Free Cocaine Confidential by Wensley Clarkson Page B

much. Only last week a bunch of fifteen-year-olds turned up on the beach and tried to muscle us out of the way. They flashed their guns around and threatened to scare our customers unless we agreed to let them sell coke on our turf as well.’
    Jose agreed: ‘Yeah. Those young bastards actually thought we’d just say, “Sure, come and take over our business.” We’ve worked fucking hard to get where we are today. This is one of the most lucrative turfs in Ipanema. Why the hell would we give it up to a bunch of kids?’
    Carlos came in again: ‘It’s a real shame but I ended up having to make an example of one of those kids. I shot him in the leg and told him he was lucky I hadn’t killed him.’
    Jose claims his background in cage fighting means he has a fearsome reputation inside the
favela
where he still lives.
    â€˜Everyone knows who I am in the
favela
, so every time I shoot someone it sends out a message to keep away from my business.’
    Carlos admits through gritted teeth it’s very difficult sometimes dealing with ‘spoilt white people’ who make up the majority of their customers in Ipanema. ‘Brazil is 95 per cent poor people and 5 per cent very rich. It’s not a nice place if you have no money but these people I deal with are very dismissive of the slum folk. It annoys me a lot. They should show us more respect.’
    Until recently Carlos was dating the teenage daughter of a very wealthy industrialist; she lived with her family in a penthouse flat overlooking Ipanema Beach.
    â€˜I met her through dealing coke to her last boyfriend,’ explained Carlos. ‘I liked her a lot but we were so different. She had a driver take her everywhere and her father was so obsessed with knowing who she was hanging out with that he even hired a private eye to follow her. When he discovered she was going out with a drug dealer he went mental and threatened to cut off her allowance unless she finished with me. She dropped me immediately. Money always talks in the end, eh?’
    Both Carlos and Jose insist they are saving much of the money they’re earning from coke dealing. ‘We’re stashing it away in a secret place where no one can get to it. That money is going to help us get out of the
favela
. I’d like to travel to Europe, maybe even England, and meet people from different places. I have a cousin who lives in Paris. I’d like to stay with him.’
    Jose continued: ‘I just want to get myself a nice place in the country outside Rio and kick back and enjoy my life. Coke dealing is short term. In this business if you don’t get out young you either end up dead or hooked or both.’
    Johnny called me from Rio a few months after my meeting with Carlos and Jose to say that they’d both disappeared from their usual ‘turf’ in Ipanema. ‘I’ve been told they “disappeared” after stealing some coke that belonged to someone else,’ said Johnny, my man in Rio.
    There wasn’t even a hint of surprise or shock in his voice …

PART THREE

DEALERS/TRAFFICKERS/TRANSPORTERS – SPAIN

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    Spain has long been regarded as the ‘Cocaine Marketplace’ of Europe. Closely linked by language and history to South and Central America, Spanish authorities have fought a long, hard battle against the coke barons with only limited success. True, there are major cocaine busts on the Iberian peninsular virtually every week but they represent a tiny amount of the cocaine travelling through Spain.
    It is estimated that 50 per cent of the cocaine consumed in Europe enters the continent via Spain. In 2010, for example, 18 tons of the drug were seized in Spain, more than in all the other EU countries put together. However the nationalities of the cartels sending cocaine to Spain has changed in recent years. While many of the Colombian groups which dominated the trade in the 1980s still continue to