At seven in the morning on Monday, August 4, 2014, a disgruntled woman entered the Ceuta Civil Guard Headquarters to report the disappearance of her husband. She was accompanied by her brother-in-law and a friend of hers. As she spoke, her rueful face contrasted with the security and integrity of her words. She said that the day before, at about half past five in the afternoon, her husband went out with three friends to sail on the boat that she had docked in the city's marina. She clarified that it was simply a recreational trip to spend the rest of Sunday at sea. When the boat was close to reaching the Moroccan coast, a black jet ski approached it at full speed and, without warning, one of its crew pulled out a pistol and began shooting. Her husband fell into the water, perhaps killed by a bullet or perhaps in a desperate attempt to save his life, according to one of those who witnessed the brawl. In any case, she concluded, from that moment nothing was heard from the father of the daughter she had given birth to 40 days earlier.
The first thing the Civil Guard agents suspected was that it was a settling of scores between rival drug gangs. “I believe”, the woman ventured to say, “that this has been a personal revenge.” And, bluntly, she pointed to the culprit: Sofian Ahmed Barrak, a young drug trafficker from Ceuta. "They call him 'Zocato', he has been working with my husband for a while and he had a mania for not giving him a promotion," she added without giving further details. The investigation of what happened began while the whole city heard the same question over and over again: Where is El Nene?
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Ceuta is one of the two maritime enclaves of Spain in North Africa. It has an area of 19 square kilometers and the unemployment rate of its 85,000 inhabitants is around 23 percent. To compensate for such adverse circumstances, the autonomous city has the status of a free port. That is to say: it has some tax advantages, such as the exemption from VAT on its exports and the return of half of what is collected in direct taxes. The measure, however, seems to be insufficient as there are few entrepreneurs or individuals from Ceuta who sell products to the rest of the peninsula. The smuggling of goods (clothes or tobacco, for example) and, above all, drug trafficking are the activities that support a large part of the families in this place, one of the key points on the hashish route to Europe because it borders Morocco. , the country that, according to data from the International Narcotics Control Board, is the main producer of this drug in the world. According to the Ministry of the Interior, Spain seizes 75 percent of the hashish that is intended to be distributed throughout the European Union.
In this loose territory, Christians and Muslims coexist with the Jewish and Hindu minorities. The majority of Christians are Hispanic Europeans with a standard purchasing power and almost all Muslims are from the Maghreb and have limited economic resources. Among the latter, there are more people from Ceuta (that is, Spaniards) and many others are Moroccans with temporary (or irregular) permits to reside here. The official language is, of course, Spanish. But it is common to hear Dariya, a North African variant of Arabic sprinkled with Spanish words and expressions.
In the streets of this city it is not uncommon to see several dealers walking their success. Motorcycles and luxury cars with loud music circulate through the center and a fleet of fast and stunning boats adorn its shores. The drug traffickers consider Ceuta their territory and for this reason they usually launder their profits right here. In fact, before the implementation of the euro, large amounts of Dutch guilders, German marks, Italian liras and British pounds were frequently exchanged at banks and exchange houses in this territory. This is how the origin of the clients of local organized crime was identified and it became clear that, in such a small area, with a population with little commercial activity or unemployment and without a buoyant tourist industry, the monetary exchanges were suspiciously exorbitant. For several years, it also began to amaze how several people from Ceuta invested more and more in the construction and hospitality industry on the Costa del Sol or even opened several bank accounts in Switzerland.
In Ceuta, the economic attraction that hashish represents is such that they have become accustomed to shooting it over each other. In the last five years of the 20th century, some 40 confrontations with firearms took place here, which left a dozen dead and more than 30 wounded. Then, for almost a decade, everything seemed to go smoothly. But starting in 2009, the shootings began to intensify again.
A sector of the city has been, and is, the usual "battlefield". His name is Príncipe Alfonso and it is known as "the Spanish favela" because of its narrow and steep streets, the disorderly distribution of its houses with colored facades, the informality of its few shops, the proliferation of thug children and adolescents, the rejection (and sometimes the aggression) to the foreigner, the constant shootings and the unemployment and illiteracy of obscene levels in this neighborhood resemble the most thuggish Brazil. Guns, hashish, altercations and even jihadist extremism abound in its "labyrinth". That is why it is classified as the most dangerous corner of Spain, a "mousetrap" in which health and security services have been trapped several times. Even most Ceutans do not dare to go up to this western part of the city, a few steps from the Moroccan border of Tarajal, because they know that the only rules that prevail between its alleys are those imposed by the drug gangs.
This ghetto hanging from a hill began to form in the 50s of the 20th century, when some North African fishermen excluded from government social programs built shacks and cabins to live. In the 1980s, with hashish trafficking at its height, brick “homes” began to proliferate, provided with water and electricity thanks to some botched job and adding a new floor every time the family grew. The overcrowding of substandard housing, among which despite everything 14 mosques were accommodated, reached such an extreme that today cars can only circulate on two streets of Prince Alfonso.
When the sun goes down, this neighborhood-border becomes a "wolf's mouth." The police leave, the only bus that crosses it stops transporting people, the taxi drivers do not consider entering it and then, aided by guns and knives, the gangs take control. Some unleash the outrages and settling accounts and others go to the coast boats to load, transport and then unload thousands of kilos of hashish in the Peninsula. And so life is spent in this cursed spiral of misery, drugs and violence that, moreover, spits out legends.
* * *
They say in Ceuta that a 14-year-old boy earned his first pesetas thanks to his impressive ability to repair boat engines. They say that he immediately knew how to put together devices that gave them greater speed and that it was not long before he was appreciated by those who controlled the passage of cannabis resin in the area of the Strait, due to his skill in traversing the waters, despite the conditions harshest weather conditions, to pick up and deliver bulky caches. They remember that the police learned of him when he was already a well-educated and independent trafficker, knowledgeable about the market and a strategist. That is, when he had turned 16 years old.
Everyone called Mohamed Taieb Ahmed El Nene. In 1998, when he was 22 years old, the Central Narcotics Brigade of the National Police classified him as "one of the most important exporters of hashish in North Africa." In April of that year, they arrested him and seized 1,800 kilos of this psychotropic drug, as well as seven ultra-fast boats, equipped with infrared viewers and radio transmitters, which he and his gang used to take illicit merchandise from Morocco to Malaga or Cádiz. Shortly before, in the face of police “harassment”, his men had thrown a ton of hashish into the sea (“if there is no drug, there is no crime”). It was a clear objective of the authorities and, nevertheless, El Nene was not daunted. On the contrary: every time he felt his heels snapped, he brought out his bravado and challenged and confronted and pushed back his pursuers. That is why his fame grew.
He told the people : he is the grandson of a Francoist sergeant. He is muslim. He has two brothers and two sons. He hardly went to school because he preferred the street. One of the first things he did with his drug profits was buy his mother a chalet. He opened several businesses (cafeterias, clothing stores, phone booths...) to give work to neighbors and friends. He not only lived on drugs, he also rented apartments and commercial premises. He gave motorbikes and cars to his people, sometimes of the same model. One year, for example, he flooded Ceuta with the most modern version of the Volkswagen beetle and, in one of his multiple arrests, dozens of these vehicles circulated for hours around the Police Station to make a display of support and power .
He investigated the police : His violence towards the forces of order was well seen by the majority of the population: he ran over civil guards, beat them in public, even put a knife to the neck of an agent during a control. His heyday coincided with the black luster of the 1990s in Ceuta, characterized by frequent shootouts between rival gangs and, in that state of violence, he moved freely. He displayed pistols, convertibles and wads of bills without being stopped by the police. He had reserved a suite in a downtown hotel in the city to entertain his people with drugs and orgies. He paid for the surgical operations of modest Muslim families. A lot of kids looked up to him and wanted to be like him. They tried to kill him, but never succeeded. He monopolized the pages and headlines of the newspapers, which he read with the morbidity and satisfaction of one who yearns for fame at any price. And, although film director Daniel Monzón denies it, his film El Niño, the story of a young man who gets involved in drug trafficking as if it were a game, is inspired by the life of El Nene.
He titled the press : Impunity and ostentation, characteristics of El Nene. Arrested the 'king' of the Ceuta mafia. El Nene distributed hashish throughout Europe. The police dismantle El Nene's gang. Ceuta, lawless territory of El Nene. He falls the biggest Spanish-Moroccan narco. El Nene turned his cell into a five-star hotel room. El Nene escapes from jail. El Nene leads a new shooting in the streets of Ceuta. The baby disappears.
He assured the Civil Guard : Mohamed Taieb Ahmed was born in Ceuta on August 27, 1975. His organization had 70 members in North Africa and thirty on the Costa del Sol. He was young, bold and violent. It is estimated that El Nene moved 50 thousand kilos of hashish a year and that his assets, taking into account his front men, was 30 million euros. The interposed companies and the third parties in whose name the properties appear are constituted with the corresponding legal advice from well-known lawyers from Ceuta. He was an innovator of illicit trafficking: he used baits to make it difficult for the police, that is, three boats left and only one was loaded. "The one we learned was almost never the good one." He broke the established codes among the mafias: he even simulated the loss of the merchandise to keep all the profit. He also had no qualms about leaking information about his competitors. Generous with his collaborators, implacable with his rivals, he behaved as the one who should impose his law in the territory.
The Customs Surveillance agents attested : In Ceuta nobody denounces drug traffickers, not even when they are their aggressors, because the law of silence is sacred. In many cases, the injured claim that it was an accident or that a stray bullet had accidentally passed through their legs. The Nene witnessed the first evolution in the transport of hashish in the Strait of Gibraltar, when the boats with an outboard motor gave way to the zodiac and, later, to the semi-rigid boats, endowed with great speed together with a higher load capacity. He soon began to show ability to pilot in extreme situations (moonless nights, strong easterly winds or fog).
They recognized his “enemies” at sea : Once their boats were requisitioned in the port, it was Mohamed Taieb himself who claimed them and personally paid the corresponding fine. He used to say: “when you pay a police officer in Spain they don't bother you anymore. Instead, in Morocco you pay one and the next day you have two more knocking on the door. The recklessness, his skill as a pilot, the desire for prominence and the taste for the exaggerated explain his popularity. Perhaps he was not the most important drug trafficker, but he was the most popular in southern Spain.
He boasted 'El Nene' : "I have more millions than years."
* * *
The intense roar of four engines is heard in the background as El Nene—shaven head, red sweatshirt, triumphant look and smile—glances at the controls of his huge, powerful Phantom glider. Immediately he looks up and sees the dozens of brown bales that are piled up on the deck. Then he turns back and observes the furrow left by his runaway passage through the sea. Thus – standing, in the middle of the journey – Mohamed Taieb Ahmed recorded himself with his own mobile phone and then uploaded the video to YouTube to exhibit before the whole world the joyful impunity of his leafy figure.
Images from the video where El Nene pilots a boat with hashish.
Actually, El Nene was not untouchable. He was clever and intelligent, he had clever lawyers and the admiration and complicity of his neighbors. That is why he managed to escape from some arrests and legal proceedings. But, even so, his criminal record shows that he was arrested 17 times by the National Police, 15 by the Civil Guard and that he spent a total of 11 years in prison for drug trafficking, possession of weapons and attempted murder. murder.
A month after, in 1998 (a year of intense shootings in Ceuta: two dead and nine wounded in 15 confrontations), they arrested him and seized almost two tons of hashish, the police captured eight of his cronies in Madrid and Malaga (four Spaniards, two Britons and two Moroccans) and took away 800 kilos of the most consumed psychotropic in Spain. That time, in Malaga, a cove (warehouse) where they vacuum-packed the drug before distributing it by land in vans was also intervened. The following year, 1999, El Nene was taken to jail accused of machine-gunning, from a large-capacity motorcycle and driven by his accomplice, a boy from the Príncipe Alfonso neighborhood as part of a settling of scores. But he left immediately. It wasn't until a few months later that he stepped foot in jail for the first time.
Two attacks on authority (injuries and disobedience) committed in previous arrests, and not drug trafficking, took him to a cell. His lawyers insisted that "these were not serious crimes", they asked him to serve his sentence in an open regime and managed to transfer him to the Victoria Kent Social Insertion Center in Madrid, a former beggars' asylum that, in the postwar period, Franco turned into a center detention of political prisoners and, later, in women's prison. After a series of reforms, in 1991 its buildings began to house people who were serving short sentences in semi-liberty for minor crimes.
El Nene had been sentenced to three years and two months. With the help of his lawyers and the complicity of his brother, he set up a car buying and selling company and presented a contract as proof that he would have a job as a manager there. That is why he entered and left, according to the regulations, the penitentiary center in which they had relocated him. But one Sunday in the fall of 2001, when he was close to being eligible for parole, his patience ran out and he decided to elope to Morocco. He settled in a luxurious mansion in the port of Marina Smir (an exclusive residential area just eight kilometers from Ceuta) and from there he regained full control of his illicit activities. He took the precaution of acquiring Moroccan nationality, under another name (Mohamed El Ouazzani), in order to avoid a possible extradition to Spain.
Things began to get complicated one night in the summer of 2003. Two rival gangs clashed in a shootout outside a nightclub and one of the injured turned out to be a bodyguard of King Mohamed VI, who was visiting Tetouan. The royal fury led to a thorough investigation of what happened and to arrest all those involved in that brawl. One of them, of course, was 'El Nene' and they soon sentenced him to eight years in prison.
The penalty, after all, was not too serious, because in the Kaki prison, located in Salé ("Rabat's dormitory city"), the audacious drug trafficker lived with the privileges of a pasha: they adapted three cells to way of "five star suite", with plasma TV, computer connected to the Internet and mobile phone. He sent his food to the best restaurants in the region, treated the guards like servants, entertained himself by humiliating the other inmates (making them compete in four-legged races, for example) and, from time to time, he was allowed to go outside. the street to settle matters related to their business or to blow off steam in a brothel.
The rest of the prisoners did not stop complaining about the prerogatives that El Nene enjoyed and, fed up with the situation, on September 20, 2005 they staged a riot. The protest worked and, eight days later, they transferred the brazen enjoyer to the Kenitra prison (36 kilometers from Rabat). But there he again corrupted the officials to rejoice during his stay until, in December 2007, he ran away. The news of the escape, however, was known ten days after it had occurred (because the silence of the officials had a price and he could pay it), which allowed him to return to Spain, where his crimes had already prescribed. Instantly, he went to renew his identity card at a police station in Malaga, with the peace of mind of any citizen who carries out the process. That time he had time to party in Marbella to celebrate his comeback in a big way and, settling in his native Ceuta, he took the opportunity to get his driver's license (without taking any courses or passing any exams) and immediately ordered a pair of Ferraris in a dealership. It seemed that everything would go back to the way it was before, but the police already had a lot of records on him and they were watching almost all of his movements.
He was apprehended (again) in April 2008, four months before his 33rd birthday, when he was driving through the center of Ceuta, aboard his brother's car. When they saw him, the police knew that he was El Nene, but when they asked for his documentation, he showed them, without being startled, an authentic Moroccan passport with another name. However, with the help of Interpol it was found that it was the same person. They immediately transferred him to Madrid by road and his lawyers rushed to file an appeal with the National High Court to demand his immediate release and not to be extradited to Morocco, because according to them they had captured a "Spanish citizen with no pending cases." ”. There was also a small demonstration in front of the Government Delegation in Ceuta to demand the freedom of a man who "gave work and was generous" with his neighbors.
The procedural appeal and the demonstration of support were useless: the judge took away his Spanish nationality "for using it for his convenience" and, in July 2009, he was extradited to Morocco. He spent three years in Casablanca jail, but when he was released he returned to Ceuta.
* * *
There is a lesson that maturity and the last confinement left El Nene: live discreetly and avoid any problem with the authorities. Go down the street without carrying drugs, weapons or large amounts of money. Have a house, a car and a boat without extravagance. Open a business, a cafeteria, for example, to use it as a "cover" and operations center for a "moderate" drug trade. Be patient and develop a great capacity for resistance. Fight to recover Spanish nationality. Take care of his wife and his newborn daughter. Trying to reach the age of 40 to stop being El Nene and become a real “man”.
Little by little he was consolidating the characteristics of that "new life" in Ceuta until, on Sunday, August 3, 2014, the sea swallowed him up and nothing more was heard of him. Two hours before the shooting, around four in the afternoon, Mohamed Taieb Ahmed called his brother to invite him to spend the rest of Sunday at sea. “Sorry, I'm in Malaga. Good luck”, he told her, and in order not to go alone, the drug trafficker who had given up extravagances invited two of his colleagues. Almost an hour later, the boat began to plow through the calm waters until the black jet ski and gunfire erupted.
His wife stressed to the Civil Guard that the Zocato was responsible, but she also recognized that it could all be a setup to disappear and "work" from the shadows with greater freedom and comfort. "I hope I'm wrong, but Mohamed is most likely dead," she said, wiping away tears.
There were three hypotheses: El Nene died, El Nene put on a theater, El Nene was wounded in the confrontation and someone took him to heal him and hide him.
In the immediate term, each assumption served to increase his legend. And in practice, who had been his right-hand man, a certain Hassan Chakor, replaced him with great success at the head of hashish trafficking in Ceuta, where clashes between rival gangs have continued to date, leaving deaths and injuries at levels that provoke “social alarm.”
Thus, five years passed until, in 2019, the Civil Guard found a witness to that brawl. He was a "repentant" member of the Ceuta underworld who asked to be classified as a Protected Witness in exchange for revealing the details of his long career as a drug trafficker. He said, among other things, that El Nene was murdered by two of his collaborators: Llalil Mohamed Dris, a hitman nicknamed El Loco, and Sofian Ahmed Barrak, the lucky Zocato who had grown tired of paying a commission for passing his own drug to El Baby.
According to the Protected Witness, Zocato and El Loco joined forces to end El Nene's life with the intention of freely using the hashish routes to also import cocaine from Mauritania. “El Nene had had problems with Zocato for money. He owed her too much. So, before they could kill him, he made the decision to finish off El Nene and asked El Loco for help.” Both, for several weeks, watched all the movements of El Nene and waited for the most opportune moment to kill him. The day that El Nene and his brother went sailing, the two got on a jet ski and went after them. They were armed with Glock pistols. El Nene saw them coming at full speed and jumped into the water, but when he emerged they shot him in the head. They waited for him to bleed to death before hoisting him aboard their boat and taking him out to sea. Then they tied it with a chain and an anchor to anchor it. And they ordered the boat to be burned so that there would be no evidence of the murder.”
At the end of that Sunday in 2014, the Civil Guard had arrested four men. They all refused to testify and were released after spending a few hours at the police station. Five years later the death of El Nene (and that of El Loco and Zocato, shot in an alleged settling of scores in 2018) seemed to be confirmed. But, to date, the mortuary remains of the capo have not appeared, hashish trafficking continues with great intensity in the area, as if he were still in control of everything, and among the residents of Ceuta the legend of him lives on.
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