CRIME ON THE COSTAS is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.
Almost crime free, although Eastern Europeans are now featuring in crime reports for petty crime to drug dealing. Criminals, specially violent ones, severely punished and can made to pay damages to victims by Criminal Courts (no need to go civil). This is one reason why for crime is very low. In Andalucia (Costa del Sol), about 50% of jail inmates are foreigners and this is expected to increase when new States are in the EU. However, problems...
The 'British in Spain' achieved notoriety during the 1980s. As a group they were stereotyped as being made up of exiled criminals, drunken hooligans and inward looking pensioners - unwelcome colonisers reconstructing their own insular 'little England'. The British on the Costa del Sol presents a more complex pictu...
When armed Spanish police raided a cocaine-laden trawler on the high seas late last month, just one member of the smuggling gang was onboard. But police knew exactly where to look for the foreigners linked to the $400 million haul. The ringleaders, a Brit and two Irishmen, were arrested back on the Costa del Sol.If organized crime is a globalized business these days, then Spain could be its European headquarters. More than 60 percent of the cannabis...
CRIMINAL gangs are targeting British homeowners on the Spanish costas and using knockout gas to overpower their victims in exclusive resorts. A spate of robberies and the murder last weekend of Winston Mills, 67, who was shot dead in front of his wife at their villa near La Manga, have prompted many Britons to put their properties on the market. Some frightened residents block roads leading to their estate with sandbags every night and mount their...
ESCAPING JUSTICE# Spain’s extradition treaty with Britain collapsed in 1978. High-profile criminals found that they could easily disappear, even after the treaty was reinstated in 1985# The “Costa del Crime” earned its name in 1983 when the thieves behind the £6 million Security Express robbery were spotted leading luxurious lives on the Spanish coast# Interpol estimated last year that the Spanish costas are home to 18,000 foreign criminals of 70...
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One of the most wanted Nazi war criminals may have fled the Costa Brava for another area of Spain or Denmark to escape an intense search by Spanish police.Investigators believe that Aribert Heim, a concentration camp doctor, now 91, who injected hundreds of prisoners with lethal cocktails at Mauthausen in Austria, may have already fled to the Costa del Sol, in southern Spain, or Denmark, according to local press reports.Spain's organised crime and...
Wilkins was also suspected of informing on Kenneth Noye, who went on the run after the 1996 M25 "road-rage" murder of Stephen Cameron. Noye stayed at Wilkins's villa. He was arrested shortly after he bought a villa near Cadiz and moved o...
The remarkable tale begins in 1992 when Wilkins escaped from a low- security prison in East Anglia where he was serving 10 years for drugs smuggling. He emerged a few months later in southern Spain on the "Costa del Crime", where he was approached by one of the Yard's top undercover detectives to help set up the sting. The idea was that Wilkins, well-connected in the murky British expatriate underworld, would introduce cops posing as dodgy businessmen...
Spain, the gateway for much of the drug traffic into Europe, has long been a prime destination for Irish drug dealersMichael “Danser” Ahern, was found dead last year in Portugal, shot five times in the head and frozen by his killers in order to dismember his body, prompting an investigation by police in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, the UK and the Netherlan...
The victim was shot five times outside ‘The Point’ – a club in Nueva Andalucia. He was dead on the arrival of the emergency services.The victim had a criminal record in the U.K. and is reported to have been linked to several crimes in Spain. Police currently have several theories about the motive and who could have been responsib...
It was supposed to epitomise luxury, prosperity and power. Instead, it became a symbol of the heady mix of excess and corruption which for too long was synonymous with Marbella, Spain's glittering city of fun.The Rolls-Royce Shining Spur was the pride and joy of the self-proclaimed "God of the Costa del Sol", the late playboy and Marbella mayor Jesús Gil y Gil.Gil thought nothing of demanding that his taxpayers fork out for the £170,000 car which...
British mother and daughter Ingrid and Rachel O'Leary are both prostitutes on Spain's Costa del Sol. But neither feels their life of vice is sordid or risky - and they love the riches they've earned. 'We're more like sisters than mother and daughter,' says Surrey- born Ingrid, 43. 'We like hanging out together and we prefer it when we work as a pair. It's our choice to work in this game.' Her daughter Rachel, 26, explains, 'Our punters are just like...
Elvis Presley is having a grand time. He is cuddling up to tipsy girls and giving them individual verses of Return to Sender as they blush, squeal and make half-hearted attempts to escape. "Hey, baby, what's your name?" he groans, and they automatically reply: Kelly, Alise, Leanne. Elvis is, of course, an impersonator, but a very fine one; if he weren't black, Portuguese and as skinny as a rake in his baggy white jumpsuit, he could almost pass for...
Brian Brendan "The Milkman" Wright is an Irish criminal involved in fixing horse races by doping more than 20 race horses in 1990 as well as a drug trafficker who is estimated to have smuggled 3 tons of cocaine into Great Britain over a period of two years. Originally based in Britain, he had been out of the country when authorities began arresting members of his organization (including his own son, Brian Jr and former son in law, Paul S) as the...
Spanish authorities announced that they had arrested one of the United Kingdom's most wanted criminals: Brian Brendan Wright, alias "The Milkman" in recognition that he always delivered.Wright fled British law after being linked to one of that country's biggest drug-smuggling operations, as well as horse race fixing. He was last seen over 10 years ago in Cypr...
At the center of the investigation is the flamboyant Chilean attorney Fernando del Valle Vergara. Del Valle and 10 of his staff were originally arrested. Press reports have stated that Del Valle´s Marbella law firm is called DVA. That has led Madrid attorney, Javier del Valle Sánchez - no relation to the Fernando del Valle - to issue a statement that his law firm 'Del Valle Abogados S.L.', and which also uses the letters DVA, has no relation to the...
The sunny southern stretch of beaches branded "the Coast of Crime" is a hedonist's paradise. It is the summer residence of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, and place where jet setters and "beautiful people" arrive by the scores, its harbors brim with yachts and buckets of cash exchange hands. It has also been an open secret that in the regional capital of Marbella much of that money comes from the seedy-side of life, linked to speculating in real estate,...
These details were released by the government’s sub-delegate in Málaga, Hilario López Luna, after the man, Vincenzo M., died from his injuries in the intensive care unit of Marbella’s Costa del Sol hospital. He had received a single shot to the head while walking in the area between the Playa Esmeralda and Coral Beach urbanizations about one kilometre from Puerto Banús.A man on a red motorcycle had driven up to the Italian, stopped his bike and then,...
MOUSE OVER FOR TIT...
It was a busy Friday evening at The Point, a bar in the southern Spanish resort of Marbella, as the mainly British clientele enjoyed the warm night air on a terrace overlooking a palm tree lined golf course.Among the drinkers was a regular known as Gerry, a popular 43-year-old Londoner who had been living around the British-dominated neighbourhood of Nueva Andalucía for some years.In the few seconds it takes to pump half a dozen bullets into someone...
Spanish police, carted the corpses of four executed British and Irish crooks off to morgues in July alone, are keeping tight-lipped. But they obviously fear the worst. Gerry's real name, it has turned out, was William Moy. "He was already known to us," Commissar Valentín Bahut, head of the police's organised crime unit in nearby Málaga, told the Guardian. "We had arrested him in 200...
Spanish police see the recent drug gang shootings as a worrying sign of change in the expat commun...
the most powerful villain to emerge from the most notorious British crime of the twentieth century: the Great Train Robbery. Wilson's life story is one of greed, corruption and an eventual descent into a living hell when his rivals decided to wipe him off the face of the earth - with the tacit approval of Spanish, British and US drug enforcement agencies. Although he first made his name in the underworld at the time of the Great Train Robbery, it...
Detectives have made a fresh attempt to break the "wall of silence" surrounding the killing one year ago of two prominent London gangland figures. Tommy Hole, 57, and Joey "The Crow" Evans, 55, were shot as they watched football in an east London pub on 5 December 1999. The two masked gunmen fled on foot from the Beckton Arms in Canning Town and have never been caught. The shooting happened on a Sunday afternoon but police were surprised by the lack...
drug dealer Scott Bradfield, from London, was murdered in October 2001. His limbs were found in a suitcase on wasteland near Torremolinos in December and his head and torso were discovered in another case near...
A FLAMBOYANT Scots gangster has been arrested after a police officer was shot on the Costa del Crime.Millionaire Pat McCadden, 52, is behind bars while Spanish police investigate the attempted murder of a fellow officer.McCadden, nicknamed Pat the Rat, and his family live in a stunning mansion in the upmarket Costa del Sol resort of Marbella after fleeing a £1million tax bill in Scotland.Yesterday, Spain's national police, the Cuerpo Nacional de...
A Londoner has been shot dead by five bullets in a late night slaying close to The Point cafeteria in the Avenida del Prado in Nueva Andalucía, Marbella. According to police sources the 43-year-old had a police record in Spain. Officers are investigating his death and are keeping an open mind on the motive and who carried out the slaying. The Briton, named as William Moy, is said to have been accompanied by a group of three people before his death....
The sands of the Sahara seemed far away from this lush formal English garden set in three acres of Northumberland. Yet the gardeners mind drifted incessantly to the reds and orange of the barren desert scene. Glancing up he returned to looking at the old air force hangar and the constant movement of denim clad inmates moving under escort from one metal cage to another. The red rust glinting threw the pale cream paint as they endlessly opened and...