Series: Drugs Uncovered: Part 15 Of 17

DEADLY CARGO

The Luxury Yachts Smuggling Cocaine Into Southern Spain Are A Key Part Of
The Drug's Route To Britain. Tony Thompson Reveals How The Glitzy
Surroundings Help To Veil A Lucrative Trade Run By Hardened British
Criminals, All Competing To Supply Saturday Night's Powder

You can't see the Mediterranean from the white benches outside Sinatra's
Bar and Grill, the hippest hang-out in the marina at Puerto Banus on the
Costa del Sol. The view in all directions is blocked by the hundreds of
luxury yachts. Factor in dozens of sumptuous restaurants, the Lexus, BMW
and Porsche dealerships on every corner and there's no doubt this is a
millionaire's playground - an aspiring St Tropez.

It is also, according to the new generation of British villains moving in
on the area, the perfect place from which to run a drug smuggling empire:
more of an aspiring Miami. 'There are times when this place is a real
madhouse,' says Chris, a 28-year-old south Londoner who in recent years has
taken to spending his winters in the sun. 'There are so many deliveries
going out to the yachts and restaurants and so many people moving about,
you could never spot anything dodgy going on even if you tried.'

According to Chris and others, the most sophisticated smugglers are
increasingly using the marinas to cover their tracks.

Working on the principle that they are less likely to be harassed if the
drugs are onboard a luxury yacht than in a small dinghy or dilapidated
fishing vessel, some gangs are chartering boats and bringing their
contraband right into the heart of the local community.

Further along the coast powerful spotlights have been fitted to beach areas
to illuminate the poor Moroccans who risk their lives attempting to smuggle
cannabis in tiny boats, but there is no such monitoring of the luxury
yachts which travel the world.

In the last three years around a dozen yachts laden with drugs have been
seized by the Spanish authorities. Some had travelled from as far away as
Colombia and Venezuela; in many cases the crew were unaware of the true
purpose of the trip, having simply been hired to make a particular journey.

Only a couple of weeks ago, Glaswegian Ricky Hayes was arrested in nearby
Fuengirola after Spanish police seized cannabis resin and cocaine in a
major bust. In March, Spanish police seized a Venezuelan fishing boat just
off the coast of the Canary Islands. The vessel was carrying 76 bundles of
high-quality Colombian cocaine worth around UKP250 million.

Spanish customs officials believe that some of the drugs would have been
offloaded at sea onto smaller boats which would in turn have transferred
the drugs to yachts bound for the marinas.

The drugs are then transported to Britain in a variety of ways, mostly by
being stuffed into specially created hidden compartments in cars and
coaches and simply driven across Europe and through the Channel Tunnel.
Spain developed its reputation as the idyllic bolt-hole for British
criminals after the collapse of a 100-year-old extradition treaty in 1978.
The loophole was closed in 1985, but by then dozens of gangsters had set up
shop there. At present there are 35 outstanding extradition requests, and
British detectives estimate there are more than 230 known criminals who
would be arrested on sight if they were to set foot again in the UK.
Gangland figure Kenneth Noye hid in Spain for three years after stabbing
Stephen Cameron to death on a slip road of the M25 in Kent in 1996.

In 1997, alarmed by an increase in violence in the area, Spain set up a
special police unit whose job is to track and control the drugs gangs.
Police officers with a special knowledge of languages and computer
technology were chosen to join the elite corps, known as the UDYCO, or
Organised Crime Units. Before long they were dubbed 'Marbella Vice'.

In response, the local crooks developed an unwritten agreement.

Arguments were settled elsewhere.

Nobody wanted to attract the attention of the Spanish police.

It didn't last. The new breed of British bad boys, like their international
counterparts, are less flashy and more sinister.

They are also more violent.

Gangs from London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow are installed on the
coast, running Moroccan hashish and now moving into lucrative cocaine deals
with the Colombians. Though at first the Colombians were happy to do
nothing apart from supply the drug, they are now attempting to get more
involved, which has also led to an upsurge in levels of violence. Last year
seven people were killed in eight days of street shootings in Madrid as war
broke out between local and Colombian drug dealers. (The way the deal
normally works with British and Spanish gangsters is they leave each other
alone as long as they are only supplying to their own markets.)

Among the leading British lights in the local drug trade are such
characters as Mickey Green, also known as the Pimpernel, a
multi-millionaire 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. A successful armed robber during the Seventies when he ran a
gang called the 'Wembley Mob', Green, now 60, moved into the drug trade
after leaving prison in the early Eighties. He now owns bars and property
in Wembley, West Hampstead, Dublin and Marbella. In the past he has had a
string of detectives on his payroll and has had close connections with the
notorious Adams family, the powerful London gangsters. He was named
Europe's most wanted drugs baron and nicknamed 'the octopus' for the
tentacles of his ever-expanding network.

But Green has always stayed one step ahead of the law, leaving behind
speedboats, yachts, Rolls-Royces, a Porsche, a Ferrari, gold bullion, cash
and cocaine in his haste to get away. He has worked out of Morocco, France
and the US, where he consorted with the Mafia and flew in and out of
Colombia before his arrest in Beverly Hills, where he was living in Rod
Stewart's former house.

FBI agents arrested Green as he lounged by the pool. He lived up to his
nickname by escaping the charges.

More recently he was implicated in a UKP150m cocaine-smuggling ring based
in Britain and was seized by Spanish police while staying at the Ritz in
Barcelona. He spent months in custody before Customs decided to drop the
charges. He is now free again and back in his Spanish villa on the south
coast. His options for travel are, however, severely limited.

He is wanted in France, where he was sentenced to 17 years in his absence,
and Holland. He also faces arrest if he returns to Ireland, over
allegations that he 'fixed' witnesses at an inquest.

Another member of the 'old school' suspected of being heavily involved in
the drug trade was Clifford Saxe, also a former armed robber, who died
while awaiting extradition earlier this year. Saxe was believed to be the
mastermind behind the ?6m Security Express robbery.

He had always denied the crime but managed to live well in Spain with no
obvious income or employment. 'People of his generation, they didn't like
drugs at all in the beginning,' says Chris. 'Then they realised how much
money could be made and they all started getting involved.

A lot of them, never did anything other than puff. There are a few like
Green who have moved into cocaine and they have done well out of it but
mostly it's the younger people who are coming along and cleaning up. The
problem is, with so many young hotheads around, people are starting to get
hurt.'

This area of Spain increasingly resembles the world portrayed in JG
Ballard's best-selling novel Cocaine Nights, in which the boring lives of
expatriates on a Costa settlement are enlivened by a murder and a spate of
drugs-related crimes.

The difference, however, is that this is all real. There have been six
murders on the Costa in the past two years.

Three of the victims have been British or Irish, and Britons are also
suspected of involvement in two other murders.

The year before, in one three-month period, eight suspected drug
traffickers were murdered.

The victims were French, Colombian, Algerian and Spanish. Two were gunned
down in restaurants in a throwback to Chicago of the Thirties.

On a Sunday night in August 2000, Michael McGuinness was spending the
evening at home in his first-floor three-bedroomed apartment in Puebla
Aida, just outside the town of Mijas Costa, with his new Brazilian
girlfriend. At 2.30am two men rang his buzzer.

He must have known who they were or who sent them, because he let them into
what is otherwise an impenetrable gated haven. According to his girlfriend,
they said they had come to collect money; she did not know how much, but a
heated argument developed.

When McGuinness tried to get rid of them, both men produced handguns and
led him out to his car, a Range Rover. Four days later the Range Rover was
discovered at Malaga airport car park. When the boot was opened, McGuinness
was found handcuffed with a bag over his head. He had been suffocated.

The question of why he was killed remains unanswered. According to sources
in Ireland, he was wanted for his part in a massive money laundering
operation linked to the local drug trade.

He was known to have been working with traffickers linked to the gang that
murdered Dublin journalist Veronica Guerin. Many of them fled to the Costa
del Crime in the aftermath of the murder, and McGuinness is thought to have
somehow fallen out with them, possibly by trying to skim extra profits from
the top of laundered funds.

Another murder under investigation is that of Scott Bradfield, another
suspected dealer with links to the Adams family, whose battered body was
cut up and stuffed into two trunks near Torremolinos. He fled to Spain
after being linked to a murder in Islington but was murdered after falling
out with British drugs barons based there.

Spanish detectives believe his body was left by his killers as a warning to
other dealers.

The violence and drug dealing are spreading out beyond the Costa del Sol to
islands such as Ibiza, where British gangsters have discovered a lucrative
drug market.

There the gangsters are virtually a law unto themselves and local police
admit they can do little to stop the booming trade.

At street level, the dealers are switched regularly to keep one step ahead
of the authorities. They are recruited in England, usually from outside
magistrates courts, and offered a plane ticket and two weeks in the sun,
plus wages. Many who accept find the work so lucrative they become regulars.

'I don't bother trying to sell stuff in Britain any more: too many Old Bill
around,' says Darren, a dealer from Basildon. 'Once a month I pack a
thousand tabs of E into a suitcase and go to Ibiza for the weekend.

The money I earn is more than enough to keep me going.

'The Spanish police class ecstasy as a soft drug, on the same level as
dope, so as long as you don't have too many on you, you don't even have to
worry about being caught.

Especially in the high season, there are so many people around, the police
are reluctant to do anything.

They don't want a riot on their hands.'

The availability and range of drugs on offer in Ibiza is legendary.

A huge proportion of young clubbers seek out dealers almost as soon as they
arrive. Ralph, from Birmingham, first went to Ibiza in 1991 for two weeks
of non-stop partying. 'We didn't take any drugs with us - we didn't have
to. You could get anything you wanted out there and it was cheaper and
superior in quality to anything you could get here. I've been back every
year since and it's the same.'

The club drug trade is controlled by criminals who base themselves on the
Spanish mainland or in Amsterdam, where there is even less risk of being
apprehended. Pat Adams, the eldest of the Adams brothers, recently fled to
Spain to escape the attention of MI5. He is now believed to be overseeing
the family business, including its club drug interests.

Another notorious figure on the mainland believed to have links in the
Canaries and Balearics is Mark Murray, the man in charge of dealing at the
club where the pill which killed Leah Betts was bought.

The success of British villains and the changing face of the club drug
market has also inspired other criminal groups to seek a foothold on the
island. Recently a newer, more vicious, type of gang has emerged.

These prey on the others, using violence to steal their cargoes.

Some have even used torture to extract information from rivals.

The latest, and potentially most lethal, addition to the Costa's crime
cocktail are the Russians. It was a Russian drugs baron based on the Costa
del Sol who allegedly planned to buy the world's most expensive diamonds,
had the Millennium Dome robbery gone to plan.

The British gangs who have been controlling the cocaine trade to the UK
might have to respond in the most direct way - by stepping up their own
violence in response.