel. At the moment West Africa is – in the eyes of the cartels – going from strength to strength. I can seriously see the day when a South American ends up as president of one of these countries. The cartel bosses are doing more for these places than anyone else.’

Not surprisingly, the cartels have also been brilliant at recruiting the local criminal element in certain West African countries to ensure their lethal ‘product’ enjoys a safe passage and to help increase its consumption.

CHAPTER 35

ALFONSO

Accra – a vibrant city of two million in which the old and new jostle beside each other – has been Ghana’s capital since 1877, when the British ruled this part of West Africa. Now a different type of colonial power – Colombia – is pulling many of the strings in the background of this sprawling city.

Officially, Ghana claims to have forced the Colombians out by cracking down on internal corruption and stepping up arrests at airports and other transit points. But in reality this is all just wishful thinking on the part of the Ghanaian authorities, desperate to prove they’re not one of the new ‘narco-states’ which have emerged in West Africa in recent years.

Accra is in fact such an important centre for cocaine trafficking that in 2009, America’s powerful Drug Enforcement Agency opened an office here after three Al-Qaeda-linked men from Mali were arrested in Ghana and charged by US authorities with cocaine trafficking in aid of terrorism.

The DEA believes that terrorist groups in the region such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb are regularly being hired to help transport cocaine up to North Africa. ‘The cocaine circle is complete when you factor in terrorists like Al-Qaeda,’ says one veteran West African smuggler. ‘The Latin American cartels don’t care who they get into bed with as long as they retain their stranglehold on an area. Look at their relationship with FARC in Colombia. It’s lasted for more than thirty years.’

West African drug trafficking is also implicated in two other terror-financing cases filed recently in New York, one involving the Taliban and the other Hezbollah, the militant Muslim group and political party based in Lebanon.

With this sort of activity going on right under the noses of the Ghanaian authorities it is no surprise that Accra has recently been compared to Casablanca during the Second World War as a centre for cocaine trafficking, espionage and intrigue.

* * *

I am in a darkened warehouse on a half-built industrial estate bordering the commercial centre near Makola Market, where hotels and office blocks can be seen in the distance through the city smog. My host is Alfonso, a Ghanaian with Colombian connections. Just a few kilometres down the road is this nation’s parliament building, where South American cocaine dollars have been employed to try and buy off even the most powerful politicians. Alfonso is protected by heavily armed gang members and his identity is hidden by sunglasses. His beige suit with wide lapels looks like something Tony Montana might have worn in Alfonso’s all-time favourite movie Scarface, starring Al Pacino as Tony Montana, the ultimate cocaine mobster rip-roaring through 1980s Miami.

‘This is where it’s at, man,’ he says with the manic glint of sunlight bouncing off his shades. ‘Ghana is safe for coke because we pay all the right people, so no one gives us no trouble.’

Alfonso says he is 35 but he seems younger. He claims that he was working ‘in the government’ until five years ago when he met a Colombian ‘tourist’ called Gerardo in the bar of a big hotel in the centre of Accra.

‘Dis cat bought me couple o’ drinks and asked me if I knew how ta get in touch wid a certain minister. As it happen, I knew diss politician so I organised meetin’ between dem. It was only at dat meetin’ Gerardo admit he a big cocaine gangsta and he want to make sure his powder got thru widout no hassle. Ya dig, man?’

Alfonso says that he and Gerardo got on so well, ‘He made me an offer I could not refuse.’ Alfonso claims the Colombians offered to set him up as their local ‘main man’ and even supply him with free cocaine every month in exchange for him continuing to introduce them to some important people in the government.

‘At first I thought it be better ta just get dem to pay me cash. Then I did my sums and realised that their coke would make me much more money widout any big risks.’

Alfonso knows full well that if he ever started buying more cocaine from other sources then ‘there might be a few problems with Gerardo and his friends’. He explained: ‘But hey, I more dan happy wid wot I have now.’

Alfonso reveals a fascinating insight into the coke business in Ghana and the rest of West Africa. ‘It’s new territory for Latins but dey want ta make it permanent and dey doin’ more fa people of West Africa dan de ’mericans or Chinese. Dey knew dat we need schools ’nd shit like dat ’nd dey providin’ it, man.’

I also get a unique glimpse inside the complex world of buying, distributing and selling large quantities of cocaine and where the future of the business is heading. ‘De Colombians are killers, man. But if ya don’t rip dem off dey fine ta deal wid. In fact, dey seem straighter dan politicians I deal wid here in Ghana!’

Alfonso could be described as the Colombians’ ‘Gatekeeper’ in Accra. He pays fat fees to the local police, politicians and customs officials to ensure the Colombians’ activities remain unrestricted. In exchange for that, he is now considered one of the most powerful people in Accra.

‘Listen, man. Dey need me ta deal wid the Ghanaians. As long as I never rip dem off I will continya ta make big money out deir coke.’

As he talks, Alfonso’s ‘team’ clinically pack more than a million dollars’ worth of cocaine into vacuum packs, which will then be driven down to South Africa hidden in a van. ‘Dey given me the South African market,’ announces Alfonso with great pride. ‘Diss stuff is de future of Africa, man. You know what? No cats here in Ghana can afford cocaine so I take it ta South Africa. Dere dey got a lotta money.’

It all makes sense; the Colombians use people like Alfonso to ‘spread the word’ about cocaine so that their marketplaces get bigger and bigger. One old trafficking vet told me that the South Americans have a ten-year plan for each continent. ‘Their ultimate aim is to get the whole world to take cocaine,’ he explained. ‘They learned a big lesson when the US started its so-called war on cocaine. They always need to look to new markets. It all makes good business sense.’

Meanwhile Alfonso in Ghana insists he’s never even come close to being arrested, despite spending the last five years handling coke virtually every day. ‘Sure I know who ta pay and who owe me favours but ya gotta understand dat de police here don’t understand cocaine at all. Dey just see it as white man’s drug ’nd dey don’t care where it go.’

Latest UN figures claim more than £10 million worth of cocaine is shipped out of West Africa every week.

‘And it’s gonna get bigger and bigger, man. Cocaine is payin’ for so much stuff here. People have regular jobs for de first time in deir lives ’cos of coke. We in a better financial state den we have ever been before. What is so bad wid dat?’

Sharp-suited ‘cats’ like Alfonso seem to do little to hide their illicit activities. The South American ‘cocaine colonialists’ also need more low-profile characters on their side as well.

CHAPTER 36

GEOFFREY

In places like Ghana, the cocaine cartels also go out of their way to recruit local ‘civilians’ willing to act as fixers for the vast shipments of cocaine which travel through their country. These characters don’t handle or go near the ‘product’. They simply smooth its passage through the country they’re based in. Often they’re middle-ranking politicians or local businessmen with contacts inside the government and police. They are essential to the traffickers because they guarantee every shipment a safe transit but they have no direct connection to the cocaine they are helping to transport.

One such character is Geoffrey. I first met him many years ago in London. He doesn’t like to advertise the fact he is actually an African prince by birth, although his family ran out of money long ago. Geoffrey explains: ‘Yes, I do come from African royalty but it hasn’t exactly done me much good!’

Geoffrey, in his late thirties, speaks with a perfect English public school accent thanks to an education at one of the UK’s most exclusive private schools. ‘I had a great time at school but it didn’t prepare me for the real world. After I left university in France, I came back to Ghana because I was expected to work in the family business.’

That’s when things started to go wrong for Geoffrey. ‘My father was murdered in a politically motivated attack. We were from a tribe who’d opposed the government of the time, so as soon as my father died the business was effectively closed down by the government.’

Geoffrey claims that other members of his family were targeted by the government. ‘They were told to leave the country but I had nowhere to go, so I took a big risk and stayed to try and start my own business.’

Geoffrey says that he struggled for almost ten years to run an import/export business that involved a wide range of legitimate goods. ‘But it was terrible. I didn’t make a penny for the first five years but I had no choice, so I plodded on.’

By the time a change of government in Ghana occurred, Geoffrey was almost destitute. ‘I’d borrowed hundreds of thousands of pounds to keep the business afloat so it was, in a sense, too late. It was ironic, though. Now I had all the contacts in the world to help me inside the government, army, police and all other officials because my father’s old friends and associates were back in power. But I couldn’t even afford to rent a decent home to live in because the loan repayments were crippling me.’

On a trip to London to see some friends, Geoffrey bumped into an old classmate from public school. ‘All I will say is that he was South American. The rest is pretty obvious!’

Within weeks, Geoffrey had been hired by his old schoolmate who needed a ‘rep’ in Ghana to ensure that shipments of cocaine were safely transited through the country. Geoffrey explained: ‘Back then I didn’t even realise the South Americans had started using West African countries as a transit point to transport their cocaine into Europe. I was stunned when I learned how prevalent it was but I was even more impressed by the money this chap was offering to pay me to guarantee the shipments would be safely waved through.’

Geoffrey continued: ‘I really had no choice. The money they paid me helped me pay off my loans, even though it also meant I was caught up in a huge criminal enterprise. No wonder they decided to target West Africa. There are many people from all walks of life who have no money. In any case, why shouldn’t we get a chunk of this money? They are using us, so we are trying to use them back.’

Today, Geoffrey lives in an affluent suburb of Accra, and is considered a very successful local businessman. ‘I still run my company at a loss and the South Americans help me to keep it afloat because they want me to camouflage my earnings from them. It works perfectly.’

Geoffrey’s job involves a lot of ‘meeting and greeting’. He explains. ‘I turn up at all the official and unofficial government functions now. It’s my job to know everyone. Sometimes I give certain officials “gifts” on behalf of the South Americans to make sure things continue to go smoothly for their product.’

Geoffrey believes that hundreds of thousands of West Africans are now reaping the benefits of providing the South American cocaine trade with a safe ‘hub’ to ensure transportation into Europe and even back across the Atlantic to the US. ‘The South Americans have helped the economies of a number of countries, including Ghana, in this region. I am sorry to say they have probably had more influence than the governments of America and Europe combined.’

Three times a year, Geoffrey flies to London for a meeting with his South American ‘bosses’. He says they are always very polite ‘unless there have been problems with a shipment’. He explains: ‘These guys are well mannered and charming unless there have been problems. But they don’t pull out guns and threaten anyone. Far from it, they let you know they’re angry and they expect you to rectify the situation, which I always do.’

Geoffrey says the South American presence in West Africa is unlikely to change. ‘Sometimes I feel as if the West is just stepping back and watching it all happening, quite happy to let them use us as a hub because it makes life easier for the Western powers in a sense.’

Then Geoffrey casually dropped a bombshell. ‘One of my oldest friends is very high up in the UN and he says the UN have been infiltrated by South Americans who want to ensure that they are not forced out of the West African countries. Money changes hands at the UN to ensure this but even more importantly, the economists are telling the UN that the cocaine trade is helping some of these countries stay afloat.’

Geoffrey believes that the South Americans are in West Africa for the long haul. ‘They’ve put a lot of money into this area. In some of Ghana’s neighbouring countries they’re paying for schools and small businesses to help the communities. It is more than the West has ever done, isn’t it?’

Meanwhile, Geoffrey continues to look after Colombian interests in Ghana. ‘I can guarantee their cocaine safe transit through Ghana by paying the right people at the right time. Sometimes that means bribing officials at the very top of government. But it is part of my job and, to be frank, it is part of life here in Africa and that isn’t going to change for a very long time.’

Interestingly, Geoffrey believes that the key to West Africa’s role in the worldwide cocaine trade is that people in these countries cannot afford and do not require their own cocaine. ‘It’s a dream come true for the South Americans. The last thing they want is to ship their cocaine through countries where it is a popular drug. Then all sorts of criminals start trying to get involved.

‘Here in Ghana and all the other West African countries, cocaine is considered a white man’s product to import and then export. The bribes are nothing more than “tax” in local people’s eyes. You see, put like that it all seems like a perfectly legitimate business, doesn’t it?’

Geoffrey does admit, however, that some of his contacts occasionally get ‘over-greedy’. He explained: ‘The locals sometimes think the South Americans are like the American and European businessmen, who give bribes to open mines and businesses here. Those straight people are often forced to pay increasingly high bribes.

‘Recently one of the government ministers who controls access to the customs department tried to double the bribe he usually receives from the South Americans. It was a clumsy move on his part. I warned him that these people were not like the Europeans and Americans. He just didn’t get it, even though I tried to explain it all to him.

‘When I told the South Americans, they said they would not pay the higher bribe because they knew that then everyone else would start doubling their “charges” and they were right. I went back to this minister one last time and tried to explain subtly that the South Americans were upset and would not pay him the extra money.

‘He was flabbergasted because he was used to the straight Western business people who’d be too afraid to say no. I told him the South Americans were not people to upset. He still didn’t get it and said he’d make sure their next shipment did not get through. He even said he’d make sure their attempt to bribe him was made public because he believed it would help his political career.

‘I went back and told the South Americans all this. They remained very calm and suggested I not speak to this minister again. “We will sort this out,” they said.

‘Well, a week later, one of this man’s closest relatives disappeared. I deliberately kept out of it. Then a week after this, the minister contacted me and said he was happy to accept their original offer of cash. I said nothing but accepted his offer and he has never suggested being paid any more money ever since.’

Geoffrey added: ‘The South Americans sent out a very obvious message when they dealt with this man. Everyone in Accra knows why his relative disappeared and so, in effect, it was like a public relations exercise by the South Americans. They now know that no one here in Ghana will try and fleece them again.’

But what about the future for Geoffrey? ‘I am happy to work as their contact here. I don’t go near the cocaine itself, so I feel that the distance between me and the drugs themselves makes it easier to keep working for them as long as I need to.’

But, I ask, surely the South Americans would be unhappy if he tried to quit. ‘Oh, I’ve had lots of conversations with them about my retirement but they keep saying to me, “Retirement, Geoffrey? By the time you retire coca will be legal and we will all be legitimate businessmen working in a highly lucrative multinational corporation.” I guess they have a point there.’

But, until the drug does become legal, there’s a lot of money to be made by traffickers in regions where they can operate outside the reach of the law, and these new ‘cocaine territories’ are not just in West Africa …

CHAPTER 37

UKRAINE

One former Soviet bloc country taking full advantage of the ever-expanding worldwide cocaine business is Ukraine. In October 2012 police and security services confiscated 30kg of cocaine worth £6 million in the western Ukrainian city of Ternopol, but by all accounts this is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg.

That particular shipment of coke was uncovered during a special law enforcement operation to try and stamp out a channel through which cocaine was supplied from South America to the European Union and Russia. It later emerged the route was run by a transnational crime group consisting of Ukrainians, Poles and Ecuadorians.

It is claimed ‘a number’ of drug traffickers with connections to Mexican and South American coke cartels now live in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. One cocaine dealer in Kiev, a former musician, told me: ‘Ukraine has become a staging post for a lot of the coke heading for Europe and Russia.’

My informant – who we shall call LM – arrived in Kiev as a struggling musician twenty years ago. ‘Back then no one had even heard of cocaine, let alone seen any. But in recent years it’s started appearing on the dinner party circuit out here. But more importantly, there are some pretty heavy characters now trafficking it through Ukraine.’

Back in August 2010, Ukrainian border services seized almost 1,200kg of cocaine in the southern seaport of Odessa following an operation backed by international partners including the European Union Border Assistance Mission of Moldova and Ukraine law enforcement. The cocaine, worth around US$180 million, was discovered stashed in furnaces on a ship that had just arrived from Venezuela. That cocaine had a market value of over US$60 million and was hidden inside thick pipes to avoid X-ray detection. It was found only after the pipes were unloaded, broken down and examined. The seizure was just one of a series of comparatively large cocaine hauls at Odessa port, indicating that it is regularly used by cocaine traffickers.

‘Odessa is the perfect place for cocaine traffickers. It’s a wild place that pretty much runs itself, which makes it ideal for criminal activities,’ says LM. ‘I remember once I was invited by a couple of gangsters to drive down there from Kiev and test out a shipment of cocaine before recommending that they buy a big load. As we drove inside the port perimeter it was clear that the coke traffickers ran everything. We got waved through like royalty and it was only then I realised that all the important port workers were being given bribes.’

Not only is Ukraine an important ‘hub state’ for cocaine, it is also emerging as a place where coke has started to be snorted in large quantities by the local population. Kiev is said to have more cocaine users per head of population than any city in the former Soviet Union.

When I stayed in a hotel in the centre of the city, I was offered cocaine twice in the hotel bar during one evening. Ironically, I was in the bar waiting to meet one of the cocaine gangsters who have emerged in Kiev in recent years. When I told him what had happened, he laughed. ‘Kiev is swimming in coke these days. The young people love it because it makes them feel Western, rich and powerful.’

HARRY

Kiev, the ‘city of a thousand golden domes’, is one of the most beautiful settlements in Eastern Europe, home to a host of sublime Orthodox churches and cathedrals, and the site of over a thousand years of Slav culture.

But the stories of Kiev I was interested in hearing revolved around the modern-day criminals who’ve helped put this ancient city on the cocaine map.

Through a contact in the record business in London, I was introduced to Harry, who has both English and Ukrainian parentage. He moved back to Kiev only five years ago after spending much of his childhood in Birmingham. Harry admits he has a serious coke habit, which is fed by dealing cocaine to a select band of people he says are ‘very high up in Ukrainian society’.

Harry explains: ‘Coke is the drug of choice here in Kiev for many successful, younger people. They love it. This place is enjoying a boom in many ways and it seems to me that wherever there are successful people there is cocaine.’

Harry first got into coke when he lived and worked in Birmingham. He says he was ‘pleasantly surprised’ when he discovered it was just as popular in Ukraine. ‘Here, I am seen as a bit of a freak. Neither fully Ukrainian nor English. When I meet Ukranians for the first time they’re confused by my background. But I consider myself very lucky because I’ve seen the best of both worlds.’

Harry claims to have a business degree from college back in the UK and that when he first arrived in Ukraine he’d lined up a job for a telecommunications company. ‘But that job never worked out properly. Meanwhile I got in with a crowd of locals, including one guy who claimed he trafficked cocaine on a big, international scale.

‘When I suggested to this guy that he should buy a relatively small amount of coke from the cartel he worked for, he laughed at me and said they’d probably kill him if he tried to muscle in on the business in that way. But I urged him to try and do a deal with them and that I’d handle the distribution around Kiev. Well, they agreed on condition we never sold any of the coke outside the city. It was simple really. The coke that this guy was trafficking was going up to Moscow, often by train, so we were not encroaching on anyone else’s turf and back then cocaine was not as popular in Kiev as it is today. I guess I’ve helped make it that way!’

Harry claims it was relatively simple to set up a coke ‘dealership’ in Kiev. ‘I was one of the first serious dealers on the scene here, which is always easier because it means there were no local gangsters upset that I was working their patch. I had a free run at it and there was a whole city to educate about coke.’

Harry says he was very careful initially as he was well aware that the police would come down hard on him because drugs were considered ‘evil’ by authorities back then. He explained: ‘Then I had a big break. A relative of mine here mentioned he knew one of the city police chiefs. Well, I knew they were badly paid, so I went in to see this guy and asked him outright if he’d wave my coke business through for a cut of my profits. He agreed instantly and from that moment on I knew I was safe.’

Harry says he’s been arrested three times in the past five years but each time the charges against him have been dropped. ‘It’s all down to that police chief. He can pull strings and in Kiev you always have to have someone like that on your side.’

These days, Harry controls a lucrative marketplace and even ‘manages’ a team of dealers who work on his behalf. He explained: ‘There is a big music scene here and when there are concerts you have tens of thousands of people in one place, so the demand for coke is phenomenal. Recently, a big European act came to the city and did three nights in a row. I sold $160,000 worth of cocaine over those three nights without one problem from the police because my boys are low key so they don’t rub the police up the wrong way. Some private security guards did get pissy with one of my boys when he was caught dealing outside a club after a concert. But we slipped them some cash to sort it out.’

These days, Harry lives in a penthouse apartment in the centre of Kiev. He says he has ‘customers’ right up to the top of government and big business. ‘You just wouldn’t believe how many people are now into coke in this city. The funny thing is that older people are now getting turned on to it and I have a couple of middle-aged customers who are government ministers.’

But one of Harry’s biggest business coups is his love-life. Recently he began dating the daughter of ‘a very important person high up in government’. Harry refuses to reveal who it is but clearly indicated that the girl was related to someone at the very top of the country.

‘I don’t want to blow this relationship. She means a lot to me and I have been careful not to let her know what I really do for a living. But of course in the back of my mind is the fact I’m making some brilliant contacts for the future. This country is new and young. Sure, the politicians make mistakes but things can only get better and that’s good news for the coke trade, eh?’

And there are many other examples of how countries in the same region can be ‘turned’ into cocaine gateways …

CHAPTER 38

MOLDOVA

Moldova has been quietly ‘converting’ into a cocaine-transit country ever since the Soviet satellite states crumbled in the 1990s. Occasionally, Moldovan law enforcement seizes shipments of cocaine, most of it en route to cash-rich Moscow. But the majority of the shipments get through without any problems.

Cocaine usage in Moldova is relatively low as the national weekly wage wouldn’t even pay for a gram of the drug on the open market. But the cocaine trafficking trade in this country is now said to be worth in the region of $250 million a year because this tiny country provides a geographically perfect location for cocaine as it makes its way to Russia.

SAMMY

With its numerous parks and treelined streets, the Moldovan capital Chisinau is considered to be one of the greenest cities in Europe. Tourism guides refer to multiple species of birds and amphibians thriving in this busy metropolis. Yet this picturesque city is providing an increasing number of drug traffickers with the perfect transit point for hundreds of millions of pounds worth of cocaine.

‘Cocaine Soldiers’ like Sammy are employed to wave through the illicit shipments of coke that are driven east and west though this tiny nation. My first meeting with Sammy was in a sleazy nightclub on the outskirts of Chisinau.

‘I have relatives who work on the borders and they help wave the coke through,’ he says. ‘I am paid by another Moldovan but his money comes from the wholesalers and handlers back in Europe and South America.’

Sammy insists he’s never taken cocaine in his life and he has no urge to try the drug. ‘Listen, I have three jobs in order to support my wife and children. I don’t have time to take drugs. But there’s no harm in making some money out of them, surely?’

One of Sammy’s other ‘sidelines’ is helping ‘transport’ young Moldovan women to brothels, mainly in Spain. ‘That’s what I call a more traditional job, yes?’ he says with a smirk. Just then he flicks his fingers and two girls working in the nightclub where we are speaking approach. They seem very nervous.

Sammy grabs one of them by the wrist. ‘Isn’t she beautiful? How much d’you think she is worth on the open market?’

I shrug my shoulders awkwardly, trying to find the right balance between being appalled by his treatment of the girl and not blowing this interview.

‘I can make $2,000 from this girl. That is a lot of cocaine, my friend.’

But surely, I say, it’s much less risky trafficking coke than human beings. Sammy disagrees. ‘No way, man. With girls I get to fuck them, too. In any case you get heavier sentences here for drug smuggling then selling women.’

Sammy predicts that the cocaine trafficking business will expand greatly as the Russians continue to get more prosperous. ‘I hear the Russians have gone coke crazy recently. They can’t get enough of the stuff in Moscow, which means the amount of shipments going through here will go up. That means more money for people like me.’

Sammy insists that the illicit trafficking of drugs and sex-workers is an essential part of the Moldovan economy. ‘Countries like Moldova can only survive if they hook into things like smuggling women and coke. There are no big industries here, so what do you expect? It’s the way of the world and nothing’s going to change that, surely?’

Cocaine trafficking in Moldova, as in all the former Soviet republics, has risen dramatically since the demise of the Soviet Union. Economic and drug-related crimes, the most visible and predictable results of the deteriorating economic situations in the newly independent countries, have overwhelmed the human and financial resources devoted to them.

But it is Moldova’s role as a trans-shipment point for illegal drugs that is at the heart of all this country’s connections to cocaine. Sammy even claims that a number of local pilots – originally trained in the military – were recently hired by Colombian coke barons to move a newly acquired secondhand airliner from Moldova to Romania, and then onto Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. ‘You see? Everyone gets paid when they need to move cocaine,’ says Sammy.

‘This is only the beginning, my friend. Cocaine is going to make a lot of Moldovans very rich over the next few years.’

Back in that nightclub on the outskirts of Chisinau, Sammy pushes one girl off his lap and clicks his fingers in the direction of the bar. ‘You want some coke, man? It’s good stuff.’ I politely declined his offer but noticed that at least four of the skimpily clad girls who worked in the club were hovering near us.

‘I think you call them coke whores, yes? They will do anything I ask when they want cocaine.’

Sammy jumped up and two girls locked arms with him and he disappeared in the direction of the bedrooms attached to the club. The place was empty of customers, even though it was a Saturday night. Then I realised the whole business was probably paid for by the sale of cocaine, so profits for the actual business were irrelevant. Across the world there must be tens of thousands of such businesses running at a loss to help clean the proceeds of cocaine. As another coke baron had said to me: ‘Imagine what would happen if every place cleaning coke money closed down? There would be a lot of unemployment, yes? It’s not really in anyone’s interest to kill the cocaine business.’

PART SIX

MULES

Cocaine continues to be often carried in small, concealed, kilogram quantities by couriers known as ‘mules’ (or mulas), who cross borders either legally, for example, through a port or airport, or illegally elsewhere. Coke can be strapped to the waist or legs or hidden in bags, but more likely it is swallowed in pellets so as to be concealed in the body. If the mule isn’t caught, the coke gangsters will naturally reap most of the profits. If he or she is arrested, though, the same criminals usually sever all links, leaving the mule to stand trial for trafficking alone.

In London, for example, the West Indian-dominated Yardie gangs are expert at using people within poor communities to work as mules. One team known as the ‘Bling Bling Gang’ – thanks to their luxurious lifestyles and obsession with designer labels – smuggled £50 million worth of cocaine into London through mules over a two-year period a few years back. The Yardies then converted the coke into addictive crack to boost their profit to an estimated £3 million a week.

Many of their mules came from the tiny Caribbean island of St Martin (Saint Maarten) which is divided between French and Dutch authorities. These couriers would fly into European cities such as Paris and Amsterdam. Then the drugs were transported to the UK by other London-based mules on planes, ferries, buses and trains. Favourite arrival points were London’s Eurostar terminal and Victoria Coach Station, where gang members would be waiting to pick up their terrified mules.

Often three mules – completely unaware of each other – were used on each flight and the gang accepted they might have to ‘lose’ at least one of them to customs or police. The Bling Blings preferred using drug addicts and impoverished single mothers as mules. Their families would be threatened with harm if they refused and then they’d often be deliberately hooked on free cocaine. Other mules would be used to take suitcases brimming with cash back to the Caribbean – often as much as $100,000 (£57,000) at a time. The gang members were eventually convicted in the UK and sentenced to jail terms ranging between 16 and 27 years; they left behind them a trail of deeply damaged women mules, many of whom had no other connections to crime.

Apart from St Martin, other small Caribbean islands including Eustatius, Saba, Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao – part of the Netherlands Antilles – have seen drastic increases in cocaine smuggling by mules in recent years.

For many stuck in the poverty trap, being a mule opens up a risky but tempting way out of their misery. A single flight to Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam from Ghana, via Morocco, in early 2013 carried 32 West Africans, all of whom had swallowed cocaine packets or concealed them in their luggage. Over the past three years, more than 6,000 drug mules have been arrested at the airport or in Amsterdam itself.

Strikingly, there has recently been a dramatic rise in women in their late sixties and seventies being conned into carrying or swallowing cocaine. Typically they’re West Africans with no previous criminal convictions who’ve left their children behind in their home countries to traffic the drugs into the UK. In a heartbreaking twist, it’s been suggested that some are already so sick that the prospect of receiving free healthcare completely obviates the threat of being caught.

‘I am convinced that healthcare is a lot of the motivation,’ said Olga Heaven, director of Hibiscus, a charity that has drawn plaudits for its attempts to highlight the issues surrounding drug mules. ‘Ninety per cent of the Nigerians have high blood pressure and cholesterol as well as gynaecological problems. We have one case of a woman in her early fifties with a brain tumour, who’s lost her eyesight.’

In 2010 a 77-year-old British grandmother was jailed for 13 years for trying to smuggle almost £1m worth of cocaine into the country in her mobility vehicle. Customs officers at the Channel port of Dover found the drug in the old lady’s specially adapted Nissan Pathfinder after she arrived from France. The pensioner had suffered a stroke and had diabetes, asthma and hypertension. Her daughter was jailed with her. ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she told police after the drugs were discovered. ‘I just went with my daughter. I didn’t ask any questions because I’m not a nosy person. I don’t smoke or drink. What am I doing with drugs?’

It’s also claimed that these days mules are being forced to swallow larger amounts, as much as a total of 1kg in condom-wrapped balls. Olga Heaven from Hibiscus explained: ‘That shows how desperate they are to put their body at such risk. They have no access to social welfare. A child might have been taken ill or the mother can’t pay the school fees. Someone will lend her money. When she can’t pay it back they apply a kind of duress.’

Meanwhile – with one eye on the increasing arrest rates for mules – South American cartels have even been recruiting London-based Nigerians and Ghanaian ‘reps’ to scour the capital looking for gullible potential drug couriers.

In London I tracked down one such classic ‘mule’ to find out first hand how the cocaine traffickers recruit and then destroy the lives of so many otherwise innocent people.

CHAPTER 39

HONEY

Honey has carried out a number of smuggling trips between Jamaica and the UK, where she lives most of the year with her family in north-west London. One time she swallowed thirty pellets of cocaine and made it back to the UK to deliver the coke, despite one of the pullets bursting in her stomach. Now 33, Honey admits that for a while she was hooked on the excitement of being a ‘mule’. Her story is both harrowing and fascinating as she unravels her involvement in the most dangerous side of the cocaine business.

Unlike so many other ‘mules’ in the cocaine trade, Honey doesn’t suffer from ‘ghetto poverty’. Sure, her life has been hard, compounded by the fact that she has an ageing mother and two teenage children to support. But she certainly isn’t on the breadline.

Honey says she had always shunned the world of cocaine, until she met a man in London who turned her on to it and at the same time turned her into his mule ‘slave’. She says: ‘There’s no other way to describe it. I loved this guy and I would do anything for him, even though I’m sure he didn’t feel the same way about me. I was putty in his hands.’

Soon after meeting her mystery man, Honey succumbed to the temptation of becoming a cocaine mule. She knew other friends who’d done it on their way back from seeing relatives in the Caribbean. The money was good and, as far as she was concerned, if it kept her man ‘sweet’ then it was worth the risk.

‘There are people out there who will read this and think I’m the biggest fool in the world but I really wasn’t worried about doing it ’cos everyone else I knew who did it had got away with it. I wanted to go back to Jamaica anyway to see my friends and relatives. It was a dream trip for me. And of course the money was handy,’ says Honey.

Within days of agreeing to do her first ‘mule’ run, Honey was in Jamaica waiting in a rundown shantytown bar to make contact with a trafficker who worked for a coke gang connected to her lover back in London. Five minutes into the meeting, the man gave her one cocaine pellet and asked her to swallow it. ‘That was the test. If I hadn’t been able to swallow it then I wouldn’t be able to do the proper job. I started to laugh, because it looked so big like I couldn’t swallow it.’ But within minutes she’d swallowed two pellets. ‘It was no big deal.’

Then the trafficker gave Honey $500 (£320) to take care of some domestic expenses and to spruce herself up before she set off back to England the next day. The man told her she’d have to swallow the rest the following morning before she went to the airport.

The packets had been washed in bleach, soaked in a syruplike solution and kept in a refrigerator for several days. Honey believes each packet of cocaine was tested. If a packet floated, that’s a sign that it could unravel and leak in the stomach; the swallower would overdose instantly and die. If they sank, they were safe.

‘You have to trust them otherwise you die,’ explains Honey. ‘You can drink anything – even hot stuff – with them if they’re wrapped properly. When they’re not wrapped properly you can’t drink anything, you can’t eat anything. You gotta be real careful.’

Next day, Honey swallowed the rest in a cheap hotel room. In all it was a total of 75 cocaine pellets.

Honey admits the flight back to London was very stressful. ‘I couldn’t stop worrying about what would happen if any of them packages burst.’ Honey knew from the trafficker she’d met in Jamaica that the most important thing was not to make any sudden movements.

‘Apparently that would draw suspicion, so I kept as still as I could throughout the flight. It felt very uncomfortable but I didn’t want to get caught. I just kept thinking about that cash and how it would help my kids and my mum.’

Honey knew she’d be met at the airport by her lover. ‘That kind of made me feel more secure about it all. It was also perfect because if I got stopped I could talk to them all about my man, proving that we were properly connected.’

At London’s Heathrow airport, her lover immediately took Honey to a house near where they both lived in north-west London. ‘It felt a bit strange going into someone’s house but I knew it had to be done.’ In the house, her boyfriend offered Honey a laxative and milk to make her bowels move. She took neither, but agreed to go to the bathroom to start the process.

“So he gave me a bucket and gloves and disinfectant and I went into the bathroom. You have to clean them off and wash them off … I did twenty first. It took me about four hours to get all the pellets out. I was so relieved when it was all over.’

Honey expected to be paid £3,000 cash because she’d been told she would get £1,000 for each 25 pellets. Her lover gave Honey £2,500. He’d earlier given her £300 travelling money before the trip.

‘I asked him how come they gave me less money and he said that some were smaller than others. I didn’t bother fighting with him …’

Within days, Honey had spent the money on fixing up her mum’s house, buying a new TV and some clothes.

It was no big surprise when, a few weeks later, Honey got a call from her lover asking her to do another trip to Jamaica. Honey says she still trusted him, so she agreed to catch the flight. ‘To me, it was just a business. I didn’t think about the people whose lives are ruined by cocaine or the heavy guys who kill people who cross them. I needed the money and this was my way to earn a lot of it.’

Half a dozen further ‘mule’ trips followed over the next eighteen months ‘They all went smooth as silk apart from the last time when a sachet split but luckily I got it out in time. But that convinced me to pull back for a bit. It felt as if it was getting more dangerous. More risky.’

Honey’s decision to take a break from the mule business caused a lot of friction between her and her lover. ‘I told him I thought I shouldn’t push my luck and I was seriously thinking that maybe I should quit while I was still at the top, so to speak. He was furious. He thought he had me under his control and now here I was daring to step back.’

For the following couple of months, Honey went out of her way to avoid her lover in a bid to separate herself from him and his cocaine gang. ‘I deliberately avoided all the places where I thought he might be. I didn’t answer his calls. All my mates were telling me to walk away from him but it’s not as easy as that. And then there was the money. I’d got used to having some extra cash.’

Late one evening, Honey’s lover appeared at her front door demanding to come in. ‘He was high on something and shouting and screaming at me. I knew what he was after and I tried to tell him to come back the next day but he took no notice and just barged in. He said the gang were threatening to kill him for failing to get enough mules to work for him. He made it sound like they were really serious and his life was in danger. I fell for it. God knows why but I did.’

Four days later Honey arrived in Jamaica for what she’d pledged to her family would be the ‘absolute last run’. Three days later she swallowed 100 pellets of cocaine and took off back for London.

Aboard the plane back to London, Honey thought she recognised two of the other women from earlier flights and suspected they might also be mules working for her lover. Honey made a point of not leaving the plane with them after they touched down in London.

Honey got through the main customs area and was just turning the corner towards the exit when she was stopped by customs officials, who immediately asked her if she’d allow them to perform a body search.

Two female customs officers then took Honey into a room and strip-searched her, but found nothing. They searched her luggage carefully but came up dry. Then one examiner told Honey they felt she had something inside her and invited her to do a urine test. She agreed. ‘What else could I do?’ she later said.

Then they took her into another room and gave her a blue book with the rights and rules of British customs and immigration laws that she was subject to. Honey says she pushed the book away but they insisted she sign it, which she eventually did. Then they gave her ten cups of water followed by three cups of hot tea.

Honey was then escorted upstairs to a toilet, which was transparent and had a big transparent hose linking it to a sink. ‘I was very scared but I tried hard not to show it. I kept thinking about my kids and how they’d suffer if I ended up in prison. And of course I finally regretted getting involved in smuggling drugs in the first place. I had been such a fool. I saw my whole life flashing in front of me and I almost burst into tears.’

Honey asked if she could have something to eat but before she could get an answer, the examiner came back with the result of the urine test. ‘I felt exhausted and flat. This was the moment I’d always dreaded and if I hadn’t been such a fool and thought I could get away with it one last time, I wouldn’t have found myself sitting there waiting for them to put the handcuffs on.’

The examiner stood over Honey and walked around and around the table she was sitting on. ‘The suspense was killing me so I looked up at her and said, “Well?” She looked really pissed off and just mumbled “You’re free to leave.”

‘I couldn’t believe my ears. I looked at her, waiting for her to say she was kidding but she didn’t say another word. I had passed! I have no idea to this day how I got away with it but I did.’

Honey claims she ‘learned a lot of lessons’ that day. ‘I finally saw the consequences of my actions. The people who would suffer for my stupidity. It was an awakening in many ways. I went to my lover’s house, emptied the contents of my stomach and slapped him harder than I have ever hit anyone in my life. He was so shocked he didn’t retaliate. I walked out of there and told him never to contact me ever again. I’d finally come to my senses and realised he’d been using me all along. What a fool I’d been.’

Luckily for Honey, her lover backed off and didn’t press her any further to work for him again. She explained: ‘I like to think there was something genuine between us and he recognised that by pulling away and not forcing me to continue working for him. But, hey, who knows?’

Honey fully appreciates how lucky she was not to be arrested and/or killed by the deadly ‘shipment’ of cocaine pellets inside her stomach. She suspects that her former lover and his associates are probably still running teams of mules from Jamaica. ‘And I’m sure one or two of them will die and others will end up in jail. We are the secret victims of all this.’

Honey believes it is now her ‘duty’ to make sure that people understand the risks and dangers of being a mule. ‘You never get the money they promise in the first place,’ she says. ‘They rip you off and they don’t care if you live or die.’

But Honey dismissed stories from some mules who claim they are forced into smuggling at gunpoint. ‘That’s just bullshit. It makes no sense ’cos some people can swallow lots of pellets and others can’t. There ain’t no point in using mules who can’t keep the pellets in, is there?’

Despite her ordeal, Honey has never once considered going to the police to help them gather enough evidence to bust open the gang who persuaded her to work as a mule in the first place.

‘Look, I got what I deserved. I fell in love with a bad man who used me along with his mates to make a lot of money out of cocaine. But I couldn’t shop them to the police because that is crossing a line where I come from. Maybe that’s why my man didn’t come after me when I finally refused to work for him ever again. He knew I would never inform on him. It’s just not the way things are done where I come from.

‘In any case, even if the police had arrested him and his gang, another gang would have replaced them. People want this stuff like they want petrol for their cars and food for their tables. As long as the demand continues there will always be bad men prepared to smuggle the cocaine in.’

Meanwhile, Honey has got herself a fulltime job as an assistant in a children’s nursery near her London home. ‘I love kids and I want to help them. This is the first time in my life I have a job that helps others. It’s a much better feeling than swallowing pellets of cocaine and sitting on a plane for ten hours, I can tell you. I may not earn much money but I go home every night feeling a lot happier.’

PART SEVEN

THE FUTURE – COCA NEGRA AKA BLACK COCAINE

Many law enforcement officials fear that a new derivative of cocaine called Black Cocaine could eventually become more widespread than the drug that’s been harvested for thousands of years in the foothills of the Andes. Black Cocaine, where the regular cocaine base is mixed with various other substances to produce a black powder, is almost impossible to detect with traditional anti-trafficking methods.

Legend has it that Black Cocaine was first invented by Eugenio Berríos, a biochemist from Chile who worked during General Pinochet’s dictatorship. It’s claimed that Pinochet ordered Berrios to produce Coca Negra as part of an illegal money-making scheme to give Pinochet such immense financial power that he would never be overthrown.

Black Cocaine itself was first uncovered during a random search of a car stopped by police near Bogotá, Colombia, in 1998. Initial fears that this might be the start of an attempt by coke barons to flood the world with an alternative version of cocaine did not come to fruition until many years later, in May 2009.

That’s when Colombian police seized their first big shipment of Black Cocaine, which consisted of 250lb in two containers, bound for Italy from Bogotá’s El Dorado airport. Documented as bubble-jet printer cartridges, the containers passed the police dogs unnoticed and the drugs were only uncovered because police were already suspicious of the Colombian export company handling the cartridges.

Since then, Black Cocaine is believed to have gradually started to become more prevalent, although this is impossible to accurately assess since it is undetectable with no odour. This means that not even well-trained drug-sniffing dogs will find it. It also has to be forensically examined in a lab before the presence of cocaine can be confirmed.

One old-time British cocaine trafficker based on the Costa del Sol told me recently that Black Cocaine ‘will eventually change the face of cocaine trafficking’. He explained: ‘The process that’s being used to produce it has never been openly revealed but I am told the key is that it doesn’t involve any of those substances like kerosene that are used to wring the juice out of the coca leaves when they get to the labs in the jungles. The trouble is that there is a lot of wastage in this process compared with “normal” coke which is why Black Cocaine’s availability has been so limited until recently.’

My contact added: ‘But I hear that the Colombians are hard at work trying to nail down the best and most productive method to make Black Cocaine. But if you think about it, we won’t know if or when Black Cocaine takes off because no one will be able to detect it.’

Experts say that Black Cocaine consists of a chemical combination of regular cocaine hydrochloride and other chemicals, such as potassium thiocyanate, usually added at 40 per cent per mixture. Cobalt and ferric chloride are then added to kill the odour of the narcotic. These chemicals are mixed with regular cocaine and can be easily separated later after a successful illegal transaction. The most important aspect of Black Cocaine is that it does not react when subjected to various official chemical tests used by law enforcement agencies across the world whenever they uncover a shipment of suspected cocaine.

According to cocaine insiders, shipments of Black Cocaine have been disguised as everything from plastic coating to make-up to fertiliser. After arrival at its intended final destination, Black Cocaine is then transformed back to the familiar white powder by being passed through solvents such as acetone or ether. In other words, it is then effectively washed out with a solvent upon delivery rather than the other way round, which is the key to why this potentially lucrative new version of cocaine may eventually take over the world market.

Recent reports claim a small amount of Black Cocaine was found during recent police raids in Germany, the Netherlands and Albania. It was stored in packages originating from the same exporters but authorities have not revealed any more details. However, this suggests that only one Colombian cartel is currently ‘experimenting’ with Black Cocaine but that is sure to change as this new type of product gains acceptability.

One Chilean coke baron explained: ‘We’ve known about black coke for years but I hear that it is not as strong as the real thing. The big cartels are being slow to produce it because they don’t trust the actual end product. Like any business they have to keep their quality levels high otherwise they’ll start losing customers. But this is sure to change as preparation methods are adapted to the new type of cocaine.’

CHAPTER 40

In this book you’ve met murders, rapists, drug dealers, pimps, people smugglers and counterfeiters. I’ve encountered men with gunshot and knife wounds and those whose wives or girlfriends have been kidnapped and raped by rival cocaine gangs. This is the real world of Cocaine Confidential.

I’ve been surprised by the level of access I’ve been able to gain to reveal the real story of cocaine for this book. Many of the older criminal faces I am regularly in contact with have been amazed that I managed to get any of the younger ‘cocaine cowboys’ to open up. As one old British villain said when describing how cocaine had changed the face of the underworld: ‘There was things you did and did not do. Now it’s just bang, bang you’re dead. End of story.’

But maybe they cannot resist showing off because they want to be somebody. Erich Fromm, in his Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, called it: ‘The need to make a dent.’ The cocaine barons want to let the world know they exist even if they can never reveal who they really are. It may also have something to do with their consumption of cocaine and other drugs; many of these younger gangsters are far more reckless than a lot of their predecessors. Yet, at the same time, some of these coked-up hoods have also shown a surprising degree of humanity. They are not all simply cold-blooded desperadoes prepared to kill anyone to get what they want. Far from it; many are just lost souls, abandoned by their families at an early age and left to fend for themselves. It’s not really so surprising they opted for a life in the cocaine business. They had little choice.

Crime has always thrived in the poorest areas, and it’s beyond doubt that cocaine is turning many of the most poverty-stricken parts of the world into criminal melting pots, sparking cold-blooded feuds and killings involving gangsters from the streets of London to the slums of West Africa.

But these days the spider’s web is widening fast. As the global financial crisis continues to bite, it is expected that many of the cocaine gangs will push deeper and deeper into the areas that most law-abiding citizens presume to be safe for themselves and their families. That means there could well be more danger to innocent people as the cocaine gangs fight over lucrative territories inhabited by middle-class cocaine consumers.

Yet one must never overlook the fact that these cocaine gangsters are contributing much to the world’s economy. In truth, they have been virtually encouraged by some Third World governments who for so many years have chosen to overlook the ‘black economy’ on their doorsteps. There is absolutely no doubt that this casual attitude has helped prop up the economies of many countries, both rich and poor. But the world is now entering a new, even more dangerous phase. The economic meltdown means there simply isn’t enough money or work to go around. The cocaine criminals out there on the streets are themselves struggling to make ends meet and that could have an ominous knock-on effect.

I will no doubt be accused of glorifying criminals and their cocaine wars, but there is no denying that such lawlessness plays a huge role in many people’s lives. No doubt some, from the safety of their ivory towers miles away from the cocaine badlands, will accuse me of exaggerating the depth of the problem but I can assure you this book reveals merely the tip of the iceberg.

In Spain and other cocaine-reliant nations like it, many believe society will revert to the Third World country it was considered to be until thirty years ago. Inland, the rural communities will fend for themselves while the once rich and flashy coastal regions will crumble into disrepair. Living standards will drop and the jobs that are sustained by tourism will collapse, leaving huge numbers out of work.

Whatever happens, there is no doubt that the world is paying a terrible price for having turned a blind eye to cocaine for so long …

But the final word goes to one of those involved in the thick of it as the world’s consumption of cocaine continues to rise.

Cocaine is the fuel that powers the people. It will never be taken off the streets.

— Rio dealer Carlos.

EPILOGUE

SAN CRISTÓBAL, VENEZUELA, SEPTEMBER 2012

There was little or nothing about the conservatively dressed middle-aged man who had just parked his car that was likely to pique the interest of residents of the sprawling Andean mountain city of San Cristóbal, near Venezuela’s border with Colombia.

So it would have come as a surprise to any local who happened to be hanging around as day turned to evening to see him surrounded by dozens of armed police as he tried to make a call at a bank of public payphones facing a church. They’d just witnessed the end of the twenty-year career of the world’s second most important and wanted drug trafficker after Mexico’s Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, head of the feared Sinaloa cartel. Known widely as El Loco – ‘the crazy one’ – for his incandescent temper and bloody way of dealing with rivals, Daniel Barrera had followed in the footsteps of many Colombian drug lords and moved to the notionally safer haven of Venezuela in the wake of his country’s relentless US-sponsored assaults on its coke trade.

‘He just shrugged and had the look of a resigned man who knew his time was up,’ said one local street vendor who witnessed the arrest. ‘The National Guard pulled up on motorbikes and he surrendered without a struggle. It was over in no time.’

The arrest was the culmination of a lengthy clandestine operation conducted by Colombian, Venezualen, British and American agents that cut short the shady half-existence Barrera had led as he sought to run his international narco-empire from San Cristóbal at the same time as evading detection. He’d used many aliases and moved between nondescript apartments and guest-houses throughout the border city; more surprisingly, he’d resorted to plastic surgery, as well as the excruciatingly painful expedient of burning his hands with acid to erase his own fingerprints. In fact his cosmetic work went beyond mere camouflage. The billionaire drug lord had admitted to one female Colombian undercover officer who’d earlier infiltrated his entourage that he was obsessed with looking thin. So much so that the svelte man taken into custody bore little resemblance to the portly figure he cut in the only known picture of him that had previously existed.

As Colombian and Venezuelan law enforcement agencies monitored Barrera’s movements with American and British assistance, they picked up ‘chatter’ in early 2012 indicating that Barrera had flown to West Africa to monitor his cartel’s operations there: the region was used as a staging post for cocaine shipments on their journey from Venezuela to the UK and Europe.

Despite the spread of cold-blooded, merciless Mexican drug cartels taking over much of the Colombian coke barons’ trafficking operations in South America, Barrera’s capture was still hailed as a major breakthrough. It was a rare success in the battle against the Latino cocaine billionaires.

Maybe Barrera’s arrest marked the beginning of the tide finally turning in the battle to break the coke barons’ stranglehold on the world’s entire cocaine market. But only time will tell.

AFTERWORD

Shortly after completing this book, I got a phone call from two British cocaine gangsters based in Spain called Jim and Tel, who helped me when I went on a research trip to their ‘manor’, just south of Benidorm. Their speciality had been smuggling cocaine on small yachts across the Mediterranean.

The last straw for them came when a vessel they were sailing off the island of Menorca sank in a storm and one of their crew was drowned. The Latin American cocaine barons who’d hired them to smuggle the drugs accused Jim and Tel of stealing their cocaine and commissioned two South American hitmen based in Madrid to kill them.

‘We’re in deep trouble and none of it is our fault,’ said Jim nervously. ‘I think we’re both going to move to somewhere like Thailand and hope that eventually the cocaine bosses will call off the hitmen and leave us in peace. But in this game anything can happen.’

Jim had these words of advice for anyone planning to try and get a slice of the cocaine business.

‘Don’t bother. There’s nothing there for anyone. The good times have gone and everyone is desperate. We’ve got a death sentence hanging over us, even though we watched one of our best mates drown in front of our very eyes. It’s not worth it.’

TEN BIGGEST COCAINE BUSTS IN HISTORY

•  30 September 1989: 47,178lb/21,399kg of coke found in a Los Angeles warehouse

•  21 March 2007: 42,845lb/19,434kg of coke seized 20 miles south-west of the Panama coast aboard a motor vessel called Gatun

•  10 March 1984: 30,423lb/13,799kg of cocaine discovered on a train in Tranquilanda, Colombia

•  17 September 2004: 30,109lb/13,657kg of cocaine seized in the Eastern Pacific by US DEA on board fishing vessel Lina Maria, 300 miles south-west of the Galapagos Islands

•  13 May 2005: 30,100lb/13,653kg of cocaine uncovered on a jungle riverbank near Tumaco by Colombian Navy

•  25 May 2011: 26,500lb/12,020kg of coke found in warehouse in Cartagena by Colombian police officers

•  5 January 2001: 26,397lb/11,973kg of coke found by US Coast Guard on the Svesda Maru, in the Pacific Ocean about 1,500 miles south of San Diego

•  23 September 2004: 26,369lb/11,960kg of cocaine seized from the Belize-flagged vessel San Jose in the Pacific by USS Crommelin

•  2 October 2002: 25,300lb/11,475kg of coke off coast of Panama discovered on board fishing vessel Paulo by US Coast Guard

•  27 July 1995: 24,325lb/11,033kg of cocaine intercepted 780 miles west of Peru on a ship called Nataly One raided by US Coast Guard

Crime leaves a trail like a water-beetle;

Like a snail, it leaves its shine;

Like a horse-mango it leaves its reek.

— Old Spanish proverb

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Nobody is better placed than Wensley Clarkson to track the vicious, violent and unexpected waves that followed in its wake, or bring to life its cast of larger-than-life characters. From smalltime crime in south-east London, to ‘the heist of the century’ and its bloody consequences, Wensley Clarkson’s The Curse of Brink’s-Mat is an epic tale of villainy, gold and revenge.

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COMING SOON

LEGAL HIGH CONFIDENTIAL

Wensley Clarkson

Legal Highs are without doubt the biggest drug scourge to blight the world since recreational drugs first hit the streets more than 100 years ago. Their growing menace opens up a new front in the drug war, shifting the battle line from the Colombian jungles, Moroccan valleys, Afghan hills and the Winnebagos of New Mexico to especially constructed laboratories on the outskirts of Shanghai and other cities across the globe.

But who are the shadowy characters behind the extravagant new drugs such as ‘bath salts’ and ‘Miaow Miaow’? The scientists, the rogue boffins, the factory sweat-shop workers, the smugglers, the suppliers, and, ultimately, the dealers who sell tens of millions of packets of these substances every week? This book will go inside the lives of all these people to reveal for the first time the true stories behind the emergence of the most deadly narcotics the world has ever seen.

PUBLISHED MARCH 2015

www.quercusbooks.co.uk

Visit www.wensleyclarkson.com to keep up with

the latest Wensley Clarkson activity, including his

numerous TV and documentary appearances

and his many bestselling books.

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication Page

PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION

COCAINE THROUGH THE AGES

PART ONE: FARMERS, PRODUCERS, WHOLESALERS – CENTRAL AMERICA

CHAPTER 1: STEVE

CHAPTER 2: THE CAMPO

CHAPTER 3: MIGUEL

CHAPTER 4: DONNY

PART TWO: SMUGGLERS/HANDLERS/DEALERS – CARIBBEAN/BRAZIL

CHAPTER 5: JEZ

CHAPTER 6: CHRIS

CHAPTER 7: TONY

CHAPTER 8: CARLOS AND JOSE

PART THREE: DEALERS/TRAFFICKERS/TRANSPORTERS – SPAIN

CHAPTER 9: GALICIA

CHAPTER 10: CADIZ

CHAPTER 11: COSTA DEL SOL

CHAPTER 12: RONNIE

CHAPTER 13: STAN

CHAPTER 14: MICKY

CHAPTER 15: LUIS

CHAPTER 16: DENISE AND JANE

CHAPTER 17: MARK

CHAPTER 18: SLY

CHAPTER 19: FRANKIE

CHAPTER 20: JODY

CHAPTER 21: PATRICK

CHAPTER 22: TIGGY

CHAPTER 23: INSPECTOR JUAN LORENZO

CHAPTER 24: THIN PHIL/GH, GIBRALTAR

PART FOUR: THE UK’S COCAINE WARS

CHAPTER 25: HJ

CHAPTER 26: JOEY

CHAPTER 27: BECKI

CHAPTER 28: KEN

CHAPTER 29: STEVE

CHAPTER 30: PETE

CHAPTER 31: BERNIE AND SERGI

CHAPTER 32: TOMMY

CHAPTER 33: ROBERT

PART FIVE: THE NEW FRONTIERS

CHAPTER 34: MARCO

CHAPTER 35: ALFONSO

CHAPTER 36: GEOFFREY

CHAPTER 37: UKRAINE

CHAPTER 38: MOLDOVA

PART SIX: MULES

CHAPTER 39: HONEY

PART SEVEN: THE FUTURE – COCA NEGRA AKA BLACK COCAINE

CHAPTER 40

EPILOGUE: SAN CRISTÓBAL, VENEZUELA, SEPTEMBER 2012

AFTERWORD

TEN BIGGEST COCAINE BUSTS IN HISTORY

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