Hash (12 page)

Kalinic confessed to the crime after being arrested in the Croatian capital Zagreb in 2011. It is believed that Jurisic, who was on the run after being convicted in his absence of assassinating Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003, incurred the wrath of his gang by stealing money from them. Another gang member, Luka Bojovic, who was also suspected to be involved in Djindjic’s murder (an accusation which he
denies), was later arrested in Valencia, where inside Bojovic’s apartment police claim they discovered documentation that supported Kalinic’s spine-chilling confession.

*

Spain’s current recession has meant that more than two million workers lost their jobs in the four years up to 2012, bringing the jobless total above the 4 million mark. This leaves Spain with one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU at 21.9 per cent. Many of those unemployed end up working illegally in the drugs trade, often for rich foreign gangsters like Eddie, who knows all the tricks of the trade.

I meet him in a darkened warehouse, in La Linea, southern Spain. Just a couple of kilometres across the bay lies the Rock of Gibraltar. Eddie is protected by heavily armed gang members and his identity is hidden by a vast hooded anorak and sunglasses, which makes him look a bit like a character out of
South Park
. Eddie explains the ins and outs of the hash business and how the global recession has affected business. We get an insight into the complexities of buying, distributing and selling large quantities of hashish and where the future of the business is heading on the Spanish mainland.

‘Like every business in Spain today, the costs have risen and the value of the produce – hash – has gone down,’ says Eddie, calmly. His accent has a hint of German and I later discover that he is Swiss born.

Eddie admits his grandfather was one of the first ever importers of cocaine into Europe from Colombia in the late
1950s. His says his father died when he fell from a yacht and drowned during a storm in the Bay of Biscay while smuggling a shipment of drugs from southern Spain to the UK.

Hash may be seen by many as harmless, but in Eddie’s twisted world it’s a ruthless business that has to be ‘protected’ with extreme acts of violence. He also pays the local police huge fees to ensure his business remains untouched. As he talks, Eddie’s ‘team’ clinically stow more than half a million euros’ worth of vacuum-packed hash into the underneath of a Mercedes van.

Eddie keeps thousands of euros in cash in a safe in his office so that he can dip into the money to pay bribes to Spanish police and local officials. He calls it ‘tax’ with a smile and he always factors in at least €10,000 in cash bribes for the really big hash shipments.

Eddie goes into his office, takes a bundle of notes out of his safe and counts out €1,000 in cash, puts it in his inside jacket pocket and explains: ‘I always have this money in case of problems. Then I can pay off a cop or a politician immediately. That way I own them.’

Eddie cracks open a bottle of vodka and starts speaking about his career in the secret world of hash. ‘It’s been a roller coaster ride, that’s for sure,’ he says with a smile. ‘But this is my life. This is my career and it will probably not change until the day I die.’

Eddie’s gang are mainly made up of Spanish guys he has worked with for years. ‘I may be a foreigner but we all go back a long way. It means I can trust them with my life. You
have to have trust in this game or else you will end up dead or in prison.’

Eddie says that hash consumption in southern Spain has increased ten-fold in the past ten years. ‘The kids are bored and broke. Hash is cheaper than alcohol. Nearly every person under the age of thirty regularly smokes hash round here. It’s a way of life and that means there is constant demand for my product.’

Eddie’s ‘territory’ is a 150km section of Andalucia between La Linea and Seville. He explains: ‘It works like clockwork and the risks are low because my hash comes over from Morocco and goes straight out on the streets in this part of Spain. I sell to local “managers” who run their own gangs of dealers.’

Eddie believes the key to his success and safety is that he sells off all his shipments of hash within thirty-six hours of it arriving on Spanish soil. ‘I like to offload it very quickly. The less time it is in my possession, the better for me. I get it unloaded and then taken straight to my warehouse where it is distributed to various cities and towns round here immediately. That means there is only a very brief period of time when the police can catch me in possession of the hash. It all makes perfect sense.’

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Eddie. Five years ago he was shot in the arm by a Moroccan, who tried to rip him off by supplying less hash than promised. Eddie explains: ‘I was very angry that this guy ripped me off so I went to Tangier to see him. We had a row and he ended up shooting me in
the arm. He was a lousy shot! It was no big deal and in the end he supplied the missing hash. I stopped working with him after that but at least I’d sent out a message that I was not to be fucked with. It was important because in this game your reputation is crucial and it stops people abusing your trust.’

Eddie showed me the scar from the bullet wound in his arm. ‘I call it my calling card now because whenever I want to make a point with another criminal I show them the wound and they understand that I will not be intimidated.’

As we knock back vodka shots and talk in his warehouse, the Mercedes van, which has just been packed with hash bricks around its suspension and under the floor at the back of the vehicle, fires up and three of Eddie’s gang head off to Cordoba to make a drop-off. ‘I only deal with local people. It’s much better that way. Whenever the British, Irish and eastern Europeans get involved it gets more complicated and risky. I stick to Spanish people. I trust them more.’

Eddie has only once fallen out with the local police – and that cost him a prison sentence when he was in his mid-twenties. ‘I know most of the policemen round here now. They leave me alone much of the time. I give them cash regularly to show my gratitude. But a few years ago a new deputy chief from outside this area came in and tried to crack down on people like me. It was a nightmare because all my old police contacts had to step back into the shadows and pretend they didn’t even know me.

‘As a result, the cops raided a warehouse I owned at the
time and found fifty thousand euros’ worth of hash, which was waiting to be taken up to Seville. They arrested me on the spot. I knew there was nothing I could do to wriggle out of it so I pleaded guilty and got an eighteen-month sentence, although I got out after a year, so it wasn’t too bad.’

Like so many others involved in the hash trade in Spain, Eddie says that if he had been found in possession of that much cocaine he would have got a ten-year sentence. ‘Even the judge shrugged his shoulders when he sentenced me. It was as if he was saying that there were more important crimes being committed out there and I shouldn’t even have been arrested in the first place.’

Soon after Eddie was imprisoned the deputy police chief who caused him so many problems was transferred to another city. ‘Thank God things went back to normal.’

With that Eddie lifted his glass of neat vodka and made a toast: ‘To hash. Long may it continue …’

I had so much cash flooding in, I didn’t know what to do with it.

– Nils, Dutch hash baron

*

Holland has been the gateway to the European drugs trade for almost fifty years. But as far as hash is concerned, Dutch police are fighting an uphill struggle because the majority of citizens in the country are said to believe it should be legalised. Yet despite cannabis being tolerated in so-called ‘hash cafes’ in the main cities, the hash gangs continue to thrive.

In the middle of 2012, a special police unit found 15,000kg of hash valued at €47 million in the Rotterdam harbour area inside two shipping containers originating from Morocco. Police arrested four suspects. The hash was destined for the Dutch and Belgian markets. Police also raided several houses and seized €100,000, a firearm and ammunition.

Yet whenever Amsterdam and hash is mentioned in the same breath, most people think of those same dinky little cannabis cafes where student stoners sit round puffing on joints. But because of its pivotal location, Holland is frequented by some of the most ruthless drug barons on earth.

Take Henk Orlando Rommy. Born in Paramaribo, on the former Dutch colony of Suriname on 4 March 1951, Rommy’s family eventually settled in Utrecht, The Netherlands’ fourth largest city. By the late 1970s, Rommy was involved in used
cars and stolen antiques. In 1977 he was arrested and convicted for trying to fence stolen art, including a Rembrandt, and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

After his release from prison Rommy became heavily involved in trafficking hash to The Netherlands and Belgium. At one point he was arrested in Morocco and put on death row for eighteen months before being pardoned, allegedly because of the birthday of Moroccan King Hassan.

On Rommy’s release, he went straight back into the most lucrative business he knew – hash. Working closely with notorious Dutch crime boss Johan Verhoek, he became one of Europe’s most powerful drug dealers. When Rommy’s Moroccan hash connection dried up in 1992, he quickly found a new contact in Pakistan, and began trafficking hash from there instead.

Rommy then focused on the Canadian and British markets and in 1993 Dutch justice estimated his organisation had an annual turnover of $120 million. Rommy had mansions throughout The Netherlands and Spain. But as his newly acquired nickname ‘The Black Cobra’ suggested, he was also a very deadly character.

On 4 April 2003, Rommy was arrested in Holland and charged with importing 1,000 kilos of hashish from Spain. He was found guilty and sentenced to just one year in prison. Thanks to a shortage of cells, Rommy was eventually released three months early.

Rommy’s luck finally ran out when he was lured into a trap in Spain by America’s Drug Enforcement Agency. He was
extradited from there to the US. On 30 September 2006 Rommy was found guilty and sentenced to twenty years in prison where he remains to this day.

But even Rommy’s activities pale into insignificance compared with the legendary Amsterdam-based Klaas Bruinsma. Reputed to have been the most powerful drug lord Europe has ever seen, he is known as ‘De Lange’ (‘The Tall One’) and also as ‘De Dominee’ (‘The Reverend’) because of his black clothing and his habit of lecturing others on the evils of drugs.

Bruinsma was born in Amsterdam and came from a middle-class background. While in high school, Bruinsma started using and selling hashish. When he was sixteen years old, he was arrested for the first time but then let go with just a warning.

Later he was expelled from school, and in 1974 he began working in drug trafficking full-time. Two years later, Bruinsma was arrested and convicted for smuggling hash. After his release from jail, he changed his identity to Frans van Arkel, aka ‘Lange Frans’ (‘Tall Frans’).

In late 1979, Bruinsma was convicted again for organising a huge hashish shipment from Pakistan. After his release from jail, he expanded his hash corporation further into Europe, to include Germany, Belgium, France and Scandinavia. In 1983, he became involved in a gunfight over stolen supplies of hash and shot several people as well as being also wounded himself. The following year, he was sentenced to three years in jail for this incident.

But none of this seemed to hit Bruinsma’s highly profitable hash business. By the end of the 1980s, Bruinsma’s organisation was said to be making millions of guilders per day. He decided it was probably time to retire but he was tempted into pulling off one last big deal by importing 45 tons of hashish. However, as soon as it arrived in the Netherlands, it was confiscated by the police following a tip-off from an anonymous source. Bruinsma was spitting blood and out for revenge because he knew it must have been one of his own gang who informed on him.

In 1990, Bruinsma and his British associate, a criminal called Roy Adkins, had a fight in a brothel over that same hash seizure. Shots were fired but nobody was injured. But Adkins was assassinated later that year and all fingers pointed at Bruinsma.

On the night of 27 June 1991, Bruinsma became involved in a verbal argument with Martin Hoogland, an ex-police officer employed by the Dutch Mafia at that time. Hoogland then shot Bruinsma dead in front of the Amsterdam Hilton at in the early hours of that morning. Hoogland was himself murdered in 2004.

These are just some of many cases, which prove beyond doubt that Holland’s role in the secret world of hash remains crucial. Not only is Holland the drugs hub for the rest of western Europe, but its hash underworld has remained largely untouched over the past ten years.

It’s reckoned that today there are more hash millionaires in Amsterdam than any other city in the world. In order to get a real insight into the local hash scene, I tracked down a Dutch master cannabis baron I first met more than twenty years earlier when we both appeared on an Amsterdam TV programme about crime.

Back then ‘Nils’ was a flamboyant club owner. A sort of Peter Stringfellow of Amsterdam, who was more than happy to flash his wealth and influence around the city. He spoke perfect English like most of the Dutch and pressed his business card into my hand saying I should look him up the next time I was in Amsterdam and he’d show me a side of the city I would never be shown by anyone else.

I thought little of it until about ten years later when I noticed a story in the newspapers about Nils and how he’d been jailed for five years after masterminding what Dutch
authorities were calling ‘one of the biggest hash shipments ever seen’. Nils, the court heard, was laundering tens of millions of euros he earned every year from hash through three nightclubs he owned in Amsterdam, as well as a myriad of local businesses, ranging from a DIY store to, ironically, three legal hash cafes he owned in the city.

So I tracked Nils down through Facebook and sent him a message requesting an interview for this book. He replied within hours and I soon realised he’d lost none of his panache. ‘Come and see me and I’ll tell you the real story of hash in this city,’ he promised.