Gang Wars on the Costa - The True Story of the Bloody Conflict Raging in Paradise. Wensley Clarkson
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