The darkest side of the Costa del Sol: "It's the UN of drug cartels"

Marbella / Malaga / FuengirolaThe first scene of the film is set in a huge guitar-shaped swimming pool surrounded by umbrellas, palm trees, waiters serving tropical cocktails to bathers floating in tranquility. A song plays – an upbeat one – by Julio Iglesias and some people are dancing. The camera slowly moves forward until it focuses on a specific table. Two men with serious expressions sit there. One of them is a well-known lawyer in the area. The other is the client, a powerful drug trafficker. They talk about drugs. Cinema has repeated this scene in dozens of gangster films, from Scarface to The Godfather. But this scene is real and was experienced by a lawyer at the Hard Rock Hotel in Puerto Banús a few months ago. Now it is a normal January day and the hotel is practically empty. It is raining outside and three foreign women are walking in bathrobes through the hall. There is a reception for VIPs and one for normal people. Jackets by Michael Jackson and guitars by Jimi Hendrix are on display.

"The Costa del Sol is the Wall Street of organized crime," says Juan José Gómez Millán, a retired national police officer who has dedicated 30 years of his life to fighting drug trafficking. In Marbella, meetings are not held in offices with views of a skyscraper skyline, but rather in hotel pools, VIP areas of restaurants or nightclubs, and shopping centers. Another lawyer explains that one day he witnessed an entire shopping center in the area being closed down just for a meeting between two drug lords. They have even gone so far as to close brothels. In Marbella, money is counted in kilograms of cocaine, not in screens showing graphs of rising and falling values. Deep down, the only thing that unites Marbella and Wall Street is that, if you want to be important, you have to be there. "If you want to be someone in the drug world, you have to be on the Costa del Sol. We are the UN of drugs," says a high-ranking officer of the National Police in the area.

It speaks of the United Nations because the Costa del Sol, in the same way that it receives tourists of all nationalities, also hosts cartels from all corners of the world. English, Irish, Turkish, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Moroccan. And they are not neighborhood drug dealers or small marijuana producers. "They are powerful narcos at a global level. They are on the Costa del Sol, but their scope of action is all of Europe," insists the police source. Mafias install some of their most important "lieutenants" on the Costa del Sol. They call the shots from white mansions with sea views. Driving along the road that follows the coast and connects cities like Marbella and Fuengirola, it is difficult to see cliffs that are free of houses or developments. Normally, drug traffickers look for elevated points to hide without losing panoramic views of the Mediterranean. "They are there, but you don't see them," explains another National Police commander.

"It is almost impossible to face it"

In the classes at the police academy in Malaga, they always make the same analogy: there is an elephant in the room, and it is called drug trafficking. The elephant is "growing", and it is already so big that it is "almost impossible to tackle it". The elephant of drug trafficking, admit police commanders, has infiltrated police structures. "Even by tripling our forces, we would not be able to fight them," they accept. Drug trafficking should not only be understood as a group of people who receive drugs and move them, but as a business. As a multinational criminal organization. "They are like Ibex-35 companies, money is never a problem for them," police sources continue. This money allows them to buy everything, civil servants and police officers, but also to resurrect after an operation that has escaped them or a war with a rival gang that has weakened them.

And even if the police multiplied their efforts tenfold, the laws changed and became tougher, and many other hypothetical scenarios, it would be very difficult to erase the footprint of drug trafficking on the Costa del Sol. It would be so because it is in a privileged location, and not only because the narcos can sunbathe and play golf. Marbella is an hour's drive from the European port with the most cocaine seizures, that of Algeciras. It also takes an hour by speedboat to sail from the main producer of hashish, Morocco, to the Costa del Sol, where the sea expands for more than 150 kilometers of sand. And Marbella is also close to one of the main marijuana producers in the country, the Granada region – which, along with Girona and Ciudad Real, are the main producers in Spain. Andalusia has become a paradise for tourists seeking tranquility, but also an ideal refuge for drug traffickers who want to dominate the southern gateway for drugs into Europe.

The drug coast

The data shows that southern Spain is deeply marked by the footprint of drug trafficking. The Spanish province with the most arrests per 100,000 inhabitants for drug trafficking-related offenses is Ceuta. Then comes Granada, followed by Cadiz and Malaga. Andalusia is the territory in Spain with the most seized cocaine – double the records of Catalonia. It also leads, by a large margin, the ranking for hashish, and even for marijuana. "This is not the Costa del Sol, it's the coast of drugs," comment two National Police agents who fight against drug trafficking. They explain that they constantly collaborate with the Mossos d'Esquadra, as Andalusia and Catalonia are two communicating vessels: the drugs negotiated in Andalusia – or entering through the Strait of Gibraltar – will eventually pass through Catalonia via the AP-7. The conversation takes place in a bar near the Fuengirola police station on a sunny January day.

The day before, however, the streets of this city near Marbella were streams of water where some residents, not accustomed to heavy rain, walked. In another bar, not far from the police station either, sits Juan José Gómez Millán, who retired a few months ago after a lifetime fighting drug trafficking. He has the perspective of an authority figure who has seen it all, but also that of a resident of the Costa del Sol who has seen his town fill up with unknown foreigners. The first question we ask him is which drug cartels are strongest in Marbella. And in the first answer, he lets out a smile: "Uf, you have them all here." The Kinahans, the feared Irish mafia; the Italians, from the oldest mafias of Sicily and Naples; the Russians, although they are seen less and less often –"But they are there." And the Balkan clans, the Moroccan hashish dealers, and the Mexicans, who, fortunately, have not yet brought fentanyl to Spain. "But it will arrive," a police commander states. Now, in fact, in the world of drug clans, these are changing times.

Mixture and new elements

The globalization that has brought direct flights from one end of the planet to the other and products directly from China to your doorstep in two days has also meant that drug traffickers worldwide know each other, do business, and mingle. It is increasingly common, for example, for criminal groups to be made up of people of various nationalities. Or for one group to be responsible for collecting the cocaine, another for storing it, and a third for moving it. "There's cake for everyone," comments Gómez Millán. In fact, until now there has been a certain diplomacy. Long gone are the days when drug traffickers attended Jesús Gil's parties and were accepted as members of the upper class of the Costa del Sol. They were interested in knowing what was going on and being part of the luxury world of Marbella. Now drug traffickers live more hidden, but until recently there were certain non-aggression pacts. The paradigm shift has arrived with the appearance of new cartels, such as the Dutch and Swedish Mocro Maffia or the Turks, groups that have also left their mark on Catalonia. They are more violent, executions have increased, and they have broken a kind of tense peace that had existed for years.

The same happens with the police. Until now, this certain diplomacy also existed. "They don't attack us to maintain the climate of peace," explains a high-ranking official from the National Police. In recent years, this has also begun to change. The drug trade is a dangerous circle. A fish that often bites its own tail when a member of a mafia goes to prison and, instead of coming out rehabilitated, comes out strengthened. "In prison they train even more and meet more people. They don't know how to do anything else and they are not afraid of anything," say two agents of the National Police from Fuengirola. The main fear is expressed by a high-ranking police official from the area, who admits that drugs, cartels, and mafias can end up "destabilizing a country".

The money laundering machinery

While the coffee finishes and from time to time he lets slip that the Costa del Sol is not like that, that it really has sun most of the year, the retired policeman Gómez Millán becomes nostalgic. He recalls the arrest of Alexander Ivanovitx Malixhev, one of the big names in the Russian mafia from Saint Petersburg in the nineties, who ended up living on the Costa del Sol and was arrested in 2008 in a luxury villa in Frigiliana, Malaga. Or the arrest of Sergejus Beglikas, a Lithuanian who was in a wheelchair and led a drug cartel from a mansionin Marbella that earned 350 million euros a year. This is probably one of the most important elements for understanding drug cartels, which are a money-making machine.

The various police sources contacted during the trip to the Costa del Sol explain that drug traffickers are lovers of luxury. The same lawyer who initially sat at a table in the Hard Rock hotel in Puerto Banús, a few months ago received a call from a client linked to the drug world. "Come, I want to go to a car exhibition of a friend's", he commented. There were 50 luxury cars, from a McLaren to a Ferrari, closely observed by people drinking cava and wearing watches worth 400,000 euros and gold chains.

Although it is the most frequent in the collective imagination, the times when drug traffickers had millions and millions of euros in cash, in safes or in unimaginable places, are becoming a thing of the past. "Narcos have realized that it is as important to move the money they have as to earn it," explains the same lawyer. That is to say, they know that laundering is as important as trafficking. And, many times, this also means paying taxes and having businesses with a completely legal appearance.

Fuengirola agents recall some traffickers they arrested who owned a car wash company. What did the company's accounts say? That they were making a lot of money. What happened when you went to their company? They washed one car a month. There have been Russian narcos who have bought hotels and declared that every day of every month all the rooms were full. There have been traffickers who have bought vulture fund shares to sell and buy buildings, who have run laundromats and bars that, surprisingly, were closed.

In fact, the location of the Costa del Sol is also important for understanding money laundering. For example, it is next to Gibraltar, which can function as a tax haven, according to police and legal sources. That narcos seek exotic tax havens to hide their fortunes is an everyday occurrence, say the same sources. To achieve this, they have lawyers – not the case of the lawyer this newspaper has spoken to – who create complex corporate structures. And, finally, the Chinese mafia must be taken into account. Often hidden, difficult to catch, but present in the money laundering of many drug clans.

The beginnings

That all this happens in Marbella, however, is neither new nor recent. Since last century, the beaches of the Costa del Sol have become a haven for fugitives. First, after the Second World War, several Nazis hid in Marbella to go unnoticed – especially at a time when Francisco Franco's dictatorship already ruled Spain. Some of the Glasgow train robbers also discovered the Costa del Sol, who took a loot of 2.6 million pounds from the Glasgow-London mail train in 1963. One of their members, Charlie Wilson, ended up living in a large villa in Marbella, where he was shot dead in 1990. The motive for the crime? A drug dispute.

Juan José Gómez Millán explains that the urban development boom in the area was between the 60s and 70s, and much of the land ended up in the hands of thieves and criminals. He has witnessed firsthand how in the 70s members of Cosa Nostra, the quintessential Sicilian mafia, and the Camorra, their Neapolitan counterparts, were already landing on the Costa del Sol. They came to "launder money" and control the passage of drugs from Morocco and through the port of Algeciras. It wasn't long before other mobsters from England and Holland arrived. And, a few years later, the Russians began to buy plot after plot.

Without the history of Marbella and the Costa del Sol, the total infiltration of drug trafficking into society cannot be understood. They have their lands, their developments, their bars, their hotels, their bribed police officers, their associates, and their rivals. Foreign language does not only mean tourism. There has always been coexistence and a certain acceptance, but now drugs not only bring mansions, watches, and cars, but also shootings, wars, and murders.

It is common in films, after the scene in the pool disguised as a tropical setting, once the meeting between the drug trafficker and his trusted lawyer ends, a conflict erupts between rival gangs, a bloodbath in which the protagonist loses friends and family, but ends up winning the upper hand and becoming the most powerful narco in the area. Again, this doesn't just happen in movies. Now the police are very concerned about the feeling that the new drug traffickers have lost their fear of everything.