Cocaine Confidential (15 page)

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.

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.