Original subtitles

The following programme contains flashing images, drug references

and very strong language from the outset and throughout.

(ROCK MUSIC)

The first time I went to Ibiza was the start of the summer in 1988.

But, yeah, I was a young man in my prime, 21.

Quite slim and good-looking then, not fat and 50-odd.

My friend was working out there, and I'd gone down to the airport,

got a cancellation for next to nothing.

And I had 300 E's that I'd made a sausage thing,

like a freezer bag, rolled up,

and then the clingfilm was wrapped round that.

And between the layers of clingfilm

was just table, you know, pepper. Just pepper.

Just in case a sniffer dog come near you, the pepper will put the dog off.

Once I was on the plane, I had a lot of apprehension.

A million and one thoughts going through me head.

At one point I thought, "Should I go and throw these

"down the toilet in the plane?"

But, obviously, I was thinking about

what could go wrong when I got off the plane?

I didn't really fancy ending up in a Spanish nick.

But I held it together, fronted it out

and walked through, and felt like kissing the ground, you know!

# INNER CITY: Good Life

# It's a good life

# Hey, hey, hey...#

It was a complete culture shock to me

because I see some things that I'd not seen as a young man

before I went to the island.

The drug scene in Ibiza was still in its infancy.

But you could see by the way the clubs were developing

and the drugs scene was growing that it was all going to explode.

# HOWLIN' WOLF: Spoonful

# 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... #

WOMAN ON ANSWERPHONE: "Sorry, I can't come to the phone right now.

"Just leave a message after the tone."

(ANSWERPHONE BEEPS) WOMAN 2: "Hi, Mum, it's Kelly.

"I'm sorry I haven't been in touch for a while.

"I meant to call, but I'm doing well, I'm still in Ibiza."

# ROBERT MILES: Children

KELLY: "It's mad out here,

"but don't worry, I'm behaving myself.

"I'm totally skint, though.

"Prices here are crazy.

"I met someone. A guy."

How about one of these?

What, is this your place? Yeah.

Yeah, it is.

"I think you'd like him."

"He's a bit of a business man."

Erm, OK.

How about a job?

Yeah. Yeah, I could work something out for you.

What else can I do for you?

What have you got?

"You could say he, well, gave me a real taste of the island."

# ROBERT MILES: Children

(LAUGHS)

Oh, mate.

Ahh.

I first heard about Ibiza in 1988...

..from lots of people that were coming back

from having experienced MDMA

and the club scene over there.

And everybody was talking about it.

If it wasn't for Ibiza, the acid house scene wouldn't have happened.

Genesis, that was my organisation,

we did some of the biggest illegal parties

in the history of Great Britain.

And we were absolutely relentless in our pursuit of a good time.

You know, we did take a lot of drugs.

The rave scene was people who were just trying to escape their lives.

Back then, England was a very violent place.

Especially for me, coming from the tough streets of Hackney.

You had to walk around like you owned the place.

You had to have a real strutter about you.

You had to be grrr, you know.

And so to leave that behind and to come to those warehouses,

that changed our lives.

Get out the way! Out the way!

But police were stopping all of the events.

We were getting threatened

with six-month mandatory prison sentences,

£20,000 fines.

And so you can either decide to stop or you can decide to carry on.

(CLUB MUSIC)

We decided that we would carry on.

We came to Ibiza,

and we was hopeful that we could actually start something new.

We launched a night at Pacha called Love It.

DJ: Come on!

It's been long time, no see.

It was always a banging night.

It was always a banging night.

(CLUB MUSIC)

To get that opportunity to leave Britain

and come to a place like Ibiza,

I mean, all of the kids were leaving Britain to come here.

And who could blame them.

Thank you.

I grew up in a very provincial little village.

Pretty much pot-less, penniless.

And I just never felt like I was anyone special.

I was bullied and picked on.

And it was shit, basically.

I knew there was something else out there for me.

And I started hearing about this Ibiza place

and I was, like, "There is where I have to go."

Back then you had to book your holiday on Ceefax and Teletext.

God, this makes me sound ancient.

And I remember booking, like, this £36 flight

which I couldn't really afford.

I got out the taxi at the bottom of the West End,

and I couldn't believe it.

It was alive.

It was loud.

It was the craziest place to be in the world.

I just threw myself into it.

It was just the best place in the world. I've got goosebumps.

But there probably wasn't many people in these clubs

that didn't take something of some kind.

# FELIX: Don't You Want Me (Hooj Mix)

# Don't you want me? Don't you want me?

Ibiza was the best place on Earth to take party drugs.

# Don't you want me? Don't you want me?

After about 20 minutes, the hairs on your arms stand up like static.

Warm rushes start from the top of your head

and it would go to the tip of your toes.

# Don't you want my loving? #

And I've actually been on the dancefloor with hundreds of people,

and then suddenly I'm elevated above everybody's heads,

and I'm walking towards these lasers.

It just takes you to another world.

It is completely mind-blowing.

I didn't stop dancing, and I just remember the sun coming up

and all of these people smiling.

And it was, like, "What is this?"

Because this didn't happen where I grew up.

If you took an ecstasy tablet, you had a bit of escapism for a while,

and you'd be out dancing like a lunatic.

There was actually one part of the night

where I could feel my arms moving,

and it was like firing laser beams out my fingertips.

Everything was amplified, like that feeling of being able

to show love to your mate, you know.

It was very sort of... "Yeah, alright, love you, brother."

You would just feel this connection.

I mean, I've seen some really hard gangsters,

and even those guys are telling their friends

that they love one another. And I remember thinking,

you know, if it can transform you, it can transform anybody.

It was a life-changing moment.

DIRECTOR: Where are the drugs coming from?

I don't know. (LAUGHS)

I don't know where they come from. The drugs are just there.

(SINISTER MUSIC)

I got involved with the E's through stolen cars.

You know, I was known as Chris The Car Thief.

Because there was a few Chrises,

and that's how I got identified for a while cos I was good at it.

A fella from South London, a well-known villain,

asked me to get him a car.

And when I've delivered it, instead of getting paid in readies, cash,

he's given me a bag of E's.

I said, "What the fuck?"

He said, "You'll earn your money with them, Chris."

You know, it equated to £700. There was 100 E's in there.

So, I've took them

and at the end of the night, the money had more than doubled.

I thought, "Well, fuck me, there's money here."

And within the space of a month, or so,

I'd gone from 100 E's to buying my own thousand.

Ecstasy had a big impact on Ibiza.

People was going out there,

A) to have holiday, and B) knowing they could earn good money

if they took ecstasy tablets out there.

And I was given an opportunity to get involved with that.

There was a lot of money to be earned,

and because they was little tablets, I see them as harmless.

I didn't see it as a hard drug.

DIRECTOR: How many pills did you send to Ibiza?

A lot more than one.

I've gotta be careful what I say here. Ha ha. Erm...

To be honest, over the course of time,

I could probably say,

if I don't get ten years for it down the line,

I'd probably say, allegedly, about a hundred thousand pills.

It was a lot of money, yeah.

The early days were brilliant,

but people started to get greedy, and things started to change.

(CLUB MUSIC)

BARTENDER: Right. Anything else to drink?

(ANSWERPHONE BEEPS)

KELLY: "Hi, Mum, it's me again.

"I know you were worried, but I told you I'd find something."

(BREATHES SHAKILY)

Ooh! Shit!

"That guy I met?"

(CHUCKLES)

You ready? Yeah.

"He's got me a job. I'm working at his club."

(CLUB MUSIC)

"I've met so many people.

"I'm really starting to feel at home out here."

How many?

"I'm actually doing alright.

"I might even be able to pay you back soon."

Any trouble tonight? No, it was alright, actually.

Sorted.

Before we all came, the island was this beautiful, lovely spot.

We were the ones that brought all of this club life to Ibiza.

And then once that club life came, that drew lots of drugs.

I would definitely take some credit

for actually bringing life to the party scene in Ibiza.

Basically, you've got thousands of people who were bang up for it,

who were really looking for that mad night out,

so there is an opportunity as a party promoter

to stage events for the whole summer.

And so that's what we did.

And that's when Ibiza really started kicking off.

# ENERGY 52: Cafe Del Mar

I would literally go from one spot to another,

start popping pills, and whatever.

And that would be the beginning of a three-day bender.

You know, no sleep till Wednesday.

And if you wanted madness,

the best place to go was Mike and Claire's Manumission.

You could see all types of things.

Whether that would be, like, a dwarf dance troop.

Or Mike and Claire on stage having sex.

Remembering you're high out of your brains.

For us, that was all about living life to the max.

You party as hard as you can party,

and, you know, you abused your body in ways that you shouldn't have.

It was insanity.

There's something about Ibiza that draws people in.

I came over for a holiday,

and when I came to leave, I flew home.

And within 24 hours I was on a plane straight back here.

I left everything and came back with less than £50 in my pocket.

So, the next night I started working in a bar.

But I got sacked off from the bar,

and I shared a flat with this other girl.

We obviously needed to get some rent together.

She said, "Well, why don't you come and do what I do?"

I went, "Well what do you do?"

She explained, she sells a few pills.

And she just kept saying, "I's really easy."

"And you can make some money." And I just thought, "What the hell?"

It felt like you were serving a purpose.

You're surrounded by people that have been doing it for years,

at a bar where the bar owner knows what's going on.

Erm...

It seemed so normal.

So normal.

Also it sounds sad,

but people liked me because I was with this girl

that did that.

It was like a Miss Popularity all of a sudden.

And then, at the end of the day, people would go off happy,

there'd be some money, and the rent was paid.

It didn't seem like you were doing anything wrong

because everybody was involved.

But, obviously, now I realise it was probably very, very stupid.

(SIREN BLARES)

(SPEAKS SPANISH)

# ROB DOUGAN: Clubbed To Death (Kurayamino Variation)

Most of the E's that I originally got was sourced in Holland

because that's where the best quality pills come from.

And every day we had lorries coming over from Holland with flowers on.

The ecstasy tablets would be in amongst the flowers.

Probably had about 30,000 E's in a flower box.

They'd get to the market.

There'd be people called "catchers,"

who used to get paid to look out for...

The boxes had been marked in a certain way.

My job was I was good at logistics,

sorting out transport for people.

If someone was moving out to the island,

and you knew the removal firm,

you'd see if you could buy a bit of space on the lorry

and do what they call a "throw-on",

like, throw a bag in there.

But different people had their own techniques, you know.

A friend of mine had a business

where he used to send, of all things, Walls sausages

and bacon in a container.

Ecstasy was put on the containers with the bacon and sausages

and being imported into the island, and that was on a big scale.

(SPEAKS SPANISH)

(TECHNO MUSIC)

If there's a plane going to Ibiza,

I guarantee you there was ten people on that plane

taking ecstasy tablets out there.

5,000 pills per person,.

That's 50,000 E's going into the island on one plane.

The way that it helped the island grow,

you know, there's nothing that compares to it.

People could go out dancing longer,

so clubs stayed open longer, they sold more alcohol,

the crowds got bigger. It's just been an evolvement,

and a lot of that was down to an ecstasy tablet.

For me, Ibiza is a land of inconsistencies.

As a kid, I loved it.

But I went back as a sort of cub reporter,

and it wasn't the laid-back place it had been in my childhood.

It had become a full-on party island.

I was interested in crime,

and I'd started to nurture some of the big names

in British crime and in Spanish crime.

And they were telling me how things were changing.

As ecstasy took off -

and we're talking big scale now -

the bigger criminals heard about it.

They saw these opportunities,

and they wanted to grab some of it for themselves.

And the major criminals realised

that mass producing ecstasy, as tablets,

was really a licence to print and make millions.

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

DIRECTOR: A million pills every month?

Mid-90s really was the big implosion.

Big-time gangsters had come in,

and as the island itself became overflowing

with people wanting drugs, as well as the criminals supplying them,

it became a much darker place.

Wait for me here. I Just need to speak to somebody, alright?

Alright.

(ANSWERPHONE BEEPS)

"Mum. Er, t's me."

I don't know how to tell you this.

But things started to happen.

(MAN GRUNTS)

MAN: Argh!

Urgh! Ugh!

ATTACKER: Ugh!

Ugh!

"That guy I met..."

Steven: You shouldn't be here.

"..he was involved in something."

(CLUB MUSIC)

Over the years, Ibiza changed.

You started to see the dark side.

The island was flooded with people

that had come over thinking that they were going to have

this crazy, wild experience.

You'd see a lot of people just drunk out of their minds.

So, it became a bit of a cesspit.

We'd sit at a table,

and people would go, "Here's some money, can I have this?"

Just people in the West End that were going out clubbing.

Pills were like sweets,

it was really crazy.

It was everywhere, it was mental.

(SPEAKS SPANISH)

Criminals are all about territory.

And the Spanish naturally felt Ibiza was their territory,

and there were foreigners making a lot of money. How dare they.

That's when a lot of the tension began.

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

Control the clubs, control the drugs.

That's what they worked on the basis of.

And it worked very well.

It was a form of protection they were offering.

But in exchange they were being allowed to sell pills.

DIRECTOR: If I was a rival dealer,

trying to deal in one of your clubs,

what would you do to me?

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

DIRECTOR: And what if I keep selling?

There were three or four or five main groups of guys

that people used to get their stuff off

that you were under, under, under, under.

You lived in fear of those guys.

I saw some guy get chased

and cracked over the head with a pool cue

so many times his brain split open.

You know, there was a lot of nasty shit that went on in the West End.

There was a scary moment that made me think,

"What on Earth am I doing?"

It was the end of the season. I did owe a little bit.

And it was only a little bit.

And I came home, and a couple of the men were in the house

which was not nice.

The fear that that set into me was hounding me for a while.

(BIRDS TWITTERING)

In any scene, where there's a lot of money,

and there's drugs, you're gonna have issues with gangsters.

I just wanted to put the parties on.

But I realised that it's getting dangerous quite quickly.

You know we had seen different firms,

and when I say "firms," I mean, like, criminal gangs from England

come over and put it on a few different party promoters.

And what we meant by "putting it on,"

is that they were either, like, robbing them, or something,

you know, going to their villa and taking their money,

or they were, essentially, just threatening them.

I was scared of getting bashed up.

I was scared of getting disappeared.

These are things that I've personally been through.

And, if you put a foot wrong,

there's a good chance that you might not come home that night.

And that's just a fact.

Fear is a great motivator.

We'd have posters all around the island,

and sometimes what rival promoters would do,

is rip down my posters.

And it might seem trivial.

But as a promoter, that is a declaration of war.

You do that to the wrong person, you have to be prepared

to take the consequences because you're damaging our business.

You know, I'm a softie.

I'm one of those guys that was running around the warehouse

telling everyone I loved them.

But there are times when you have to shift gears,

and you have to be a little bit stronger.

We needed to make sure that we were strong enough,

so that nobody could do that to us.

And, so, you know, I had a strong firm behind me.

People big and strong enough and bad enough to kick the fuck out of you.

I totally got pulled down a path I didn't like.

I'm not an aggressive person.

You know, I'm a fun-loving dude,

so, it was totally out of character.

But you couldn't just say things,

you had to be prepared to carry it out.

(SINISTER MUSIC)

Things started to change,

and there was a little bit of a flip in the '90s.

You get involved to a certain point

where there's a lot of money being moved about

because people's morals seemed to fucking go by the wayside.

They become violent, unpredictable and unreliable.

The biggest risk was other firms.

Being robbed or being knocked.

DIRECTOR: Did you ever get robbed by another firm?

Attempted. Come through the door.

I got clumped with a baseball bat round the back of the head first.

Didn't put me down.

I stayed on my feet, and I got stabbed three times.

It was a solid-steel carving knife,

two millimetres away from my femoral artery, then into my stomach.

It was only when my leg give way and I hit the floor

that I thought, "Hold on, something ain't fucking right here," you know.

And it was literally like someone had poured a tin of red paint over me.

DIRECTOR: Did they get away with the ecstasy?

No. They panicked, you know, cos they thought they'd killed me.

But, yeah, they got away with 300 quid.

So, it weren't a good day's work for them.

But my neighbour had heard the commotion,

and, erm, come running over and probably saved my life that day.

(SPEAKS SPANISH)

(SIREN BLARES)

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

Right. Somebody has taken so many pills,

so many tablets at the disco Space.

we are told that this man has lost his conscious.

(SIREN BLARES)

(SPEAKS SPANISH)

DIRECTOR: Did you fear taking on the drug gangs?

(SPEAKS SPANISH)

They just started to police the streets and police the clubs more,

seeking out people that were taking drugs, selling drugs.

If you got caught, the Guardia Civil were very heavy on people.

You heard of people being kept in cells for days,

having their passports revoked,

not being allowed back to the island.

Horrific stories.

It sort of set the fear of God into me.

But I decided to get some money together.

So I went down to the bus station.

Obviously, people getting on the disco buses,

you want to target them, and you're, like, "Oh,

"do you want to buy some of this? Do you want to have some of this?"

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I just clocked a Guardia Civil, and I think he saw me.

And I just never forget running up the West End.

If I was caught as part of that operation...

..I could have gone to jail.

I know people that did go to jail. (SIREN BLARES)

That probably would have ruined the rest of my life, you know.

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

You're late. I said midnight. What's happened?

One of ours got stopped at the airport.

If he's grassed, I think the police...

I think the police are watching me. What?

I need you to take this for me. I need you to look after it.

Yeah? What am I supposed to do with it?

Just look after it. I'll be in touch.

(DISTANT SIREN BLARES)

(TV REPORTER SPEAKS IN SPANISH)

Mum...

I...

I fucked up here, and I don't really know what to do.

I got caught with something, but it wasn't mine.

I promise you, it wasn't mine.

(EXHALES) I don't know,

I think the police must have been following...

Terminado.

Erm...

I'm sorry, Mum, I have to go, but as...

..as soon as they let me back on the phones,

I promise I'll call you back, alright?

(SPEAKS SPANISH)

DIRECTOR: Were you ever worried about the police finding your lab?

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

DIRECTOR: Did the police connect you with the lab?

Ibiza just got too much. You know, you can have too much of one thing.

You know, the whole pressure, it just gets to you.

I didn't like having to be aggressive with people.

I didn't like that part of it.

It starts to just get you down.

I'd taken more drugs than I'd ever taken in my life.

I'd gone well beyond the limits of what anybody should take.

And it starts to mess with your mind.

I was breaking out crying for no given reason.

And I was seeing some

of the most horrific hallucinations I've ever seen.

So, I come to a point where I just couldn't take anymore.

I realised that I was damaging my mind.

So, I left my company, I left my business partner,

I left them with all the money.

And I decided that I was going to get

as far away from this as I possibly can.

(BIRDS TWITTERING)

If I'm honest,

consuming that many pills is playing Russian roulette with your life.

I've got friends, you know, some of them were suicidal,

and some of them are suicidal today. Some of them people got sectioned.

You look back and wonder if you've done any brain damage, or whatever.

But it opened up a whole world for me,

all off the back of me consuming MDMA,

so I'm not ashamed of that, you know.

I realised that I didn't want to do it anymore.

And, obviously, because I didn't take them myself either,

I'm selling these things that could potentially be harmful to somebody.

That was probably the worst feeling.

It was a dumb thing to do.

It's not something that I was proud of doing.

Erm...yeah.

Phew, I feel a bit... Yeah.

(GENTLE MUSIC)

Ibiza had become like a conveyor belt for people to make money.

And the residents knew perfectly well that this mass of people

that came to visit were helping

the economy of the island incredibly.

There was no way of getting off that conveyor belt.

If you did, suddenly the whole island

and a lot of peoples' incomes would just collapse.

But as we came to the end of the '90s,

the ecstasy bubble had burst to a certain degree

because the price of ecstasy had come down.

And the criminals realised, "We're not making the money like we were.

"It's time to bring some cocaine on board."

People that I was doing business with,

they started to move cocaine out to Ibiza.

It was a good money earner for them out there.

And, you know, they were sending quite big amounts.

One day my pals phoned me up and said they had a little bit of a problem.

They'd got something out in South America,

and it was stuck, could I help them out?

And they needed someone to get it home.

It weren't a massive importation, it was three kilos.

I've got through the airport at Buenos Aires,

thought, "Oh, this is alright." Get back to England,

got through Customs.

My pal's pulled up in the car,

I've thrown the bag in the boot,

drove up the road and we got ambushed by the Old Bill, by armed police.

And, yeah, that was that.

Goodbye, Vienna.

The hardest part was phoning my family

and telling my son

that I weren't gonna be home for a while, you know.

Erm...

Yeah, it still touches me today.

You know?

I'd rather have the shit kicked out of me. You know?

Physical pain I can deal with. Emotional pain I don't deal.

And that hurt, you know,

because I broke a little boy's heart, you know.

Cos he was a Daddy's boy, you know.

My mates used to call him my shadow, my Sam.

Sorry. Yeah.

Yeah, so, er...

Yeah

My son was only five when I went away.

You know, what I've done has destroyed my life,

destroyed my family's,

and it bottles back down

to that fucking age-old problem of greed, you know.

Stupidity and greed.

I'd rather be skint than go down that road again.

Erm...

I'm trying to be a better person than I was,

and do right by my family now.

(MOODY ACOUSTIC GUITAR MUSIC)

(SPEAKS SPANISH)

(SOOTHING MUSIC)

(SPEAKS SPANISH)

DIRECTOR: How much money were you making in the '90s through drugs?

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

The more money we was earning, the more cocaine you did.

That was partying in Ibiza.

If you didn't die, you had a story to tell the next day.

(SAPO SPEAKS ENGLISH)

Ibiza was a very loving place.

But I never went nowhere without guns and knives.

Like, that was my point.

Fucking kill me, or you're gonna die!

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