In the centre of Playa de Las Americas, the high-rise party capital of the Canary Islands, is BDL Tenerife, which calls itself ‘Europe’s Biggest Coffee Shop’. But they don’t sell any hot drinks.
Instead, the menu offers half a dozen types of fizzy pop, plus no fewer than 44 varieties of marijuana.
To enter, you press the buzzer next to a plain set of double doors on the side of a shopping centre, and smile in the general direction of a security camera. Once they’ve buzzed you in, and taken 20 euros for ‘lifetime membership’, you climb a set of stairs to a vast lounge, filled with leather seats, pool and ping-pong tables, arcade games, and the most enormous cloud of smoke.
Curtains were drawn when the Mail visited yesterday afternoon. Ultra-violet lights illuminated a handful of bleary-eyed punters, and hip-hop music played in the background. Behind the bar were sweet jars filled with ‘product’, which came in varieties named ‘haribo’, slurry cane’, ‘white truffle’, ‘purple banana cream’, and so on.
The only rule, to keep things vaguely legal — or at least exploit a loophole in Canary Islands law that allows for ‘private’ cannabis consumption — is that patrons are required to spend at least 20 minutes inside on each visit. Oh, and the ‘weed’, which costs between ten and 30 euros a bag, must be paid for via a mobile phone app topped up with cash on the door.
Jay Slater with his friend Brandon Hodgkin at a pool party at Tenerife’s Hard Rock Hotel
Jay, 19, vanished into thin air almost two weeks ago after attending a weekend-long music event in Tenerife
BDL (which apparently stands for ‘Big D*** Lounge’) plays a small, but nonetheless instructive, role in the mystery surrounding Jay Slater, the British teenager who vanished into thin air almost two weeks ago after attending a weekend-long music event.
For on the afternoon of Sunday, June 16, the eve of his disappearance, it played host to a daytime party for revellers at the NRG (‘New Rave Generation’ festival, the event for which Slater had travelled all the way to Tenerife. Running from 1pm-6pm, it’s described in NRG’s official literature as a ‘coffee shop takeover’.
Four hours later, at 9pm, the festival’s final event kicked off at Papagayo Beach Club, a night-club on the end of Veronica’s Strip, a few hundred yards away.
Slater’s night there ended as the sun started to come up, around 4am. After which, he seems to have found himself in a car with two older British men, who he’d only recently met. They drove an hour north, via a treacherous mountain pass, to a tiny cottage in a secluded village named Masca. Then, just after 8am, he appears to have walked off into the hills. No one has seen him since.
A huge manhunt, along with a police investigation, is about to enter its second week. And almost every line of inquiry, in the increasingly desperate search for Jay Slater now revolves, in some way, around drugs.
There are, to this end, two vaguely coherent explanations for his disappearance. One is that he took leave of his senses, after three straight days and nights of substance-fuelled revelry, and decided to attempt a perilous and hugely demanding trek into the Parque Rural de Teno, a cactus-strewn national park that surrounds Masca. The other, as we shall see, is more sinister.
With regard to Jay’s state of mind, it had certainly been a heavy weekend. The NRG festival kicked off at 6pm on Friday, with an open-air rave at Xanadu, a ‘finca’, or horse ranch, in the hills.
Thousands of party-goers, who’d each paid NRG’s Leeds-based promoters 399 euros a ticket, were corralled into a Roman amphitheatre-themed arena, which usually hosts re-enactments of chariot races. Music and laser shows continued until 2am.
Saturday, meanwhile, involved a ‘pool party’ at Tenerife’s Hard Rock Hotel.
Here, Slater was photographed with two acquaintances with whom he’d travelled to the event: Brandon Hodgkin and Lucy Mae Law, an 18-year-old college student who seems to have been the last person to speak to him (by phone) before he vanished. Then it was back to Xanadu for another 2am rave, before Sunday’s events at BDL and Papagayo Beach Club.
While we don’t know if Slater attended every single event on this list (for example, no pictures have yet emerged of him at BDL), he was playing hard. It seems unlikely he was thinking entirely straight when the music stopped.
The young man was certainly in no fit state to go walking in the treacherous Masca valley, which is filled with steep ravines, cliffs and dense vegetation.
BDL Tenerife offers half a dozen types of fizzy pop, plus no fewer than 44 varieties of marijuana
Almost every line of inquiry in the increasingly desperate search for Jay Slater now revolves, in some way, around drugs
Alternative explanations all centre on the possibility that the 19-year-old apprentice bricklayer, who was on his first foreign holiday without his parents, somehow found himself on the wrong side of the organised criminals who run Tenerife’s lucrative narco trade.
Slater’s family, who believe ‘drugs are a worrying aspect’ of the affair, appear to suspect this may be the case. They have suggested he was kidnapped, perhaps after a drug deal went wrong.
His mother Debbie Duncan, who is in Tenerife, says she got a Snapchat message 24 hours after Jay vanished stating: ‘Kiss goodbye to your boy, you’re never going to see him again, he owes me a lot of money.’ She has since told reporters: ‘I think he’s been taken against his will with what’s been said.’
Intriguingly, in this light, I can reveal that local police are now investigating a scuffle outside Papagayo Beach Club shortly after closing time on Monday, June 17 — the most crucial hours in Jay’s disappearance — in which a burly Eastern European man allegedly had a valuable Rolex watch stolen.
Last Friday, one of Slater’s friends, who had come to Tenerife to join the hunt, told detectives that the early morning incident led directly to Jay going missing. Officers are now examining CCTV footage from the venue’s security cameras.
One theory now understood to be on the table is that the Rolex had somehow ended up at the remote mountain cottage to which Slater had travelled, and that he fled into the wilderness in an ill-fated attempt to steal it.
The hotel apartments where Jay was staying. His mother Debbie Duncan is now staying here while the search for her son continues
Jay with his mother Debbie, who is currently in Tenerife. She believes her son has ‘been taken against his will’
Though much-loved, Jay Slater is certainly capable of making mistakes.
Last August, he found himself at Preston Crown Court, among a group of eight youths convicted of attacking a fellow teenager like a ‘pack of gorillas’, using a machete, golf club and an axe, at an abandoned paper mill.
Judge Philip Parry said the case involved ‘intimidation of witnesses, supply of class A drugs, and street robbery’. However, the mention of drugs appears to have been a reference to two other defendants who were linked to a county-lines drug investigation. Friends of Slater, who got an 18-month community order, say the attack was in fact the result of an argument over a girl.
And in 2017, he was involved in a curious incident in his hometown of Oswaldtwistle, just outside Blackburn in Lancashire. He and a friend appeared in the local newspaper after a incident which saw them ambushed by a gang of three Asian men, who jumped out of a car and beat them up.
Both episodes are at least partly responsible for some of the more extravagant speculation that has been doing the rounds of social media in recent days concerning Slater’s disappearance.
Many online sleuths believe he financed the trip to the NRG festival by selling drugs on behalf of a criminal gang.
To this end several photos and video clips taken at the Sunday night event show him behaving somewhat suspiciously: touring the dancefloor, seemingly attempting to catch the eye of revellers.
Whether his T-shirt was on or off, at all times a large black bag with thick straps is seen hanging from his shoulders.
A huge manhunt, along with a police investigation, is about to enter its second week
On TikTok, where all manner of conspiracy theories are being aired, millions have viewed a clip purporting to contain audio of a conversation recorded at the event between Slater and a female companion. They appear to be involved in a frantic argument after losing the bag in question, which contains a significant amount of cash, with the girl apparently saying: ‘You’ve lost the bag? If we lose it, you’re done!’
The clip appears to be a fake, however. When the Mail played it to Jay’s mother Debbie, she said that the voice of the man talking on it does not match her son’s.
A second viral TikTok film that can be safely debunked revolves around a long message, apparently typed via the ‘notes’ facility of an iPhone by an anonymous friend of Jay. It claims he’d been recruited by a drug gang and offered £5,000 to spend the weekend selling drugs.
The message says Slater was then given a bag containing a large quantity of narcotics ‘to sell at the festival or on the streets.’
However, it claims, he discovered at around 3am on Monday that he’d managed to lose not only the bag but also a significant quantity of the gang’s money.
Readers are then told that furious organised criminals responded by kidnapping Slater and threatening to kill him unless they are reimbursed with £30,000. It alleges that Jay never actually visited Masca.
Instead, it claims his friends then cooked up an elaborate scheme to stage his disappearance by taking a taxi to the hills around the village and dumping his mobile phone in a remote patch of undergrowth, before launching a crowd-funding appeal to raise the required cash.
A GoFundMe campaign has certainly been launched, with £41,000 in the kitty. But although it has been viewed more than five million times, the theory advanced via this second viral TikTok — namely that Jay never visited Masca — is also demonstrably untrue.
For at 7.30am on the morning Slater went missing, he used Snapchat to post a blurry image of his right hand, holding a cigarette. It was tagged to the local area, and the tiles in the background match those outside the AirBnB to which he was taken.
More to the point, the sister of the rental property’s owner, one Ofelia Medina Hernandez, has told the Mail that she saw the teenager standing by the bus stop next to the property around 8am, when he’d asked about buses back to Los Cristianos, the town in the south of the island where he was staying.
‘I held up my fingers on my hands to say 10am as he didn’t understand me,’ Hernandez recalled. ‘Then I went home briefly before driving up the mountain to Buenavista del Norte, but this time I saw him walking on the road out of the village. It was no more than ten or fifteen minutes after I had spoken to him and he was about a kilometre from the house. I drove past him and that’s the last time I saw him.’
Lucy Mae Law, who is believed to have now returned to the UK, has told reporters that Jay phoned her at around 8:15am, sounding panicked. She has recalled him telling her that his phone battery was on one per cent, that he needed a drink and ‘didn’t know where he was’.
Mountain rescue workers say his telephone last transmitted at around 8.50am, close to the Mirador La Cruz restaurant at the top of the pass into the next valley.
As for the two men who are supposed to have taken Jay to the remote AirBnB — a two-bedroom, £40-a-night cottage set in a ‘unique natural landscape’ and named Casa Abuela Tina — they have yet to speak publicly.
The eldest is described by friends of Slater as a black man in his 40s, who goes by the nickname ‘Johnny Vegas’. The younger one’s name is unknown. Both may hail from Luton.
Mark Williams Thomas, a TV detective working with Jay’s family, is anxious to identify them, saying they are likely to hold evidence that could crack the case.
Williams-Thomas is also anxious to establish why the duo, who had rented the property until the following Saturday, decided to cut their holiday short after speaking to local police shortly after Jay’s disappearance. They are believed to have flown into Gatwick.
‘I do not know the names, I know the nickname of one of them, and I have a photograph of one of them. They know who they are. I would urge them to come forward,’ he told reporters on Thursday.
Their role is likely to become the subject of intense focus in the days ahead.
For now, neither Williams-Thomas nor anyone else involved in the search for Jay Slater really knows whether a drug deal gone wrong, a stolen watch, or simply a chance to see the sun rise over the Atlantic brought him to the remote village of Masca where the hunt is centred. But with each passing day, the plot thickens.
Additional reporting: Nick Pisa
