Hash (11 page)

One British criminal who spent many months in Alhaurín told me that the inmates reckoned the authorities deliberately house the women just within sight so that ‘we really suffer’. He said that it was possible to wave to the women in their cells and that sometimes inmates managed to form some kind of long-distance relationship but it all sounds very
frustrating and simply adds to the dead, tinderbox atmosphere inside Alhaurín.

From a distance, the prison resembles a cluster of rundown, low-rise tower blocks, right slap-bang in the middle of a desolate rocky terrain looking down towards the sea and the mass of concrete that makes up the vastly overdeveloped Costa del Sol. When Alhaurín was first built, most of the coastal resorts were nothing more than fishing villages dotted along a picturesque, deserted coastline. Now the Costa del Sol looks like a sprawling mini-Rio de Janeiro dominated by bland tower blocks and depressing-looking estates of private holiday homes, jerry-built at high speed during the boom years of the 1990s. Many of them are empty and deserted since the Spanish recession started in 2007.

Inside Alhaurín, the grim-faced guards search all visitors in a casual, nonchalant manner, which belies the sort of security one would expect inside the biggest prison in the vast southern region of Andalucia. These ‘screws’ seem deadened by the sheer flatness of the atmosphere that pervades in this bland environment. They are poorly paid and it shows.

I was in Alhaurín to meet Billy, a notorious veteran British criminal based on the Costa del Sol. He’d been arrested a few weeks earlier while dropping off a shipment of hash at the home of another criminal who happened to be under police surveillance because he was suspected of being a major arms dealer, as well as a drug baron.

My visit inside Alhaurín was shrouded in secrecy because
the only way I could get in was to pretend to be a friend of Billy. I’d actually interviewed him for a TV programme years earlier and kept in contact with him. A few weeks earlier he’d phoned from an illicit jailhouse mobile phone to say he’d been caught up in a police sting and reckoned he’d be in the prison for some months before his lawyer could get the courts to grant him bail. The legal system in Spain works in strange ways. Often a foreign criminal will be arrested, thrown in jail and told he will only be released to await trial if he can provide a certain amount of bail money. As Billy explained: ‘That can take months and months and it wears you down. In the end, you cough up the cash – usually fifteen to twenty grand, and you get released and then you fuck off out of there as quickly as possible.’

The Spanish authorities would never openly admit it, but there seems to be a deliberate policy at work here. If the criminal provides enough bail money he or she can then disappear, saving the system hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of euros in legal expenses and the cost of keeping that criminal in prison. As Billy explained: ‘It’s a lot cheaper to let me go as long as I leave the country than to sit there for twenty years soaking up all their cash. It makes sense in a way, doesn’t it?’

The ratio of guards inside Alhaurín to prisoners is 20 to 1, which seems quite good compared with some of the other prisons I have visited around the world. Incidents of attacks on warders are pretty uncommon, too. But it took the canny Billy to explain the significance of that. ‘The guards are no
different from us, really. Most of them were rejected as policemen. They’re badly paid and quite resentful about it, so they often sympathise with us, which means most of them are open to a bit of bribery and corruption.’

Billy had access to a mobile phone whenever he liked and if that was ever confiscated, his cellmate Leon had three more hidden in their cell. Warders even brought in extra food for inmates if they were prepared to pay for it and there was a special annexed kitchen area near Billy’s cell where cordon bleu prisoners enjoyed cooking their favourite meals every evening. TV sets were even allowed in the cells.

‘It all helps keep things calm here,’ Billy said. ‘The guards are all right on the whole. No one seems to mind the backhanders from the inmates to them, although they’re not so keen on openly allowing drugs to be brought in.’ But Billy then added with a wry smile, ‘Mind you, I’ve had the best quality hash I’ve ever smoked here in Alhaurín. No one would dare sell bad stuff because we’re all in here together and we’d soon find out who cut it.’

Yet despite the supposedly relaxed atmosphere in Alhaurín, it’s not always a pleasant place to be in, by any means. ‘There are a lot of prisoners here who should be in mental institutions. The Spanish just don’t seem to accept that people do have psychological problems and prison is no place for them,’ Billy told me.

Before Billy turned up on the Costa del Sol twenty-five years ago, he was a London-based university-educated professional musician with great hopes of making it as a rock
star. Then he got caught up in a £10,000 hash deal and decided to head to the Costa del Crime. ‘The guy I bought the drugs from got arrested and I knew it was only a matter of time before the police came after me. I’d heard that Spain was easy to operate in so I booked a flight, packed a bag and turned up here. I’ve never been back to the UK since.’

Billy quickly settled into the drugs, sex and booze lifestyle that dominates life for so many expats in southern Spain. ‘Dealing in big shipments of puff mainly was so easy out here back then. The cops were so badly paid they never even chased up cases,’ explained Billy. ‘They took the attitude that just as long as the criminals were only dealing in hash then they wouldn’t bother with them. In any case, all the cops I’ve ever met out here all love hash and I always made sure that my favourite policemen got as much as they wanted.’

So for the following twenty years Billy built up a hash empire run through his own gang in the resort of San Pedro, just a few kilometres west of Marbella. ‘Those were great days. I had a good crew working for me and I was making a fortune, spending it all on wine, women and song and even paid for my kids to go to private school. I had a top of the range Mercedes and a house bought for cash. I felt I was untouchable. And you know what? I was, in a sense. I dealt hash like a banker deals in stocks and shares. I was relaxed, confident and never had to get heavy with anyone. Most of the time, my team of lads did all the direct contact with the buyers, so I hardly ever had to get my hands dirty. It was a good system.’

Billy also made strong hash connections inside Morocco. ‘It was really civilised. I’d pop over to Tangier every six weeks or so, organise another shipment, pay over the cash and then get my people to meet the boats when they came in.’

Billy reckoned that for fifteen years the hash trade in southern Spain was ‘safer than working as an estate agent’. He explained: ‘I looked on myself as a professional businessman. My wife and kids thought that was what I was. The money was rolling in. There was never any violence and I was on top of the world. I felt almost invincible.’

But then Billy got, by his own admission, ‘too big for my own fuckin’ boots’.

He told me his story. ‘I bought this club which was basically a brothel and reckoned it would make a nice little sideline and I’d be able to launder all my hash money through it.’

‘Clubs’ as they are known in Spain are bars with bedrooms attached, which get around the anti-prostitution laws because the girls who work in the clubs ‘rent’ the rooms. ‘The profit was in the drinks more than the sex,’ explained Billy. ‘You could charge ten times the normal amount for a beer and the girl had to pay you 25 per cent of her “fee” on top of that.’

But soon after purchasing the club and recruiting girls from as far afield as South America and eastern Europe, Billy was given a stark reminder of what being a criminal on the Costa del Sol had become. ‘These two Russians walked into the club and pulled me aside and said they wanted a share of it. I was stunned and told them to fuck off. I couldn’t
believe they would have the bare-faced cheek to think they could lean on me.’

But that incident sparked off a vicious turf war. ‘The Russians proved to be complete nutters. They kidnapped my Bulgarian girlfriend and told me they’d slice her ear off if I didn’t let them take over control of the club. I was outraged. No one had ever tried to do this to me in all my years in Spain but times were changing.’

In the end, Billy paid a €100,000 ransom to the Russians and then hired three Romanian gangsters to ‘teach them a fuckin’ lesson’. He went on: ‘That whole thing cost me close to a quarter of a million euros. One of the Russians was shot dead and I had to start hiring security staff to protect me and look after the club at all times of the day and night. It was fuckin’ dreadful. I had to start arming myself around the clock and I ended up getting visits from three different gangs trying to get a piece of my club and drugs business off me.’

Billy says that today the foreign gangs are trying to run every single aspect of the criminal scene in southern Spain. ‘They try to control the girls, the drugs, the people smuggling, the counterfeiting. I knew it was getting dodgy but I couldn’t just close my operation down and retire to the Balearic Islands because I had mouths to feed and a business to run.’

Today, Billy recognises that he should have got out of the hash game then. Instead he ended up being arrested by the Spanish police when he delivered a shipment of hash to that arms dealer. ‘No one would have taken any notice of that gun dealer in the old days,’ he said. ‘But the police terrorism
unit was on his tail because they reckoned he was supplying terrorists with arms. I walked straight into a trap.’

Billy says he deeply regrets not shutting down his operation earlier. ‘I knew all this was coming but like so many others I thought I was untouchable. I really believed that all these foreigners would shoot each other down and then it would just go back to the way it was all those years earlier.’

But Billy admits: ‘Being arrested was a blessing in disguise in a sense because I’m sure I would’ve been gunned down by one of those psycho foreigners in the end.’

Billy predicts it’s going to get even more deadly on the Costa del Sol. ‘I’ve heard of people being shot over a 500-euro debt. It’s got out of control and I can only see it getting worse.’

A few weeks after our interview, Billy slipped out of Spain following his release on bail from Alhaurín. Shortly afterwards, he called me to say he wouldn’t ever be back on the Costa del Sol. He was heading for South America. ‘That place is finished. It’s on the scrapheap and it’s about to implode. I reckon it’s going to get even more deadly out there. I’m going to scrape a living together somehow but drugs are now a thing of the past for me. I lost my club, my house, everything after I was arrested and now I have a chance to make a clean start a long way from all the madness.’

It’s not just the Brits who have turned Spain into the criminal badlands of western Europe. Today it is estimated that the Spanish coastline is home to more than 20,000 foreign gangsters of some seventy nationalities, including the Russian Mafia and armed gangs from Albania, Kosovo and the former Soviet republics. In addition to drugs there is a flourishing trade in illegally imported tobacco and cigarettes, which are almost as profitable to foreign criminals in Spain as drugs but with minimal risks.

Younger, flashier, mainly eastern European gangsters have been gradually eroding the power of the traditional Spanish and British hash gangsters out on the Costa. Many of these characters are based full-time in Spain. They stay mainly in the background as fixers and organisers, often hiding behind legitimate businesses while arranging big
hash consignments, as well as committing all sorts of other crimes.

Drug investigations take up 70 per cent of police work on Spain’s coastal regions. And according to Spanish officers, the typical hash baron these days is in his late twenties or thirties and often foreign. They are the sort of characters who’ll walk into a bar or club and shoot someone to send out a message to rivals.
Don’t fuck with me
.

These Spanish-based hash gangs use Uzis and even hire hitmen to send out a chilling message to anyone who dares to cross them. They often number fifteen to twenty hardcore members, some of whom may have grown up together. Violence can flare up when there is a ‘crossover’ such as a turf war or when a drugs consignment goes missing. These criminals often begin by investing in the burgeoning club scene and supplying synthetic drugs from Europe, especially Holland.

The vast number of drug busts in Spain underlines the role being played by foreign criminals. In recent years, gang bosses have cultivated their contacts in Spain and set up members of their own gangs to act as international go-betweens with hash smugglers. Those links with Spain have become even more sophisticated and their network of suppliers and distributors is often now second to none.

Many Irish drug gangsters fled their home country and headed for Spain after the authorities introduced the Proceeds of Crime legislation and set up the Criminal Assets Bureau following the shocking cold-blooded murder of
Dublin journalist Veronica Guerin in the mid-1990s. One infamous suspect is rumoured to be operating in southern Spain as one of the biggest suppliers of hash in Europe to this day.

His emergence has come since the arrest in Spain of an even more powerful gangster who was born in Birmingham to Irish parents. After that arrest, the notorious villain became the Mr Big in Irish drug circles on the European mainland and he has spent the past three years moving between the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain.

Spanish police allege that sadistic Serbian hash gangsters operating in Spain’s capital, Madrid, gave a gruesome indication of the kind of brutality they were capable of when Sretko Kalinic, nicknamed The Butcher, along with others, tortured and killed a fellow gang member then turned him into a stew. After beating Milan Jurisic to death with a hammer, they skinned and boned him with a sharp knife before forcing his corpse through a meat grinder. Police say the gang made a macabre facemask from his skin, cooked his flesh and ate him for lunch. They disposed of his bones by tossing them into Madrid’s River Manzanares.