Cocaine Confidential (2 page)

So who are the shadowy people behind cocaine? The coca farmers, the jungle sweat-shop workers, the coke barons, the smugglers, the suppliers, and, ultimately, the dealers who provide the world's hundreds of millions of users? Why do so many people of all kinds have a connection to this deadly narcotic?

The real story of cocaine is soaked in drama because in a relatively short time it has gone from being a miracle drug and promising commodity to an illicit substance at the centre
of a massive, highly lucrative industry that helps keep a number of Third World countries financially afloat, despite being an outlawed narcotic. In fact cocaine is one of the few products grown, processed, exported and distributed entirely from the Third World. Its export value by itself is equivalent to at least half the world's coffee trade. And that's before it is broken down into ever smaller units for distribution: prices can eventually increase by over 300 per cent.

From the thousands of peasant families who grow coca leaves to the billionaire drug barons directing much of its production, processing and trafficking, the cocaine business wields enormous economic, social and political power in Latin America. Apart from the corrupting influence of such huge sums of ‘narco-dollars' on police and judicial systems, Congressmen are elected with cocaine funds, banks are sustained or broken by coke trafficking gangs and exchange rates fluctuate in sympathy with the state of some countries' trade in cocaine.

Cocaine is now snorted, smoked and injected by everyone from the infamous to the tragic: users claim it gives them confidence, alertness and business acumen. Others have labelled it a deadly drug that destroys people's physical and mental health. The world's law enforcers have struggled to cope with the tidal wave of cocaine flooding the globe over the past forty years. Unlike other class A narcotics, this notorious substance is used by the rich and powerful, as well as ordinary citizens. It occupies a unique place in the social strata of many societies, which makes it even harder to
eradicate from our streets. As a result, the cocaine business continues to flourish.

* * *

In this book I will try and take you, the reader, on an authentic, nail-biting, roller-coaster ride through the full, face-on criminality of cocaine. All roads inevitably lead to this subculture; virtually every murder in the cocaine capitals around the globe has a link to the cartels who have made their fortunes out of the world's most deadly narcotic.

In order to unravel
Cocaine Confidential
, I've had to delve deep into the underworld at considerable personal risk. Yet many of the cocaine-connected villains I've come across during the course of my enquiries are mildly amused by my book, despite it giving away many of the tricks of their trade. They enjoy the kick of their world being featured in a widely published book, even though only their closest criminal associates would recognise their contributions. Some gangsters who were less concerned about me hiding their identity believe their exposure in this book will bring them even more respect in the cocaine badlands.

Inevitably, I broke the writer's golden rule of getting too close to some of my subjects on a number of occasions. I had a few threats from the relatives of one well-known coke baron when I was accused of pushing my luck in the name of research. It ended with a sinister phone call: ‘Stop stickin' yer nose in our business.' But that was it, thank God. As another, more friendly, villain later told me: ‘If they'd really
been after you they would hardly have bothered to tell you first, would they?'

Not everyone I've written about in
Cocaine Confidential
is wholly bad. These characters can be funny, vulnerable and even kind, and I've tried to provide a full insight into these people's lives rather than just the predictable hard-hearted stuff. Many are street-smart survivors doing what they know best. Others are victims of circumstance, desperately trying to keep their heads above water.

If you spend 300-plus nights a year ducking and diving around cocaine's mean streets you inevitably see the world differently from people who have normal jobs and normal lives. You learn to survive by your instincts; you don't trust many people; you don't make light conversation because loose lips can sink ships; you spend each day thinking that your world may be shut down by a sneaky police informant, a jealous lover or an angry punter; you devise ways and means of keeping ahead of the game.

I am fascinated by how criminals often seem to thrive so blatantly right under the noses of the police. I've been inside foreign prisons where conditions are appalling compared even to the oldest British jails. I've spent countless hours with killers, drug barons, pimps, child prostitution dealers, counterfeiters, conmen and the classic old-time-bank-robbers-turned-coke-dealers. I've even found myself sharing a beer and a joke with people responsible for the deaths of many people. This book doesn't set out to answer any
questions. It simply lays out the facts and asks you, the reader, to take a journey inside this frightening world.

Naturally, many of the characters featured here would not have made it into this book if it had not been for my numerous contacts inside the underworld and, of course, most would rather you did not know their real identity. So to all the ‘faces' I've encountered and the ordinary, law-abiding folk who've also helped me, I say, ‘Thank you.' Without them, this book would not have been possible.

I'd also like to thank the good, law-abiding citizens of the countries I've highlighted here, who've endured many difficulties because of the power and influence of cocaine. Many of these nations are being torn apart by its pernincous presence.

Most of the dialogue used here was drawn from actual interviews, some from documentary sources, while a few descriptions were reconstituted from the memory of others. There are no hidden agendas in these stories and I make no apology for the explicit sexual action and strong language, either.

Ultimately, you are about to read a real-life story that twists and turns through the city streets, jungles, beaches and mountains of many of the world's most pivotal cocaine countries. It's been a fascinating journey, which I hope you're going to enjoy and relish as much as I have.

Just don't say you haven't been warned!

Wensley Clarkson, 2014

While cocaine in its present form is a relatively recent innovation, the use of coca leaves – whether in rituals, to alleviate hunger, or to help cope with the challenges presented by living in the thin air of the Andes – has been an intrinsic part of indigenous South American culture for thousands of years. When chewed, coca, a natural anaesthetic, numbs the mouth and produces light-headedness. Brewed as a tea, the leaves make a milder stimulant than coffee. In recognition of its fiercely defended traditional functions, its cultivation remains licensed in many parts of the continent.

Unlike other New World products such as tobacco and potatoes that were enthusiastically adopted by Europeans, it wasn't until the nineteenth century that Western medicine settled on a popular use for the plant. However, in 1859 a Milanese doctor fresh from a spell in Peru where he'd been intrigued by the native use of coca, began to experiment on himself and was subsequently inspired to write a paper in which he described the effects. He identified a potential
medical use – to treat ‘a furred tongue in the morning, flatulence, and whitening of the teeth' – and other suggestions as to how it might be employed soon followed.

Before long the American manufacturer Parke-Davis was selling cocaine in numerous incarnations, including cigarettes, powder, and even a cocaine mixture that could be injected directly into the user's veins with a needle supplied with the drug. The drug was marketed as a product that would ‘supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent and render the sufferer insensitive to pain'. Its use grew exponentially – largely because it was increasingly viewed as a general stimulant rather than just as a medicinal good.

By the turn of the century, cocaine's addictive qualities had helped it acquire a somewhat darker reputation. The subject of hysterical and lurid stories in the press, it was increasingly associated with prostitution and crime and became the repository for many of Middle America's fears about its black population.

An increasingly hostile legal climate saw the banning of sales of the drug outright in many states as well as the implementation of various items of Federal legislation that culminated in the Harrison Act of 1914, which introduced significantly stricter legislative controls over the sale of the drug. These effectively made it illegal to use it for recreational purposes – and indeed outlawed many of its previous medical uses. It was later banned in the UK in 1920 amid reports of crazed soldiers in the First World War as well as a series of
moral panics surrounding the death of dancers like Billie Carleton.

More than any other country, the US endeavoured to stamp out both the cultivation and abuse of the drug, but their efforts in the 1950s and 1960s saw little conspicuous reward; use of the narcotic continued to skyrocket, especially once the infamous cartels took control of the Colombian coke business and began to flood the market with unprecedented amounts of white powder. The excesses of the hedonistic seventies were typified by nightclubs such as the legendary New York club Studio 54, where customers snorted cocaine off table-tops in full view of other people. And recreational cocaine really took off in the UK in the early-to-mid-1980s. As a reporter on the London tabloids, I frequently visited nightclubs in pursuit of all sorts of stories, mainly about crime and celebrities. In those places, I found the drug's use was rampant among the rich and famous. I remember watching men queuing up to snort a line in the lavatories of one well-known West End club. The attendant did nothing to prevent it and stood by in expectation of some big tips from the coke-sniffing clientele.

It was probably no coincidence that Ronald Reagan's publicly lauded ‘war' against Colombian cocaine was declared in the same decade. An eradication programme was launched in which billions of US taxpayers' dollars were used to wipe out cocaine production by spraying chemicals on all Colombia's coca fields and offering subsidies to farmers to grow other things. It was a lot easier said than done.

In fact, the US's decision to target Colombia's cocaine production created room for its neighbours step up their own coke production, which is why in 2012 Peru became the world's number one producer of the drug. Cocaine had been closely linked to Peruvian history for almost as long as it has been in Colombia. In neighbouring Bolivia, production has also steadily risen since 1970. Bolivia has recently experienced a wave of coca nationalism, an explicit reaction against the repeated efforts of the US authorities to demonise the use, and combat the cultivation, of the leaf. Many Bolivians refuse to accept that cocaine is an illegal substance and they see its production as a vital part of the nation's economy. Indeed it's arguable that the financial survival of the eastern Andes as a whole remains dependent on the production of cocaine.

The US has sponsored efforts similar to those employed previously in Colombia to stamp out the cultivation of coca in the other South American countries. But their attempts to substitute other crops have met with equally limited success. Nothing else provides a comparable income.

The new market leader Peru exports about 60,000 tons of the drug a year, and Bolivia a further 50,000 tons. Brazil and Ecuador have also expanded their operations very rapidly in recent years and small plantations in other countries such as Panama, Venezuela and Argentina raise the total amount produced by South and Central Americans to at least 200,000 tons annually. It's been calculated that the capacity for making illicit cocaine in the Andes is now 150 times the
region's peak capacity when the drug was a legal medical product at the start of the twentieth century.

Control of the trade itself still rests firmly in the hands of the Colombians. Their traffickers and coke barons finance much of the coca cultivation throughout the Amazon basin, and it is estimated that as much as 60 per cent of the continent's cocaine output passes through the country's borders to be refined. In recent years, the much-feared Colombian cocaine ‘cartels' have substantially changed their operating methods, gradually dispersing into hundreds of streamlined entrepreneurial groups who are constantly on the lookout for new cocaine production ‘bases'. As one South American cocaine expert says, ‘Their power has been diluted but that has made them even more lethal in many ways because they are much more desperate for business.'

Right from the earliest days of the first big cocaine trafficking boom in the early 1970s, the Latin America countries that grew coca realised that the drug had the potential to provide the region with a lucrative homegrown product that could create a worldwide market. As a result, few foreigners were involved in the production of the drug and that has remained by and large the same to this day. It is without doubt these Andean historical roots that have also made the cocaine trade so difficult to infiltrate – and stamp out.

The coca plants themselves have always grown virtually everywhere in the moist tropical climate of the Andes in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Today, much of the upper Amazon is still dotted with plantations where steep terraces
climb the mountainsides as high as 2,000 metres. Some stretch blatantly across the lowland plains, others are hidden in the forest. But the really good quality plants tend to come from areas not too high above sea level.

The leaves of the coca plant are processed in jungle laboratories using kerosene, methyl alcohol and sulphuric acid. The resulting powder is dried, cut into blocks and transferred to ports in Colombia and Venezuela, routinely these days, for shipment to the US, Europe and beyond.