Highway A-8052 at the height of Almensilla (Seville). Midnight at the end of September. A car with the Civil Guard logo stops a white van. Three agents, dressed in a cap and with the regulatory uniform, approach the driver and his co-pilot and force them to get off at gunpoint. They remove their cell phones and their documentation, tie their hands with some bridles and begin to search the van. In the back, on a double bottom of one of the sides, there are six bundles of hashish. Without saying a word, the agents put the drug in the trunk of their car and leave with the lights off leaving the other men tied next to their car and without understanding very well what just happened. They are not really civil guards. They are narcos that rob other narcos . They are dumps .
Music plays in the beach bar next to the Guadalquivir. My white star of the Seville trio Flamenco Fund is heard. «For the star we are having. This stealing from the bad guys is giving us good, ”jokes the tall guy who has the name of his four daughters tattooed on his chest. They call him The Computer . «For the white and good coca we have now. Arrival directly from the port of Cartagena (Colombia). We took it from some fools in Seville who didn't even know what they were wearing, ”says the young man who wears a snake-shaped belt. They call him The Algerian .
Palms are heard on the table at the bottom of the beach bar. And laughs. Many laughs. As if they were celebrating something. Maybe a good hit. “We also have first class chocolate that we take away the other day from some Frenchmen who were in a van. But we have to keep an eye out because these people are now buying automatic (guns) to protect themselves from theft, ”says the man with gummed hair and wearing a silver zippo with his engraved initials. They call him El Pijo . He is in charge of making the toasts. The first, for life. Then, for the survival of theirs in the lumpen in which they move. And, the last one, dedicated to the new customers of Malaga to those who are going to place that "first chocolate" for a few thousand euros. The atmosphere becomes increasingly blissful and energetic fueled by beer, house wine and cocaine.
-Your roll is a bit like in La Casa de Papel : you are in disguise, you call yourselves by your nicknames, each one has a role in theft ... It looks like a movie.
- [The Pijo] Movie will be your fucking mother. This is no game , kid. The thing has gotten ugly around here. The Police have asphyxiated the clans of the Strait drug so much that now there are many of us who stick to each other. And people defend the merchandise with their life. This is not easy. And if you make a mistake and give it to the bosses who drive a lot, they send you to an outside professional who takes out your guts without asking.
- Can you say that you are narcos that you steal from other narcos?
- [The Informatic] We are people who have stopped risking so much but want to continue making money. And this was one of the possibilities we had. Other of our partners down there have been smuggling tobacco or kidnapping children who arrive from Morocco and then ask their families for money to free them.
The music is turned off in the beach bar next to the Guadalquivir. The band has to work. They are a diverse group of drug traffickers and thugs . Some have dedicated themselves to bringing hashish in boats from Morocco to the Andalusian coasts. Others were debt collectors or small thieves. Now they do what in police slang is known as rollovers : they steal hashish and cocaine from other traffickers and then place the drug on their own clients.
Today is a logistics meeting: find a goal and plan the theft. One of his sneaks, of the kids who unload the hashish for the Cadiz narcos and those who pay for each breath, has told them about a small cargo that will reach the port of Bonanza (Sanlucar de Barrameda). “We only get into small groups that move a few kilos or with medium camels because those who drive a lot are well armed. Here we all have a family to feed and we prefer to be behind bars than with a shot in the head. Sometimes we have disguised ourselves as civil guards and set up controls when the hashish is raised in cars. Other times they blow us where the nurseries are (place where they store the drug) and assault them. We are armed, although luckily we have never had to shoot. The good thing about this is that nobody is going to report the thefts, ”explains El Informático , whose job is to find out about the hashish items that reach the Andalusian coast and know the means available to their owners to protect the merchandise.
The patron of this dump band is a Colombian who, he says, in the 70s was a paramilitary who fought against the guerrillas of his country, then he went on to be a murderer for hire of the drug cartels and a couple of years ago his The job was "to make sure that the cocaine that is shipped camouflaged in containers from the Caribbean route to Algeciras did not reach the wrong hands." His role then was to avoid drug rollovers. Now he is stealing what he used to protect.
This is one of the dozens of organizations of this type that have appeared this year in Spain. They have been deployed by the mouth of the Guadalquivir taking advantage of the change of route of the drug lords of the Campo de Gibraltar who, asphyxiated by police pressure, have allied themselves with other Andalusian clans to continue introducing hashish through other less guarded tracks. There are no figures on how many bands can be dedicated to rollovers or how much money or drugs they can move. The reason is simple: when a drug is stolen from a drug dealer, he obviously never reports it .
«Drug overturns skyrocketed during the crisis in Spain. First with robberies in marijuana crops and then to the capos of La Línea. Many thieves who got into the homes of wealthy businessmen saw that those who never ruined were the drug dealers, who were doing better and better, and went for them. Now many of those bands have been reactivated . Some clans have also realized that, instead of playing it by going to Morocco for hashish, they can find out when the cargoes are going to arrive and hit, ”says the Colombian. "The problem is that as more robberies are taking place, there are more and more revenges and account adjustments that end in shootings, kidnappings and murders." The drug thief refers to those who actually run the business of hashish in southern Europe, when they suffer any of these robberies, hire the services of a professional hitman who normally comes from France, Morocco, Algeria or other countries such as Armenia or Romania to recover the merchandise, using any method of extortion or even murder.
FRENCH SICARIES
The last example of these account adjustments due to rollover issues we met on the afternoon of September 22 in Chipiona. Four French hitmen , with their collection office mounted on the outskirts of Paris, and a Moroccan, kidnapped three Cadiz traffickers, tortured them in a villa and then threw them from a moving van. One of them, Manuel Jurado , who also received a stab in the chest, died shortly after falling to the road. The other two remain in a coma in the hospital. The newspaper El Español said that the hitmen, who were arrested by the Civil Guard, were actually looking for a well-known dealer in Chipiona who is missing, who was the one who had stolen the hashish and tortured his friends to get information.
In the underworld of drug trafficking it is said that it is not the first time that these four hitmen [Atikossie Emerick (28 years old), Michael Adner (27), Jackson Elpenor (28) and Mahamadou Diaby (34)] came to Spain to execute some work , but never in such a "noisy" way. They are all in the prison of Puerto II de Cádiz. The case is secretly summarized and the investigation is being carried out by the Judicial Police of the Civil Guard.
“It is not new for organizations to hire these types of hitmen to recover the drug that has been stolen from them. But now we are seeing more cases. These people usually come from outside, use their means of torture to recover merchandise, charge and leave. What is not so usual is that someone is charged with a stab because they are professionals that what they usually do is scare and do not usually kill, ”explains a Civil Guard investigator who has participated in several operations against drug dumps .
Returning to the Guadalquivir beach bar, located in a municipality near Seville, the youngest of the group, El Argelino , explains that they also often have support from other bands outside to commit the robberies. «They are usually people who live in North Africa or who are based on the Costa del Sol, who do the work quickly and cleanly and leave. In this world we have to make many alliances to survive and rethink thieves from other gangs dismantled by the Police, ”explains this boy who fled Algeria two years ago when his country's agents arrested his boss, Fellah Ben Chabane , an acquaintance narco who led a gang specialized in drug trafficking and theft. «We always work with prepaid phones with cards in the name of other people. We take many precautions and we are constantly changing offices because the Police are very much on top, ”he says.
In Jerez de la Frontera another organization is installed that went from bringing hashish from Morocco to dope of drugs. His ringleader is a stocky man whom many know as El Italiano , although his accent is closer to that of the Maghreb countries. He is a guy with several antecedents for robbery with violence that has worked for a Camorra clan installed in Spain that stole hashish from Cadiz narcos and then took the drug to Rome. Then he was with another group in Malaga robbing mafias that move cocaine, until the thing got serious and these mafias began to entrust murders to their hitmen as revenge. That was last year, at the beginning of the so-called Costa del Sol narco - war : shootings, kidnappings, torture, bombs ... «Here there are two types of murders among criminal organizations. Executions made after police operations for doing bad work and those committed after overturns, as revenge against the mafia that stole cocaine, ”explains Mariló Valencia , general secretary of the Unified Police Union (SUP ) In Malaga.
"THIS IS NO GAME. PEOPLE DEFEND THE GOODS WITH THEIR LIFE"
The last operation in which El Italiano participated on the Costa del Sol was last May, when he disguised himself with his police people and shot a hashish-loaded van driven by other traffickers. Four months later, this time in the Sevillian town of Almensilla , the Civil Guard arrested a dozen employees of El Italiano who disguised themselves as agents of the Benemérita to rob those who raised the hashish to Seville.
Now, the narco-war has moved around the Doñana preserve, where the organizations that move hashish operate. And those who steal it. In addition to the case of the three men thrown from a ditch in Chipiona (Cádiz) for an adjustment of accounts, last week we learned from the Civil Guard that a group of six Moroccans with guns had raided a nursery in San Fernando carrying 19 kilos of hashish. And a few days ago, on the road that goes from Algeciras to Seville, a group of four false civil guards simulated police control of an all-terrain vehicle loaded with hashish. They handled the two carriers and took the drug. Then they placed some clients in Valencia. Instead, those who were to be the original recipients of that cargo, a group based in the Spanish capital that had paid a part in advance, are now claiming their money plus compensation interest under threat of sending their thugs to settle accounts with the narcos who were victims of the robbery.
«They are very tense. We have suffocated many of them by seizing many drug shipments and arresting their people. And that is pushing them to steal from each other, ”explains an inspector of the Drugs and Organized Crime Unit (UDYCO) of the National Police. "After the high pressure we have done in the Campo de Gibraltar, many clans settled there have moved to the Guadalquivir, where they have set up their infrastructures." This change of route is due to the Special Plan of Security of the Field of Gibraltar, promoted a year ago by the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska . Police devices (77.8% more anti-drug operations, according to Interior) and arrests have multiplied. For the first time the Narcos narcos began to be afraid. More than 12 months after the plan entered into force, Minister Marlaska takes chest for good results: 4,852 arrests of people linked to drug trafficking, 149 tons of seized drugs (143.1 tons of hashish, 5.4 of cocaine; 500 kilos of heroin and 108 of marijuana) and 2,761,000 euros, and 133 vessels seized.
Now the agents also have to fight against the narcos that rob other narcos. A particular war between clans that already has its professional murderers to defend their black gold. A lot of business, a lot of crime and little complaint. They are the last thing: rollover of drug SA
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