Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
The Great Train Robber, the Colombian drug kingpin and the deal that got Britain hooked on cocaine CASH CROP
Charlie Wilson met a Colombian called Carlos in Parkhurst prison in 1972. Carlos had been convicted of cocaine trafficking in London and, at first, Wilson was unfriendly towards the South American because he was a “druggy”.
So-called “real” criminals robbed banks and trains. They definitely did not deal in drugs.
But charming Carlos, a tall, handsome, dark-haired man who spoke with an educated, upper-class Spanish accent, had a friendly, relaxed manner that eventually put Wilson at ease.
Carlos taught him some of the basic economic reasons why cocaine dealing made good criminal sense.
Carlos told Wilson: “What’s the point in risking your life to rob a bank or hold up a train when you can make 10 times that money and never even have to touch the product?”
Wilson continued to keep his head down in jail. He was a frequent visitor to the library and when staff asked why, he would simply reply: “I want to learn about things. I missed out on school, so now I’m making up for it.”
Other inmates started calling Charlie “Mister Brains” because of his ferocious appetite for reading and researching.
He had access to US newspapers, which carried stories about the cocaine epidemic then sweeping the USA.
It was giving him ideas. If cocaine was that popular, it was time it got sold in other parts of the world, surely?
Wilson worked out that in order to orchestrate the sale of the drug across Europe and the UK he needed to have a base well away from London. He settled on Spain.
When he was freed in 1978, Wilson moved with wife Pat to the Costa del Sol and quickly became a banker to one of the large hash-trafficking firms operating between North Africa and Spain.
He realised his cannabis smuggling operations were being watched closely by the world’s richest cocaine producers, Colombia’s Medellín cartel, headed by Pablo “El Doctor” Escobar.
By the mid-1980s, the Colombian authorities were under pressure from the US to rid the country of its cocaine gangsters.
Escobar recognised there would be long-term business problems in the lucrative US market.
He started thinking seriously about Europe, where a ripe, young market of wealthy, upwardly mobile yuppies were potential customers for his product.
Enter Charlie Wilson. In late 1984, US law enforcement agents matched Wilson’s description to a man who flew into Bogota from Europe and then travelled to Pablo Escobar’s estate, the Hacienda Nápoles.
The property included a private zoo and was located between the Colombian capital and Medellín.
But Wilson and Escobar were said to have clashed so badly at their first meeting that Charlie stormed out of the drug baron’s ranch.
He later admitted he had taken a “f***ing big risk” losing his temper with Escobar. But he was the ultimate gambler and had calculated that the Colombian drug lord would trust him more if he challenged his authority during that first meeting.
Wilson secured a two-year agreement to buy and distribute cocaine on a vast scale across the UK. He would also handle big shipments destined for other parts of western Europe.
One former cartel member said: “Many had turned up in Colombia and
ON HIS COCAINE HABIT
never been seen again. Yet here was this old gringo, and he’d just been given carte blanche to handle more Medellín cocaine than anyone else in the world.”
Wilson was on a mission to make tens of millions of pounds. Escobar told one associate in Medellín he believed Wilson would become the godfather of European cocaine-trafficking.
But there was still work to be done. Back in Spain, Wilson could soon be found pulling out bags of cocaine while chairing meetings to discuss deals.
He would invite everyone in the room to take a snort.
One old friend said: “Charlie wouldn’t touch the stuff when he first came to Spain, and that had made some of the chaps a bit nervous,.
“Then one day, this mouthy villain says to Charlie, ‘How do I know you ain’t rippin’ us off. You won’t even try it yerself ’. So Charlie chops out a line and off he goes. Trouble was he got a bit hooked on the stuff.”
This was the world in which Wilson, a grandfather in his mid-50s, now lived.
He was dealing with vast shipments of cocaine, consuming huge amounts of drugs himself, enjoying a lively sex life with multiple women and spending his vast income with creditable panache.
But then Escobar and his associates heard that Wilson might not be using his money very wisely, and the Colombians believed that the weakest link in the cocaine trade was always money. One of Wilson’s oldest criminal associates later explained: “I’m not sure Charlie took Pablo Escobar seriously enough. He used to tell us that Escobar was some kind of nutter, always puffing on a joint and talking nonsense.
“I said to Charlie one time, ‘You need to be careful of him, you’re not that important to him and he’ll drop you right in it if you cross him in any way’.
“Charlie looked at me and smiled, ‘He hasn’t got the bottle’.” Charlie looked on