Hash by Wensley Clarkson Page A

the gated doorways. It’s a strangely muted place, though, which is surprising because this imposing building houses some of the most dangerous drug gangsters in the world. And it’s all just a few kilometres from Europe’s number-one holiday destination.
    Alhaurín itself sits on a flat plain beneath a vast mountain range, which is rumoured to contain numerous graves of dead drug smugglers and other criminals. It’s what they call a modular prison, which means that there are five different blocks that house different classifications of prisoners; perhaps more surprisingly, there is even a women’s block, although the men and women’s sections of this prison are not directly connected for obvious reasons.
    One British criminal who spent many months in Alhaurín told me that the inmates reckoned the authorities deliberately house the women just within sight so that ‘we really suffer’. He said that it was possible to wave to the women in their cells and that sometimes inmates managed to form some kind of long-distance relationship but it all sounds veryfrustrating and simply adds to the dead, tinderbox atmosphere inside Alhaurín.
    From a distance, the prison resembles a cluster of rundown, low-rise tower blocks, right slap-bang in the middle of a desolate rocky terrain looking down towards the sea and the mass of concrete that makes up the vastly overdeveloped Costa del Sol. When Alhaurín was first built, most of the coastal resorts were nothing more than fishing villages dotted along a picturesque, deserted coastline. Now the Costa del Sol looks like a sprawling mini-Rio de Janeiro dominated by bland tower blocks and depressing-looking estates of private holiday homes, jerry-built at high speed during the boom years of the 1990s. Many of them are empty and deserted since the Spanish recession started in 2007.
    Inside Alhaurín, the grim-faced guards search all visitors in a casual, nonchalant manner, which belies the sort of security one would expect inside the biggest prison in the vast southern region of Andalucia. These ‘screws’ seem deadened by the sheer flatness of the atmosphere that pervades in this bland environment. They are poorly paid and it shows.
    I was in Alhaurín to meet Billy, a notorious veteran British criminal based on the Costa del Sol. He’d been arrested a few weeks earlier while dropping off a shipment of hash at the home of another criminal who happened to be under police surveillance because he was suspected of being a major arms dealer, as well as a drug baron.
    My visit inside Alhaurín was shrouded in secrecy becausethe only way I could get in was to pretend to be a friend of Billy. I’d actually interviewed him for a TV programme years earlier and kept in contact with him. A few weeks earlier he’d phoned from an illicit jailhouse mobile phone to say he’d been caught up in a police sting and reckoned he’d be in the prison for some months before his lawyer could get the courts to grant him bail. The legal system in Spain works in strange ways. Often a foreign criminal will be arrested, thrown in jail and told he will only be released to await trial if he can provide a certain amount of bail money. As Billy explained: ‘That can take months and months and it wears you down. In the end, you cough up the cash – usually fifteen to twenty grand, and you get released and then you fuck off out of there as quickly as possible.’
    The Spanish authorities would never openly admit it, but there seems to be a deliberate policy at work here. If the criminal provides enough bail money he or she can then disappear, saving the system hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of euros in legal expenses and the cost of keeping that criminal in prison. As Billy explained: ‘It’s a lot cheaper to let me go as long as I leave the country than to sit there for twenty years soaking up all their cash. It makes sense in a way, doesn’t it?’
    The ratio of guards inside Alhaurín to