Hash (22 page)

*

The Strait of Gibraltar is crossed by at least 1,000 vessels every day of the year. As a result, it is virtually impossible to police, not helped by the dispute between Spain and the UK over ownership of the British colonial territory of the Rock of Gibraltar. Numerous hash boats slip between the various authorities who patrol the narrow strip of water. As one hash gangster told me: ‘Sometimes I think God put the Strait there specially for us. It bridges North Africa and Europe perfectly, which is rather handy because Europe is the world’s biggest single hash market.’

So while Spain and the UK continue bickering over ownership of the Rock of Gibraltar, the secret underworld of hash slips beneath the radar to exploit that ‘weakness’ to great effect.

Indeed smugglers appear to be the only winners when it comes to the ongoing feud between the UK and Spanish governments over ownership of the Rock of Gibraltar. In 2011, the Royal Navy and Gibraltar police were accused of piratical behaviour after clashing with Spanish police who had arrested drug smugglers in British territorial waters. A Guardia Civil officer was left with arm injuries after two boats
collided when the Gibraltar forces tried to snatch Moroccan hash gangsters from a Spanish customs ship, which was surrounded by seven Royal Navy and police vessels, further stoking tensions between the two countries.

Reports in the Spanish media claimed the situation was ‘five minutes away from a clash of incalculable consequences’. The Guardia Civil later issued a statement alleging that its members had been subjected to ‘serious insults, harassment and threats’ and claiming the Royal Navy and Gibraltar police had acted like ‘pirates, as in other times in the past’.

Earlier, in September 2010, a Royal Navy patrol from Gibraltar arrived close to the Spanish shoreline in the coastal resort of La Linea while chasing a drug trafficker on a powerful jet-ski launch. Witnesses said the British vessel came close to the town’s San Bernardo beach while following the trafficker, who was eventually arrested on Spanish soil by the Guardia Civil and local police. Spanish media reported that the arrested man was carrying several bags of hash. The Spanish pointed out shortly afterwards that the British patrol boat was not fired upon for entering Spanish territory, unlike whenever the Spanish had cause to enter the waters around the Rock of Gibraltar.

It seemed logical to begin my look at the law enforcement war against the hash barons by talking to Spain’s hard-pressed Guardia Civil.

The Guardia Civil has a long and chequered history in Spain since they were a paramilitary organisation until the death of dictator General Franco in 1975. But today they are responsible for busting drug gangs across the nation. Commissioned in 1844, the Guardia Civil was formed to maintain order in Spain’s wild countryside where bandits and malcontents roamed threatening the monarchy and government. The state needed to stamp its mark of authority upon an anarchic situation and the GC fitted the bill perfectly.

Their fearsome reputation made them figures of hate and revulsion, especially in Spain’s furthermost southern region of Andalucia, where many of the residents were of Jewish, Arab and Romano stock and the population was renowned for having scant respect for authority. During the first thirty or so years of the last century, the Guardia Civil cracked down on the ‘bandoleros’ who ruled the mountain passes.
Many battles took place during which the Guardia Civil used their so-called ‘fast response’ squads on horseback. The final bandolero was killed by the Guardia as recently as 1934.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), the Guardia divided almost equally between the Nationalist forces and the Republicans; whether that was a tactical move to ensure success whoever won, or whether it reflected the specific location of the various Guardia
cuartels
(barrack blocks built in most main towns to control the area) when the war started, the Guardia fought on both sides. But after the war the Guardia became victor General Franco’s strongarm force, maintaining strict control over all rural areas, where dissidents were more likely to spring up.

Even after the introduction of tourism in Spain in the late 1950s, Franco encouraged his Guardia Civil to continue to use an iron fist. In the thirty years from the end of the Second World War they were a force to be feared by anyone who opposed the state and the ‘status quo’. Then after Franco’s death, the Guardia Civil virtually disappeared from public view, only to return with responsibility for tracking drugs and terrorists, including ETA, the military wing of the Basque separatist movement which went on to kill dozens of Guardia Civil officers in their homes or in full view of the public. Today’s Guardia Civil also carry out traffic controls, as well as having a special nationwide remit to deal with organised crime, including human trafficking into Spain from Africa.

One of the Guardia Civil’s biggest anti-drug operations is run from the southern port of Algeciras, just opposite Morocco.
The Guardia use superfast powerboats that constantly patrol the Strait for any suspicious vessels. It’s an incredibly busy sea-lane and police admit they cannot check out every suspect craft but in their operations room at the Guardia Civil’s headquarters near Algeciras port, they maintain round-the-clock surveillance of the sea through radar and carefully positioned long-lens remote control cameras.

Watching the mass of tiny dots moving slowly across the green radar screens in the Guardia Civil’s operations room sums up the huge scale of the problem and the difficulties of policing such a busy shipping lane. There are literally hundreds of vessels sailing between the Spanish mainland, Gibraltar and Morocco at any one time.

Specially trained Guardia Civil officers can tell most of the time what sort of vessels are out there by their shape on the radar screen. But the officers know that smugglers often use ‘sleeper vessels’ to test out the Guardia Civil monitoring system. One officer tells me: ‘Often they’ll send a craft out ahead in the hope that it will be spotted by our radar. Then a patrol boat goes out to intercept it while the boat with the actual drugs slips quietly past thanks to the diversion that has been created.’

The Guardia Civil admit they are fully stretched and barely able to cope with the sheer number of smuggling vessels and only expect to catch around 10 per cent of the smugglers crossing the Strait at any one time. It also becomes apparent during my day with the Guardia Civil that they don’t always
consider hash smugglers to be ‘serious criminals’ because cannabis is less harmful than Class A drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

‘Sometimes we have to prioritise suspected cocaine and heroin smuggling more than hash,’ explains one officer. ‘That doesn’t mean we don’t come down hard on the hash smugglers but, let’s face it, cocaine is a much more dangerous substance so it is more important to get the bad guys behind those gangs than the hash boys.’

Down in the actual port of Algeciras, the Guardia Civil also regularly uncover shipments of hash hidden in vehicles coming across from Morocco. ‘We know all their tricks and it’s a lot easier to catch them coming off a ferry than out there on the high seas,’ says another officer. ‘A lot of smugglers use a van or a car to bring the hash in and it’s easy for our dogs to smell. Even when it has been carefully wrapped in clingfilm and smothered in hair conditioner to disguise the smell, it only takes one fingertip to have touched the car body for our dogs to pick up a scent.’

On the day I spent with the Guardia Civil at Algeciras port, their border patrol officers did precisely that when one of their sniffer dogs picked up the scent of hash on the bodywork of a Spanish-registered people carrier, after it arrived via a ferry from Tangier. Officers later revealed they only uncovered the haul because one of the smugglers had touched the wing of the car without gloves when the hash was being hidden in the vehicle. That alone gave the Guardia Civil probable cause and they immediately dismantled the
vehicle in a drive-in garage next to the actual border crossing. Officers eventually uncovered more than €200,000 worth of hash hidden in tightly-packed slabs beneath the floor at the back of the people carrier. The vehicle had been driven by a Spanish man with his wife and small child.

Guardia Civil officers say it’s ‘pretty common’ for entire families to come through the port carrying drugs. ‘They think it makes them look less suspicious and to an extent they are right. But I never cease to be amazed how any mother could want to put her child at risk in that way,’ explains an officer.

Less than two hundred metres away in a parking lot for lorries which have been stopped by the Guardia Civil, plain-clothes officers are searching underneath a huge Volvo articulated lorry which they suspect is carrying a large shipment of hash. It belongs to a long-haired Spanish trucker called ‘Angel’ who is standing in handcuffs thirty metres from his lorry. Officers refuse to confirm how they knew about the vehicle but it is presumed they must have had a tip-off.

One detective explains: ‘We are well aware that smugglers sometimes give us details about hash coming through in the belief that if they “sacrifice” that shipment another much bigger one will slip through unnoticed. It’s a ruthless business because the guy driving the lorry ends up in prison thanks to his so-called friends, who were happy to sacrifice him for a bigger load.’

A group of plain-clothes officers stand next to the huge artic. One of them kneels beside a wheel and begins grappling
with something underneath the axle. He shouts and swears as he continues pulling and prodding the area. Suddenly he lets out a cheer. ‘Si. Si. Si.’ Bingo. They’ve just found what they were looking for.

As dozens of plastic-wrapped bricks of hash come tumbling out of the underside of the truck, the officers standing nearby congratulate each other. It’s a bizarre sight as the mass of small hash bricks tumble out from underneath the lorry as if the vehicle is having a massive shit.

In all, it turns out there is hash worth more than a million euros under that one lorry. The detectives insist that proves they were not acting on a tactical tip-off. ‘Why would they want to risk losing a million euros’ worth of hash? No, this was somebody who had a grudge against the smugglers and he wanted revenge.’

As three plain-clothes officers carefully begin stacking the hash in neat lines alongside one of the tyres of the truck, my police guide takes a call on his mobile.

One of the Guardia Civil’s green and white powerboats has just intercepted a boat on the other side of the harbour after radar monitoring officers noticed it steering erratically and very close to land. My police guide excitedly explained that as the Guardia Civil approached the boat, they saw three men on board pushing what looked like wooden crates overboard.

As the Guardia Civil powerboat closed in, the men dived into the murky water and swam for shore. Unable to get close enough to land on shore in the choppy waters, the
Guardia Civil on the powerboat radioed to colleagues to try and intercept the men as they watched them running across a nearby beach. Meanwhile the officers on the powerboat boarded the abandoned vessel to find it was empty, although they were convinced that the boxes being thrown overboard earlier must have contained drugs.

By the time we get the call to join them in another smaller Guardia Civil craft, two police divers are bringing up the boxes, which contain hundreds of carefully-wrapped slabs of hash. It’s a surreal sight to watch the police divers keep coming up to the surface clutching more boxes.

But why would the smugglers try to offload the drugs so near to the Guardia Civil border control building, which was only about 500 metres from where their boat was spotted? One officer explains: ‘They probably reckoned we wouldn’t think they were suspicious because they were out in broad daylight and so near to our base. To be honest about it, if they hadn’t stayed in one place for so long we probably wouldn’t have bothered with them for that very same reason.’

We bob about on the choppy waters as more boxes are brought up by the police. Three Guardia Civil patrol cars appear on the strip of land opposite where we are. But the men have long gone. ‘That’s the other thing,’ adds the officer. ‘They knew they could make a run for it because they were so close to land. They probably even had a car parked somewhere nearby to escape in.’

The most astonishing thing about my day with the Guardia Civil is that in the space of what they insisted was ‘just an
ordinary day’ they had uncovered three big shipments of hash.

I was impressed until one of the senior officers points out: ‘Just think about it. We’ve managed to stop three shipments of hash but probably ten times that amount slipped past us today.’

Back at the quayside after the two Guardia Civil powerboats have docked, a group of officers offload the boxes of hash they’ve just recovered from the bottom of the sea. As the last box is piled on top of the others, Commandante Jorge Figuera steps forward proudly and invites me to watch as he pulls a huge hunting knife out from his belt and digs the point of it into a tightly packed brick of hash. With a small quantity of the brown substance on the tip of his knife he lifts it to his nose and inhales.

‘Mmmmmmm. That is top grade hash. No doubt about it.’ Figuera sounded more like a dealer than a policeman. ‘What balls those guys must have to think they could smuggle all this hash right under our noses next to one of the busiest ports in the world. They are either
loco
[mad] or stupid. Maybe both!’

Just then, word comes through that the three men who swam ashore from that boat had, after all, been caught by Guardia Civil hiding in a nearby derelict warehouse. There is jubilation among the Guardia Civil officers, especially when they hear that the men surrendered without any resistance.

Half an hour later, Figuera invites me into the main building of the Guardia Civil next to the quay. As we walk
through the office area I notice three scruffy men in damp clothes sitting in front of a desk having what looks like a friendly chat with a plain-clothes officer sitting opposite them.