Moroccan Drug Lord ’El Nene’: From Teen Smuggler to Strait’s Trafficking Kingpin

"El Nene" was first arrested in 1989, at the age of 14, while transporting kilos of hashish for a local gang. At 16, he bought his first boat and created his own organization. Nearly ten years later, in 1998, he was arrested again in possession of cannabis resin bales. Considered at the age of 22 as "one of the most important Moroccan hashish traffickers", Mohamed Taieb had started building his empire from his hometown of Ceuta. Born in 1975 in the Poblado de Sanidad neighborhood of the autonomous city, El Nene served as an intermediary between the heads of about 70 networks and about thirty drug lords in the Spanish cities of the Campo de Gibraltar and the Costa del Sol, the coastline between Cadiz and Malaga.

Having Spanish nationality, Taieb who speaks Arabic, could go to Morocco and return to Ceuta at will. In one night, he was able to carry out three to four drug transfer operations. This allowed him to make a lot of money. In the 1990s, he developed a method that revolutionized drug trafficking in the Strait. It consists of putting several boats in the water but only loading one, thus reducing the risk of being intercepted. This is how El Nene made his fortune and did not hesitate to indulge himself in boozy parties in the cities of the Costa del Sol or by buying luxury watches in the shops of Puerto Banús, in Marbella.

El Nene, who was the subject of several ongoing legal proceedings for drug trafficking and attempted murder, was the main target of the Spanish and Moroccan authorities who were fiercely fighting drug trafficking in the Strait. He was arrested in 2000 in Ceuta and sentenced to four years in prison for a public health offense. The Interior Ministry requested his transfer to Madrid, but he managed to suspend this transfer several times. Then, he managed to escape and return to Morocco in October 2001, from where he continued to manage his network. Spain is asking Morocco to extradite him. But the Moroccan authorities refuse on the grounds that the fugitive is not Spanish but Moroccan and is called Mohamed el Ouazzani.

Arrested in 2003 in the context of a shootout between rival gangs in Tetouan, El Nene was sentenced to eight years in prison for these altercations and a drug trafficking case. He lived in comfort in prison and bribed the guards to have everything he wanted. He will then be transferred to the Kenitra prison from where he manages to escape on December 7, 2005, three months after his arrival, thanks to an irregular exit permit obtained with the complicity of the agents. The boss reaches Ceuta by jet ski. The Moroccan prison officers who contributed to his escape were sentenced to prison terms ranging from two to four years.

Wanted on an international arrest warrant issued by Morocco, Mohamed Taieb was arrested on April 24, 2006, while driving a BMW in the name of his brother in Ceuta. A few weeks later, he was extradited to Morocco to serve his eight-year prison sentence. According to Moroccan police sources, El Nene, upon his arrival in Morocco, was taken to a secret place and tortured, before being locked up for several months in an underground prison, without ventilation or light. He also managed to corrupt the agents of the penitentiary center. Upon his release, he was no longer the same, complains a close friend of the trafficker, specifying that he had become more violent. "He was already someone else before he died. The Nene I knew when I was young was not the one who was eaten by the fish."