Read Cocaine Confidential Online
Authors: Wensley Clarkson
Leopold Senghor airport in the Senegalese capital Dakar is one of the most popular departure points in West Africa for couriers taking cocaine to Europe. Yet seizures are rare. The going rate at the airport for bribing airport security to ignore half a kilo of cocaine â with a European street value of £15,000 â is about £3,000. Dakar's nearby seaport has never chalked up a single major cocaine seizure, despite being one of the largest ports in the region.
The South American cartels also have serious plans to eventually transform West Africa from being a cocaine staging post into an operating base.
Raw coca â grown until very recently solely in South America â obviously has to be refined into pure cocaine. In the past this process usually occurred in South America. But recent seizures of crack cocaine in West Africa suggest that chemical processing is already starting to take place there.
Even more significantly, the cartels also have plans to cultivate their own raw coca plant in West Africa by setting up new coca plantations. The area's climate had always been considered unsuitable for coca cultivation until the emergence of a new strain of coca plant originally developed to be grown in the moist jungle regions close to the Amazon â and which we've already seen growing in Panama. Many in Latin America believe that the new type of coca plant would thrive in West Africa.
Such âhome produced' cocaine would be a first for Africa. It is a potential goldmine for the cartels because it would cut out the most expensive part of their manufacturing process, which is the transportation of cocaine across the Atlantic Ocean.
One ex-trafficker told me the South Americans have already begun experimental âgrows' in isolated areas of West Africa as âpilot projects'.
So, with at least three so-called ânarco-states' in the region now said to be virtually under the control of the South American cartels, I talked to some of the gangsters involved in turning this area into such an important hub for cocaine.
Cocaine trafficker Marco â now based in Spain â told me he âran' six airliners across the Atlantic from South and Central America to West Africa during an eighteen-month period between 2009 and early 2011.
Before then, only light aircraft â often twin-engined Cessna 441s â would take off from transit points (usually in Venezuela) laden with cocaine produced in the rainforests of neighbouring Colombia and Peru. To extend their range, the planes were packed with plastic containers filled with aviation fuel.
These small aircraft then flew across the Atlantic, often with one crew member furiously pumping extra fuel into the engines. Having landed on a bush airstrip on the West African coast, the plane's valuable cargo would be unloaded for onward trafficking to Europe.
But, says Marco, the cartels wanted bigger, better ways to
transport their coke and they believed using larger planes would be far more financially viable. He explained: âIn any case, more than half those light aircraft flights ended in disaster with pilots either crashing or ditching their planes because they were either loaded with too much or too little fuel.'
Marco went on: âSo the cartels started buying up secondhand airliners. It made complete sense. The main attraction to the cartels is that there is no radar coverage over the ocean, meaning big aircraft can cross the Atlantic virtually undetected. The sky's the limit.'
So âAir Cocaine' was born. It was a remarkable development â even by the cartels' standards â because of the distances involved and the complexity of flying big jets. A trip from Venezuela to West Africa is about 3,400 miles.
âBut they're ludicrously cheap to buy second hand and actually create less suspicion than smaller craft,' says Marco. âThe pilots are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars just for one flight. They make more in a week than most pilots make in a year.'
Law enforcement agents first became aware of the Air Cocaine flights in November 2009, when a burned-out Boeing 727 was found in the desert in the African nation of Mali. Coke smugglers had flown it in from Venezuela, unloaded the aircraft and then torched it. As Marco explained: âThat plane had only cost very little because the second-hand market for airliners is dead, so it was actually easier and cheaper for the cartel to destroy the plane than try and fly
it back to South America. But now they've started keeping the airliners because they cause so much less suspicion than the small planes.'
The current global economic slump has left hundreds of cargo planes and airliners idle. A multiple-engine jet capable of crossing the Atlantic can often cost even less than £100,000. Law enforcement officials on both sides of the Atlantic also believe that the cartels fly Gulfstream executive jets, some of which are also used as transport by the cocaine barons themselves and then leased out by them to the traffickers. Marco explained: âThe big names like to come in here now and again and they usually arrive unannounced on a Lear jet, which is then sent back to pick up coke in South America and then arrives back in West Africa to pick up the cartel chief for the flight home. These guys don't like to waste any money if they can help it. The last time authorities even detained a Gulfstream heading for West Africa was back in 2007 as it tried to leave Venezuela, heading for Sierra Leone.
âI worked for the Colombians as their rep in West Africa for eighteen months,' says Marco. âBasically, my job was to ensure that the airfields where these aircraft landed were ready for arrivals. That involved carrying a lot of dollars around to bribe people with.
âOften, I'd have to pay everyone from the local kids in the village to the cops in the nearest police station to ensure the planes were not disturbed. At one stage I had four different airfields in my pocket. The locals got so used to the planes
coming in and out that they ignored them. The key thing for me was to prevent any interference with the flights.
âI did have a problem with one local priest in Ghana, who labelled the flights as “devil planes”. But I tracked him down after he wrote a piece for the local paper. I then made a big donation to his church fund and I never heard another word of complaint after that.'
When one airliner was seized in Sierra Leone in July 2008 with 600kg of cocaine from South America, one of the pilots â a Russian named Konstantin Yaroshenko â was arrested. Later he claimed he was tortured by local police before being handed over to America's DEA. The Russian foreign ministry later accused the US of âkidnapping' Yaroshenko. Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, called his arrest an example of the US overstepping its bounds. Yaroshenko, who is currently serving a twenty-year sentence in the US, continues to maintain his innocence.
Few arrests have ever been made in relation to these Air Cocaine flights. âThe quantity of cocaine distributed and the means employed to distribute it are extraordinary,' prosecutors said during one extremely rare criminal case against a West African trafficker in South America. They warned of a conspiracy to âspread vast quantities of cocaine throughout the world by way of cargo aeroplanes'. But the case received little media coverage and the flights, meanwhile, are said to be continuing without interruption.
Marco says he arrived in West Africa just before the âbreakthrough case' which blew the lid on Air Cocaine. âThe truth
of the matter is that the case was chickenfeed. It was heard in South America during a court case against a Colombian cartel member, not in West Africa, so it had little effect on operations there.'
Marco then revealed the organisational skills which go into the Air Cocaine flights to and from West Africa. He explained: âI even used detailed spreadsheets to compute flight costs and distribute codebooks to conceal our plans. Special sketched maps of West Africa showing points where the coke could be safely delivered were always used at meetings in Colombia to plan coke drop-offs. Fuel and pilots were usually paid through wire transfers or suitcases filled with cash. I had to be on top of a lot of things at one time. One slip and we'd all be in trouble and if I'd let the Colombians down then they would probably have killed me.'
Marco was understandably reluctant to talk in any more detail about his âduties' in West Africa for the Colombians but his role highlights the deft organisational skills that are helping the South Americans make such deadly inroads into the area.
Drug enforcement agents in the US see Air Cocaine as a throwback to the 1970s and '80s, when pilots flew planes packed with coke freely between Colombia and numerous staging points near the US border. Back then, Mexican drug lords such as Amado Carrillo Fuentes, nicknamed the Lord of the Skies, dispatched jets with as much as 15 tonnes of cocaine from Colombia to northern Mexico. Better radar
coverage in the US has now made it almost impossible to move cocaine into the States in such large aircraft.
The emergence of Venezuela as a popular transit point for South American cocaine is down to its late president Hugo Chávez's decision in 2005 to sever ties with US law enforcement agencies. That immediately made it easier to store cocaine in staging sites on the Venezuelan coast. The Venezuelan military and police are alleged to this day to be making money by waving through such shipments.
While most of the cocaine going through West Africa is destined for Europe, there are even some shipments going on to New York through this newly established backdoor route into the US. Marco explained: âThe traffickers are always looking for new ways into the States because it has got harder and harder to bring coke in via Mexico in the south. Delivering it via West Africa makes sense in some ways but it obviously adds a lot to the transport costs.'
One Colombian cartel is rumoured to be seriously considering building its own fully functioning airport to cope with the long-range airliners they frequently use to drop cocaine in West Africa. Marco explained: âI heard they wanted one big airport so they could land the flights in West Africa and then service the planes so they would be safe to make even more flights back to South America. It sort of sums up the power and influence they hold in the area.'
Marco said the short length of his âjob' in West Africa was deliberate. âThe Colombians were very professional about it. They reckoned eighteen months was the maximum you
should be out there before problems started occurring. They also believed it kept the locals more on their toes if they kept changing their personnel. At the moment West Africa is â in the eyes of the cartels â going from strength to strength. I can seriously see the day when a South American ends up as president of one of these countries. The cartel bosses are doing more for these places than anyone else.'
Not surprisingly, the cartels have also been brilliant at recruiting the local criminal element in certain West African countries to ensure their lethal âproduct' enjoys a safe passage and to help increase its consumption.
Accra â a vibrant city of two million in which the old and new jostle beside each other â has been Ghana's capital since 1877, when the British ruled this part of West Africa. Now a different type of colonial power â Colombia â is pulling many of the strings in the background of this sprawling city.
Officially, Ghana claims to have forced the Colombians out by cracking down on internal corruption and stepping up arrests at airports and other transit points. But in reality this is all just wishful thinking on the part of the Ghanaian authorities, desperate to prove they're not one of the new ânarco-states' which have emerged in West Africa in recent years.
Accra is in fact such an important centre for cocaine trafficking that in 2009, America's powerful Drug Enforcement Agency opened an office here after three Al-Qaeda-linked men from Mali were arrested in Ghana and charged by US authorities with cocaine trafficking in aid of terrorism.
The DEA believes that terrorist groups in the region such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb are regularly being hired to help transport cocaine up to North Africa. âThe cocaine circle is complete when you factor in terrorists like Al-Qaeda,' says one veteran West African smuggler. âThe Latin American cartels don't care who they get into bed with as long as they retain their stranglehold on an area. Look at their relationship with FARC in Colombia. It's lasted for more than thirty years.'
West African drug trafficking is also implicated in two other terror-financing cases filed recently in New York, one involving the Taliban and the other Hezbollah, the militant Muslim group and political party based in Lebanon.
With this sort of activity going on right under the noses of the Ghanaian authorities it is no surprise that Accra has recently been compared to Casablanca during the Second World War as a centre for cocaine trafficking, espionage and intrigue.
* * *
I am in a darkened warehouse on a half-built industrial estate bordering the commercial centre near Makola Market, where hotels and office blocks can be seen in the distance through the city smog. My host is Alfonso, a Ghanaian with Colombian connections. Just a few kilometres down the road is this nation's parliament building, where South American cocaine dollars have been employed to try and buy off even the most powerful politicians. Alfonso is protected by heavily armed gang members and his identity is hidden by sunglasses. His
beige suit with wide lapels looks like something Tony Montana might have worn in Alfonso's all-time favourite movie
Scarface
, starring Al Pacino as Tony Montana, the ultimate cocaine mobster rip-roaring through 1980s Miami.
âThis is where it's at, man,' he says with the manic glint of sunlight bouncing off his shades. âGhana is safe for coke because we pay all the right people, so no one gives us no trouble.'
Alfonso says he is 35 but he seems younger. He claims that he was working âin the government' until five years ago when he met a Colombian âtourist' called Gerardo in the bar of a big hotel in the centre of Accra.