Joshua Parfitt
A Colombian cocaine trafficker from Malaga has told Telecinco that corrupt police officers, security or dock workers keep ‘between 25% and 30%’ of cocaine smuggled through Spanish docks.
The narcotrafficker, whose face was obscured to protect his identity, said that these corrupt officials did not drive around the nightclubs selling the drugs, but took this pre-planned cut as payment for getting the gear through high-tech scanners at Spanish ports.
He said: “If it wasn’t for these corrupt functionaries, we wouldn’t get any drugs in.”
He added that a kilo of cocaine could fetch a price of €4,000 once through port security.
“So if you’re sending 100 kilos, that’s some money. If you send 1,000 kilos, it’s millions—that’s what keeps them sweet,” he said.
The cocaine smuggler said he had been in the illicit drug trade for 30 years, after jumping ship from the financial world that ‘doesn’t especially excite’ him.
He said, however, that times have changed dramatically in recent years.
“It’s a jungle of savages,” he told Telecinco.
“If you lose sight for a moment, they’ll rob you.
“In the past, the difficulty was in collecting the merchandise and making money from it.
“Now, the difficulty is that the the merchandise arrives without being stolen en route; or that the buyer doesn’t just rob you of your merchandise; or that you get paid and then they steal the money back again.”
He said that the days of living by unwritten rules is over, and that no one respects anyone anymore.
Yet despite the inherent risks of his occupation, and despite spending 11 years in prison—and paying ‘a lot of money’ so that his name doesn’t appear in the press—the Colombian trafficker confirmed he would probably see out the rest of his working life in the black market cocaine trade.
“I know how to win, and I know how to lose,” he said.
