The end of the heroine king

Nicol, in a photograph provided from the book Traffickers of Death.

A broad-shouldered man with a black leather jacket, a large bald head, walks handcuffed with the National Police in June 2019 through the outer courtyard of the Pontevedra police station.

His name is Sabdullah Unnu, Nicol, he is 61 years old and has two nationalities: Turkish and Dutch.

In 1994 he was arrested in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) with the largest cache of heroin seized in Spain to date: 119 kilos that he kept in an apartment full of drugs where he used closets as stalls.

In 2008 he was arrested again, this time in Sitges (Barcelona), again with the largest cache of heroin seized in Spain and one of the largest in Europe: 316 kilos of drugs packed into 633 packages inside a sailboat that arrived in middle of the night to the Catalan coast.

He went back to jail, came out again after serving his sentence and learned from mistakes.

Or so he believed.

In recent years, he never spent more than two nights in one place, he could make trips by car of more than 2,000 kilometers, he slept in the car on many occasions and he did not have a mobile phone;

she communicated by calling from phone booths and her dealings were open face.

This man they called Nicol had run a 21st century business since the 19th century, exaggerating security measures until he was known as the itinerant drug lord, one of the most powerful heroin drug traffickers in Europe.

He was hunted in June 2019 at a toll on the highway between Pontevedra and Vigo when he was on his way to deliver seven kilos of heroin to Francisco Javier Janeiro Javillo, who was waiting for him in Sanxenxo.

He died last week on the street after being released on bail weeks ago by the National Court.

The news was advanced by Diario de Pontevedra.

He was 62 years old.

Its history dates back to the early 90s, when Nicol was a successful young businessman who had a position in Mercamadrid and a seafood import business with interests in Chile, Spain and Turkey: Mariscos Nicol, based in Coslada (Madrid) .

Too much money, too much business.

The National Police already had him under radar when, in December 1993, German agents intercepted a truck with 58 kilos of heroin destined for Spain.

The driver asked to collaborate with the authorities: he sang that he had to leave the load in Madrid and he lent himself to play along with the agents.

The information is detailed by journalist Víctor Méndez in a recently published book, Traficantes de la muerte.

From heroin to fentanyl (Editorial Catarata), where he reviews the implantation of this drug in Spain, giving names and surnames to the main traffickers and the operations that brought them down.

Specifically, the one who first identified Subdallah Unnu, Nicol, was due to the betrayal of the driver of the truck captured in Germany.

Due to the fact that this transporter did not know the owner of the drug or its recipients in Spain, the police, with their help, led it to believe that the movement of the heroin had taken place without incident.

Juan Antonio Ojeda, a member of the Central Narcotics Brigade and current head of the heroin section, recounts in the book how Nicol's arrest was carried out.

The driver made the drug traffickers who were waiting for him in Spain believe that he had arrived at the Feria de Madrid hotel where the delivery had been agreed.

He did it from a German jail.

He called, said his room number, and announced that he was waiting for instructions.

The person who spoke to him told him to wait there.

The prisoner, however, wanted to alert the drug traffickers by saying two or three times, without much meaning in the conversation, that his head hurt to make them see that something was wrong.

It didn't work.

His interlocutor arranged an appointment with him at the hotel and, there, a surveillance device identified Sabdullah Unno, Nicol, entering the establishment, who left empty and remained crouched for a while.

By then, in the Central Narcotics Brigade, he was the man to watch.

They found that he lived in a chalet on the outskirts of Madrid, in Barajas, and that he combined his legal business with the illegal one.

He used to go for coffee at a hotel in Alameda de Osuna, where he was called directly to the reception phone and received visitors.

Police learned that Nicol was involved in several heroin operations at the same time, and that his name was directly or indirectly related to stash seized at the time.

It was learned that a flat on Calle Caballería Española in Alcalá de Henares was his center of operations, and there he was detained with sufficient evidence, one of them the inconspicuous delivery of boxes of prawns in some establishments with the Mariscos Nicol anagram.

It was December 13, 1994;

119 kilos of heroin and several weapons were seized, in addition to the arrest of two Turks and two Spaniards, one of them a prison officer who was helping the gang from an Asturian jail.

Nicol's second arrest was 14 years later, in 2008, and after a very slow and laborious investigation similar, in his execution, to the landing devised by the Turkish-Dutch drug dealer to bring more than 300 kilos of heroin into Spain.

Months of monitoring trying to decrypt the language used in the wiretaps and traveling south following the gang ended the day when police officers watched in shock as Nicol, accompanied by a member of his team, parked near Port Ginesta, in Sitges, guarded with binoculars by agents from two nearby hills.

There they learned what it was about: a ship.

Like the previous operation in which Nicol fell, this one was on the verge of being frustrated;

this time by a random control of the Civil Guard in the port.

Undercover agents (one of them as a security guard at the facilities) warned their colleagues that they were about to capture a cache, and that the random device would scare off the drug traffickers.

The Civil Guard withdrew from the port and the Turkish-Dutch organization was arrested and imprisoned.

Sabdullah Unnu, Nicol, was re-arrested last year after serving a sentence for his latest landing.

He took all imaginable security measures, but fell by chance — the objective was not him — when entering into deals with Francisco Javier Janeiro, Javillo, the largest Galician heroin trafficker.

Javillo operated from Ourense and the Rías Baixas with an organization of which his mother and wife were also part.

Nicol had seven kilos of heroin hidden in the car;

Javillo's gang seized 66 kilos of speed, 134 acorns of hashish, 250 grams of hashish pills, 30 grams of cocaine, two revolvers, a blank pistol, a shotgun with superimposed barrels and 130,000 euros in cash.

The police fished with dynamite in what they called Operation Javillo without knowing that it was also taking away a veteran king of heroin.

Police sources do not explain why he was granted freedom pending trial;

the cause of his death is from a heart attack.