Читать книгу Gang Wars on the Costa - The True Story of the Bloody Conflict Raging in Paradise - Wensley Clarkson - Страница 6

SPAIN IS PLAYING host to a new breed of criminal from the UK these days. Younger, flashier gangsters have been gradually eroding the power of Britain’s traditional criminal families out on the Costa. Many of these characters have settled in Spain. They stay mainly in the background as fixers and organisers, hiding behind legitimate businesses and arranging the links for big drug consignments and all sorts of other crimes.

Drug investigations take up 70 per cent of police work on Spain’s coastal regions. And according to Spanish detectives, the typical British and foreign gang leader these days is in his late twenties or thirties. They are the sorts of characters who’ll walk into a bar or club and shoot someone to send out a message to rivals: Don’t fuck with me.

The British gangs in Spain are usually early school leavers with convictions back in the UK, which often gives them status with other criminals who turn to them for help.

These gangs often number 15 to 20 hard core members, some of whom may have grown up together. Violence can flare up when there is a ‘crossover’ such as a turf war or when a drugs consignment goes missing. Back in the eighties these organised criminals would have turned to armed robbery and then to drugs after building contacts in Spain, South America and North Africa. But since the 1990s they’ve gone straight into the drugs trade. Back then in Spain, they often invested in the burgeoning club scene and supplied synthetic drugs from Europe, especially Holland. These gangs would protect their territory with sawn-off shotguns and even hired hitmen to send out the ‘right’ messages.

The sheer number of drug busts in Spain underlines the role being played by British and Irish criminals. In recent years, gang bosses have cultivated their contacts in Spain and set up members of their own gangs to act as international go-betweens with drug smugglers. Those links with Spain have become even more sophisticated and their networks of suppliers and distributors are often now second to none.

Many Irish criminals fled their home country and headed for Spain after the authorities introduced the Proceeds of Crime legislation and set up the Criminal Assets Bureau following the shocking cold-blooded murder of Dublin journalist Veronica Guerin in the mid-1990s. One infamous suspect, known to the Irish police (the Garda) as ‘Chaser’, is now rated as one of the biggest suppliers of drugs in Europe. This follows the arrest in Spain two years ago of an even more powerful gangster, who was born in Birmingham to Irish parents. After that arrest, ‘Chaser’ became the Mr Big in Irish drug circles on the European mainland and he has spent the past three years moving between the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain.

Cannabis remains the most widely used drug in Spain. Vast shipments arrive from North African countries and are also smuggled out of Spain – mainly as freight – on lorries travelling across the continent through France and then on to the UK and Ireland. Until recently, ecstasy was second to cannabis in the market as distribution of the tablets spread to all four Spanish provinces. But in recent years cocaine has overtaken ‘E’. It is relatively easy to get a plentiful supply of, and these days it’s popular across a broader spectrum of society.

Spain leads Europe for cocaine seizures and it accounts for half of all drug confiscations – and the traffickers are always coming up with new smuggling tricks. Among current techniques are those involving gangs that drop loads of cocaine fitted with radio-transmitting buoys into the Atlantic and have boats pick up the drugs.

But Spain’s fast track to a recession has moved the spotlight back on this country’s spectacular ten-year building boom, much of which has been driven by ‘dirty money’. Criminals capitalised on the gold rush mentality that infected Spain in the 1990s. With house prices doubling in ten years between 1997 and 2007, many were desperate to grab a piece of the action. Some unscrupulous local authorities even turned a blind eye to ‘front’ companies set up by gangsters and also took backhanders to grant building licences.

Keen to hide the spoils from prostitution, extortion and drug dealing, organised criminals have channelled hundreds of millions of euros into buying property. Meanwhile, police and judicial authorities were often overwhelmed by the scale and sophistication of criminal activities. On the Costa del Sol – where estate agents believed in the boom years they virtually had a licence to print money – anti-corruption magistrates found themselves dealing with scores of cases.

But then ‘dirty’ – or undeclared – money has always been something of a national custom in Spain. During property deals, the real value is never declared to the tax authorities. Instead, envelopes stuffed full of cash are passed between buyer and seller, while the notary or lawyer witnessing the transaction conveniently leaves the room. Just how much ‘dirty money’ entered Spain in those boom years is impossible to say. But it is claimed that 40 per cent of all the €500 bills in existence are circulating in Spain. They are called ‘Bin Ladens’ because, like the world’s most wanted man, although everyone knows what they look like, no one has ever actually seen one. These €500 bills fill the envelopes in ‘black money’ property deals.

Spain became a popular destination for Britons on the run after the collapse of the extradition treaty between the two countries in 1978. But Britain has had an extradition treaty with Spain since 1985, when the country joined the European Union. Yet this has done nothing to stem the tide of gangsters flooding on to Spain’s vast coastline. In January 2004 European arrest warrants also came into effect, making it far easier to bring British criminals back into the British criminal justice system. But still they kept coming.

Today it is estimated that the Spanish Costas (meaning coasts) are home to more than 20,000 foreign criminals of 70 nationalities, including the Russian Mafia and armed gangs from Albania, Kosovo and the former Soviet republics. The Costa del Sol was nicknamed the ‘Costa del Crime’ back in 1983 when the thieves behind London’s notorious £6 million Security Express robbery were spotted leading luxurious lives on the Spanish coast. In addition to drugs there is a flourishing trade in illegally imported tobacco and cigarettes, which are almost as profitable to British criminals in Spain as drugs, with minimal risks.

The sums at stake are huge. Officially, one in five cigarettes smoked in Britain has been smuggled into the country, meaning that there is a vast illegal market available to British gangs based in Spain. Unofficially, the figure could be as high as one in three. A packet of 20 cigarettes legally costing more than five pounds a pack can be bought on the black market for half that sum. So smuggling is well worthwhile, with such bootleg trade costing the Exchequer more than £3 billion every year.

There is an ever-growing ‘white van’ trade on cross-Channel ferries and many people smuggle goods on flights from Spain and the Canary Islands. But 80 per cent of the shipments are by organised gangs operating much like major import-export companies. One 40-foot shipping container can hold up to eight million cigarettes, with a revenue value of £1 million. Consignments pass through the docks mixed with garden furniture and other such legitimate cargos.

Importers can clear a profit of up to £500,000 per container, depending on how many middlemen are involved. The cigarettes end up on sale in pubs and clubs, at car-boot sales and on housing estates. HM Revenue & Customs seize more than a billion illegal cigarettes every year.

However, officials probably only intercept about 10 per cent of smuggled loads. This suggests that up to 10 billion cigarettes are entering the UK illegally.

Unlike trafficking in drugs, there are no steep penalties to deter the black marketeers. The worst they can expect is confiscation and up to seven years in prison, although that is very rare. These ‘businessmen’ write off a certain percentage of their imports to seizures. They simply buy more cigarettes – which means more orders for manufacturers.

In 2000, the then British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, finalised a new fast-track extradition treaty with the Spanish authorities, but it seems to have done little to stem the tide of crime rolling across Spain. The treaty was supposed to be aimed at figures such as the ‘Pimpernel’, a multimillionaire criminal who has been on the run for more than 20 years and is believed to be one of the most senior figures in the British underworld.

Spain’s criminal gangs undoubtedly benefit from the country’s massive 4,900km of coastline, from which drugs shipments can be received from South America, via Morocco or Algeria to the south, and launched into northern Europe, with little fear of detection by police or coastguard patrol boats. Spain’s position as a staging post for drugs from places such as Colombia and Bolivia is also partly a symptom of its colonial past and the language ties between Spain and South America.

One of the most disturbing things about researching this book is the way in which Spain has embraced all the luxuries that we take so much for granted but is now on the verge of returning to its previous Third World status. The economy there is even more shattered than that of the UK. Two million properties remain un-lived in because the building boom has flooded Spain with unwanted housing.

Spain is already well into its first official recession in 15 years – 1.3 million workers lost their jobs in 2008, bringing the jobless total up to 3.2 million. At the time of writing, Spain has the highest unemployment rate in the EU at 13.9 per cent, and it is expected to top the 16 per cent mark by the end of 2009.

So there you have it. A brief insight into why Spain has become the gateway to villainy for so many British and Irish gangsters in recent years. Throw into that mix a large sprinkling of criminals from other countries across the globe and it’s little wonder that Spain has become a tinderbox of crime, on the verge of exploding at any given moment.