Читать книгу Gang Wars on the Costa - The True Story of the Bloody Conflict Raging in Paradise - Wensley Clarkson - Страница 10

DOWN ON THE south coast of Spain, the smells and fear that dominate Alhaurín jail are never far from the minds of the hyped-up, overactive coke-addicted gangsters scraping a living in places like Fuengirola – a poor man’s version of Marbella, which is sandwiched between the more glamorous bits of this coastline and Málaga Airport. Fuengirola is a five-mile strip of grey sand and concrete and must be the only place on earth where you can meet more people called ‘Lee’ outside of prison than inside. An incredible 40 per cent of all cars stolen in Europe are nicked on the Costa del Sol.

At one large Fuengirola supermarket just off the main N340 coast route known to many as the ‘road of death’ because of the large number of car crashes that occur on it, many British hoods sit and sip a coffee and a brandy while negotiating the purchase of guns and drugs. The first time I walked into this den of crime, I noticed every single voice in the canteen was English and male. Some were even waiting for their girlfriends and wives to do the weekly shop while they sat wheeler-dealing with other criminals.

I was introduced to this, the most notorious gangland café on the entire coastline, by a young villain called Mark, who promised me I could buy any gun, a brand new passport, or a UK driving licence through the shady Arthur Daley-style characters who have turned this place into a sunshine version of the fictional Winchester Club, which featured in the hit TV show Minder.

When I met Mark in the car park outside the supermarket he warned me, ‘No one will deal with you as a first-time customer, but once they get used to you being there, they might start offering up stuff.’ In fact it took two more visits to the café before I actually sat down and started negotiations with a Scottish man in his thirties called Gerry. ‘I can get you shooters, passports, UK driving licences all for a price,’ he said. ‘What are you after?’ I later discovered that this was the very same place where notorious gangster Kenneth Noye came when he was on the run from British police following the road-rage death of a young motorist on the M25 more than ten years before.

Gerry explained: ‘Shooters take a week to deliver but it depends what you’re after. The passports and the driving licences take much longer.’ I told Gerry I was after a revolver. ‘One thousand euros. Seven-fifty up front. The rest on delivery.’ I said I’d get back to him.

My visit to that supermarket café seemed to confirm what so many criminals had been telling me – that the Costa del Sol’s underworld was still thriving right under the noses of the police and hundreds of thousands of tourists. I never did follow up on my request but I bumped into Gerry a few weeks later in a notorious villain’s bar on the front 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 shooters the next day so it went right out of my mind.’

My original Fuengirola contact, Mark, told me that he’d been in southern Spain for three years and had initially been shocked at the state of the underworld out here. ‘There’s such a crazy mix of different nationalities and they’re all chasing the same stuff: drugs and hookers. I came out here with a couple of mates planning to run a bit of puff (cannabis) but the prices have dipped so badly that I’ve had to get into other stuff.’

That ‘other stuff’ includes cigarettes and people-smuggling back to the UK. ‘The key is the contacts you have back in Britain. If you’ve got them you can set up all sorts of things out here. But you have to keep it all really low-key because if the eastern Europeans or South Americans get wind of what you’re up to they always try to get a slice of it.’

Mark, who comes from Gloucester originally, says he has resisted the temptation to be armed at all times but says he always carries a knife under the front seat of his car ‘just in case’. He explained: ‘I run a team of three, which is sensible. Keep it small and then the nutters stay away from you. But once you start expanding, someone will always come after you.’

At one stage, Mark got into illegal gambling from certain bars on the seafront at Fuengirola. ‘There’s a lot of very bored people out here with a few bob that they’ve saved up over the years and they like gambling, so these illegal bookmakers have set up shop in a few bars out here.’

Mark’s ‘work’ involves chasing up debts incurred by some of these illegal gamblers. ‘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 bookie ten grand from six months back. 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.’

But Mark says that in recent years there has been an unhealthy ‘crossover’ between the British gangsters and the foreign contingent. ‘It’s fuckin’ scary at times. I’m here minding my own business and these bastards just come in waving guns and expecting to get a chunk of what we’re doing. Its completely out of order.’

Mark revealed that many of the eastern European gangsters are settling in Spain after spending time in the UK. ‘It’s outrageous. A lot of them take their families to Britain, get settled in, claim all the relevant benefits and then dump their families on the state in the UK and head over here to find themselves new opportunities. The trouble is that makes them even more dangerous because they know how the Brit crims operate. They know that we hardly ever use real violence and so they think they can intimidate us.’

Mark says that a couple of months ago he met a Russian hooker in a bar and ended up going to a hotel with her. ‘Then halfway through doing the business this Romanian pair burst into the room and demanded my wallet and all my cash. It had all been a scam and if I ever see those two bastards again I know who I am going to phone to have them permanently taken care of.’

But Mark admits that this sort of violent response is the basis of so many problems on the Costa del Sol. ‘It’s all about hitting out first before you’re crushed by the opposition. I don’t like resorting to violence but I don’t know what else to do. It’s a bit of a nightmare scenario because more and more people are going to get topped as a result.’

Mark says Fuengirola is a lot more dangerous than anywhere back in Britain. ‘This place is so dodgy. 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 coke-fuelled nutters waiting for any chance to have a pop at you. It’s fucking frightening.’

But Mark and many other younger British gangsters are literally trapped in Spain to a certain degree. ‘Look. It’s much easier to be a crim out here because the police still don’t seem to give a fuck but the recession is biting hard and its got harder and harder to make decent money. The trouble is that it would be even more expensive 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.’

So who exactly are these ‘nutty’ foreign criminals who are taking on the Brits at their own game? In the middle of researching this book I met a Romanian gangster called Sly who seemed to prove the very point Mark was making. Sly, 32, had married a British woman called Val – who was 30 years his senior – three years earlier. Ironically, that helped him to stay in Spain, although Romania’s recent acceptance into the EU has made that irrelevant these days.

Sly provided a chilling insight into the gang wars on the Costas. I was astounded when he began telling me the inner secrets of his gang and how it was all perfectly normal in the world where he came from. ‘In Romania life is cheap,’ said Sly in a very relaxed manner. ‘Spain is like paradise compared with my home country.’

Sly didn’t take much persuading to open up. He looked and acted extremely hard and his piercing blue eyes seemed to be boring holes into my conscience. Yet in the middle of telling me some of the most horrific things, Sly would suddenly start giggling and nudge his wife Val and then 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. Sly would have stabbed me in the back as soon as look at me if I crossed him. I had no doubt of that, but there was this strange childlike side to him. I later found out he had spent much of his childhood in an orphanage. Maybe that’s where it all came from.

Sly told me in calm, clinical terms what he did to his enemies if they ever fought back. ‘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 that he often stalked his prey if he had vengeance on his mind. ‘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 businesses. It’s easy.’

Sly said he regularly tortured other gangsters who threatened him. ‘Sometimes you have no choice. Last month I had a problem with this Bulgarian who was trying to set up a rival 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 pretty obvious. But that wasn’t all. Sly continued: ‘We had trouble with the Chinese a while back. They are crazy motherfuckers 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 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 (road). It’s a message to the other Chinese to stay out of our affairs. I think it must be working because they have been very quiet recently.’

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 was 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 obscene fashion. ‘This is my little baby. He does lots of things for me.’

Just then Sly demonstrated his love for his little ‘baby’ 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 is good to surprise them.’

Aiming for the face it not only hurts but could also cause the maximum damage. Sly said he’d lash out at anyone who got in his way. ‘I had to use it on this Russian woman because she wouldn’t give me the phone number of another criminal 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 co-operated. 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 gang or even breached gang rules, especially the 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 evidence of that.

Sly said that even if an enemy survived a beating or a stabbing, he could expect Sly and his men to come after him again. ‘We don’t want people thinking we are soft in the head. 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 he himself had had to pass certain tests in order to become a member of a local criminal gang. ‘I was expected to stab a policeman in our town. The boss 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 refused to say what happened to that first victim but he did explain how that first attack had evolved. ‘I knew that it was a condition of my membership. When I asked them how I would 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.’

Although Sly had already refused to go into any details of that first attack, I decided to press him further and asked him what happened.

Sly hesitated for a few moments and I started to wonder if he was getting angry that I’d ignored his earlier pledge not to discuss the incident. But then he took a deep breath, leaned down closer to me and started talking once more. ‘I was walking to the shop near my home 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 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 life and crimes in Spain because that was key to my book and revealing the real extent of the underworld out here in the Mediterranean sunshine.

Sly was a bizarre mix. He was tall, with jet-black wavy hair and startlingly pale blue eyes, and there was an almost effeminate air to him. Yet there was definitely a lot of macho stuff going on when it came to these kinds of eastern European gangs. After all, men like Sly had to prove their courage and suffer in silence at all times. There were clearly so many dark secrets inside Sly’s head.

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 terrifying. Val said that Sly had been the victim of a vicious rape as a 12-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 become 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.’

Val said that Sly and a group of other kids formed a gang, which still exists in part on the Costa del Sol. ‘Sly and his friends trust no one other than each other. That’s how they have survived. He and two others came out here a couple of years ago because he kept being arrested and put in prison and he had had enough. The trouble is that Sly only knows one way to make money and that’s by committing crimes.’

Back in Romania the tunnel kids gang – featuring Sly and his friends – soon gained a notorious reputation within Bucharest’s criminal fraternity. Sly and his comrades 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 overstretched police came on the scene, the gang would have long since disappeared back beneath the surface of the city.

Sly and his gang specialised in robbing people who were often defenceless, and they soon had a chilling reputation in Bucharest. They terrorised the warren of tunnels beneath the surface of the streets, making sure that no strangers invaded their ‘space’. Legends and myths grew about Sly and his gang, according to Val. Even after they’d grown up they continued living in the tunnels, and there was talk about them having wives and children.

It was only when there was a government-inspired cleanup ordered by authorities that Sly and his gang members realised they needed to flee from Romania. Spain seemed the perfect destination.

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. ‘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 are 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 green, 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 so much easier for me to operate out here,’ interrupted Sly who had reappeared halfway through my conversation with Val and now wanted to take over the interview once again.

But, I asked, could you ever leave the gang as Val hopes you will? ‘Look,’ he replied. ‘The gang is my life. I would not have anything if it were not for the gang.’Val looked crestfallen at that last remark but Sly seemed determined not to give her the wrong impression, which was admirable in its own way.

‘There is no way out of the gang, except by dying,’ explained Sly in a very matter-of-fact voice. ‘I cannot survive without them.’ Sly said it was his idea to bring the gang over to Spain. ‘I recognised that it was a safer place for us, rather than, say, London.’

‘Safer?’ I asked.

‘Yes, the Spanish don’t really care what we do as long as it does not involve their citizens.’The one secret Sly refused to reveal was the name of his gang. ‘That’s between us only. That way if we have any impostors we find out very quickly and dispose of them.’