Читать книгу Gang Wars on the Costa - The True Story of the Bloody Conflict Raging in Paradise - Wensley Clarkson - Страница 9

ALHAURÍN PRISON IS a foul-smelling hole of a place. The waft of sweat, fear and loathing hits you in the face the moment you walk through the gates. Everything is off-white in colour, from the deadpan faces of the guards to the chipped walls and the yellowing metalwork of the gated doorways. It’s a strangely muted place, though, which is surprising because just 50 metres from the entrance are housed about 1500 of Spain’s most notorious criminals, merely a few kilometres from Europe’s number-one holiday destination.

Alhaurín sits just beneath a vast mountain range, which overshadows the Costa del Sol and is rumoured to contain more shallow graves of dead criminals than any other mountain range in the world. It’s what they call a modular prison, which means that there are five different blocks that house different classifications of prisoners; perhaps more surprisingly, there is even a women’s block, although the men and women’s sections of this prison are not directly connected for obvious reasons.

One British criminal who spent many months in Alhaurín told me that the inmates reckoned the authorities deliberately house the women just within sight so that ‘we really suffer’. He said that it was possible to wave to the women in their cells and that sometimes inmates managed to form some kind of long distance relationship, but it all sounds very frustrating and simply adds to the tinderbox atmosphere inside Alhaurín.

From a distance, the prison itself looks like a load of run-down 1970s low-rise tower blocks, right slap-bang in the middle of a desolate rocky terrain looking down towards the sea and the mass of concrete that makes up the Costa del Sol. When Alhaurín was first built, most of the coastal resorts were nothing more than fishing villages dotted along a picturesque, deserted coastline. Now the Costa del Sol looks like a sprawling mini-Rio de Janeiro dominated by bland tower blocks and depressing-looking estates of private holiday homes, jerry-built at high speed during the boom years of the 1990s.

Inside Alhaurín, the grim-faced guards search all visitors in a casual, nonchalant manner, which belies the sort of security one would expect inside the biggest prison in all of Andalucia. These ‘screws’ seem deadened by the sheer flatness of the atmosphere that pervades in this bland environment. They are poorly paid, and it shows.

I was in Alhaurín to meet Joey, one of the most notorious and well-known British criminals on the Costa del Sol. He’d been arrested a few weeks earlier while dropping off a shipment of drugs at the home of another criminal who happened to be under police surveillance because he was suspected of being a major arms dealer, as well as a drug baron.

My visit inside Alhaurín was shrouded in secrecy because the only way I could get in was to pretend to be a friend of Joey’s. A few weeks earlier he’d phoned from an illicit jailhouse mobile phone to say he’d been caught up in the police sting and reckoned he’d be in the prison for some months before his lawyer could get the courts to grant him bail. The legal system in Spain works in strange ways. Often a criminal will be arrested, thrown in jail and told he will only be released to await trial if he can provide a certain amount of bail money. As Joey explained: ‘That can take months and months and it wears you down. In the end, you cough up the cash – say 20 grand, and you get released and then you fuck off out of there as quickly as possible.’

The Spanish authorities would never admit it, but there seems to be a ‘special policy’ at work here. If the criminal provides a big enough amount of bail money and then disappears it saves the system hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of euros in legal expenses and the cost of keeping him in prison. As Joey explained: ‘It’s a lot cheaper to let me go as long as I leave the country, than to sit there for twenty years soaking up all their cash. It makes sense in a way, doesn’t it?’

The guards inside Alhaurín were not particularly forthcoming about their jobs. The ratio of guards to prisoners is 20 to 1, which seems quite good compared with some of the other prisons I have visited across the globe. Incidents of attacks on warders are pretty low, too. But it took the canny public-school educated Joey to explain the significance of that. ‘The guards are no different from us, really. Most of them were rejected as policemen. They’re badly paid and quite resentful about it so they often sympathise with us, which means some of them are open to bribery.’

Joey had access to a mobile phone 24 hours a day and if that was ever confiscated his cell mate Leon had three more hidden in their quarters. Warders even brought in extra food for inmates if they were prepared to pay for it and there was a special annexed kitchen area near Joey’s cell where cordon bleu prisoners enjoyed cooking their favourite meals every evening. TV sets were even allowed in the cells.

‘It all helps keep things calm here,’ explained Joey. ‘The guards are alright on the whole. No one seems to mind the backhanders from the inmates to them, although they’re not so keen on openly allowing drugs to be brought in.’ But Joey then added with a wry smile, ‘I’ve had the best quality cocaine I have ever snorted in my life here in Alhaurín. No one would dare sell bad stuff because we’re all in here together and we’d soon find out who cut it.’

Yet despite the supposedly relaxed atmosphere in Alhaurín, it’s not always a pleasant place to be in, by any means. ‘There are a lot of prisoners here who should be in mental institutions. The Spanish just don’t seem to accept that people do have psychological problems and prison is no place for them,’ Joey told me.

Before Joey turned up on the Costa del Sol 25 years ago, he was a London-based university-educated professional musician with great hopes of making it as a rock star. Then he got caught up in a £10,000 drug deal and decided to head to the Costa del Crime. ‘The guy I bought the drugs from got arrested and I knew it was only a matter of time before the police came after me. I’d heard that Spain was easy to operate in so I booked a flight, packed a bag and turned up here. I’ve never been back to the UK since.’

Joey quickly settled into the drugs, sex and booze lifestyle that dominates life for so many expats in southern Spain. ‘Dealing in big shipments of drugs, puff and coke mainly, was so easy out here back then. The cops were so badly paid they never even chased up cases,’ explained Joey. ‘They took the attitude that just as long as the criminals were only being horrible to each other then they wouldn’t bother with them. In any case, all the cops I’ve ever met out here all love cocaine. It’s their drug of choice and I always made sure that my favourite policemen got as much as they wanted.’

So for the following 20 years Joey built up a drugs empire run through his own gang on the resort of Estepona, just a few kilometres west of Marbella. ‘Those were great days,’ he continued. ‘I had a good crew working for me and I was making half a million a year, spending it all on wine, women and song and even paid for my kids to go to private school. I had a top-of-the-range Mercedes and a house bought for cash. I felt I was untouchable. And you know what? I was in a sense. I dealt drugs like a banker deals in stocks and shares. I was relaxed, confident and never had to get heavy with anyone. My lads did all the direct contact with the punters so I never even had to get my hands dirty. It was a good system out here back in those days.’

Joey soon made strong connections with the Spanish mafia based up in Galicia in north-west Spain, where the majority of cocaine comes in by fishing boats from South America. Joey went on, ‘It was really civilised. I’d pop up to Galicia every six weeks or so, organise another shipment, pay over the cash and then get my man to drive it all down here. Then I’d have my team distribute it to all our customers and there was never any aggro.’

Joey reckons that for at least 15 years, the drug trade in this part of southern Spain was ‘safer than working as an estate agent’. He explained: ‘I looked on myself as a professional businessman. My wife and kids thought that was what I was. The money was rolling in. There was never any violence and I was on top of the world. I felt almost invincible.’

But then Joey got, by his own admission, ‘too big for my own fuckin’ boots.’

‘I bought this club which was basically a brothel and reckoned it would make a nice little sideline and I’d be able to launder all my drugs money through it.’

‘Clubs’ as they are known in Spain are bars with bedrooms attached, which get around the anti-prostitution laws because the girls who work in the clubs ‘rent’ the rooms. ‘The profit was in the drinks more than the sex,’ explained Joey. ‘You could charge ten times the normal amount for a beer and the girl had to pay you 25 per cent of her “fee” on top of that.’

But soon after purchasing the club and recruiting girls from as far afield as South America and eastern Europe, Joey was given a stark reminder of what being a criminal on the Costa del Sol was about to become. He told me: ‘These two Russians walked into the club and pulled me aside and said they wanted a share of it. I was stunned and told them to fuck off. I couldn’t believe they would have the barefaced cheek to think they could lean on me.’

But that incident sparked off a vicious turf war. ‘The Russians proved to be complete nutters. They kidnapped my Bulgarian girlfriend and told me they’d slice her ear off if I didn’t let them take over control of the club. I was outraged. No one had ever tried to do this to me in all my years in Spain, but times were changing.’

In the end, Joey paid a €100,000 ransom to the Russians and then hired three Romanians to ‘teach them a fuckin’ lesson.’ He explained: ‘That whole thing cost me close to a quarter of a million euros. One of the Russians was shot dead and I had to start hiring security staff to protect me and look after the club at all times of the day and night.’

Joey says that 2001 was the year when, ‘It all really went fuckin’ pear-shaped. The Russians and eastern Europeans had already decided they liked the look of the Costa del Sol as well, and they were turning up here in their droves. It was fuckin’ dreadful. I had to start arming myself around the clock and I ended up getting visits from three different gangs trying to get a piece of my club and drugs business off me.’

Joey explained that the foreign gangs were determined to run every single aspect of the criminal scene in southern Spain. ‘They were trying to control the girls, the drugs, the people smuggling, the counterfeiting. Everything. But I was caught up in it all and I couldn’t just close my operation down and retire to the Balearic Islands. I had mouths to feed and a business to run.’

And there were other problems lurking in the background. The local authorities tried to shut him down because of safety problems with his electricity supply to the club and also said it was a fire hazard. They were out to get him, he said, because he wasn’t paying the police enough in bribes at the time.

In order to keep the club open, Joey said he then had to shell out more than €100,000 in bribes to the local authorities. ‘Up until then I’d had nice low outgoings and suddenly in 2001, my outgoings skyrocketed and I was starting to wonder if there would be any profit left for me in the end.’

Then the 9/11 attacks in the US occurred and another, even bigger headache emerged on the horizon, as Joey explained: ‘The Government here became obsessed with drugs money being channelled into terrorism and I was getting a lot of pressure put on me by the police for the first time. Until then, you could put quite a few bob in the bank and no one would come after you.

‘After all, the black economy out here was running everything until then. I mean, you could buy a house back then and pay cash for it and no one would raise an eyebrow. Then 9/11 happened and suddenly we’re all suspected of supporting terrorism. It was really just an excuse to come after us but it hurt us bad.’

Eventually, Joey ended up being nicked by the Spanish police when he delivered a shipment of drugs to the arms trafficker who was under surveillance. ‘No one would have taken any notice of that gun dealer in the old days,’ he said. ‘But the police terrorism unit was on his tail because they reckoned he was supplying terrorists with arms. I walked straight into a trap.’

Joey says he deeply regrets not shutting down his operation many years earlier. ‘I knew all this was coming but like so many others I thought I was untouchable. I really believed that all these foreigners would shoot each other down and then it would just go back to the way it was all those years earlier.’

Joey even acknowledges that he is ‘one of the lucky ones’.

‘Being arrested was a blessing in disguise in a sense,’ he admits, ‘because I’m sure I would have got gunned down by one of those psycho foreigners in the end.’

The worldwide recession will, Joey predicts, cause even more problems on the Costa del Sol. He believes too many properties have been built for the holiday market and prices have crashed, so none of the villains are putting their money into property any more. ‘In the end, the demand for coke and other drugs will drop and that’s when all the crims will get really desperate and come out shooting. It’s going to get even more deadly on the Costa del Sol. I’ve heard of people being shot over a €500 debt. It’s got out of hand but I can only see it getting worse.’

A few weeks after our interview, Joey slipped out of Spain following his release on bail from Alhaurín. He then admitted in a call to me that he wouldn’t ever be back on the Costa del Sol. He was heading for South America. ‘This place is finished. It’s on the scrapheap and it’s about to implode. I reckon it’s going to get even more deadly out here. I’m going to scrape a living together somehow but drugs are now a thing of the past for me. I lost my club, my house, and everything after I was arrested and now I have a chance to make a clean start a long way from all the madness.’