The following programme contains drug references, flashing images,
strong language and strong images of real life injury.
Every level of the drug game was there in Spain and Ibiza.
And I can only assume that I got shot
because I was the conduit to the cheaper drugs.
They just shot me in the leg.
So the first one...
went right in my leg here.
(GUNSHOT) Bang. I've hit the deck.
And now I'm on the floor.
Fucking mug! Go on! Go on then!
(GUNSHOT) Bang! Gone through the arm.
I didn't think he'd do it again but he shot me again.
But it went through my willy and shot my right testicle out.
And then he come walking towards me. Like you.
You walk towards me. There.
And he pointed the gun out.
And I thought he was going to kill me.
Oh no, this can't kill me. And bang.(GUNSHOT)
He's shot me and I thought right I'm going to die.
No, no, no, no, no. And then I heard him running off.
I've had to learn the hard way because I didn't want to listen.
So I tell people listen.
You don't want to learn the hard way. It's no good.
It came right through there.
(THEME MUSIC STARTS)
# It could be a spoonful of diamond
# It could be a spoonful of gold
# Just a little spoon of your precious love
# Satisfy my soul #
(THEME SONG ENDS)
DANNY: 'In the summer of '92, when I was 18,
I come to Ibiza and it's just freedom.
I just got to experience freedom.'
(DANCE MUSIC) (INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Girls and bikinis and beaches
and I was able to do whatever I damn so pleased.
Just, just hedonism.
This is Es Paradis.
Es Paradis Terrenal.
Which used to mean, or stills means, it's paradise on Earth.
(PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC)
But we sat here and I just fell in love.
18 years old, looking around going, where am I?
Kid from a council estate, alcoholic mother, no father,
no money, debt collectors always knocking on the door.
And then you come here and you're in paradise.
And then we got the opportunity to do parties out here.
REPORTER: Tonight's the opening of Clockwork Orange.
One of the club's partners is 25-year-old Danny Gould
and he's got a long day ahead of him.
That looks wicked, darling!
Gotta put my dodgy outfit on yet.
I hate my outfit.
(DANCE MUSIC)
Clockwork in Es Paradis was always about the atmosphere.
But quarter to six, all the cushions would come out,
a man would go in the middle and sweep out all the glass
and all the cigarettes and then when it was all clean,
he'd give the thumbs up...
# I'm singing in the rain...
..and then the fountains would go on.
And then everyone'd go into the middle.
(CHEERING)
And you imagine 3,600 people.
It was just a maelstrom of madness and getting on it.
And if I wasn't the person at the end of the night
who looked the most buckled, then I'd failed basically.
And then, as more money we was earning, the more cocaine you did.
That's the basic truth of it.
(MUFFLED DANCE MUSIC) (MUFFLED CHEERING)
I think a lot of it was to do with the ritual as well.
Getting it.
Holding it.
Sharing it.
It's almost like a dance. Know what I mean.
Got a bit of bugle, got it in me pocket.
Do you know what I mean?
It magnified my madness.
If you didn't have a key, you'd punch the window in.
And then my mate tells me he was only joking,
and he's got the keys to the front door anyway.
That was partying in Ibiza.
If you didn't die, you had a story to tell the next day.
DIRECTOR: Where were you getting your cocaine from?
Ooh I can't remember.
Who knows where anyone got any of that stuff from.
Would you be driving a shipment of drugs in a car like this then?
(TENSE MUSIC)
(THEY SPEAK SPANISH)
(DANCE MUSIC)
(EXHALES)
(BOTTLES CLINK)
(WHISTLES)
Aye aye.
How's your night shift?
Yeah, get that down you, mate.
Ooh, look at this.
For me?
Nice one!
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
(MAN GROANS)
(MAN GRUNTS)
DIRECTOR: Cut!
Is that how things really went down?
REPORTER:
EL SAPO:
DIRECTOR: Press reports claim
that Los Miami were making 58 million euros a year.
(LAUGHS)
Late 90s, early 2000s, the island was evolving,
all these clubs expanded enormously
and it coincided with cocaine becoming far more popular
but there was a very difficult balancing act going on,
because Ibiza thrived economically
but at the same time was changing, was hardening up.
Turning into a tough, criminal island.
You've got British crime groups in San Antonio,
but the rest of the island was the Spanish crime groups
who've decided that it's their territory and they own it.
The dominant group was Los Miami.
They had a hell of a reputation.
They'd spent the previous decade dominating Madrid
and the area around it and they were now transferring their skills,
if you want to call them that, to Ibiza with great effect.
And I actually met a group of them once
and it was the most terrifying meeting I've ever had
with criminals.
They didn't laugh, they didn't smile,
they hardly said a word.
And I remember looking in their eyes and... there was deadness.
Cocaine brought with it a new, colder type of criminal.
Organised crime groups were all using enforcers
to keep control of their individual gangs.
Cos what they're trying to tell their own workforces
or other crime gangs is, "Do not fuck me over,
we will get you."
(GRUNTS)
'Basically all the drug cartels was there in Ibiza.
And I was doing business and doing things
with the highest level of criminal fraternity you could ever imagine.'
(GRUNTS)
'People got cut, beaten, stabbed and shot over there.
The same as any other drug haven.'
(GRUNTS)
'Anywhere the criminals go, drugs guns and violence goes.
And that's the reality of it.
It was my life.'
I come from a long line of criminals.
I weren't told we were all criminals.
But, you know, we got, "Shh. Police."
"Someone's at the door. Shh."
(EXHALES)
My dad was an international drug dealer.
Drove my mum to drink and drugs.
It sort of rippled into us.
So it was just like a chaotic life of madness, really, growing up.
Drugs abuse from the early age of 13.
You might smoke an ounce of crack
and then take a gram or two of heroin to come down.
But I went up the criminal ladder rapid.
Everything to do with stealing, robbing,
fighting, and guns and drugs. I was in it.
I was the guy that added value to people by looking after them.
And I done that through a lot of violence.
It was barbaric.
So you were the guy that could sort of guarantee
that a deal would happen? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
How?
You'd be doing something then all of a sudden I'd be there,
like... "Hello mate, I need to have a word with you."
And they'd be like, "Fucking hell Marv. What's the matter."
"Listen, (IMITATES GUN LOADING) what's your fucking problem,
are you gonna do it or not? It's not complicated.
And they'd go, "Ooh. Yeah..."
Ibiza was a very loving place.
But I never went nowhere without guns and knives.
If anyone was at that level with criminal activity,
they wouldn't go anywhere without them either.
That's all you've got to protect yourself, you can't ring the police.
Like, that was my point, with everybody.
Fucking kill me or you're going to die.
(CAR ENGINE STARTS)
How easy was it to bribe the police?
EL SAPO:
What was it like working with the cartels?
EL SAPO:
BARTOLOME:
EL SAPO:
What, you put trackers on their boats?
(BEEPING)
NEUS:
It wouldn't be a multi-million-pound industry
if the police wasn't involved.
Because they'd do everything they could to stop it.
What, so if you get caught..?
How big's the problem, mate?
How big? Please how big?
And they go... And you go...
Now fuck off.
That's how it was.
JAVIER:
BARTOLOME:
REPORTER (IN CATALAN):
BARTOLOME:
(SHUTTER CLICKS)
EL SAPO:
Were you on the boat?
(CHUCKLES)
BARTOLOME:
I had the authorisation for an American Express Black Card.
So I'm in Ibiza and I was spending like the king.
I mean, I been on the yachts partying, on the super yachts.
My drink of choice was Dom Perignon, yeah.
So I'm giving it the absolute biggun - partying, partying,
partying, partying. Buying everybody everything.
At the time, everything's the best in the world man, everything's fun.
BARTOLOME:
It's beyond your wildest dreams, it really is.
If I'm being honest, we was just insane.
And it was just, it felt normal.
But Ibiza had a really dark side to it
that you could only really suffer for a little period of time,
otherwise you'd crack up.
And a lot of people did crack up from Ibiza.
Some people lost the plot over there, man,
cos it was deep over there.
DANNY: I thought about this the other day.
Someone was in a club once and they was talking about someone else
and they went, "That geezer's a coke head."
I thought, how glamorous is that. That's how twisted I used to be.
I thought, "How glamorous is that? That's what I want to be.
I want to be a coke head." And I did. And I was.
And the more successful we were, the more I was taking.
It'd just go on for days.
But it was always the same.
Always made me clam up. Always made me like that.
Wary, my eyes got bigger.
It was just overpowering. I did it.
I did it for years.
But it's no fun.
The paranoia.
You can't think straight.
Everything's heightened.
Everyone going, "What's that noise?"
"Who said that?" "I didn't say nothing."
"What's going on?" "Who's outside?"
And you'd all go and hide in a darkened room
and looking out the curtains.
I used to think people were living in my flat, in the cupboards.
I'd search for them with a knife every night.
"I know you're in here."
And in the end, it broke me. It literally broke me.
I'd be frozen to a chair.
I'd just literally sit like that.
Frozen to the chair.
There was no partying. There was no conversation.
It was like a crackhouse.
That ain't normal, do you know what I mean. That ain't normal.
(MUFFLED DANCE MUSIC) (BREATHING HEAVILY)
(SNIFFS)
(DANCE MUSIC INTENSIFIES)
(PEOPLE WHOOPING, CHEERING)
(OBJECT CLINKS)
(OBJECT THUDS)
(SNIFFS)
(COUGHS)
(LAUGHTER ECHOES)
(SIZZLING)
(INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE)
WENSLEY: All of the crime groups
were filled with problems with cocaine.
The criminal bosses themselves were getting increasingly paranoid
about what their soldiers and their gangs were up to.
And that was leading to even more irritation,
violence, paranoia.
Honestly, it was a really bad environment to be in.
EL SAPO:
REPORTER:
EL SAPO:
NEUS:
WENSLEY: The implosion of Los Miami led to a power vacuum.
And there were a lot of criminals on the island
who didn't know which way to turn.
They didn't know who was their friend, who was their foe.
And it led to a lot of problems.
You never knew where you stood.
One criminal said to me it was impossible to know
what would happen in the next hour, let alone the next day.
Put it this way, I never got stabbed. I did get shot.
But I got shot by my own people, not by the Europeans,
my own people shot me. And the reason why I got shot was
because people wanted to mess about with the prices.
So I got shot to be taken out of the way.
Really? Yeah, because look,
everybody wants to make more money for themselves. They're all slags.
Everyone in the drug game is a slag that wants to make as much money
as they can for themselves.
So, look, halfway down the leg,
you can actually see the bullet, yeah? The whole bullet. See it?
I got told I'd never walk again,
but yet the bullet that went through the eye...
there's the bullet, that white thing there
is the bullet. It stopped halfway through my eye.
And they don't know what stopped it.
It's a bit of a miracle you walked away from that, isn't it?
I believe so.
(SNIFFS)
(GUNSHOT)
DIRECTOR: Why didn't you end up like that?
Someone shot you?
What happened?
REPORTER:
You were arrested in 2011
for crimes including drug trafficking, kidnapping,
violent robberies, the mutilation and amputation of limbs,
and money laundering?
JAVIER:
Why did you turn your back on the drug world?
Did you ever feel... guilty?
The people who had overdosed,
had become addicted to drugs that you were involved in moving?
So you didn't have empathy for them?
DANNY: In the height of my addiction,
I used to be sitting there gasping for breath.
Paranoid, going like that. (GASPS REPEATEDLY)
Thinking if I die now, I die happy. And that's sad.
We was in a restaurant one night
and I pressed what I call the "fuck it" button.
I went "Fuck it." I drunk that. I done this shot.
I done that. I went give me loads of pills.
Give me some weed. Give me some more gear.
At the end of that night, my head was like a melon
and I actually thought it was going to split open.
That was the pain in my head. Like, insanity.
And I woke up the next morning, rung my mum up, who was,
how long was she sober by then, 17 years,
I just said I don't think I can do this anymore.
The actual desire to wanna drink and to get on it every day
was gone from that moment.
I blamed the island for many, many years.
That's how mental I am.
Nothing to do with the island. It was who I was as a person.
MARVIN: I wouldn't go back there myself, personally.
Too many triggers of my old life.
Although it's very glamorous to some people,
it's a world they'd wished they'd never got involved in
once they got balls deep in the drugs trade.
It's not a place you want to be in.
It's not a world that you can be proud of.
And it's not a place you want your kids to be, so what's the point.
(WATER RUNS)
I thought about the ripple effect of my actions
and you think wow, like,
we do this to everyone else's kids, everyone else's family.
It was just, come on, this is madness.
And that was my turning point.
I'm embarrassed beyond belief
that I actually believed being a criminal
was a much better option than doing anything else.
Like, I'm actually embarrassed I was that thick.
(UPBEAT DANCE MUSIC)
Drugs have provided the good, the bad, and the ugly
as far as Ibiza is concerned.
Its finances and its economy
have continued to boom beyond belief.
And yet, in the core of it, it's got a criminal element
that probably no other island in the world has got.
BARTOLOME:
Something about this island kept drawing me back.
Some would say like the party scene but there's something else about it.
Only when I when I got sober did I actually realise what it was.
And it's just Ibiza in itself.
Everything that it gives to you.
The beauty, relaxation, the food,
the countryside, and the smell.
That pine. The sea.
When I'm here and I smell it, I'm back in my spiritual place.
It's just magical, amazing,
life-changing,
not to be forgotten.
(DANCE MUSIC)
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