A murderer and a cocaine trafficker – out to dinner together ‘come se niente fosse’

You know you’re in Malta when you pop out to supper at a family restaurant on the Valletta Waterfront and right there at a table near you there are a murderer and a cocaine trafficker, the one sentenced to 22 years in prison and the other to 15, having dinner à deux come se niente fosse.

In December 2001, Etienne Carter was sentenced to 22 years in prison for the murder of a young police constable two years earlier. He himself was a policeman when he committed the murder.

Yet 14 years after he was sentenced to 22 years (and even allowing for the two years he had been held on remand pending trial), we see that Etienne Carter is out and about, dining with a cocaine trafficker. He was released from prison two years ago, having served just 14 years of his 22-year sentence.

Meinrad Calleja was jailed in Rome for cocaine-trafficking in the 1980s, but was returned to Malta by the Italian government on the understanding that he would serve out the rest of his sentence in the Maltese prisons. He did not, and was released back into Maltese society immediately on his return.

He continued his Brazil-based operation and was put under surveillance by the UK authorities because of his frequent trips between that country and London Heathrow, and his use of Brazilian brothels as cover for cocaine-trafficking. Calleja’s father was a very senior army officer at the time, which afforded him protection from investigation for many years and even access through the VIP lounge at Malta airport, unscrutinised by customs officers as he came and went.

The police finally had to act in December 1993, when a young woman was caught delivering a kilo of cocaine to a man waiting in a car in Sliema, and that man was being watched by the police. They pounced on him and the young woman and discovered – no doubt to their horror and dismay (“X’naghmlu, sir?”) – that her father was the Commanding Officer of the Armed Forces of Malta, Brigadier Maurice Calleja.

“My brother gave me the bag,” she told the police. “I had no idea that it contained cocaine.” Matters took a turn for the worse when she added that her brother had given her the kilo of cocaine while they were at the army chief’s house.

Further investigations revealed that Meinrad Calleja had conspired to sell six kilos of cocaine to Charles Muscat, known as Il-Pips. A few months later, Muscat shot two people dead after a five-day cocaine binge at his home in Mosta – another drug-dealer who was with him and a neighbour who was fixing his car in the street outside. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison but only served 17. He had been taken into custody and held on remand immediately after the 1994 double murder, but was released in 2011.

Meinrad Calleja, meanwhile, was sentenced in 2001 to 15 years in prison and fined Lm30,000 (€70,000). He had been held on remand for the previous five years. He was released five and a half years later, in late 2006, having served just under 11 years of his sentence, and having been let out of prison almost every day before that to attend a full-time degree course in Arabic at the University of Malta, chauffeured there and collected again by Corradino Prisons transport and left to roam the campus unsupervised in the meantime.