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. Thedrug 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-calledboom 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
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. Thedrug 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-calledboom 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
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