Hash (13 page)

My trip to see Nils in Amsterdam was to open up another side to the secret world of hash, which I had never even thought existed. For, since getting out of prison, Nils had, in public at least, turned over a new leaf and, in his words, ‘gone legit’. I had no idea if he was telling me the truth but I knew that if I could get inside his head then I might get some interesting answers.

*

Nils’s driver Harold met me at Schiphol Airport in a black Mercedes. He didn’t say much on the journey into Amsterdam, except that Nils (at his own insistence) had reserved me a room in a very nice boutique hotel, which I later learned he owned. Just then Harold’s mobile rang. He spoke briefly in Dutch to the caller then handed me the phone without a word.

‘Welcome to Amsterdam,’ said the unmistakably throaty voice of Nils. He instructed me to check into the hotel, dump
my bags and then Harold would drive me to his office. It sounded like a sensible plan.

An hour later, I walked aboard the most luxurious canal boat I had ever seen. It looked modest from the outside and was tucked down a narrow waterway just off one of Amsterdam’s busiest tourist areas. Now in his early seventies, Nils still looked the part, dripping in gold bracelets and dressed like a mobster from
Scarface
in a light brown double-breasted suit.

Unlike most criminals, Nils made small talk with ease and even sounded vaguely interested to hear about the progress of my book career since we’d met all those years earlier. I was embarrassed because I could barely remember what we had spoken about when we first met, so I let him do all the talking at first.

‘You’re a lucky man,’ said Nils. ‘Twenty years ago I would not have agreed to talk to anyone about the hash business. I kept it away from the surface because I knew the police were looking closely at my activities.’

Nils admitted he’d been ‘a major hash trader’ in Holland until his latest incarceration. ‘No one could touch me back then, or so I thought. I had the main Moroccan routes sewn up. At one stage I reckon I had control of 60 per cent of the hash coming out of North Africa. I owned the supply routes and the Moroccan gangsters had to pay me for my transporting expertise.’

‘What does that mean?’ I ask.

‘It means that I ran the port of Rotterdam when it came
to guaranteeing that the shipments got through. I organised the bribes and the officials would only deal with me. It gave them a sense of security because they were all afraid of being caught at the ports. I became the buffer between the crooked officials and the criminals. It was much more profitable than organising teams of smugglers and then having to find the dealers to sell my produce.’

I was beginning to realise that Nils had a unique role as far as hash smugglers and gangsters were concerned. ‘It’s a bit like being a movie producer,’ explained Nils, lighting up a big fat Cuban cigar. ‘I am not interested in just one movie. I want to produce dozens at the same time and that’s what I did with hash. I was getting a chunk of virtually every hash shipment in and out of Holland. At one time before my arrest I was earning in excess of €250,000 every week.

‘I had so much cash flooding in, I didn’t know what to do with it. Yet I never once went near the hash itself. It was a beautiful deal. The risk was minimal and rewards were fantastic. I laundered a lot of the cash through buying property in Holland and Spain. I ran my three nightclubs in Amsterdam at a loss. I even invested in crap businesses just to be able to lose some of the money to stop the taxman and the cops looking too closely at me.’

Nils paused for a moment and opened a drawer in the desk in front of where he was sitting. He pulled out a newspaper cutting and smoothed it out in front of me. ‘See? I even paid for an orphanage to be built. They wanted to
name it after me but I knew that could bounce back so I refused and donated all the money secretly. This newspaper article talks about a secret donor but no one but the school itself knew I had provided the funds.’

Then Nils admitted that he had been an orphan himself. ‘I know what it’s like for those kids without families because I was one. If I’d had a proper childhood, maybe I wouldn’t have committed any crimes, eh?’

As often happened with Nils, he was drifting off track. So I gently nudged him back in the direction of hash.

‘Why hash? Well when I was about eighteen, I met a woman whose husband dealt in hash here in Amsterdam. It was the late fifties and cannabis wasn’t well known back then. Most people looked on drugs as if they were the devil’s candy. But I noticed this guy had a hard core of customers and they just kept coming back for more. The hash came from the Lebanon and Afghanistan back then but often nothing turned up and there wasn’t any in the city for months.

‘I could see that the people who used it wanted it all the time. It didn’t make sense to have a product that was in demand which you couldn’t get all the time. So I got this guy to introduce me to his supplier, an Arab based in Rotterdam. He told me he could sell hash every day of the week if he had enough of it.’

Within months, Nils recruited a dozen merchant seamen whom he promised to pay handsomely for bringing back hash from their journeys to Lebanon and Afghanistan. ‘To
tell the truth, I didn’t care where the hash came from as long as I could get my hands on enough of the stuff.’

But, said Nils, it wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. ‘Dealing with those seamen and the street dealers was a pain in the arse. I started bringing in shipments hidden under fruit and stuff like that. But some of that would go missing. Port officials here kept demanding bigger and bigger bribes. I started to wonder if it was all worth so much trouble. That’s when I realised it was better to step back and let others do the dirty work.’

From that moment on, in the early 1970s, Nils turned his hash connections into a specialised Dutch-based criminal network that worked behind the scenes to ensure that the hash came safely through Rotterdam. ‘Basically, I could guarantee any gangsters that their shipment of hash would get through customs here and then could be distributed to the rest of Europe. Without my influence, the hash would not get through Holland safely. At first, a few idiots tried to do it without me but they all failed and in the end they all had to come to me for my help.’

Nils claims that for the following thirty years he remained safely in the background pulling all the strings for hash shipments coming in and out of Holland.

But even a so-called perfect criminal enterprise can come up against a few problems. Nils explained: ‘You get a lot of bigshots in this business. They are guys who think they’re tough and they try to cut out the middlemen like me. They are bullies. I’ve had a couple of them come round here and
pull guns on me but my answer to them is always the same. No one else can control the officials at the port and other points of entry. You can’t just set up this type of operation overnight. It takes years of making contacts.

‘I told one idiot to go and try and do it on his own and if he succeeded I’d hand over my business to him. Well, you can guess what happened, can’t you? He got arrested and put in prison within months because he started openly offering bribes to people at the port. They told the police immediately and they came looking for him.’

But, I ask, how did Nils himself end up getting caught?

‘Oh, that was just bad luck on my part. I had a fallout with a criminal who claimed that my men had stolen his shipment of hash as it came through Rotterdam. Stupid asshole had been robbed by his own men without even realising it. But this guy got obsessed that I was ripping him off and he started shouting his mouth off in Amsterdam. The cops got to hear about it and they put me under surveillance for months.

‘I knew the police were watching me but I thought they didn’t have anything on me. I didn’t realise that this same bastard had been arrested and agreed to give evidence against me in exchange for a lighter sentence. In the end they filmed three criminals coming to my office for meetings and then combined it with the testimony from this guy and I got arrested. It was still a thin case but the cops were determined to make something stick.’

At first Nils continued running his hash empire from inside prison but then a corrupt officer he knew informed Nils that
the police were building another, much bigger case against him. ‘That’s when I decided to quit while I was ahead of the game. I’m too old to go back to prison.’

Nils is still ‘dabbling’ in the hash game but he believes that as long as he remains low key, the police will not bother with him. It’s hard to believe that someone as powerful as he once was would turn his back on such a lucrative trade.

So, how was he making the majority of his money these days?

‘Hotels. Apartment blocks. Houses. I have plenty of property to keep me busy. I don’t need the hash business any more and it doesn’t need me.’

Who, then, had taken over his business?

Nils hesitated for a few moments before answering. Another couple of beats of silence followed before Nils sighed deeply.

‘There is another, even more important reason why I quit. One of my best friends got shot dead in the reception area of one of my own hotels. It was a disgusting, cowardly act but certain people were trying to send a very nasty message to me and it worked. I realised I was too old to try for this game.

‘I talked to my family and friends and decided to enjoy the rest of my life without these types of threats hanging over me. In the drugs business, the only survivors are the sensible ones who sit back and take stock of their lives and get out at the top. Acting rashly always ends in death and destruction. The smartest move I ever made was to walk away from it. I just hope it never catches up with me in the end.’

That night I had dinner with Nils in the restaurant of his boutique hotel where I was staying. We never once talked about the hash trade again. He had said his piece. He’d allowed me into his world and there was nothing more to be gained by talking about it further. Instead, he spoke of his regret at never marrying and how if he had had better opportunities while growing up he might have made his fortune from legitimate means rather than crime. I had no doubt he meant every word he said.

There are two million regular hash smokers in the UK. Unofficial estimates predict that that figure will double within the next 20 years.

*

Britain is, in the words of one law enforcement official, ‘a very lively marketplace for hash’. That’s understating it, to say the least. Britain has its own hash epidemic and with prices remaining high, it is attracting more and more opportunistic gangsters.

Back in the summer of 2007, a bunch of Essex villains tried to smuggle enough cannabis into Britain to make joints stretching from John O’Groats to Land’s End. Two shipments of hash worth £11 million – hidden inside boxes of cucumbers – and weighing around four tons. The twelve-strong gang were foiled by the Serious Organised Crime Agency, who tracked the shipments from Spain to the UK in a covert sting operation. The hash gangsters were eventually jailed for a total of sixty-six years.

Around the same time, police in south London uncovered an Amsterdam-style hash smokers’ den based in a popular Streatham restaurant, which pulled in hundreds of customers a week. Smokers could place their order at the counter before heading to a comfy basement lounge to light up. Officers later said they’d found portions of the drug packaged and ready for sale alongside tasty snacks and pastries.

That raid came days after three separate cannabis factories were dismantled across Newcastle in a twenty-four-hour period. In total more than 5,500 plants were seized, while data collected by the local newspaper suggested that residents are never more than a mile away from a cannabis farm in Newcastle.

*

But my intentions to uncover the British side of the secret underworld of hash for this book proved a hard nut to crack. Clandestine meetings in pubs, motorway service stations and isolated lay-bys occurred as I tried to unravel the UK end of the hash trade. Many of these initial contacts were middlemen who insisted on finding out more about my book project before putting me in touch with the real characters involved in hash. But the first batch of hash gangsters I encountered had little extra to offer following on from the British hash kings of southern Spain, so I bided my time.

Then one day I met a slippery character called Benny in Camden, north London, who said that he’d put me in touch with someone whom he guaranteed would give me a completely different perspective on the hash game. ‘This bird’ll blow your mind, mate. She knows it all inside out.’

So, that’s how I came across Tina, probably the most unlikely member of the secret underworld of hash I was ever likely to meet.

Tina is what they call a ‘living legend’ inside the secretive hash business. She’s a light aircraft pilot from Suffolk, who’s flown tens of millions of pounds’ worth of Moroccan hash into the UK from northern Europe over the last twenty-five years. Being a woman in a predominantly male environment, says Tina, has given her a big advantage. ‘Villains are typical blokes. They think they’re hard and macho and tough, so when they meet a woman they just presume she’s a bimbo.’

In Tina’s case, nothing could be further from the truth.

Tina is a surprise package in many other ways, too. She went to a fee-paying public school; her father was the headmaster at the same school and her mother ‘was just about the most prim and proper person you ever came across’. Tina had what she openly describes as a typical middle England upbringing. ‘It was boring but safe and my parents
expected me to go into something equally safe, such as working in a bank or becoming a solicitor.’

But Tina’s grandfather was the biggest influence on her childhood: ‘He was a pilot in the Second World War. What a character. I think I got my reckless streak from him. He wasn’t scared of anything. He got shot down and taken prisoner in France and then escaped from a prisoner of war camp. I loved hearing his stories about the war. He seemed so much more interesting than the rest of my family.’