Ibiza, "the perfect place for jaded executives, mature housewives and beautiful ladies". So begins the documentary that Sky Showtime has dedicated to the island of Ibiza and, more specifically, to the drug traffickers who pass through it. Interspersing the "new with the old", the first images already contrast the luxury of the tranquillity of the villas with swimming pools with the frenzy of the night-time parties.
The island "starts out as a dream place for hippies, but then becomes the drug capital of Europe," the sensationalist British documentary recounts. "It was the craziest place in the world, the best place to be. "You soon realise it's pretty dark: gangsters, cartels, people who are big and strong enough to blow you up". These are some of the definitions offered of Ibiza in the first two minutes of the episode, which already drift towards crime and mafias: "A very good place to kill someone and make them disappear".
The first episode of the documentary Ibiza Narcos focuses especially on the hippies, how they arrived on the island and their experiences in the communes and with drugs. According to the producers and collaborators, it was the hippies who introduced the drug business to Ibiza, as well as the reason why they opened the first nightclubs.
El Sapo
Jon Imanol Sapieha Candela, alias El Sapo, defines himself as the leader of the largest and most important criminal group in the distribution of drugs in Ibiza, as well as carrying out other types of crimes such as armed robberies. Born in 1963, El Sapo arrived in Ibiza when he was only six years old, when his father, "a rich hippie with long hair and driving a Ferrari", brought him. Sapieha explains that hippies like his father used all kinds of drugs, as well as bringing their own substances.
El Sapo does not like the hippie way of life. He has never been attracted by the habits or by being stoned all day. He himself claims he has never smoked a joint and jokes: "I'm sure there are vegetarians who sell meat". "I'm a complete capitalist. It can be seen that El Sapo followed in his father's footsteps, albeit on a larger scale, as his father organised the transport of hashish from Morocco to Spain. Organised mafias from places like France or North Africa shook up the drug market in Ibiza, the documentary recounts. The hippies had to step aside.
"My father belonged to what is called the 'hippie mafia', but I didn't. It's a kind of disorganised crime. It's a kind of disorganised crime - how are you going to organise people who are up to their asses in drugs all day long," says El Sapo. He got into the business when the boat on which his father trafficked disappeared "without anyone knowing what happened".
This event turned El Sapo into the criminal he became. He started importing hashish from Morocco and bought several boats to carry out his illegal activity. "For ten years I imported 120 tonnes of hashish a year," says El Sapo, who says that the drugs were not even hidden on the boats.
Organised crime
For him, "things changed" in the 1980s when the media started mentioning "that people come to Ibiza to take drugs". "From then on, we started to have tourists from all over the world," he explains.
Harry, the troubleshooter, belonged to an English criminal organisation, one of the first to enter the island to take over the drug business. Harry talks about the distribution of island territories between mafias and uses numerous euphemisms to avoid specifying that they made people who were against the business "disappear". He even disguised himself to look like different people to ensure that the payments were correct and the business ran smoothly.
Luis Alfonso Ares Fernández, a police detective, enters the scene, according to the documentary, when drugs were already more than present in Ibiza. Ares Fernández joined the police drug squad (made up of about five people) in 1987 and experienced the arrival of ecstasy, "called the love pill".
The persecution of ecstasy
"We walked the streets a lot and contacted informants," says Ares Fernández. Jean-Michel Fueter, a "marginal" criminal, as he defines himself, came to Ibiza after being arrested several times in his native Switzerland for smuggling hashish. His goal on the island was to become "a professional at doing nothing". "People were poor and happy to rent out their fincas to hippies," Fueter continues.
The production relives some of the moments Fueter experienced on the hippie farms, where drugs of various "potencies" were traded and even kept in hollow bibles. The Swiss became a drug dealer to get money to buy more drugs for himself. However, with the advent of organised crime, Fueter became a dealer, one of the first to trade ecstasy and even ship it to other countries from Ibiza.
Police officer Ares Fernandez and his team were on Fueter's trail, carrying out surveillance 24 hours a day. On 24 March 1984, the police group proceeded to arrest the Swiss trafficker as he was going to his "office" to pick up pills to leave for Valencia. It was the largest seizure of ecstasy ever made in Europe.
Clarkson claims that the arrest of Fueter (who spent three years in prison) marked the end of the "hippie dream". El Sapo, for his part, explains that the police "have to make numbers", make arrests, and that it was better for them to "catch people who pose no danger" than to catch people "who are a danger if you bother them". "I respect the police because they have never done anything to me," says Sapieha.
He says he was caught only once, when he was travelling on a boat with 58 tonnes of hashish, and was imprisoned. "But nothing happened; four and a half months and he was out," he says, explaining that it never crossed his mind to leave his "job" when he got out of prison. "A week after getting out, I do the same thing but bigger, to recover the money I lost", concludes this drug trafficker.