Hash (6 page)

Just then Fara sits down on a big stone outside the shack and lights up a massive spliff, takes three huge sucks on it and then passes it to Leff, saying something in Arabic.

It’s just become apparent that both Leff and Fara have one
classic weakness. They adore smoking hash. Surely that breaks the golden rule for any professional criminals involved with the drug?

‘It’s not a problem,’ Leff says with a shrug. ‘We both love to smoke but we make sure it doesn’t affect our ability to make money from Kif.’

The effect of the hash seems to calm both Fara and Leff down and they drift effortlessly from hard-nosed criminals into slightly vulnerable-looking young Moroccan men, who obviously find hash the best way to try and forget their problems.

Hassan the farmer, meanwhile, is now back inside the shack going through the final stages of the process to produce more hash for the middlemen. He is pouring it into ten-kilo sacks. Hassan delivers yet another sack outside to the now vacant looking Fara, who opens it and smells it like Hannibal Lector inhaling a fava bean stew. Fara looks up, grins broadly and passes the bag to Leff, who performs a similar task before tying up the bag and casually leaving it on the ground.

It’s only then I enquire about the value of such a bag. Leff says in English: ‘That’s worth maybe $100,000 in Europe.’ Then he laughs. ‘But we make sure that Hassan doesn’t realise it!’

Over the following half an hour, Fara and Leff load the bags onto the back of the flatbed truck below before announcing they will meet us back in Ketama, at the base of the vast valley. We all agree it would be ‘indiscreet’ if they were seen in a convoy with our vehicle.

Si – who himself had sucked on a couple of joints over the previous half an hour – merrily acts as intermediary. He even adds: ‘They’re right. A convoy filled with strangers could really wind up the locals.’

Just before departing, Hassan reappears from inside the shack and talks to me through Si. ‘He wants to know how much Kif costs in the UK.’ There is an awkward wall of silence as it becomes clear that Fara and Leff are listening to this exchange. Fara butts in and screams something in Arabic at Hassan. Si translates: ‘He’s just told Hassan to mind his own fucking business.’

Hassan does yet another of his customary shrugging of the shoulders and tries to laugh it off. But then Fara yells even more angrily at Hassan. Hassan shouts back and for a moment the two men have a face-off as they try to stare each other down. Eventually, Leff intercedes and laughs while he tells them both to calm down.

As Fara walks off down the hill towards his truck with the last bag of Kif, he looks up at Hassan, still standing outside his shack with his arms folded, glaring at the other man with a snarling expression on his face.

Minutes later we set off ahead of the flatbed so as not to be seen driving in convoy to Ketama. I turned and looked behind me to see Fara still glaring up at Hassan in the distance.

That’s when I decided that Fara must have been the same man who’d threatened to rape Hassan’s wife.

*

It’s now mid-afternoon in Ketama and there is no sign of Fara or Leff in a dusty layby on the edge of town, where we had arranged to meet them. After more than half an hour of waiting, Si walks me to the nearby souk, which is awash with dozens of traders, all pushing to sell their wares, from food to silk. Within this general market place, Si takes me to a discreet shop, where he’s quickly ushered inside. Here you can buy a ‘Caramelo’ or ‘egg’, which is a small pre-packed amount of hash, wrapped in clingfilm. Amateur smugglers can buy it, swallow it, and then travel over the border en route to Europe. People tend to buy between five and fifty at any one time. Si gives me a chilling first-hand account of how he met such Westerners in jail.

‘They’re fuckin’ stupid because the clingfilm is paper-thin and there is a danger it can burst inside you and then you’re in real trouble,’ explains Si. ‘I knew one guy who came here twice from Newcastle. He bought four dozen packs and then swallowed the lot with a bottle of castor oil to help them slip down more easily. First time he did it was a doddle but when he came back he got greedy and swallowed even more packs and, surprise, surprise, two of them burst as he got off the plane the other end. He was lucky there was a doctor at the airport but he ended up serving three years for smuggling. Stupid bastard, eh?’

Just then Leff finally calls me from his mobile. As he speaks, I can tell he’s stoned because he keeps laughing and there is the sound of his associate Fara doing likewise in the background. They are clearly off their heads and I can just
make out from Leff that they are in a cafe halfway down the mountainside. I’m irritated because I have to be back in Tangier as quickly as possible to catch a ferry to Algeciras in Spain, where I have an appointment with a Costa del Sol hash baron that very same evening.

I know that Leff is fishing for a ‘fee’ from me, even though I told him I could not afford to pay anything for their help. Suddenly, the friendly potted-out voice changes tone.

‘You must wait for us,’ says Leff. ‘Or there may be problems. We need to discuss the expenses.’

I didn’t like the coldness in his voice so I ignored his comment about money and told Leff I would wait for him but he must hurry up. Keeping Leff calm seemed a sensible move.

Si doesn’t sound in the least bit surprised when I explain what has happened. ‘Sounds like it’s the devil or the deep blue sea, mate.’

I then remembered an anecdote Leff had told me just a few hours earlier up in the mountains about how he and Fara had to shoot a man in the leg as a warning to a rival gang not to invade their hash farm.

‘Yes, but what’s the point in waiting for them?’ I ask Si.

‘It’s up to you, old son. I told them not to fuck us around and now the silly bastards have got off their heads.’

‘But Leff is your contact,’ I asked. ‘I don’t want to upset him for that reason.’

‘Bollocks,’ says Si. ‘I haven’t done business with those two clowns in years. Let’s just fuck off.’

So we opt for the Straits of Gibraltar and head off at high speed in the Land Cruiser for the port of Tangier, three hours west of Ketama. Within an hour of setting off, a call from Leff comes through on my mobile. I look at the screen and listen to it ringing but decide not to answer.

Si laughs alongside me as we pick up speed on the first stretch of dual carriageway we have seen for more than a hundred miles. ‘Typical, greedy bastards,’ he says. ‘Serves ’em right. You know what they say? Don’t get high on your own supply.’

I listen to the message from Leff on my phone.

‘
You motherfucker English asshole. We want money and if we don’t get it we will shoot your fuckin’ balls off. D’you understand? I will come and find you in London and rape your wife and kidnap your children if you do not pay us. I will call back in ten minutes. If you do not pick up the phone you are a dead man
.’

The phone rings exactly ten minutes later. This time I pick it up and then switch it off immediately. I know full well we are probably two hours ahead of this hapless pair of Tangier dopehead gangsters.

Then Si announces: ‘They know we’re catching a ferry.’

‘Good point.’

‘Hope it leaves on time.’

The next time I switch on the phone again is when the ferry is pulling away from the port-side of Tangier’s newly built passenger terminal, as it sets sail for Algeciras. There are twenty-three messages from Leff awaiting my attention. Most of them feature threats to kill my wife, children, mother,
father and promising to ‘hunt’ me down in London and throw my body in the River Thames. Sitting in the ship’s restaurant, Si listens to the messages with a broad grin on his face.

‘They fucked up. Not us. Leff will calm down. I’ll talk to him in a few days.’

Just then I look out of the porthole and notice a familiar looking flatbed truck travelling at high speed across the deserted car park in front of the ferry disembarkation spot. It screeches to a halt. I can just make out Leff and Fara jumping out and running to the water’s edge as the ferry steams slowly between the gap in the harbour wall while making its way out into the Strait of Gibraltar.

‘Stupid little bastards,’ says Si, drily. ‘They’ll calm down eventually. The one thing I learned about Moroccans when I was in jail was that they don’t hold grudges. In the end they’ll respect us for doing a runner. They’ve only got themselves to blame, haven’t they?’

I was tempted to ask Si whether he thought their threats to visit London and my family were serious but decided not to tempt fate.

As the ferry made its way slowly across one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, I flipped open my research notebook and began reading up on my next interviewee – a shadowy character called Zaid.

The market for hash continues to grow in Europe, where it’s reckoned that one in five adults have used marijuana or hashish. The European Union’s drug agency produced a 700-page report on the use and abuse of cannabis and established that more than 13 million hash smokers use the drug every month in Europe.

*

Just across a 7.7 nautical mile stretch of water from Morocco lies Spain, which has a hash consumption epidemic on its hands. The Spanish make more seizures of the drug than all other European countries put together but nothing, it seems, can stem the tide of hash flowing across the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco.

Vast shipments arrive from North Africa virtually every day and the traffickers are always coming up with new methods of smuggling. One of the latest techniques is for gangs to drop loads of hash fitted with radio-transmitting buoys into the Atlantic and have boats pick up the drugs.

In 2012, Spanish police arrested five members of a gang of drug traffickers on the Costa del Sol when 1,600 kilos of hashish was discovered in a house in an operation called ‘Sarco’. The investigation started at the end of the previous year when the police became aware of the group and started to identify its members. It was later alleged that the gang of several nationalities moved hash from Spain to Holland, Great Britain and Ireland.

In 2011, 840 kilos of hashish was intercepted on a yacht that had arrived in the port of Marbella from Morocco. The
drug was disguised inside twenty-seven bales hidden between the cabin and different parts of the leisure craft. The raid was the culmination of a six-month investigation into the activities of a group of Spanish hash smugglers initially detected on the Costa del Sol. The gang transferred the drugs on the high seas and brought it ashore on different parts of the Málaga coastline. At the beginning of 2011, the group tried to acquire a powerful boat with high top speeds from the Spanish town of La Linea opposite Gibraltar, but the illicit operation failed after the boat was stopped two days after the sale for not having a licence.

Also in Marbella, two French citizens, a father-and-son hash trafficking ‘team’ were arrested in 2011. Fifty-two kilograms of hashish and €58,340 in cash plus false documents were recovered. The hash was found in a suitcase hidden under a staircase in a house rented by the two men.

A former councillor in the city of Ceuta, a Spanish territory that borders with Morocco, was arrested with 690 kilos of hash in a van he was driving as he was about to board a ferry to Algeciras in 2011. Police – who’d been tipped off – immediately searched his vehicle and located blocks of the drug, hidden in different parts of the vehicle.

The routes of entry of Moroccan hash into Spain are constantly changing due to the use of fast boats with longer ranges. Drug smugglers now reach Spanish provinces such as Huelva, Almería, Murcia and Valencia, where the number of seizures have multiplied in recent years. Large quantities have even been seized as far north as the Ebro river delta.

According to the Observatoire Français des Drogues et des Toxicomanies, Moroccan hash is also sent southward by truck to the Atlantic port of Agadir, to Casablanca and Essaouira, from where much of it is exported through northern Spain. But the favourite route remains smuggling hash in trucks and cars travelling on ferries leaving from the Moroccan Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla or from the port of Tangier.

*

Before Spain’s current crippling recession, it enjoyed a spectacular ten-year building boom, much of which was driven by ‘dirty (black) money’ spent by the hash barons. Criminals capitalised on the gold rush mentality that infected Spain in the 1990s and early part of the new century. House prices doubled in the ten years between 1997 and 2007. Unscrupulous local authorities even turned a blind eye to ‘front’ companies set up by gangsters and took backhanders to grant building licences.

Keen to hide the spoils from hash and other drug smuggling, as well as prostitution, extortion and human trafficking, gangsters channelled hundreds of millions into buying property. Meanwhile, police and judicial authorities were often overwhelmed by the scale and sophistication of criminal activities. On Spain’s Costa del Sol – where estate agents believed during the boom years they virtually had a licence to print money – anti-corruption magistrates found themselves dealing with scores of cases.

Just how much ‘dirty money’ entered Spain in the so-called
boom years is impossible to say. But it is claimed that 40 per cent of all the €500 bills in existence are circulating in Spain. They are called ‘Bin Ladens’ because, like the terrorist who was the world’s most wanted man until his death, everyone knows what they look like but few people have ever actually seen one. These €500 bills fill the envelopes in ‘black money’ property deals.

Southern Spain was clearly awash with hash and my next subject, Zaid, was one of the biggest names in the business.

With Leff and Fara left far behind still fuming in Tangier, it was time to meet an altogether different character. Spanish-born hash baron Zaid was brought up in the port of Algeciras, which itself is only separated from Morocco by the Strait of Gibraltar. Zaid owns and runs a number of warehouses in the industrial area of the city.