Gangbuster (11 page)

Frankly, I didn’t give a shit about being banged up. What I did care about was my professional integrity being compromised. So I stuck to my guns.

Mr Sheridan persisted with his fishing trip, no doubt hoping to hook a killer whale.

Would I continue to stay silent over Richard’s identity even if the judge ordered me to reveal all, asked Sheridan. Yes, I said, I certainly would.

A bid by prosecution barrister Mr Pitt to have yet another legal argument on the subject without the jury was quickly dismissed by Judge McHale. Mr Sheridan resumed the attack with the key question we all knew he wanted to ask. Was Richard an informer?

Me, yet again, repeated parrot fashion in a crazy cross-examination that was going nowhere fast, ‘I do not wish to answer that question, Your Honour.’

‘Well, are you going to answer any of my
questions?’ Mr Sheridan enquired.

He should have known the answer by now! I replied cagily, ‘I don’t know what questions you are going to ask.’

Right, that was it for the exasperated Mr Sheridan. He turned to the judge for help to try to resolve this impasse. And he got it.

In other words, I’m not going to stick up my informant’s name for some sort of retaliation in the future.

His Lordship was seemingly running out of patience and clearly not happy at my lack of deference to his authority over the court and all those in it, including humble witnesses like me.

I wasn’t going to bottle out now, that was for sure. ‘With respect, Your Honour,’ I repeated for the umpteenth time, ‘being aware of all the circumstances, I decline.’

That was it, interrogation over, reputation intact, consequences to follow.

‘You may withdraw,’ said Judge McHale and added, slightly onimously, ‘Do not leave the precincts of the court.’

According to the transcript which I read later, Mr Sheridan went for the jugular once I had retired from the battlefield. It was, he argued, unfair on his client that I was blanking all the questions about Richard.

This was a first for our prosecution counsel as well. ‘I have never been in a situation where a prosecution witness, a police officer, no doubt for perfectly good reasons, has refused to answer the questions posed,’ he told the judge.

So what to do with me? Nothing too hasty, he told the assembled lawyers. Any contempt of court proceedings against me should best be dealt with by another judge in another court with me represented by another lawyer. But what he didn’t want was another fiasco with me in the witness box
stone-walling
everything that was thrown at me.

‘I think there is something inherently obnoxious about that,’ he said. ‘It is not a state of affairs which I think should be allowed to continue.’

The case was adjourned overnight with me off to seek advice from senior officers and police lawyers and hoping to God they’d be backing me in the morning. God certainly wasn’t backing Mr Sheridan on his journey to court; he was four hours late having been trapped in a monster traffic jam on the M25
within 100yds of his exit but unable to reach it. Shame, I thought, but this was the geezer trying to get me banged up, so I wasn’t too upset at the stay of execution.

Next move was from our barrister, Mr Pitt. It came as no surprise considering the court room stalemate between myself and Mr Sheridan.

‘We have considered the position overnight and the Crown propose to offer no further evidence against the accused and ask that he is discharged.’

That was it – he was off the hook, acquitted on the direction of Judge McHale. Inevitably, the lawyers for the other two accused men rapidly followed suit and successfully applied for their clients to be discharged as well. They argued that it was apparent that I, as the chief police witness, would continue to refuse to answer any questions about Richard’s identity and background put to me on behalf of the other defendants. And they were right, of course.

The judge ruled that I had declined to answer questions about Richard ‘with courtesy and without any arrogance or anything of that kind’, which was something of a relief. But there I was – no toothbrush, no change of underpants, I’d worked undercover in a potentially dangerous situation, knocked my bollocks out and all the defendants have walked and I was the only one left. I’d tried to play the white man, tried to protect my source and I was likely to get a spell inside. To my relief, however, the judge decided not to hand out any punishment there and then.

He told me, ‘It seems quite inappropriate that I should deal with this matter in a summary way and I shall direct that proceedings for contempt of court be brought and be brought before another judge. The
court has said on more than one occasion that these things should not be dealt with in haste and I take the view they are better dealt with by another judge.’

My counsel, Mr Pitt, asked if that meant I was bailed to appear at another court at another time.

‘No, he is not bailed,’ said Judge McHale.

I stood there and thought, Oh fuck, I’m going to get banged up as well now, but he quickly clarified the position by adding, ‘As I understand it, he’s finished his evidence and is released in the normal way.’ That, I thought, was a bit of a result. At least it won’t be B and B in Brixton tonight.

The accused lads all seemed to have a bit of a chuckle over the whole fiasco, especially over my particular predicament. There was only a couple of minutes between them coming out and me joining them outside, and I could see they were having a bit of handshaking and back-slapping and all that sort of thing, and one of them called across the concourse as I was with a fellow officer.

‘Oy, you.’

He looked across and said, ‘Yes?’

He said, ‘That Peter Bleksley … he’s a lot better than any of your grasses.’

My colleague said, ‘Oh yes? Why’s that?’

‘He keeps his fucking mouth shut.’

Everyone smiled and gradually they all dispersed, and I was left standing with the threat of legal proceedings and a potential prison sentence still hanging over my head.

I subsequently received a letter from the Attorney General’s office saying I was going to be charged with contempt of court. I thought, Sod it, let them get on with it. But that was followed a couple of months later
by another letter saying the matter was being dropped because it wasn’t in the public interest and I never heard another thing about it. I like to think that whoever reviewed the case came to the very sensible conclusion that putting a copper in the dock for protecting his informant would achieve absolutely nothing at all.

At the end of the day, no real harm had been done. It just stood to reinforce the many and varied problems that beset the job of being an undercover officer.

The trendy pony-tail look I favoured at that time had become one of my favourite disguises. It was acceptable for all sorts of different jobs in the shadowy world of villainy, but in the bewigged and begowned portals of our courts of law you could feel seriously unloved and out of place. But that’s the way it had to be. My pony-tail, my designer jeans and my leather jacket were as important to my role as the legal manuals were to the lawyers. I could be scruffy with a pony-tail if, for instance, I was involved with a low-life drugs gang. If I was in the Windows on the World restaurant on the twenty-eighth floor of the Hilton entertaining over lunch or an evening meal I would have the hair slicked, be suited and booted and look the part of a high-roller. If I needed to look like an oik buying 20 grand’s worth of cocaine, I could have the arse hanging out of my trousers but the pony-tail would still look OK. It wouldn’t matter. I could take the pony-tail out if I wanted to and I had the biggest fucking mass of curly hair you’ve ever
seen. I could look like Marc Bolan at the drop of a hat. I could be as smart as I wanted to be or as scruffy as I wanted to be. It was all about dressing up, dressing down, playing a role. Beards and moustaches came and went. The nagging concern that is always in the back of your mind is that you might be recognised at the wrong place and wrong time and I always tried to keep one jump ahead of that possibility.

Y
es, I have to put my hands up to nicking drugs from Scotland Yard. Regularly and systematically. Heroin, cocaine, cannabis, Ecstasy, speed – you name it, I had it away. I did it because I had to. If that sounds cock-eyed I must explain that, as one of the leading undercover drugs investigators in Britain, I was frequently asked to lecture at training courses attended by trainee officers from forces throughout the UK. The Government, police authorities, Customs and society in general was reeling from a massive upsurge in drug-taking and drug trafficking in the Eighties and suddenly everyone was taking the subject very seriously. The problem was way past a few rock stars getting smashed and a bit of puff being smoked socially. It was boom time for businesses with no hint of the great crash to come, money was plentiful and
heroin, cocaine and cannabis were being smuggled into the country at unprecedented levels. Consignments of smack were even arriving in London courtesy of the Russian Mafia who saw rich rewards for their filthy trade in all the big European capitals. Cosmopolitan London was top of their list. It was nothing short of a drug explosion.

Police forces across Britain came under mounting pressure to increase the strength, sophistication and effectiveness of their drug investigation teams. At Scotland Yard’s Central Drugs Squad – unquestionably in the forefront of the battle against the big-time crime barons – manpower was increased dramatically in a very short space of time from a squad of 24 officers with three detective inspectors to a team of 60 officers with six DIs and continued to grow year after year to become the massive part of the National Crime Squad it is today.

The war on drugs became as big a topic in the UK as it had been for years in the USA. They say we are usually ten years behind America with every social phenomenon. They were right about drugs. Crack cocaine was already a major problem in dozens of American cities and was wiping out hundreds of young lives needlessly week after week. Cannabis dealers were floating up the English Channel almost daily with tons of the stuff, then sneaking off back to their Costa del Sol bolt-holes to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. Heroin and cocaine traffickers were devising ever more cunning ways to get their contraband past Customs. It became vitally important that, if the British authorities were to combat this menace in any sort of effective way, they must upgrade manpower and training right across the board. That is where I
came in.

As an undercover officer, I was dealing with drugs cases on a permanent basis and my expertise was drawn on to help train other officers in the tricky task of drug-related operations – a real minefield in police terms unless you knew exactly what you were doing. Cases across Britain were being dealt with on an
ad
hoc
basis by individual squads with no formulated policy or pattern, no logging of the operations or the operatives; they were still doing it willy-nilly. There was a pressing need to centralise the entire crime-fighting network and do it fast.

So the undercover unit at Scotland Yard, the Crime Operations Group – or COG as we called it – was set up to head the battle in 1986. Because of the increasing success we’d had against the drug barons and against big-time crime in general, COG became the pivotal unit in amalgamating all aspects of training and operations. It also took on board the witness protection programme to look after informants who might be in danger after grassing up fellow villains. They instituted the register of informants, and really became the heart and soul of undercover operations in the UK.

The first training course specifically for undercover officers was established in 1987. Twelve of the most experienced undercover operatives in the force were to be guinea pigs as part of a plan to devise a national structure for the increasingly important area of covert policing. I was one of the dirty dozen. It was more of a melting pot than an instructional course because they were teaching us a lot we already knew, but at the same time they were countenancing our views as to how it could be shaped, altered,
adjusted or developed for various grades of undercover officers and would-be undercover officers, ranging from very experienced and partly experienced to totally inexperienced. They were looking for a format which would benefit all those who would be following on into this dangerous field of operations. They wanted to train people specifically for drug-related operations where extra manpower was so crucially needed, teach the identifying of drugs, how to detect them by smell or touch, how to test them to ensure it was genuine gear, and so on. I was the officer with the most experience in this field, a wide knowledge of most drugs and a string of good undercover ‘kills’ under my belt. It fell to me to explain the various techniques of drug testing to my fellow officers on the undercover courses.

The most basic thing for them to know was the street testing of all kinds of drugs. How to know what gear you were dealing with, and how to keep your credibility as a dealer, pusher or whatever you were posing as, intact, and not make the bad guys suspicious. You had to go out there and
be
a
drug-dealer
, not some witless prick playing at it. You had to know the gear and know the lingo.

It was here we hit the first major snag. It was pretty pointless lecturing people about illegal drugs when you hadn’t got any drugs in front of you to show them, to let them handle, to smell, to know what it was likely to do when someone shoves it up their nose or into their veins. When you’re undercover, it’s not just identifying what the drug is, you’ve got to be able to know precisely what its effects are, what its possible side-effects are, what is good gear and what
is shit gear.

Cannabis, for example, comes in a Heinz 57 of varieties – in slabs, in oils, in bars, soaps or slate, or rocky or ricky – there are dozens of names for it, and you’ve got to know them all if you’re not going to get caught out. If you’re with people who have been drug-dealing all their lives and you don’t know what you are talking about, you will very quickly be sussed out.

I used to impress on the students all the time how important it was to know what you were doing; be familiar with the drugs, how to handle them, know the language of the drug world. When a gramme of cocaine is presented to you in a wrap and you’ve got to open it out and look at it, it would be a dead giveaway if you did it all wrong and tipped the bloody lot all over the floor. A lot of the young officers on the courses had never even seen a wrap of coke, let alone opened one. A wrap is put together in a special way users and dealers know. So must you.

While I was doing the training courses, it was fair to say that I had a somewhat testy relationship with the Metropolitan Police Laboratory in Lambeth, South London. I would regularly go on an undercover job, pick up a sample of heroin, cocaine or other drugs. I’d have a wallet full of cash to buy a sample on the spot and a whole lot more of the stuff later if it was OK gear. What I then needed to know by the time I had my next meeting, sometimes only a couple of hours later, was the quality of the drugs, so I could let the dealer know whether I was interested in continuing with the deal or not. It was often not possible to test the drugs in front of them. You couldn’t if you were in a hotel, a bar, a club, or some sort of public arena. You couldn’t start running up a
bit of heroin or washing up cocaine to get the purity level. You had to say, ‘Right, I’ll take the gear, thanks very much, I’ll test it when I get home and I’ll come back to you when I know whether it’s any good.’ Never would I seem to be too keen to want to do the business. I mean, if it was shit gear it would only be the police who would want to buy it to get a nicking. You had to have quality gear if you were playing
drug-dealer
.

I’d take the samples to the Metropolitan Police lab for testing. That was the official procedure. It was a time-consuming rigmarole of making out paperwork, sealing the drugs in a special bag, entering it into the register, filling in the details, and constantly looking at your watch all the time in case you’re not going to get back for your meet. You really didn’t want to be doing this. You are doing a covert operation; you don’t necessarily want anybody at the lab to know who you are and you don’t want the time-wasting.

The problem was, they were scientists through and through. And, of course, they adopted a very scientific standpoint to everything. That was all very well and good and I appreciate that was the way they had to do things, but for the practicalities of an undercover drugs operation it could be a nightmare. And sometimes it was necessary to side-step the rigid formalities of the world of science and do of bit of DIY drug research which would tell me exactly what I needed to know. If I had a gramme of cocaine, I could walk into my own kitchen with a bit of bicarb and a drop of water, wash it up and bring it down to base cocaine to tell me what purity I was dealing with. I could do that in one minute. If I went to the laboratory, they’d say, ‘Oh well, it takes several hours
for us to do our standard procedures for drug testing,’ and they only get you a purity banding – between 30 and 50 per cent or 40 and 60 per cent, which was far from precise. That was useless to me. I’d got the bad guy sitting waiting somewhere, thinking I’ll be back in two hours to tell him how I rated the gear. I couldn’t have risked blowing job after job through delays, so I managed to get the lab boys to give me a quick banding test instead of the precise analysis which would have given me down to 97.3 per cent purity, for example, which was about as good as it gets. Even that took a lot of persuading. They didn’t understand the urgency of it, though there was one scientist there called Jim Cowie, a lovely fella who was on our side and who sympathised with the predicaments we found ourselves in from a practical point of view and tried to help. But, of course, he had the hierachy above him who were still very constraining and there were endless arguments with some of the scientists. I would say, ‘Look, I need this done urgently,’ and they would say, ‘It’s going to take hours and hours,’ and I’d say, ‘Why don’t you let me do it here? I’ll show you a test that will tell me what I want to know in a matter of minutes.’ They’d say, ‘How can you do that?’ I’d say, ‘Easy – I’ll mix three parts coke to one part bicarb, mix it up, moisten it, microwave it for 30 seconds and wallop … that’s how it is.’ ‘Oh yes,’ they’d say, ‘all right, we can see how that would work but if there are artificial caines in there – ligocaine, procaine, this, that and the other as opposed to cocaine
–
your test would not be so precise, would it?’

Well, I had to accept that, but if I was a fucking
bona
fide
drug-dealer my test wouldn’t need to be
that fucking scientific.

This was the mentality I had to fight against all the time. It wasn’t helpful to anyone out there trying to catch drug-dealers, which was our sole priority. It was so bloody frustrating. At times, I used to feel I was banging my head against a brick wall. We did our best but sometimes just had to bypass the system. The bureaucracy and the dogmatic scientific standpoint, which they frequently could not be shifted from, put up too many difficulties and too many barriers. So we frequently had to resort to doing it ourselves.

Then we’d get problems like testing a sample of cannabis we’d picked up. You can tell it’s cannabis OK by warming it up a bit, have a sniff, have a crumble, but how do you know if it’s any good? Cannabis is one of the drugs where the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or in the puffing as the case may be. Books have been written on the cannabis varieties; there’s dozens of different resins – slates, soaps, Afghan, Thai, Moroccan black, herbal (any number of different types of herbal) – I mean, you had to know them all. And to know it, you had to try it.

Because the lab were then confronted with a new set of circumstances, a new type of copper doing a new type of operation, they could make life difficult. They always seemed to look at you as though you were doing something utterly and totally wrong; these long-haired, hippy-looking undercover chappies are not what policemen used to be. We were supposed to be on the same side but we were often worlds apart. Their attitude was, ‘My God, you’re going out buying drugs. You’re in the police; you’re
supposed to be going out and arresting people for having drugs.’ That’s the attitude that existed.

So we had no choice if we were going to get results. We’d utilise the scientific facilities if it was convenient, otherwise we’d go off and do what we had to do with our own inventiveness. If that meant putting together a joint and smoking it, that’s what we did. Hands on work. Practical puffing. We weren’t doing it at the Yard, of course, not all nipping into the gents for a joint. You can imagine them seeing some spaced-out cop and saying, ‘We know what squad he’s in.’ We were more discreet, but I remember going into the Yard canteen after one testing session and having a fit of the uncontrollable giggles as we demolished the dish of the day.

It’s fair to say at that stage I was probably the most knowledgeable drugs officer in Britain. I became an expert in all types of illegal drugs, from smack to magic mushrooms. I’d had some drugs grounding in America, sampled coke in California. I’d spent my adolescence in South London where drugs were freely available, affording me real-life experience of the burgeoning drug culture which helped equip me better to hit back at the drug barons invading Britain with ruthless determination. I made it my business to know drugs because it
was
my business to know drugs. I had to know what I was doing at all times. People would ring me up from within the police and say something like, ‘We’ve had a strange parcel down here we’ve not seen before. Can you get over and have a look. It might be of some use to you.’ If I thought it might help with my drugs education or broaden my knowledge in some way, then I would.

I remember when Thai sticks were first found in this country, I had a call from a pal asking me if I wanted to have a look. I’d go over and sneak in through the back way at the nick where the stuff was all bagged up. My pals would say, ‘Have a look at this.’ I’d say, ‘Terrific, we’ve not seen that before,’ or maybe we hadn’t seen it for some time and it was useful to know it was back on the streets. I’d ask the officers to ask the bloke they’d found it on where he’d got it, where it came from, anything that would serve to increase my knowledge of the drugs scene worldwide.