ROCK OF CRIME
At 8.30pm, with the setting sun dipping below the sheer eastern cliff of the Rock of Gibraltar, a powerful inflatable surges through the waves. Trailing a worm of phosphoresce from its outboard, the purring craft – the Spanish call them planeadoras – loses speed and sashays slowly into the Caleta bay just as another smaller speedboat appears, drawing foamy coils in the sea. A man in the inflatable throws at least a dozen watertight boxes into the other, smaller boat. The boxes, though bulky, are plainly not heavy.
The smaller boat then surges off towards the beach where three other men pull the craft onto the sand and quickly load the boxes into a waiting van. Out in the bay, the inflatable’s powerful engine thrusts into life as it heads back across the Straits of Gibraltar towards Morocco where another consignment of cocaine awaits collection.
Welcome to the Costa del Crime’s classic drugs route. The Rock is now used as a junction for hash from Morocco and cocaine from the cartel in Columbia by many of Britain’s most powerful criminals. It is believed that Gibraltar’s super-busy drug barons are importing more than a billion pounds’ worth of narcotics each year right under the noses of officials on this little piece of Britain in the Mediterranean.
Getting in and out of the Rock is so easy for many British criminals that they’ve helped turn Gibraltar into the money-laundering centre of the Mediterranean; it is a virtually lawless society built around a rapidly depleted Navy whose members spend more time brawling in seedy bars than defending queen and country. Top of the list of villains who have popped in and out of the Rock in recent years is master criminal Kenneth Noye. While on the run from British police for murdering a motorist in a road-rage attack in Kent in 1996, Noye spent many months on the Rock setting up drug deals and buying cheap electrical appliances for his home in a deserted Spanish retreat, 70 miles up the road.
Noye boasted to one criminal associate that he’d never once been asked even to show the photograph in his false British passport during his numerous trips in and out of Gibraltar between 1996 and 1998. ‘Kenny was told to never drive a car onto the Rock because that would be more likely to be stopped and searched, so he’d walk through the border checkpoint waving his UK passport without even having to show it,’ one of Noye’s associates told me.
Noye also reckoned Gibraltar was one of the easiest places to fly back into Britain from when he had deals to do and people to see back in his old manors of south-east London and Kent. But even more disturbingly, he managed to set up a number of multi-million-pound drug deals during a series of meetings with one of the Rock’s most powerful drug barons. ‘Those meetings on the Rock were an open secret. We all knew who Noye was, but the man he met runs the Rock and no one would dare upset him,’ says one local criminal, who visited Noye on a number of occasions while he was on the run in Spain back in the late-1990s.
Kenny Noye also knew from the days back when he handled more than £20 million worth of gold bullion from the notorious Brinks Mat robbery at Heathrow in 1983 that he could convert currency into gold with ease in Gibraltar. But Noye’s dodgy dealings on the Rock are only the tip of the iceberg. Gibraltar is awash with more gangsters per square mile than Chicago in the 1930s.
Thin Phil – a pseudonym, but his real first name is every bit as clichéd – is a typical member of the Gibraltar mafia. He works as a runner for a major former north-London drug baron now based on the Rock. Thin Phil and other runners can make up to £5,000 a week steering their inflatables across the ocean. His boss has numerous boats and crews, lock-ups to store drugs and dozens of people to load and unload his narcotics on both sides of the Straits.
The biggest earner used to be the hash available 14 miles due south in Morocco. It’s a rich harvest of drugs less than an hour across a busy but underpoliced stretch of water. These days, however, that flotilla of speedboats and inflatables smuggles an even more valuable commodity – cocaine. The biggest irony of all this is that, while the British-run colony seems to be virtually turning a blind eye to these multi-million-pound criminal enterprises, it is ‘the fucking Spanish’ (as Thin Phil calls them) who are genuinely trying to crack down on this evil trade.
Spanish police now use a powerful launch – the smugglers call it a turbo – to pursue the drugs couriers in their inflatables. And, naturally, they insist that Gibraltar’s lawless reputation is yet more evidence that it should be permanently reunited with the Spanish mainland. In a community with only 30,000 inhabitants, nearly everyone on the Rock knows the men who work for the drug barons. Their tinted-window cars thud rap music out of rattling speakers as they coast up and down the colony’s tacky high street stuck in second gear. Yet they remain relatively untouched by authorities.
The irony behind the influx of British villains into Gibraltar is that many of them are drawn to the Rock from their whitewashed villas on the Costa del Sol by the very Britishness of the place. Back in 2000, Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar handed Tony Blair a file on alleged criminal activity on the Rock, which claimed that criminals, including at least six UK firms, in Gibraltar had begun turning their hand to murder and kidnappings connected to their big-money criminal enterprises.
Down at the Rock’s Queensway Quay Marina, favourable mooring rates and luxurious amenities have even persuaded some of the Costa del Sol’s flashier villains to keep their yachts there when they are not out sailing. Every now and again Gibraltar’s government is reminded by the big chiefs in Whitehall that they should crack down on the drug barons. Then orders are issued to seize a few of the smugglers’ favourite boats, the rigid inflatables. But, as happened a few years back, the owners of these crafts (the drug barons never have legally proven ownership) erupt, battle the police and cause a bit of mayhem.
The result? A discreet pause and then the boats are given back and business carries on as usual. The Rock’s authorities even introduced a law banning any further importation of rigid inflatables. Owners of such boats were ordered to show evidence that they were used for bona fide purposes. ‘Now everyone who owns an inflatable has paperwork proving that he does boat trips for tourists,’ says one Gibraltar regular. ‘The law was a waste of time but at least it shut Whitehall up.’
But the other important reason why so many British criminals use Gibraltar as a base for their dodgy enterprises is because the Rock is awash with funny money – forged currency and black cash from the proceeds of crime. Of the £3.5 billion floating around Gibraltar, more than half of it is reckoned to be the proceeds of illicit business dealings, smuggling and drug trafficking.
Back in the mid-1990s, the US Drugs Enforcement Agency and the British government set up Operation Dinero. Authorities created a fake offshore bank in the British dependency of Anguilla and the cash soon started rolling in – from Gibraltar, no less. Offshore investors in the Rock had included such luminaries as pension-sapping newspaper baron Robert Maxwell and fraudster Peter Clowes of Barlow Clowes – a big player on the Rock – who was convicted of diddling investors out of £150 million. Recently, Spanish authorities were horrified when they established links between the Basque separatist group ETA and money-laundering operations based in Gibraltar. They have no doubt that the British-run colony is inadvertently helping fund ETA bombings and killings in Spain.
One of the few Gibraltar-based villains to be actually nicked in recent years was Pasquale Locatelli, who used shipping companies based on the Rock to launder the proceeds of crime. Locatelli had connections with Rome mafia boss Roberto Severa as well as Sicilian mafia moneyman Pippo Calo. Even Roberto Calvi, ‘God’s Banker’, who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge after his bank slid into fraudulent bankruptcy in 1982, was linked to Locatelli and other Gibraltar-based individuals.
And then there is the latest money-obsessed boom to hit the Rock: gambling. While there is no suggestion that the spate of new betting enterprises are connected to criminals, gambling has made Gibraltar an even more attractive proposition to any Costa del Sol-based villain who fancies a flutter. In the past couple of years, Victor Chandler, Ladbrokes, Coral and Stan James have all set up betting operations from the Rock. They all insist that Gibraltar is ideal for them because of its favourable tax breaks, the English-speaking workforce and decent weather. ‘Gibraltar is booming financially and a lot of it has to be down to the drug barons, money launderers and corrupt businesses,’ says one former Gibraltar resident, Chris Coombes. ‘If the UK tries to clean it up then it will rapidly slide into complete and utter financial collapse and that’s when the Spanish will move in and make their strongest claim yet to rescue the colony.’
In other words, the criminals are good news for Gibraltar. It’s a sad irony.