Fear and Loathing on the Costa del Crime

It’s not called the ‘Costa Del Crime’ for nothing. A remarkable number of Irish drug dealers have relocated to the coastal region around Alicante, in Spain. The logic is simple. If you're a drug dealer you want to be where the action is and Spain is the main European channel for cocaine originating from South America, and for marijuana from North Africa. As a result, Alicante makes a good base for both networking with the international criminal classes and keeping in touch with Ireland. And the climate just happens to be nice...

In a sense it’s a by-product of the low-cost airline boom: just as the Criminal Assists Bureau (CAB) was beginning its crackdown on criminals, no-frills airlines were expanding into regional parts of Spain – making it a lot easier for Irish dealers to get offside. That's what a lot of them have done.
CAB was set-up in the wake of the murder of Veronica Guerin. Its purpose: to ‘smash’ the drug-gangs in Ireland. On the face of it, the agency has scored some significant successes – and yet the drugs trade is still flourishing. In fact the market is bigger than ever. Which is why the Gardai are beginning to turn their attentions to Spain. Already, they have a permanent liaison officer in Madrid. “We are in constant contact with Interpol and Europol to monitor and investigate international criminal activity,” Garda press officer Brendan Walsh told Hot Press. More than that he wouldn't reveal.
A number of CAB's potential targets were here long before the agents of law enforcement, however.
There are whispers, for example, that John Traynor, alleged by John Gilligan in court recently to have been involved in the Sunday Independent journalist's death, is living what tabloids call ‘the high life’ in a secluded villa not too far from the main airport. It’s rumoured that he regularly flies between Dublin, Amsterdam and Alicante, on what are referred to as business trips. But he's not alone. Peter Mitchell (crime reporters like to call him ‘Fatso’ even though he’s in good physical shape) lives just down the road in Puerto Banus, where he owns a pub. Another favourite target for the tabloids, Freddie Thompson – he also has been dubbed ‘Fat Freddie’, suggesting something of a pattern – is said to travel back and forward between Spain and Ireland. But, in truth there are dozens of refugees from the deprived estates of Dublin – from Crumlin, Drimnagh, Ballyfermot, Finglas and Blanchardstown – here in Alicante. We've all read the tabloid version at some stage – but I wanted to know what kind of a life they really lead.
As part of the recent Hot Press drugs edition, we interviewed a major dealer. He liked the article so much that he agreed to help us get behind the scene in Spain. The plan was to put together a feature on the Irish criminal community that would offer a genuine insight into the place itself and into the people who have located themselves there. On the basis of a positive recommendation from this underworld figure, one big-time drugs smuggler who is now based in Spain – let's call him Sean – agreed to meet Hot Press and answer our questions. It was a good start. Surely we would meet other gangland insiders once we touched down...

I took the 6.20am Aer Lingus flight, arriving at a highly respectable 10.15 am, in the process mimicking the regular flight patterns of Irish criminals. As I discovered, there is no passport control in Alicante airport. You simply get off the plane, collect your bag and walk out the door – straight into what is fast becoming one of Europe's drugs, money laundering and prostitution hotspots.
I had agreed to hook up with Sean at the Casi Casi Café. When I arrived at the suburban location, I immediately spotted some well known faces, characters from a notorious North Dublin drugs crew, sitting outside the café under a parasol. They were knocking back the beers.
The clientele at the Casi Casi Café is mostly made up of retired Dutch and Germans, who remain oblivious to the fact that they are sitting beside a bunch of drugs dealers. The boys are easy to pick out. Their uniform consists of either Dublin GAA or Glasgow Celtic football jerseys, tracksuit bottoms and Adidas runners, with the compulsory Ray-Bans resting on their shaved heads. Complete with elaborately tattooed arms, they look like something straight out of central casting.
The dealers are creatures of habit. They follow what amounts to a daily ritual. They meet at the Casi Casi, usually congregating from noon onwards for a few pints. They sit texting and talking on the mobiles, punctuating their business with the odd bit of banter. At night, they can be found drinking in the same bars, switching between two favoured haunts, eating in the same restaurant, and even visiting the same brothels, a couple of times a week.
But today is different – today these dealers are celebrating the successful arrival of a major consignment of drugs – into Ireland. They're knocking back the beers as quickly as they’re being poured for them by the English barwoman. As I sit down at the bar, one of their phones rings. I’d need earplugs to avoid hearing what’s going down. After the call has ended, glasses are clinked.
“Happy days,” one of them says before swallowing half a beer in a single gulp.
“They like to do their bits and bobs at the Casi Casi," one underworld source confirms. "They stick out like sore thumbs. You can hear them before you see them. They are meant to be keeping their heads down, but they are often pissed and they can be quite loud.”

Sean arrives. He spots me with a copy of Hot Press on the table and comes over. Within a few minutes we've struck up a conversation with the Northside Crew, who are happy to chat, providing no one is identified.
If Hot Press was able to track down a bunch of drug dealers within a few hours of getting off the plane, you’d presume that the authorities are also aware of their whereabouts. The Northside Crew don’t give a shit.
“OK, some particular dealers might not be hard to track or follow,” says one of the drinkers, who wishes to be known as Gerry, “but when the Irish cops do come by, they usually fucking stick out like a sore thumb, they're so obvious. We know we’re being fucking watched. And, more importantly, we know when we are being watched.
“It’s not hard to spot the Irish cops. They're normally six foot tall, snow white, drinking orange juice, looking intensely at everything and not talking much. We just move on when they appear on the scene. They have to catch you red-handed and that’s almost impossible. They’d never be able to get a mole in here or anything like that. We only deal with our own, which makes it hard for them to infiltrate us or to gather intelligence.”
The majority of Irish dealers in Alicante are pushing coke.
“Coke is the number one drug cos it’s easier to smuggle,” Gerry explains. “It’s easier to conceal and it’s not that bulky and you get more money for it. You know, one decent shipment would easily be in the million bracket. I would say that there is at least a 75% success rate. So, as you can imagine, there is major bread in coke. We used to be up to our bollocks in everything. There used to be big money in smokes but not anymore. But there is a big demand for coke back home. So, supply and demand and all that, you know?”
Where are they buying it from?
“A lot of the big consignments are coming in from Amsterdam to Cork and on to Dublin or wherever. And South America is a major source for cocaine. But lately, we’re buying more and more coke and hash from North Africa because it’s cheaper. It is also, believe it or not, very easy to smuggle large quantities of drugs into Alicante because the boys are using jet skis to bring it over from Morocco. They have backpacks on with stones and if the police come anywhere near them they simply dump the shit into the sea. But they are very rarely picked up.”
According to the tabloids there could be several hundred Irish drugs dealers and money launderers operating in Spain. Gerry maintains that those figures are wildly exaggerated. He estimates that there are five or six major Irish drugs dealers here, and some smaller time operators, with no more than a few dozen Irish underworld figures in total.
“There might be more but they’d be retired and are keeping their heads down,” he resumes. “The active ones are mostly Dubs, but there are a few Cork lads and a couple of Northerners. Surprisingly, I haven’t meet any Limerick lads here. There is one big Northside Crew and one big Southside Crew. The two crews don’t normally mix with each other. But there have been occasions when we’ve socialised or maybe financed something together.”

Not all is sweetness and light, however. There have been several Irish deaths in recent times, along with reports of some known Irish drug dealers simply vanishing.
“I have heard stories about people going missing here because of deals going wrong or because of people talking when they’re not meant to. But it’s their own stupidity. Some of these guys come over here thinking that they are big players. Back home they might have a reputation – but over here most of the Irish are only little fish. They are only fucking stupid boys who don’t give the respect deserved to the Russians, Eastern Europeans, Turks, or whoever the hell they are doing business with. If you tell some of these people to ‘fuck off’, or if you won’t pay on time, they’ll kill you. Stone dead.”
He then recounts a story about how one Russian walked in off the street with a bag of cash and purchased a Sunseeker motor yacht. He then got an Irish lad to take out the water tanks and put in secret compartments.
“But the Irish lad got drunk and boasted about the job,” he recalls. “To cut a long story short, he was tortured and they filled him up with that expansion stuff that is stuck into walls. Life is cheap in this business.”
Later that night, we are dining at the Budapest Restaurant. Gerry explains that, not so long ago, the proprietor disappeared.
“He refused to pay protection money and just vanished. The restaurant was closed until he was found washed up on the beach a few weeks later.”

Later that same night, the Northside Crew are still celebrating their success smuggling a cocaine shipment into Cork. From there, this shipment will be brought to Drogheda before being moved quickly on again to a cutting facility in Dublin.
They have been floating around the bars, gentlemen's clubs and nightclubs since they first congregated at noon.
By midnight they are at the Eden Roc Hotel – actually a brothel on the outskirts of Torrevieja, which is full of sweaty, beerbellied men drooling over an endless supply of beautiful, young, skimpily-dressed women.
Apparently it’s not unusual to see families arriving at the doors of this brothel looking to book in, but the rooms are rented by the hour here. Naturally, the families are politely turned away by the Russian bouncers on the door, who charge an entrance fee of €12 into the ‘hotel’ – which gets you a drink at the bar.
As soon as the Northside Crew arrive, the women – predominantly of Eastern European extraction with some Asian and African thrown into the mix – go into action. They start by stroking the men’s arms, before provocatively whispering sexual innuendos into their ears, as the guys nonchalantly knock back the expensive drinks. Within minutes, this teasing has the desired effect, as the boys gladly strike a deal to shell out €70, plus €10 for clean sheets, for a half-hour of playtime with one of the women.
Once up in the bedrooms, the women politely insist that the men crouch down over the bidet and clean their penises with liquid soap and water. The deal is that they will carry out whatever fantasy takes you, but there are two rules: no kissing and a fresh condom must be used for any sexual scenario.
Some 30 minutes later, the four crew members are back at the bar and in boisterous mood, with the giggling women wrapped around their arms. The lads are throwing money around like it’s confetti. It’s costing them €20 to buy a drink and when they do, the lady they’re with gives the barman her card to be swiped, to register her commission.
“We’re celebrating a successful business transaction and want to party – and party big time,” one of the men boasts.
Eventually, two of the men decide to head back upstairs to one of the hotel suites with women in tow: the suite comes equipped with a Jacuzzi and ‘complimentary’ champagne, at a cost of €250 for an hour – per woman. Another member of the group picks out three women – one Eastern European, one Asian and one South African – to accompany him upstairs for whatever he has in mind.
At around 2am, after a few hours of hard partying, the four crew members stumble out of the hotel having spent approximately €1,500 between them. One of the men has brought a girl home for the night after paying a ‘bar fine’ of €120, as well as agreeing to a €300 fee with her to stay until morning.
“I love Irish men because they are good payers and they come very quick,” a 25-year-old Romanian prostitute named Julia giggles. “These particular gentlemen like to come here regularly. At least two or three times a week. Normally they would come in for a half-hour with one of the girls and leave. But once in a while, like tonight, they will spend big money. If they like you they will give you a generous tip.”
Prostitution is rife in the Alicante region. There are dozens of brothels. You'll also find anywhere between five and 20 streetwalkers, mostly Bulgarian and Romanian, standing on most roundabouts, to drum up trade.
Another popular source of business for the prostitutes is one of the many local freesheets. In its listings section, you’ll find girls of all nationalities – Spanish, Argentinian, English – offering to ‘discreetly call out to your hotel’ or inviting you to drop by and party with a selection of Russian beauties in their private villa.
On the night the Northside Crew were partying in Eden Roc, I bumped into a best-selling author from England. Understandably, he asked not to be identified in this article, but he did give me the interesting statistic that the average Spaniard spends €4,000 a year on visits to brothels. God knows what the Northside Crew's expenditure is – suffice to say it’s probably substantially more than the average industrial wage in Ireland.
“There you go,” one of the Northside Crew tells me, “Now you’ve seen a typical day in the life of a player…”
And he laughed.

At least five Irish criminals have been murdered over the last four years on the Iberian peninsula. The figure could be higher, as several other dealers have disappeared, apparently without a trace.
The most notorious of these deaths was the savage murder of drug dealers Shane Coates and Stephen Sugg, who vanished in January 2004. Known as the Westies because they hailed from Dublin West, their bodies were eventually found in a concrete tomb beneath a warehouse floor in an industrial area, near the Torrevieja region.
Writing their obituaries, veteran reporter Paddy Clancy pulled no punches: “Coates and Sugg were two of the most vicious mobsters in Dublin. They specialised in drug dealing, armed robbery, torture and intimidation. Their evil string of atrocities included the torture of a drug-addicted mother of nine. They used lighted cigarettes to burn her breasts because she owed them for heroin. When another woman crossed them, they chopped off her hair and smashed up her home and car.”
It’s doubtful that they could be described as nice guys. But why exactly did they meet such a horrible end in sunny Spain?
According to the tabloid newspapers in Ireland, the two Westies were killed because of a drugs deal that went disastrously wrong. During their time in Spain, it was reported that the duo had made enemies as a result of sloppy dealings with other Irish, British, and Moroccan gangs in running drugs from North Africa. The press speculated that the hit was probably carried out by a Russian gang.
But, according to well-informed ex-pat criminal sources, Coates and Sugg fell foul of a low-key Anglo-Irish traveller criminal boss, when their activities threatened to upset his lucrative cigarette smuggling operation.
An underworld source explains the full story.
“It’s one thing or the other – and I can’t say which for sure,” he says. “What's been hinted at, but never printed, is that the Pikey, who’s a tough operator, got rid of them because he discovered that they were using his cigarette smuggling operation, without his knowledge, to get their drugs into Ireland. He got pissed off because about this and had them sorted because he didn’t want undue attention being brought down on what is a very lucrative trade.
“The other possibility is that they messed with some Eastern Europeans or Russians. Whichever one's right, they weren’t appreciated over here, to put it bluntly. They had a high profile back home and they tried to throw their weight around in this neck of the woods, but it’s a different ball game and nobody of any real substance feared them.”
Giovanni Di Stefano, the Italian solicitor who has represented top Irish criminals like John Gilligan and Paddy Holland, sums it up succinctly when he describes the lifestyle of criminals hanging out in Alicante as being more about fear and loathing, than the playboy depiction in the tabloids.
“It hardly seems likely that anyone that has to constantly look over his shoulder either for law enforcement agencies or rivals can lead any kind of life let alone the high life,” he says. “Criminals don’t lead a high life. They lead a life on credit that can be recalled at any moment! It may seem ‘high’ – but what people fail to distinguish is the difference between a criminal and a delinquent. Those the media call criminal are actually just delinquents. Real criminals rarely get caught and are never detected.”

Various well-known Irish criminals have opened bars and restaurants in the Alicante area. At one stage, the man the tabloids dubbed Fat Tony (maybe being ‘fat’ is a crime in itself?) had a bar, but now he can be found most nights of the week ‘keeping his head down’, drinking in a local pub called Clarke’s.
At least two other underworld figures from Dublin are visibly active in local the business community, owning bars and restaurants, presumably as a cover for illegal operations. But, according to our sources, time is running out for them: the local authorities are said to have them under constant surveillance.
However it is The Judges Chamber (sic), which has achieved most notoriety back home, thanks to its close association with John Gilligan, the man targeted by Gardai as the likely mastermind behind the murder of Veronica Guerin. Gilligan, who insists that he had nothing to do with the Guerin murder, is currently serving an astonishing 20 years for smuggling 20,000 kilograms of cannabis into Ireland.
The Judges Chamber is situated in a characterless suburban area, close to Playa Flamenca, on the outskirts of Torrevieja town. It is part of a shopping complex, with a fish ‘n’ chips shop next door and another Irish bar directly across the road.
The Judges Chamber is owned by Tracey Gilligan, the daughter of the criminal nicknamed Factory John. Her mother Geraldine can, on occasion, be found working behind the bar. There appears to be some confusion over how the actual ownership of the bar was transferred to Tracey, but it is known that the bar did belong to the her late partner Liam Judge.
When Hot Press visited The Judges Chamber, the bar had just celebrated its fourth birthday with the added attractions of a bouncing castle, face painting and a special 5 cent bar for the locals. But Hot Press got a less enthusiastic reception at the deserted bar on a mid-week afternoon. About half a dozen customers – none Irish – sat listlessly around. Two German women were perched in the corner watching sports on the pull-down big screen. There was a smattering of locals. Even the barwoman didn’t speak fluent English.
Unfortunately, Tracey or Geraldine weren’t on hand to give us an Irish welcome.
Later, one underworld source explained that the frosty reception was down to the fact that we were ‘spotted’, as we approached The Judge’s Chambers, taking photographs of the bar.
“It was obvious you were press when they saw the camera and they are just sick and tired of the Irish tabloids coming in here,” explained one underworld figure. “You’ll never find the real players drinking in The Judges Chamber. It’s too far away from all the action and, besides, it would be downright stupid to be seen doing business there. The only people who come here are those who want to boast about having been served by Gilligan’s mot or daughter.”
On the positive side you won’t get ripped off here – the price of a pint is only €2.40, very reasonable for an Irish bar. And, if you do drop by, have a close look at the receipt – written across the top is the immortal line: “The Jury’s Out.”
At least, the Gilligan clan have maintained a sense of humour.