Deals with the world’s most dangerous men

Julian Chisholm would stop at nothing to make his riches – including making deals with the world’s most dangerous men.

In 1990, the oil diver-turned-cannabis smuggler branched out and partnered with two notorious organisations – ETA and the Cali Cartel.

ETA was a Basque separatist group which believed large swathes of northern Spain should be independent. From 1959 it targeted Spanish officials and anyone considered an enemy of the Basque people.

The group killed more than 820 people, including 340 civilians, mainly in bombings. Some attacks were money-raising operations to buy weapons.

Around the time Chisholm went into business with ETA, they shot two Spanish Army generals, a prosecutor and two police officers.

One man ETA valued was Fransciso Jose Boo Torres – the skilled captain of the Dimar-B who sailed drugs around the world, including marijuana from Pakistan to Canada and cocaine from South America to Scotland.

The late Chris Howarth sailed on board the Dimar-B on one drugs run and described how, Torres showed him a stash of guns.

Torres revealed that one of the ways he had made money for ETA was taking £5,000 payments from African refugees for a voyage to Europe – only for Torres’s men to throw them overboard and shoot them dead.

It would be another few years before Torres would be taken down by a combination of Canadian Mounties, Scottish customs bosses and a woman from Stonehaven – as we will explore in this series.

But if ETA meant trouble, the Cali Cartel was even worse.

Feared in its native Columbia and known throughout the world, the gang dominated the world’s cocaine supply from 1975 to 1995, when the last of its leaders were caged or killed.

Its bosses, Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela – feared nobody.

In 1987, the pair broke their alliance with Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, confident they could go it alone.

They even made jokes to show how brazen they were, such as putting the Gucci logo on their cocaine packages to denote quality.

Another gag was at the expense of their nemesis, the Colombian President Virgilio Barco, who had sworn to stop the gang – the Cali Cartel put his name on drug packets.

Such was their free reign of South America, the Cali Cartel could fly aircraft at will, transporting cocaine to freighters waiting at sea, such as the Dimar-B.

They bought off everyone, from the police, army and navy, to government officials.

Once the drugs were loaded on to the Dimar-B, it was up to Scottish customs to find them – teeing up a dramatic conclusion in the new year of 1991.

Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela.