Inside new crimewave at Brit loved Spanish resorts where sadistic gangsters settle disputes through torture & execution
ON a remote and lonely Costa Blanca road, the ten-metre trail of blood on the Tarmac had led to John George’s body.
Whoever killed the Belfast dad-of-two had been in a hurry, his corpse hauled off the rural highway and left beneath a lemon tree without so much as an attempt to dig a shallow grave.
When I visited the scene on Thursday — two days after the 37-year-old’s remains were discovered — the arrows police had placed next to the bloody spatters were still in position.
John’s badly decomposed body was found in a citrus orchard on the outskirts of the upmarket expat enclave of Rojales some three weeks after he went missing on a sunshine break.
His murder is part of an explosion of violence on Spain’s Costas that saw another corpse, riddled with bullets, found in Rojales within days of Northern Irishman John going missing. The incidents are not thought to be linked.
Further west, on the Costa del Sol, there has been more blood-soaked mayhem, with four shootings over the Christmas period at resorts favoured by British tourists.
One man was murdered with a bullet to the head in Fuengirola in December.
On Christmas Eve, a German man was shot and injured close to the Cristamar shopping centre in swish Puerto Banus.
Meanwhile, on Boxing Day, two Swedes — alleged to be drug traffickers — were fired upon with assault rifles in Benalmadena.
Settle disputes through torture and execution
Another attack on January 2, also in Puerto Banus, saw a German ex-Hells Angel blasted in the groin.
The violence is believed to be linked to the lucrative narcotics trade.
Marbella’s chief prosecutor, Julio Martinez Carazo, said last year that local drug trafficking is generating “reckless delinquency — delinquency with no scruples”.
The Costas have long been a sunny place for shady people.
When the extradition agreement between Britain and Spain expired in 1978, the coastline here became a safe haven for the elite of the UK underworld, earning it the nickname the Costa Del Crime.
It was immortalised in the 2000 movie Sexy Beast, with Ray Winstone playing an out-of-shape bank robber lured out of retirement for one last job.
Barbara Windsor’s former husband Ronnie Knight — who fled to Fuengirola in 1984 after his brother John was arrested over the previous year’s Security Express depot robbery — helped popularise the area among Britain’s underworld.
Another lured by the glitzy lifestyle was Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson.
He would be found murdered in his Marbella home in 1990.
Today, the Costas are a drugs superhighway and clearing house, where a new, sadistic breed of ultra-violent criminal settle disputes through torture and execution.
The mobsters party with hordes of unwitting tourists, lured by the balmy temperatures, golden sands and garish fleshpots of Marbella and Benidorm.
And their brutal methods sometimes affect those who have come to the Costas for a quiet life.
Visiting the spot in Rojales this week where John’s body was found, I was met by a genteel expat community of British, Irish and Scandinavian retirees enjoying drinks by their pools as temperatures nudged into the low 20s.
Green parakeets flap between towering palm trees above £250,000 luxury villas in pastel shades as the sun glints off the nearby Mediterranean.
But scratch the surface and there is a darker side to this paradise.
John George is the second murder victim to be discovered close to the sedate villas in a matter of weeks.
In the early hours of December 17 — three days after John’s family last heard from him — a 39-year-old Lithuanian man was killed trying to creep into a villa repurposed as a marijuana factory.
One neighbour, a 70-year-old retired gas engineer from the UK’s Midlands, told me: “I heard gunshots at around 1.30am coming from the villa that my property backs on to. Everyone knew there was a cannabis farm there.
“You could smell it. Apparently a Lithuanian man had gone in and tried to steal some of the plants. Someone inside shot him dead.”
Expat Paul Rowan, 52, a former funeral director from Wokingham, Berks, who also lives nearby, added: “I was on my own in the house and at around 1.40am, my doorbell started ringing. It was the police.
“The girlfriend or wife of the Lithuanian man — who must have been parked nearby and heard the shots — had called them.”
Blue and white police tape remains draped on the weed factory’s doorway, one of its upstairs windows open to the elements.
Another expat, Paul, assures me that Rojales — around a 35-mile drive south from Alicante and with a population of 21,000 — is “a lovely area” where people enjoy “golf and drinking”.
As for crime in the town, the former police officer added: “Any nice place is going to have something going on.”
At nearby Edina’s Bar And Grill, owner Edina Csaszar, 46, said of the two murders nearby: “It’s shocking really for the people who live here because it’s a bit scary.
“It’s beautiful and quiet here. Full of pensioners. A lot of English, German, Russian, Dutch. There’s not many Spanish in this area.”
A popular haunt with the expat crowd, locals told me that other bars and restaurants dotted along the Costa Blanca seem to remain open with few customers.
British and Norwegian retirees I spoke to were able to name bars and restaurants they believe are fronts for laundered dirty cash.
“There’s definitely a lot of money- laundering going on,” one Brit in their seventies told me.
“There’s a restaurant near me that’s hardly ever open and, when it is, there’s no one there.
“They’re sort of operating — money’s moving around — but it’s not really being run as a restaurant.”
Unsavoury characters attempt to blend in with the expat community on the Costa Blanca coast.
In March last year, Brian Charrington Snr, a British mobster from the Sexy Beast era, was arrested at his villa in Altea near Benidorm.
The shaven-headed 68-year-old — once a car dealer in Middlesbrough — was held as part of a swoop linked to drug trafficking and money laundering. He was later released on bail.
He is known as the Wikipedia Narco for reportedly updating the internet site himself with his catalogue of crimes.
A colourful 40-year criminal career awash with cash and cocaine saw him serve time for drugs offences in Germany and France.
Like a James Bond baddie, Charrington was said to have kept crocodiles in the swimming pool of his Spanish villa.
Last January, three other Brits were held in the resort of Denia on the Costa Blanca after a high-speed police chase that led to the seizure of more than £10million of cocaine.
One of the suspects rammed two police cars after the Brits took charge of a van containing 300 kilos of the Class A drug from two Albanian criminals.
Two of the Brits were in the van and a third in a look-out car driven in front to alert them to any police roadblocks and other potential hazards.
There is also a British presence among the big crime syndicates that have made the hip bars and plush eateries of Marbella their fiefdom.
More than 100 crime gangs from 59 nationalities are estimated to operate in the tourist haven.
That includes 14 British firms as well as the Italian mob, Serbian mafia and Swedish biker gangs.
Such is the proliferation of multinational hoods that Marbella has been called the “United Nations” of organised crime by one Spanish cop.
Spanish journalist Nacho Carretero, whose reporting on the underworld was the basis for TV crime drama Marbella, said: “Once it was just the bosses who lived here.
“But now it’s the whole organisation, including the soldiers, so you have these kids from the streets of Liverpool or Dublin. They often get into trouble for misbehaving.”
The shooting on January 2 in nearby Puerto Banus saw former Hells Angel Saman Baghi, 34, blasted three times after he had alerted enemies by revealing his location on Instagram.
‘We’re bringing him back home where he belongs’
The Cologne native — a pumped up bodybuilder and ex-MMA fighter — had posted a story showing himself on an exercise bike at the Real Club Padel on January 2.
Within two hours, he had been shot by a man in black gym gear as he left the building.
German paper Bild reported: “One bullet went through his buttocks and grazed his penis, the second hit his anus, the third pierced his left leg.”
Miraculously, he discharged himself from hospital on the same day he was admitted, despite losing a considerable amount of blood.
In April, local authorities launched “Plan Marbella” in a bid to curb crime by boosting police numbers.
But the latest mayhem close to the city will do little to allay the fears of law-abiding locals.
Back on the Costa Blanca, a Czech man has been arrested in connection with John’s murder.
The motive for the alleged slaying of the dad — a one-time boxing champion who had become hooked on drugs — remains unclear.
After three weeks searching for him, his family now have a body to grieve over and will have a grave to lay flowers on.
Dad Billy — who had been searching for his son with other relatives — said: “We came out to get John, we’ve got John.
“Now we’re bringing him back home where he belongs.”
Another senseless victim of the blood-drenched Costas.