Hash (10 page)

So, in order to survive, Barny has been selling hash for the last ‘few years’. He says: ‘It’s a lot better than some of the things my other friends are having to do. Two girls I went to school with turned to prostitution to survive. They work in the brothels that are semi-legal out here. They hate it but they have no choice.’

The streets around the once opulent resort of Marbella
and its glitzy neighbour Puerto Banus used to be crammed with expensive sports cars and designer-dressed men and women. Now there is an overwhelming feeling that the place has been deserted by the
richerati
and abandoned by many residents too poor to afford to live there any more.

‘I don’t think people back in the UK realise just how poor Spain has suddenly become. It’s almost as if it is sliding back into being a third world country after thirty years of success,’ says Barny.

Since the 1960s Spain’s economy has relied heavily on tourism and the construction industry which, to a certain extent, went hand in hand. As Barny points out: ‘The biggest problem out here is that everything is expensive to buy but no one has the money to pay for it. My parents relied on cheap remortgaging to stay afloat and it worked brilliantly as long as our house kept increasing in value. But once the crash came many properties, including ours, went into negative equity and everyone fell into the same big black hole.’

Barny was first introduced to hash by one of his teachers at school who offered him a drag of his joint on a school trip when Barny was just fourteen years old. ‘I got hooked on it real quick. By the time I was fifteen I was smoking hash every day and stealing from my mum’s purse to pay for it. I never realised back then how it slows you down and makes you lethargic and apathetic. I fell into all the classic traps associated with hash.

‘My parents knew I was smoking it but because I stayed
in my room virtually all day long they did little to try and stop it. I think they found it easier to handle me on hash because at least I wasn’t out causing trouble like some of my other friends.’

Then, shortly after he left school, aged eighteen, Barny’s parents’ money problems came crashing down on them – and that proved to be a big wake-up call for Barny. He explains: ‘I’d turned into a complete pothead and, quite frankly, I’d hardly noticed what was happening with my dad’s work. He was a property developer without any property to develop. But when he told me they were planning to return to the UK, I freaked out. I felt like they were abandoning me, although they wanted me to go with them. But I’d only been to the UK a few times in my entire life. Spain was my home.

‘My parents took off back to the UK pretty quickly after trying and failing to persuade me to join them. It was awful saying goodbye to them but I just couldn’t face a new country with new rules. But at least their decision to leave made me stop and think about my overuse of hash at the time and I actually gave it up and tried to start looking for a job.’

Despite hundreds of applications, Barny failed to even get one job interview on the Costa del Sol. ‘I was willing to try anything but jobs were so thin on the ground out here and there was some prejudice against me because I had an English name. It meant I got dismissed by many possible employers before they even met me.’

After months of struggling in Spain, Barny came across an
older Brit called Al, who knew some of Barny’s schoolfriends because he was their hash dealer. ‘I got talking to Al and he said that despite the recession the demand for hash was as big as ever. We both reckoned it was probably because it’s cheaper to smoke hash than drink alcohol, which kind of makes sense.

‘Anyway, he said he needed a “runner” to make deliveries to some of the urbanisations [estates] on the west side of Marbella and that he would pay me a basic salary if I worked for him every day of the week. By this time, my parents had gone and I had been sleeping on a friend’s floor. I jumped at the chance of any job, even an illegal one.

‘With my salary from Al the hash dealer, I could do a flat-share with two other old school friends. It was like a weight lifting from my shoulders. Thanks to the job with Al I could look forward to a proper future in Spain.’

Also, Barny admits that after his parents left Marbella, he found life a lot less stressful. ‘They’d been in such a meltdown after the recession started hitting hard that they were rowing all the time and the atmosphere at home had been crap. Quite frankly, I was glad to see the back of them.’

But then nine months after starting work as a ‘runner’ for Al, Barny’s life turned upside down when he got the news from London that his mother had been killed in a car crash. ‘I was completely numbed by what happened to Mum. I felt so detached by this time because they’d moved to the UK and yet I felt heartbroken all the same. I rushed back to London to console my dad but he was a broken man. He
was also angry with me for not coming back with them in the first place. He was virtually blaming me for her death. Also I felt completely out of place with my relatives in London.’

Two weeks after his mother’s funeral, Barny took the decision to head back to Spain. ‘Sure I felt bad. It was as if I was abandoning my dad but nothing I said or did seemed to make him happy, so I convinced myself he’d be better off without me. It probably wasn’t true but it gave me an excuse to head back to Marbella.’

But by the time Barny returned to Spain, he found that hash dealer Al had replaced him with a new ‘runner’, a pretty brunette girl whom Al believed could keep his customers much happier than Barny did. ‘I guess I was pretty naive to think no one would try and nick my job with Al. The young people out here are all as desperate as me and this girl was very attractive so I could see why Al preferred her to me. But it was a terrible blow. I had no money to pay the rent on the flat-share. My mates were threatening to turf me out and it felt as if my life had gone backwards once again.’

That’s when Barny says he ‘reached rock bottom’. He explains: ‘I moved out of the flat-share. Well, actually they kicked me out and threw all my stuff out of the balcony onto the pavement below. I had nowhere to turn, so I started sleeping rough on the beaches near where I used to live. I’d eat scraps of food I found in dustbins outside restaurants and supermarkets. I slept in little coves on beaches I knew from my childhood but I had to keep moving because
I was afraid of being arrested for vagrancy by the Policia National.’

Barny admits: ‘I was wandering around in a daze of depression and hopelessness. I simply didn’t know where to turn. I slept in doorways and beaches and even on benches but I was running out of options. I kept wondering if my dad was okay back home. I had no money so I found a phone box and called my dad
cobro revertido
[reverse charges]. When he heard it was me he refused to accept the call. I was so upset I started crying in the street. At that moment I felt like the loneliest person in the world. My family didn’t want me. My friends had tossed me out of the flat we shared. It had got so bad that when I passed old school friends in the street they’d turn their heads away and ignore me.’

Later that same evening, Barny met another older man who was also ‘on the road’. He explains: ‘This guy was English, from up north and he seemed a decent sort. We ended up deciding to put our heads down on a quiet strip of beach I knew from my childhood. Then, suddenly in the middle of the night I woke up after hearing a lot of movement in the darkness.

‘I didn’t open my eyes at first because I wanted to stay asleep for as long as possible. Then suddenly I felt someone on top of me. It was the man trying to rape me. I pushed him away but he was strong and got me in an arm lock and tried to make me kneel on the sand. I said I wasn’t gay but that seemed to make him even more angry. He ordered me to drop my trousers but I refused. Then he weakened his grip
on my wrists for a split second and I lashed out at him and turned and kicked him incredibly hard in the balls. It was only then I realised he was completely naked.’

Barny continues: ‘I took off and ran and ran for at least a mile to make sure he couldn’t find me. I decided there and then I had to get my act together and get some money together. I thought about all the things I could do to earn a living and concluded that selling hash was probably the safest option. I knew where Al got his supplies from and I knew I had to be careful not to sell on his patch but it was my only option.’

Within a month Barny had a list of clients, thanks to his connections inside Marbella, and enough money to try and lead a ‘normal’ life.

Now, more than two years later, Barny says he’s desperate to move away from the hash business and try to make something of his life. But with the recession in Spain worsening by the month, there seems little chance of that.

He continues: ‘I’ve had a few near misses while working as a hash dealer but nothing particularly dangerous. Most of the people I deal to are good old-fashioned dopeheads, who wouldn’t harm a fly. I even bumped into Al not long after I set up business and he wished me well, just so long as I didn’t start flogging hashish in his area.’

The biggest problem, says Barny, is when the professional gangsters who supply the hash to him decide to suddenly up their charges or simply fob him off with substandard product. ‘That’s when it gets a bit dodgy. These guys are out
and out criminals, unlike me. If I show weakness to them they try to bully me and exploit it. A couple of times I’ve had a gun pulled on me because I stood up to them. Funnily enough that is the best way to deal with them because then they at least show you a measure of respect.’

One of Barny’s most regular suppliers of hash is a local policeman. ‘This guy actually approached me through another customer,’ he says. ‘I thought he was pulling my leg at first then he explained that his police station confiscated literally tons of hash every year and it was supposed to be burned in an incinerator each month. But he said that it was never closely checked and it was easy to steal huge lumps without anyone noticing. I was obviously wary at first but this cop proved to be as good as gold when he turned up as promised at a pre-arranged rendezvous with a brick of the best hash I had ever come across!’

However, Barny remains convinced he is treading a dangerous path if he stays in the hash game for too long. ‘I’ve noticed that the dealers who are clever never stay in this profession for too long. They say that once you start thinking about stopping you should quit immediately because if your head goes, then you start making mistakes and once you do that you’re basically fucked and something bad will happen to you sooner or later.’

Barny mentions the case of another smalltime dealer working on the perimeter of Barny’s ‘territory’ who ended up getting ‘a very brutal lesson’. ‘This guy bought a load of hash off an Albanian who I have always managed to avoid,
thank God. Anyway my mate didn’t have the full amount of cash required when he took a delivery of this guy’s hash but then the stupid idiot forgot to pay up when he next saw the Albanian. A few days later a man with a gun knocked on my mate’s door and when he answered he got the bullet – literally. He wasn’t killed but he hasn’t had a job of any kind ever since.’

But the most harrowing anecdote of all from Barny came when he told how another young dealer he knows lost a shipment of hash that he was handling for a major criminal. ‘They tracked down this young dealer, smashed the front door down of his flat and when he said he couldn’t pay for the lost shipment they hauled him off to a gay brothel in Estepona and forced him to work off his debt. In the end the guy did a runner and the last I heard of him he was somewhere in northern Spain working for a really nasty gang of Colombians.’

So how is Barny ever going to escape the clutches of the hash trade? He explains: ‘I’ve saved up a lot of cash and when the moment is right I will make the move. I know it has to be sooner rather than later otherwise I could end up in the same shallow grave as a few of the other dealers round here.’

Barny’s story is both sad and revealing. He has used hash to survive but, ultimately, he is more a victim than a criminal and he longs for a life of normality and happiness like everyone else.

Alhaurín de la Torre Penitentiary, near Málaga, on the Costa del Sol, is renowned as Spain’s most overcrowded prison with more than 2,000 inmates. It’s designed to house only 900 prisoners. It also happens to contain more hash offenders than probably any other jail in the world.

Attacks against prison guards and among the inmates are infrequent because the regime is relaxed in many ways. Many inmates have mobile phones and it’s said that all the staff are bribable, if the price is right.

However, my visit to Alhaurín coincided with the discovery of the body of a twenty-one-year-old prisoner in his cell, who’d swallowed more than a dozen capsules of hash. His cellmate reported that the youth was ill and lying on the cell floor. He died a short while later.

The dead man had only been in Alhaurín for forty-eight hours but he’d swallowed the hash while being transferred
from Puerto III prison in Cadiz in order to make a court appearance in nearby Melilla. Word on the prison corridors was that the man had been given the hash to swallow by a guard.

Alhaurín prison is certainly 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, despite the pungent aroma of disinfectant. Everything is off-white in colour, from the faces of the deadpan guards to the chipped walls and the yellowing metalwork of the gated doorways. It’s a strangely muted place, though, which is surprising because this imposing building houses some of the most dangerous drug gangsters in the world. And it’s all just a few kilometres from Europe’s number-one holiday destination.

Alhaurín itself sits on a flat plain beneath a vast mountain range, which is rumoured to contain numerous graves of dead drug smugglers and other criminals. 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.