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