Gang Wars on the Costa - The True Story of the Bloody Conflict Raging in Paradise. Wensley Clarkson
gangsters in the past, but what makes Jimmy so important is that he represents a complete sea change in the way villains operate in Spain. These evil, cold-blooded characters take no prisoners. They shoot to kill in a way that has even terrified some of the most infamous British villains of the past. Those old boys of crime say the rules have changed. Women, children and so-called ‘civilians’ are no longer off-limits to these ruthless characters.
I was deeply perturbed by what I witnessed in Spain during my research into this book. But in order to unravel the truth about this disturbing crime wave, I have had to delve deep into the underworld at considerable personal risk. I am fascinated by how the criminals seem to thrive right under the noses of the police. I’ve even been inside some of Spain’s prisons, where conditions are appalling even when compared to the oldest British jails. I’ve spent countless hours with killers, drug barons, pimps, child prostitution dealers, counterfeiters, con men and bank robbers. At times I have been threatened, and what I’ve witnessed has deeply disturbed me, but sometimes I have found myself sharing a beer and a joke with people like the hitman responsible for the deaths of dozens of people who admitted he didn’t sleep well at night. 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. Crime gangs are not a new problem, but their membership does seem to be on the increase, especially in Spain.
I have travelled to all the coastlines, and the holiday islands, of this complex nation and discovered types of criminals I never thought existed. I hope that this book will at least provide you with an insight into a criminal phenomenon that seems to thrive right in the heart of a country visited by more Brits than any other nation on earth and lived in by more than half a million other former-UK residents.
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