BLOG #1 TO MY BROTHER HARRY PART 1: HARRY IN ENGLAND This first blog, in which I hope to promote my book,
BLOG #2 THE RACKETEERS
The Racketeer influenced and Corrupt Organisations (Rico) Act was passed in 1970 in the US, in order to combat organised crime, allowing prosecutors to target leaders of criminal enterprises, and to dismantle powerful criminal organisations. Such was the world I inadvertently became a part of from early in the year of 1981, until the December of 1995 (which included the incarcerated consequences from 1984 to 87); although with a period of six years adhering to the straight and narrow, from 1987 to 1993. But for those two distinct eras, 1981 to 84 and 1993 to 95, I followed that other path, the one in which my fates were dictated to and sealed by certain traqueteros as the Colombians called them: racketeers to you and me.
PART ONE : THE UNITED STATES IN THE EARLY 1980s
By and large there were major drug traffickers, or racketeers in Federal parlance, active in the cocaine industry in the US for a number of years before my arrival in 1981 – which just happened to be at the onset of the first prodigious phase of these all-encroaching activities. The US mafia was obviously grossly involved as were any number of maverick operators. Both elements were already up to their necks in this business during the latter years of the 1970s, most infamously notorious of all being the Godmother of Cocaine, the Medellin born (or paisa), Griselda Blanco. She it was who educated one Pablo Escobar in the mercurial but ever-deadly world of Colombian cocaine in that land of plenty that lay to the north, across the Caribbean Sea . She worked out of Miami, as so many did from those early days in the later 1970s and throughout the following decade.
As the years went by thousands more Colombians, mainly enterprising paisas, flooded into the South Florida paradise to become players in their own right, many climbing the ladder to full-blown racketeer-hood. And naturally, there were plenty more home-grown ones in the mix – and not only in Miami, that glittering jewel in the Colombian crown, nestled there as it was, by the warm, enticing shores of the Atlantic Ocean; the Caribbean itself to be more precise. They were all over the land, quite apart from the American HQ that was Miami; mainly in New York and Chicago. And also of course, in the far-away and therefore super-lucrative Los Ángeles.
I personally ended up working with a select few during my years stateside. It was inevitable, given the way I was introduced into the business – and given the way I happened to be, with my thirst for adventure, addiction to adrenaline-rushes and naturally the lure of thousands of dollars available to he or she who put themselves about to a fairly high degree, as well as having the inherent courage to do so (or perhaps the uninhibited disregard for laws designed to cause, let’s say a hindrance to our nefarious activities. That was me in 1981, I’m afraid.
So I got myself involved, relatively innocently at the start early in 1981, and within a short time began meeting top racketeers in their own right. The most prominent was a young, urbane and highly educated character from Orange County, on the south side of LA sprawling along the Pacific coat in those impossibly beautiful, uber-affluent districts of Newport Beach, Long Beach and Huntington Beach. They became my stamping grounds too while “away on business” from “home” in Kendal, south-west Miami. Where most of the other Colombian residents of Miami happened to live.
And so I worked with a few of these always-ambitious racketeers in my day; first in the US, then a decade later in Europe, including my own home-town, London. They formed the meat and potatoes of that life I became a part of during the 1980s and 90s. Just as I’ve described it in my book, Tales of an English Contrabandista – which you can read about at leisure right here on this website… the actual “home” of my book and life adventures brushing up with the Medellin Cartel, albeit not too deeply (fortunately!), in the process. If these racketeer’s hadn’t existed then there would have been no real role for me back then in America.
We were drawn to each other like a magnet, although everything was meticulously figured out beforehand. The whole performance was like a well-drilled theatre production, each character well-moulded into the particular parts they played – with perfection. Which was how most international criminal enterprises were structured. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, in this case in the US of the 1980s, the original players involved with the enterprising young ex-university student Alan Mobley were compromised right from the start by an FBI plant, who of course fed back plenty of juicy information to the full power of the law. Mobley got wise to it and had to start all over again, eventually scaling up his booming business considerably. A couple of years later the FBI managed to infiltrate the gang again, this time by using wire taps for a period of six months until everyone in the Mobley organisation – including me – were well and truly cooked and just waiting to be served up. Not only were the wire taps used against us but also a host of new traitors who had cooperated with the Feds for lesser charges or none at all. Snitches, in a word.
So there was a fraught sense of impending doom when we were all rounded up on the 12th of May, 1984.
Alan Charles Mobley, all-American ex frat boy, had been the spider weaving his web for at least three years. Based in Orange County, LA, he held all the cards – or at least appeared to. He worked hard but raked in the money during that magical period of 1981 to 84, the first truly monumental heyday of King Coke in the United States. He was the first real racketeer I met. Always affable and even charismatic, I have to say it was a pleasure to work with him. He was professional but always genuinely attentive to the needs and anxieties of those who worked for him … and this magnanimity extended to when we all did jail time together, in collectively fighting the case – until one by one we had to accept the plea bargains on offer, and embarrassingly fold our cards.
Mobley facilitated the importation of six tons of pure, unadulterated Colombian cocaine each year for about three years. Cocaine that made its way to Miami and from there by courier – which was my particular job – across country to the distant LA where he distributed it as both wholesaler and retailer. The key element was the way in which Medellin and Miami worked so well together, like a match made in heaven – and then some. For the most part the business generated between them went ahead like clockwork. And I was a small cog in its ample, well-oiled wheels. But we rode our fortune as long as it lasted, no more. In the end the full weight of federal law proved a bridge too far, so we were eventually rounded up and then hung out to dry.
The so-successful young Mobley had married into the equally ambitious Machado family based in Medellin (of course, where else!), each member of which played their roles to perfection. The wife was involved at domestic level as a kind of junior partner; and the mother in law as a kind of live-in phone secretary. The father in law together with his brother organised the business from home base, Medellin, in the purchase, packaging and shipment (depending on the Medellin Cartel, naturally) of the hundreds of kilo bricks heading northwards towards the US.
Certain brothers in law completed this tight circle back in Colombia while one of the youngest of the family, the valiant Luis aged around 17 in 1981, was responsible for receiving the drugs in Miami, and then dispatching them across the 3,000 miles to LA. It was this very young but already blooming racketeer I worked with personally each time I set off from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, nearly three full days and nights of driving those Interstate Highways – including the iconic Route 66.
I began this “career” by flying the merchandise but driving it was to prove far superior: much more volume on every occasion, and far less pressure and absurdly unnecessary hardships than on the flights … although these took but five hours instead of the 66 by road. But safety first was our most obvious watchword. And so I dealt personally with two main racketeers during my time stateside: the major one, Mobley, and the lesser one Luis Machado. I was aware of just one other courier like myself, who specialised in that same route, Miami to Los Angeles, a native of Colombia’s third city Cali, and known as El Tio. We met once at one of Alan Mobley’s celebratory lunches at his home whenever new merchandise was delivered.
I had just arrived with my quota while El Tio (real name: Edgar Ramírez) was already there with his. Both of us having replenished Mobley’s fast-selling nose-candy sold to so many uni students in Orange County, plus eventually several members of the Hollywood community – almost certainly inevitable in that particular city and region. After all, Hollywood was one of the main purchasers of cocaine, and has been from its beginning until now. It’s a community with a natural born affinity with the drug after all.
At the same time I was introduced to other “players” back in Miami, who supplied clients up in New York and Providence, Rhode Island. My reputation preceded me, and so these other racketeers contracted me to undertake deliveries up north as well as out west. I was quite happy to go wherever I was sent: the world – or rather the United States – was my oyster. And cocaine its pearl. The lady who sent me to NY, to a strongly orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn in fact, was a certain Estela Pereira but I never got to know her as well as Luis, my dispatcher to LA. She was the consummate professional.
In addition there was a well-known character called Lito B, connected deeply with the Cartel itself. Lito, also a major racketeer one could say, contracted me for a couple of temporary jobs in Miami, one of which proved utterly life-defining – as in a life or death situation. Lito put me in charge of a three man crewed fishing vessel purportedly returning to “base” at a busy Fort Lauderdale marina after a night of deep sea fishing around the Bahamas. These were common expeditions back then and specialised in marlin catches. Or, alternatively, bringing in large quantities of “merca” stashed on the islands. This type of smuggling was invented by Carlos Lehder, one of the four founding capos of the Medellin Cartel. And there on that occasion, was I sitting on that vessel pretending to fish as we neared the Florida coastline.
The voyage had turned into a bitter-sweet mission from the outermost island of San Salvador, via Nassau on the way back across the wild, unpredictable seas between the Bahamas and Florida … in no way a job for the faint hearted! The cargo was 396 kilos, four of which had been paid upfront to the accommodating islanders who babysat the coke while being stored there in its wait for its final, onward journey stateside. Twelve hours of heightened tension before arriving safely at that homely – and incredibly busy – marina in Lauderdale.
In fact all those little marinas up and down the south Florida coast kept themselves busy day and night during those heady years. The racketeers, both Cartel members and independents, made damn sure there wasn’t a dull moment for over a decade in that astonishing neck of the woods. For more of this adventure, and many others, make sure you read the book “Tales of an English Contrabandista”.
PART TWO: EUROPE, MID-1990s
When I re-started in that “Colombian enterprise” in 1993 I was reunited with another racketeer – one who played a lesser role back in the US, although also part of the Mobley set-up – but who would now in the brave new world of the 1990s take up the mantle of a leading racketeer, a veritable baron no less. I eventually thought of him as even more ruthless than Mobley. I had known him as a fellow-con during our spell of federal incarceration, and he actually tracked me down as soon as he was deported back home to Colombia, as that’s where I was leading a life of honest – and successful – private tutor of English to a good number of professional people in Medellin.
Staying well away from “the business” until this character known as Herman came calling. With a proposition akin to that in the Godfather movie: an offer that can’t be refused. Well, I could have refused, but certain circumstances led me to accept. Which I soon regretted but by then couldn’t change. Again, for all the details, including how things were in the war-zone of beautiful but damned Medellin at that crucial time of the Pepe’s and Escobar’s fight to the death, you have only to read my book, Contrabandista. We lived through all that crisis in La Cuidad de Eterna Primavera, and I was very happy indeed there. Yet the time finally came for a change, so I went along with Herman’s appealing though controversial offer.
After serving his time stateside this over-ambitious paisa was sold on the idea of being among the first major racketeers to add several European nations, including the UK, to Colombia’s malign influence of flooding the planet with its magical snow-white product. In 1991 and 92 the whole continent was up for grabs. Plans were made at the Barcelona Olympics of 1992 and again at the celebrations in Seville of the 500th anniversary of Columbus arriving in America. Now it was the turn of Colombians taking over Europe, and Herman was determined to be right there in the vanguard.
And so he was, representing his small but highly enterprising “Office” based in Bogotá, but comprising mainly relocated paisas as Medellin had become far too toxic to work from. A great many similar “offices” thought the same way, and Bogotá soon became a haven for hundreds of paisas – and those from Cali too – looking for a new, quieter life in the wake of Pablo Escobar’s fall from power and ultimate demise in 1993.
Plans were also laid in highly secret “summit meetings” of the Colombian mafia with those from Italy and Spain; the Sicilians (later replaced by the Ndrangheta from Calabria, ) and those from Galicia, north-west Spain, who ruled the cocaine roost over there in the gateway to Europe.These top-level mafia parleys were held in the Dutch island of Aruba in 1987 and 1991, with a further one in 93 where the Russians were invited. Europe was ripe for it. Cocaine began to pour into the continent, Spain mainly, though the UK was always considered the jewel in the crown, although the hardest to penetrate. Spain was the main “gateway” from the beginning and still is, with the Netherlands and Belgium in close second place.
And so my “friend” Herman, a most successful racketeer indeed, enriched himself as the right-hand man of his busy little Office back in Chico, Bogotá, directing the traffic from his luxury lair in Las Rozas, Madrid; while I slowly but surely became his main man, or general factotum anyway, as the various roles I came to play were essential to his, and his particular cartel’s enormous successes year after year. I was involved in every single aspect of those cocaine operations. It was people like me, the “soldiers” of the huge enterprise, who actually kept the wheels turning at the most practical level, let alone a mere cog in the wheels.
At the high level it was of course the real racketeers themselves who were the movers and shakers: they set up the deals with their millions, and put the wheels in motion – including Herman’s main wholesaler in Madrid, a Bogotano known as Ricardo, with whom I worked both directly and indirectly. He was one of the racketeers too. But at the lower street-level, where the true dirty work was accomplished, it was those like me who really made the business work. That’s how life was for me during the heady years of 1994 and 95, facilitating the importation and distribution (etc!) of 300 kilos in each of the two years.
My very first year of 93, was spent in unlovely Germany though, which was to become completely freezing and lonely from the November onwards; where I was supposed to “establish” a new business venture. But it wasn’t to materialise – except for a major debacle in the June, from which I had to literally flee the land. But I was sent back a few months later. As much of a failure as Germany turned out to be, Spain proved a roaring success for us. I just so happened to fit very well into the whole setup, though literally rode my luck on countless occasions.
However, my most fascinating experiences came in my own hometown of London. Herman and his ever-expanding Office had also a been working with a pair of villains, intent on becoming the biggest suppliers of Colombian cocaine to London Town. They were both from Glasgow, and I was told to go over there in early 1994 to work closely with them. Which I did for the following two years, toing and froing between Colombia, Spain and London throughout that crucial time. The Scotsmen were major racketeers indeed: the boss, Brian Doran the truly big one, his partner (or rather henchman) Kenny, a smaller variety but proper racketeer nonetheless. They were based in Fulham and Chelsea, and were incredibly busy bees in their various coke businesses across Britain’s capital city.
They had interests in north London, connected with Jewish gangsters (themselves allied with those in Brooklyn NY), but their biggest base was in south London. There, the main drugs gang they worked with was led by none other than Anthony White (of Catford), he of Brinks Mat fame, 1983. In other words another major player, top baron and veritable racketeer if ever there was one. But the main Scotsman, known by the Colombians as The Professor, was definitely the biggest in the mid-90s. And I worked closely with him!
Herman and Doran were tightly knit indeed. Even before I was first called to get involved with the Scotsmen they seemed to be cleaning up in London – which was in the February of 1994. I was in London specifically to pick up large quantities of cash from them and pass them on along the line of a well-established laundering set up in the city. Herman’s people had Eldorado Airport, Bogotá, all sewn up so business proceeded smoothly most of the time. And the Scotsmen looked set to take over as London’s biggest coke dealers at the time.
However, just as Mobley’s network in California in the early 80s this set-up of both Herman’s Office in Bogotá and the Scots seemingly smooth operations in London involved various growing leaks and security was well and truly breached. As far as I was concerned it appeared that the Colombians themselves were much worse infiltrated – and as it turned out not by Scotland Yard but the even more deadly Customs & Excise. But there proved to be a serious leak at Doran’s end as well. The huge Customs operation launched against us was known as Operation Stealer, the largest of its kind ever mounted thus far.
What transpired is that by the autumn of 1994 I was asked to cooperate as mediator between Herman and his people, now back in Colombia, and the ever-active Scots working out of Fulham. Herman told me I was needed to facilitate the last stages of advanced plans for the large-scale importation of cocaine directly onto the south coast of England by way of an ocean-going catamaran, the Frugal, commissioned by the Scotsmen themselves, and even having done a trial run.
A great many personnel were involved in this most secretive operation, including the crew obviously, Tony White’s Catford mob, and several others whose expertise was needed in the fulfilment of the exercise. The boat finally set sail, collected the bales of drugs “bombed” into the ocean around the Caribbean islands, and headed eastwards to a safe haven in Sussex. But it wasn’t to be: the whole enterprise had become known to HM Customs (through their famous Operation Stealer), and screaming blue lights were all over the beach at Pevensey Bay on the night the Frugal arrived … right in the middle of a fierce storm! And then the storm that followed in the midst of Herman’s Office in Bogotá not to mention among those involved – and duly arrested – in Sussex and in London was an almighty one indeed.
I happened to be safely in Colombia enjoying Christmas and New Year holidays, so was spared. And miraculously got to be able to work through the whole of 1995 with impunity – though experiencing a whole host of dangerous turns along the way. But the capture of the good ship Frugal in the January opened a can of worms that led eventually to my own fall in the December of that year. 309 kilos were decommissioned as they were found floating in the sea when the crew realised the game was up and jettisoned them.
The grand operation, knitted together from Bogotá and London, was therefore seriously compromised. I knew from personal experience which became obvious after my arrest and the official paperwork was published, that Herman’s people had been well and truly infiltrated. I myself dealt with one of the Customs’ secret agents as if he were a bona fide member of our organisation, that’s how good an actor the man was, known as “Ron 0007” a deliberate parody of James Bond. But the Professor let me know a long time later he also suspected certain members of his own extended set-up as highly suspicious of betrayal – including, so he confided in me, certain of the Frugal’s crew. Or perhaps, he surmised, certain members of the Tony White gang.
But the damage had been done. Big time racketeers went down in big sentences in 1997, both Scotsmen receiving 25 years; but the big Colombian fish, my racketeer “friend” Herman, got clean away with it. Free to fight another campaign in Spain the following year … and for all I know several succeeding years too. But I’ve never discovered what, if anything, happened to him down the years – which have now been exactly thirty since I got arrested, on the 3rd of December 1995.
And so it was that during those industrious years in the mid-1990s that I worked hand-in-glove with several big-time cocaine racketeers in Europe and the UK. Herman and Doran were of course the prime examples; Tony White as well though his association with me was extremely indirect.
Of course, I’d been there before, in the previous decade and on a different continent entirely, with the likes of that gentleman-villain of Orange County, Mr Alan Charles Mobley, entrepreneur extraordinaire! And the cartel racketeer, Lito B. I had thus worked with some high-level coke barons, on both sides of the Atlantic and encompassing two decades … and lived to tell the tale. Which I’ve called “Tales of an English Contrabandista”. You should buy it and read it … at least to discover how incredibly dangerous and stressful that life really is. Easy money, some say of it? Don’t you believe it; it’s fool’s gold when all’s said and done. With rare exceptions (mainly of being a capo who stays and keeps his hands clean at home in Colombia), you end up either doing many years in a tiny jail cell, or else six feet under. Read my book to discover all this, and much more, the decidedly easy way!
I myself, was destined to do it the hard way. But hey, I’m alive when all’s said and done … and even wrote the book to pass the valuable message on. Watch movies on the subject, read books on the subject by all means. But stay the hell away from it; it is NOT worth the hassle. I got myself involved – and can safely say I’m here to tell the tale thanks to a series of absolute miracles. They say cats have nine lives; well this here cat must have had a hundred and nine, as that’s how it was for me. But not for you, dear reader, if you have at least one fully functioning brain cell!
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