Hash (2 page)

Across the world there are many other examples of massive
hash shipments financed by the underworld. Tony’s trucks always carry legitimate goods such as fruit and vegetables as cover, which are themselves often sold in the UK for an extra, healthy profit.

Yet as I’ve probed further and further into the hash business, I’ve come to realise the risks are just as deadly as for any of the Class A drugs. I’ve been told of hitmen paid to kill rival criminals who dared to encroach into another gang’s cannabis territory. I’ve found myself feeling just as uneasy in the company of hash barons as any Colombian cocaine dealers or Turkish heroin smugglers.

I came across a Dutch yachtsman called Jak, who said he had a price on his head because the boat he used to smuggle hash had sunk in an accident off the coast of Majorca, with the loss of the lives of his two best mates. He explained: ‘That hash shipment was my responsibility and the criminals who paid for it are still after me because they believe that I owe them the cost of the entire shipment, even though it’s lying at the bottom of the sea alongside the bodies of my two friends.’

It’s five years since that tragic accident, but Jak believes he still has that underworld price on his head and he continues to watch his back and move house once every few months. ‘I’ve got no choice. If I went to see them to ask them to let me off, they’d probably shoot me dead on the spot. As far as they’re concerned that shipment was my responsibility and unless I pay them back the full value of the hash, then they will continue to try and hunt me down.’

So, the violence committed in the name of the hash trade is as cold-blooded and senseless as every other heavyweight criminal enterprise, it seems. Another hash smuggler called Billy, an expat Brit living in southern Spain, told me how he was cornered in an English bar near Marbella and beaten by two men with baseball bats after he was suspected of talking too loudly about his hash baron bosses.

Billy shrugged his shoulders as he explained how he was attacked in the middle of the bar in full view of all the customers. Eventually they dragged him outside into the street where they ‘beat me to a pulp’ and then left him semi-conscious in the gutter for all to see. It was a classic criminal reprisal, deliberately done in public so that anyone who might be stupid enough to talk openly about the gang would get the message loud and clear that they should keep their mouths shut.

Numerous other examples of the violent, destructive side of the hash business have emerged while researching this book. The cast of characters expanded as it became increasingly clear that hash’s criminal influence spread across the world and affects a vast range of people from all classes and backgrounds. Ultimately, most of it is down to one driving force; the major league criminals are only interested in securing the maximum profits, irrelevant of the hardship and danger for those producing and smuggling the actual drug. They see hash as a business like any other. And if they can’t guarantee themselves a fat profit, then they’ll happily mix the hash with anything to ‘stretch it out’ in order to retain those big profits.

There is a common misconception among recreational drug users that cannabis resin is always 100 per cent pure. It’s complete nonsense, as any hash baron will tell you,
off the record
. Cocaine users have come to expect their produce to be laced with all sorts of things from baby laxative to flour. Ask a hash smoker the same question, however, and he or she will almost always say they like hash in part because they know it’s pure. Yet by the time hash usually reaches many smokers in the West, it has often been ‘watered down’ by up to 50 per cent. Everything from bits of plastic to strips of tree bark have been known to be used to stretch out the profits for the hash gangsters.

It’s ironic when you consider that most hash farmers see themselves as hardworking people who pride themselves on the quality of their crop and who shrug their shoulders with a sense of apathy when they hear about the vast profits being made off the back of their ‘product’.

So perhaps not so surprisingly, behind most farmers there is a middle man, who usually has close criminal connections in nearby cities. He negotiates the prices paid to the farmers and then uses teams of smugglers, who will handle the drug’s journey across oceans and borders.

Often those same middlemen own the land that the farmers grow the cannabis on, which gives them even more control over the product. They in turn are often financed by local drug lords. In many of the world’s biggest hash producing countries there are even local politicians – and sometimes governmental officials – involved in ‘waving through’ the
hash when it makes its way from the countryside into the cities and ports.

And relationships between the gangsters and their smugglers can frequently be tense. The smugglers are often led by foreigners, who come from the country where the hash is eventually going to be delivered.

One Scotsman I met called Geoff spent five years working as a smuggler in Morocco’s notorious Rif Mountains – the world’s biggest producer of hash. He described being a smuggler as ‘the worst fucking job in the world’. Geoff explained: ‘I had the Moroccans trying to con me every inch of the way and I had a paranoid cokehead of a gangster back in London accusing me of ripping him off. I hated it.’

Inside the twisted criminal underworld of hash it’s always best not to presume anything. Most of these characters live by their wits and know that their next shipment could well be their last. A lot of the criminals I came across had records for violence and robbery and involvement in heavier drugs, such as cocaine and heroin.

At the very top of the criminal ladder, there are a small number of kingpins making tens of millions of dollars each year out of hash. Most of these faceless gangsters lead through fear and intimidation, especially of their own workforce. They also often pride themselves on not even touching the drugs themselves, which makes them ‘clever’ in underworld terms.

Yet a surprisingly large number of criminals at the lower end of the underworld ladder smoke hash themselves. Many
are so heavily into it that it is undoubtedly affecting their ability to operate in a criminal environment. The money that many of these villains boast they have made from hash often doesn’t stack up when you find them living in seedy rented accommodation in rundown city slums.

As someone who’s never particularly enjoyed smoking cannabis it’s been awkward to refuse the offer of a joint and sometimes, in the name of ‘research’, I have succumbed because it would be considered offensive if I didn’t sample the ‘product’.

Take Irishman Sean. He was the son of one of Ireland’s richest criminals and was very upset when I refused a toke of his joint after saying I was about to undertake a road journey of fifty miles and didn’t want anything to impair my ability to drive. He eventually calmed down but I realised then that I would have to smoke the stuff occasionally when it came to twitchy villains, who seemed to need the reassurance that their product is socially acceptable.

Inside the secret world of hash, I found countless layers of characters whose income was wholly derived from the drug. Yet it also became clear that much of the ‘vast profit’ projected by most law enforcement agencies whenever they try to crack down on hash smuggling is often greatly exaggerated. The phrase ‘street value’ is a favourite term used by the police after making up a figure of money in order to pat themselves on the back whenever they uncover a large shipment of drugs. That may sound a harsh appraisal but I believe it to be true.

And, finally, then there is the effect of hash itself. One of the wealthiest hash barons I met summed up what the drug meant to him personally when he told me:

Much of the structure of this book relies on a long series of interviews, conversations, and recollections supplied, at times unwittingly, with dozens of individuals over the past two years. Some of the dialogue represented in this book was constructed from available documents, some was drawn from courtroom testimony, and some was reconstituted from the memory of participants.

Obviously, there are few readily available written records covering much of the activities of the criminals involved in the hash business, so I have had to trust the judgement and recollections of numerous individuals, many of whom would rather not have their names reproduced in this book. It has been dependent on the memories of men, fallible, contradictory, touched by pride, and capable of gross omission. But I believe them because there are no hidden agendas in this story and I make no apologies for the strong language, either.

To ensure the accuracy of these stories and anecdotes, I
tried where possible to verify information with more than one source but it was not easy, since paranoia rules when it comes to the underworld and on more than one occasion I was accused of being a ‘spy’ on behalf of the authorities. So I had to accept the word of many.

I have cross-referenced many incidents with newspaper and TV reports of the same – or similar – crimes and that has helped me fill in many of the holes while at the same time providing the sort of colour and detail which is needed when describing these incidents fully. I have also used Google and newspaper libraries to retell some of the most important other stories involving hash from the past ten years. Some of these accounts are like gold dust to a writer because they enabled me to expand and elaborate in a way that might not have been possible without such important additional details.

Throughout my career as a writer of investigative books about the underworld very few criminals have been unwilling to talk to me once I have met them personally and established a working connection. When I entered the world of hash, I was able to get an introduction to other gangsters and it was as if I was opening a huge door into a secretive world, as more and more criminals contacted me to talk about their involvement with the drug.

I travelled to far-flung, isolated places such as the Rif Mountains of Morocco in my quest for the full story of hash and I was not disappointed. I sometimes spent days on end with only these criminals for company and I learned about their lives outside of crime and how many of them see
themselves simply as hard-working individuals, who chanced upon a highly lucrative way to make a living.

I avoided the clichéd, celebrity criminals who’ve come out in the past to talk about their experiences because the key to this book is that it goes inside a world never previously revealed. I enlisted the help of some ex-criminals and current gangsters in my quest and I remain convinced they were extremely reliable on the whole and I owe them a debt of gratitude for trusting me enough to allow me to hear their most closely guarded secrets.

The way that I linked up with some criminals was truly bizarre. In London, I met a friend of a friend who happened to own property near Tangier and he in turn put me in touch with a Moroccan, who chauffeured him whenever he was in Morocco. This man then contacted a distant cousin who financed a hash farm in the Rif Mountains and that enabled me to make the sort of breakthrough that is essential in my ‘business’.

It was a similar story in Britain, Spain and other countries where an assortment of underworld contacts went out of their way to put me in touch with some genuine hash gangsters.

One time I had to meet a Spanish gangster in his hometown of Algeciras in a broken-down, badly lit boathouse. It was impossible to know if I was being set up but I trusted my instincts and, thank goodness, they proved to be right.

In Holland, I met one of Europe’s most notorious hash barons on his luxury canal barge in Amsterdam in the heart of one of the main tourist areas.

Back in Spain, one expat Brit gangster insisted on taking me out on his powerboat because he was paranoid about being spied on by the authorities. The weather was atrocious and the hash baron was snorting lines of cocaine in front of me as he struggled to stop the boat tossing and turning in the storm. In the end he agreed to head back for port. He admitted afterwards he was ‘testing’ me to see what I was made of. When I didn’t complain, he decided he could trust me.

So to all the people I’ve met during my research who’ve given me a helping hand, I say, ‘Thank you’. Without their input, this book would not have been possible.

The driving motive behind writing this book is to uncover the real story of this shady underworld, which has turned hash into an extraordinarily lucrative business. Sure, there are numerous
smoker’s
books out there about the wonders of hash and its emergence as a drug of choice for so many people. But this is the first inside account of hash’s hazardous, sometimes even deadly, journey into ordinary people’s lives.

Ultimately, I’ve revealed a story that twists and turns from the mountains of northern Morocco to darkened warehouses overlooking the Mediterranean and beyond, where hash provides a much-needed boost to local economies while also lining the pockets of underworld drug lords. It’s been a fascinating journey, which I hope you are going to find as illuminating as I have.

Wensley Clarkson, 2013

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