Michaella McCollum Connolly, dressed for work in Ibiza Facebook
A tale of guns, drugs, and go-go dancers currently playing out across the British tabloids is so bizarre, it might be a joint screenplay between Spring Breakers'Harmony Korine and Trainspotting'sIrvine Welsh.
In late July, a 20-year-old Irish dancer named Michaella McCollum Connolly went missing in Ibiza, where she was spending the summer working in bars in the seedy San Antonio district. After her family contacted Interpol and launched an international appeal for information regarding the young woman's whereabouts, she turned up, all right in Lima, Peru, where she and another Ibiza summer worker, 19-year-old Melissa Reid, from Scotland, were arrested after attempting to board a flight to Madrid with 11 kilos of cocaine hidden in their luggage. McCollum Connolly and Reid told authorities that they were kidnapped at gunpoint in Ibiza, flown to Morocco and then to Lima, where gang members gave them $2.3 million worth of cocaine hidden in Quaker Oats packets to carry back to Europe. Last week, the story took an even stranger turn when Peru's El Comercio suggested that the two women might have been recruited by a Lima-based gang run by Philip Austin Collins, the 39-year-old nephew of Phil Collins. (Collins, accused of a 2012 attempt to smuggle 50 kilos of cocaine across the Atlantic on a private yacht, is currently being held in Peru's maximum-security prison Piedras Gordas.)
The unfolding news has rapidly metastasized into a tabloid shitstorm complete with dominatrix photos, one-eyed bodybuilders, a gangster named Goldfinger, a prisoner found hanged in his cell, and "7am ketamine-fuelled raves." The latest salacious twists in the tale offer a teasing glimpse of a tawdry subculture where young people working as bartenders, dancers, and flyer-distributing "PR girls" rack up enormous debts on the island and are strongarmed into serving as small-time dealers or smugglers for local criminal organizations. ("From Ibiza to Peru: How gangs turn innocent young girls into drug mules," crowed the Mirror.) Sensationalist headlines aside, however, the story underscores the grim reality that lies beneath Ibiza's hedonistic faade: Some seriously sordid stuff goes on there. As it happens, that debauched behavior is the topic of a new book by the British academic Daniel Briggs. His study,Deviance and Risk on Holiday: An Ethnography of British Tourists in Ibiza, follows young, working-class British tourists as they run amok in San Antonio's bars and the island's superclubs.
The publisher's promotional copy explains, "This book represents the first attempt to step inside the holiday experience of young British tourists. Using ethnographic methods such as observation, open-ended interviewing and focus groups in San Antonio, Ibiza, this book reveals the ugly truth about 'how' and 'why' young Brits get involved in deviance and risk-taking when they go abroad, exploring vivid accounts of drug use, drug dealing, violence, prostitution, and injury." Along the way, Briggs encounters charmers like the Southside Crew, a group of four 20-something Brits, all with previous arrest records (one served time for dealing cocaine, another for battery) who spend their holiday on a booze-, drug- and rage-fueled quest to get laid.
Briggs' book shifts the blame for such "pathological" behaviors from individuals to a complicated nexus of socio-economic forces: The low-cost airlines that ferry tourists to the island in droves; the nightclubs that profit from clubbers' extreme inebriation; and, ultimately, a "neoliberal, free market society based around consumption," in which week-long Balearic benders serve as a kind of opiate of the masses the classic bread-and-circuses scenario, but played out with body shots and foam parties. Citing Zlavoj iek'sconcept of "unfreedom," Briggs writes, "[T]he behaviours these young working-class Brits exhibit abroad, to some degree, have been already structurally conditioned, socially constructed, packaged, repackaged and marketed to them and it is this commercial pressure which is aggressively foisted on them during their holiday in the resort."
SPIN spoke to Briggs about the White Isle's dark side, from binge drinking to criminal gangs. Diddy might want to hurry up and release his long-promised film tribute to Ibiza: "The island is in a dead-end situation," Briggs said. "The whole situation gets worse; it's like a cancer."
Given your research in Ibiza's nightlife community, what has been your reaction to the way this case has unfolded? There's a lot of silliness in the media. They love to take a very extreme case and blow it out of proportion, try to suggest that it's a general pattern. The question that they've been trying to ask me is, are Mr. Big and his evil bastard cartel ready to pounce on vulnerable, young British tourists in Ibiza? No. That's not what's happening at all. What this looks like, really, is that the party has got out of hand. The extent to which it's got out of hand is quite alarming. How do two young girls, 19 years old, go to Ibiza as casual workers and end up shipping kilos and kilos of cocaine from South America? Something fishy is going on, but I don't think it's Mr. Big or his bastard cartels.
Although a legal process will determine what's happened here, my research would suggest that these young women fall in the category of the kind of people who have let the lifestyle lead them into some very odd situations. Young people with these very patchy attachments to work and education get commercially duped into this lifestyle to the extent that they feel that, "Right, OK, let's have a bit of this permanent fun, get on the plane to Ibiza and live as casual workers." In the articles that you've probably seen, it was suggested they lived with other casual workers. There's a real hub of these hotels, almost complexes, dedicated to these casual workers. It's very incestuous. The parties that go onlots of sex, booze, lots of drugs. You're talking about people that see themselves a cut above the tourists. "We're living the dream. You people come here and have the good life for a finite period of time, but we're the casual workers. We live here, we work here, and you haven't got the balls to do what we're doing." Once they get into this situation where they're living it, it is a 24/7 party, seven days a week, for two or three months on end. How do you fund spending, I'd say, a grand or two a week on going out? It's certainly not going to be through a meager wage of selling tickets. If you're lucky selling tickets, you can get maybe 10 or 15 euros a day. If you're good, maybe 40. But it's very easy to have a little top-up and be selling Es and earn yourself an extra hundred euros a day. And you have some Es left over for yourself.
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Ibiza Drug-Mule Arrests Offer a Glimpse Into the White Isle's Seedy Side