Gangbuster (18 page)

They would bring the stuff to the warehouse, unload, and I would look after it until their other transport arrived to move the goods onward to the dealer network. You would never know, looking at the furniture, that it was anything but innocent. The cannabis resin had been so carefully built into chairs, sofas, three-piece suites, washing machines and so on; a few kilos here, a few kilos there, but when it was all added up, it was a nice earner. They were bringing
over the contents of people’s houses who were moving to or returning to England, so there were all sorts of places for concealment of drugs. Of course, the owners never knew their precious property had been opened up and abused in that way.

The gang just thought I was a bent warehouse manager who would be paid handsomely to keep his mouth shut. What the villains didn’t know, of course, was that the depot had been bugged to catch every movement in and out and every conversation. They’d come in and deposit each load and then disappear. I’d be told that so and so would be there to collect it in an hour. And that’s when I started earning my money.

The premises were fully rigged up with video and audio equipment, but we still needed to know if there really were drugs inside the various items of furniture, and where they were stuffed. I’d have to open it all up, find the drugs and put them on show to photograph it for evidence for the eventual court case. The driver would only play the innocent and say, ‘I’ve only got some furniture on board, mate,’ if he was pulled, so we needed to know that the drugs were definitely in there. I’d have an engineer available who would help me dismantle the settee or whatever, get the hash out, get a photographer in to take photos, and stick everything back exactly as it was. This took a great deal of skill. Our man needed to be able to replace everything in such a professional way that it wouldn’t be noticed. He’d stick settees back in place, replace the backs on washing machines and other domestic appliances, and get it all sorted so it didn’t look as though it had been tampered with. He’d have earned a fortune with MFI.

Once that was done and looking ship-shape, I’d sit
and wait for the next lorries to arrive to move the stuff on. This was the beauty of it being a police job, and not a Customs job. Although technically it was an importation, we could keep it running and nick the entire network, not just the drivers bringing it through the docks. We knew it was going to keep on coming in and, if we acted half-blind about it, pretended we didn’t know and Customs didn’t happen to get lucky and make a seizure, it would enable us to take out a very big distribution network if left to our own devices.

When the mainland crooks came to pick it up and load it all back on another lorry, we’d have a chat, and I’d try to embroil the driver in a conversation in which he would implicate himself.

‘Ooh, that’s a heavy sofa, ha ha ha …’ I’d say, in the hope he might say something that would drop him in it, along the lines of, ‘You’ll never guess what’s in there, mate.’ Sometimes they couldn’t resist telling you.

‘What, wacky baccy? You’re kidding.’

They’d also go to other premises where they’d start to dismantle the settees and other items themselves. We’d get these wired up as well and you’d hear them meet up with the gang chiefs and get excited about it all. They found it very difficult not to go and fawn over the drugs parcel, to be a part of it, to look at it. This was holiday money they were looking at – ‘Hawaii, here we come.’

We started nicking members of the distribution ring over a 100-mile radius after following various vehicles to various addresses and setting up observations in garages, warehouses, wherever the drop was. The Old Bill would steam in and scoop
them up and the beauty was that, when it got to court, the evidence would start at the point of arrest: ‘At such and such a time on such and such a day I was observing premises at … this man turned up, I saw him unload …’ It was stand alone evidence and once again we could preserve the overall undercover operation and our source of information. I would still be intact at the Thurrock warehouse waiting for the next lot to arrive. Nobody ever twigged.

I think, at the end of the day, about half-a-dozen people were nicked, there was some sort of family link among the gang, but some were left free to protect the operation. They didn’t know it, but they were living on borrowed time. There was always tomorrow once we knew who they were. We’d be back.

The operation lasted about six months and I came out of it knowing a darn sight more about the transport system than when I started. I’d had to gen myself up on transport policy, lorries, HGVs, tachometers, fuel prices, motorway links, all that sort of stuff, because people would be coming in all day talking to you about it and you couldn’t afford to look like some incompetent idiot. They’d soon become suspicious of you. It helped if you kept saying Norbert Detrassangle a lot!

I had a couple of mates with HGV licences and I picked their brains to get a quick lesson in the transport business. It was all playing roles, being an actor in a black comedy half the time, stopping yourself from getting killed by some nutter or other. Preparing your act properly and professionally was the art of the undercover business.

I had a legitimate pal at that time who ran a
market stall. Sometimes, at weekends he couldn’t make it so I would go in and do his stall for him. Just a favour for a mate. I’d go to work at Eltham Sunday market, set my stall up, get all the gear out and wait for the punters. I was a weekend stall-holder. Terrific, it was on-the-job training. Once I’d done that a few times, I knew what being a stallholder was all about. And I used that cover quite often when I went out and met the bad guys. I’d been there, done it and got the T-shirt, so I knew what I was talking about. I knew who the ‘Toby’ was, the guy who collects the rents, I knew the market jargon, how to haggle a deal, all the little bits and pieces you pick up. The only thing I would ever make up if I was using that cover was the fact that my mate was actually selling pot pourri and pot pourri oils. Now that wasn’t exactly the hardest thing to have been doing if you were going out and buying heroin and cocaine, so I said I dealt in nicked antiques and bric-à-brac. You couldn’t afford to look a bit of a poofter with some of the geezers I ended up dealing with.

But that, strangely, is where my undercover career all started. It was back in the early Eighties, I was in CID at Kensington, and working with an informant who was gay. No problem. He put up some information about a gay antiques dealer in Fulham who was dealing in LSD. Now, officially, Fulham was part of a neighbouring manor and, going strictly by the book we should have passed the job over to them. But there had been a lot of rivalry between different police stations and we were very loath to give this job away. We went out and obtained a search warrant to turn over his premises. He lived in a flat above his business premises. Our informant was insistent that
the guy would only deal with other gays, and the code word to use to get drugs was ‘stamps’.

The informant assured us we could set up a deal over the phone, using the code word, but said that the person who picked up the stuff must look obviously gay or there would be no deal. So I phoned up the fella, a very flamboyant member of the gay community, and said, ‘Got any stamps?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Right, I’ll be round this afternoon, about two o’clock.’

‘Yes, see you then,’ he lisped.

So there we were, a bunch of young, relatively inexperienced detectives flying by the seat of our pants and wondering where to go next, making it up as we went along. Who’s going to do the buy? All eyes were on me. OK, I say, I’m game.

Now we were going to need some money for the transaction. Bearing in mind this was before the introduction of the undercover unit as we know it now and the capacity to draw police funds for such an operation, we turned to our own devices. We knew that a lot of LSD could be concealed in a very small space, such as on blotting paper, and we needed to buy a substantial amount to prove he was a dealer of some calibre. So we all went to our hole-in-the-wall bank cashpoints, got a few quid out and everybody lent it to me so that it looked as if I’d got a bit of a wad. Talk about Keystone Cops. But these were early days in my undercover career. It was my case, my informant, I was keen to do it, so it fell upon me to be the gay boy who did the buy. At the time, I was boxing for the police so I was as fit as a butcher’s dog and didn’t carry an ounce of fat. I put on my tightest pair
of faded jeans, went to Marks and Spencers and bought a string vest, which was all the rage at the time, heavily slicked my hair back with gel, wore a couple of leather wrist bands I’d bought from Kensington market (again,
de
rigeur
)
and got dressed up in the bogs. When the CID lads saw me they just pissed themselves laughing. They were in hysterics. So I slipped a heavy coat on in the height of summer and slunk out of the back door of the nick to go about my business, hoping no one else would see me. I arrived at the geezer’s flat in Fulham, by then rid of the coat, and as directed by him I hadn’t gone into the shop but round the back way, if you’ll pardon the expression, and crept up the metal steps outside the back of the flat. I got to the flat door and found it open. I rapped on the door. ‘Hello?’

No answer.

I thought I might as well walk in. He knew I was coming. I was still calling out as I went inside.

I looked in one room, a bedroom, and there suspended from the ceiling was a full body harness. It was the sort of thing used for sado-masochistic games. I was thinking, Uh oh, was this a very clever idea? Eventually, he heard me from the shop and he came tottering up the internal stairs. We met at the top of the stairs, he looked me up and down and said, ‘Oh, my, you do work out, don’t you?’

I said, ‘Well, yeah, yeah, I do, but I’ve got a boyfriend and all that, so can we just get on with the business?’

He seemed a bit put out that I wasn’t interested in a bit of hanky panky but said, ‘OK, then.’ He disappeared off for a few minutes then came back with a huge sheet of LSD tabs. He lisped, ‘And how
many would you like?’

At that moment I pulled out my warrant card and said, ‘All of ’em, ’cos you’re nicked.’

With that, he threw his hands in the air and promptly collapsed on the sofa in a dead faint. I slapped him round the face a bit to bring him round and he went into a real drama queen number. ‘Oh my God, I can’t go to prison, I’d never survive.’

By then, the other lads were thumping their way up the stairs after I’d shouted, ‘Come on, then,’ and he was nicked and the flat searched. They found about 500 doses of LSD – a lot of trips which could have had horrific side-effects for the users. He went to court and pleaded guilty. There wasn’t much else he could do in the circumstances. And lo and behold, when he was given a four-year stretch, we got the histrionics again and he fainted in the dock. In my book, another award-winning performance. But the operation gave me a taste for undercover work that was to last another ten years, a dress rehearsal for what became a life of professional deception.

H
e looked like a tourist enjoying the sights of London. But I knew he was here on more sinister business. And I knew who his bosses were back home in Italy … the Mafia.

It was July 1991 and the police had been tipped off that a leading criminal figure, on the run from justice in Italy, had arrived in the UK with the specific intention of setting up a major drugs network and was looking for buyers to handle large quantities of cocaine, heroin and other narcotics. He was known to be an organised-crime figure and to have a serious criminal record back home.

The job had been landed by one of the area drug squads but was considered too hot to handle in the light of the Mafia involvement. The call for specialist assistance came in to the Undercover Unit at the Yard. Drugs and Mafia? Step forward Detective
Bleksley. I was dispatched to join the area squad with the aim of infiltrating this sinister Italian – known only to me as Bruno – and smashing his drugs operation before it got off the ground and before we found ourselves flooded with Mafia drugs and Mafia hoodlums.

I had first to be sure that the area squad was up to providing the sort of high-quality back-up that would obviously be needed in view of the quality target we were after. Fortunately, I knew a couple of the blokes on the squad and had worked with them before so I knew they had some pretty sharp operators up there, people with previous experience of undercover jobs with major targets. And once we’d had a couple of briefings to discuss our game plan, I knew they were more than capable of handling a job this size. In other circumstances, they might have been forced to hand the whole job over to a higher squad like Central Drugs, but with COG involved and some solid blokes on the home team, we were set to go.

I met up with the informant, usual old game, and I was told the Italian suspect I was about to meet didn’t speak much English. I don’t know one fucking word of Italian after ‘spaghetti bolognaise’ so I went back to the undercover unit and requested an Italian-speaking officer to be drafted in to help me. They searched through police personnel records and came up with a girl who could speak the lingo. This suited me fine because she could always pose as my girlfriend. She was pretty inexperienced in this sort of work but was mainly going to be there as a translator. With a little bit of coaching and a little bit of persuasion she agreed to be my side-kick.

She arrived looking every inch the part on the
evening of Tuesday, 23 July and we set off for Shelley’s Wine Bar in Albemarle Street in the West End. We ordered a couple of drinks and I played the pinball machine while we waited for the informant and our Mafiosi mate to arrive.

Within ten minutes, they were there. The informant introduced me to Bruno, our target, and a most unlikely-looking Mafia hood. He was about 5ft 9in tall, aged around 45, slim, short grey hair, a distinctive lazy right eye and casually dressed in jeans, T-shirt and red cardigan. More like a favourite uncle enjoying a night out than a fugitive drug-runner. But I’d known too often in this game that appearances can be deceptive.

Bruno and the informant asked for drinks but were told the bar had closed. So we all went upstairs to Shelley’s Pub, where the bar was still open, bought drinks all round and sat down. Like a lot of self-respecting villains Bruno didn’t want to talk business in front of my ‘girlfriend’. He didn’t want to talk to her and didn’t want her to be privy to any of our conversations. It was a case of ‘don’t involve your women in your criminal activities’, a code which a lot of crooks abide by and which I have a lot of respect for. Consequently, she’d only been there a matter of minutes when she was banished to the ladies.

When she came back, I said Bruno had asked that she shouldn’t be present while we discussed business. She acted a bit put out, not too much but pouty enough to be convincing. She had a brief conversation with Bruno in Italian and as a result moved to another table 10ft away and out of earshot. I said, ‘Right, if you’re happy now, let’s get down to business. I gather you’ve got some powder on offer.
What have you got and what’s the price?’

I had to get by as best I could on the language front. Luckily, his English wasn’t that dire and I tried to keep my vocabulary as simple as possible so there wouldn’t be any confusion. The informant knew some Italian and was able to translate if we hit a problem. He spoke to Bruno and the Italian said to me, ‘Coke, £45,000 a kilo, heroin same price.’ That was way too high.

I said, ‘Is this geezer real? What sort of mug does he think I am, or is he just taking the piss? Forty-five grand, no way.’

This sent the Mafia man and my informant into a heated debate for several minutes. Then the informant said, ‘It has got to be that price because it is such high-quality merchandise and because this is a first-time deal.’

Bruno said the heroin was available immediately but the cocaine hadn’t reached the UK yet. I had set my stall as a cocaine buyer and it would have looked a bit sussy if I’d changed my mind and said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll have the heroin anyway.’ If you started chopping and changing you could lose your credibility and he could start smelling a rat. I had to resist the chance of a big heroin seizure there and then and knock the deal back, albeit reluctantly. I said no thanks, I’d stick out for the cocaine, but I’d have a word with a bloke who could shift the heroin. But Bruno wasn’t budging on his prices. If I had been a real drug-dealer, my profit margins would have been ridiculously small, even with cutting the gear. His prices were exorbitant even for top-grade gear. I said to the informant, ‘You tell him he’s in London now, not Rome or Milan or wherever. We do things our way over here. Either he
gets sensible or the deal is off.’

I knew I was chancing my arm a bit, but I had to be realistic. At his price it worked out at £45 a gramme and the street price then was only £60 a gramme. There wasn’t a dealer in town who would have touched it with those profit margins, even with Bruno’s assurances that it was 90 per cent pure coke and each kilo could be cut to make a kilo-and-a-half at street price. I think I must have taken a brave pill that morning because then I found myself getting Bolshie with a Mafia drug dealer and telling him how fucking pissed off I was with his prices.

Bruno seemed to have got a bit more grasp of English all of a sudden. ‘I try to tell you story,’ he said. ‘Our operation have got stuff here. We not pay for it yet. So we have to charge high price to get more over. Will not get here unless we pay some money to them.’

I said, ‘So how does that affect me? That’s your problem not mine. If you’ve got the gear here, you can’t expect to charge those prices to pay for your operation. You’ll never sell it.’

Bruno replied, ‘We have sell some. Only want two or three customers and then in six months everything OK and you can have 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 kilo a time of what you want.’

This was big-time stuff by any standards. We were talking millions of pounds here.

‘Are you saying,’ I asked Bruno, ‘if I pay this high price now you will guarantee everything I want afterwards?’

He sure would, he said and went even further, promising to show us exactly how the drugs were brought into the country and how his operation worked.

‘You will be very happy,’ he said. He said that if I shifted some of the heroin for him he would share some of the profits with me.

I asked him why he didn’t just bring down the price of his cocaine and share some of those profits with me. I was getting pretty pissed off so I said through the informant, ‘Either he gets sensible or I’m out of here.’ I was really calling his bluff.

I got up from the table, acting sort of humpy, and went and bought some more drinks. Then we had a chat about women, Italy, Italian football, and so on. Then Bruno cracked. The bluff had paid off. He agreed to a trial purchase of half a kilo of cocaine for £22,500 with regular supplies of 2 kilos a week at a much cheaper price to follow. Bruno wanted me to buy more but I said I wouldn’t know what demand there was until I’d seen it, tried it and let my customers have some.

‘I do for you any amount,’ he said, ‘all 90 per cent.’

He agreed to supply the trial package in a couple of weeks. And he was still keen to move his heroin. ‘I do that now, you see,’ he repeated for about the third time.

‘Yes,’ I said ‘I’m not deaf.’

We returned to more touristy lines of conversation like holidays, golf, racing, fucking and fighting and then said our goodbyes. The scene was set; the trap was laid. I beckoned my ‘girlfriend’ over and we strolled out into the night hand in hand. Her part was over.

Mine was now moving into top gear. I tried to persuade the management that this was a case that would justify buying the first consignment, without arresting Bruno, and setting him up for 10 or 20 kilos
or even more in the future. But they were always a bit suspicious of us, cops working undercover. There’s got to be some sort of wheeze going on. They said no, that we’d have to take him first time up. They knew, of course, through Interpol, that he was high on the Italian wanted list and the sooner he was banged up and then deported, the better. I was keyed up and ready to go over the next few days expecting Bruno’s call on my mobile to set a time and place for the hand-over. Nothing. It was a full two months before he surfaced again. Not unusual with professional criminals. It was often a waiting game.

It was on a Friday evening in late September when I met him again at Shelley’s with our informant. I shook his hand, bought us drinks and said to him, ‘I was wondering if I’d ever see you again.’

He said he’d had problems but it was all sorted now. ‘You OK?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’m fine, but it’s a good job I don’t rely on you to make a living from or I’d be skint.’

It fell on stony ground and the informant had to translate the slang. Bruno declared that our cocaine was now on site and the trial half-kilo could be delivered the next day.

‘How do you know I haven’t found another source?’ I asked a bit cheekily.

‘But you here, must be good reason you want Bruno give you best coke,’ he replied.

‘I might just have a friend interested in the heroin,’ I told him.

‘Have you?’ he said, spotting a chance to make a nice few quid from the smack.

‘Let’s deal with the coke first,’ I said.

He wanted to arrange the hand-over next day but
I said, ‘That’s no good, I’m busy’. I needed more time to set up the operation. So we agreed on the following day, a Sunday, to meet by the petrol station near the Kensington Hilton Hotel at 11.00am. Not a day of rest for drug-dealers or undercover cops! He said we would go to a safe house nearby for the exchange. He said he would bring a sample of the heroin he was so keen to get rid of to my supposed mate, free of charge. ‘Very generous,’ I said sarcastically as we parted.

I turned up at the Hilton Hotel sharp at 11.00am on the Sunday with £22,250 of the Commissioner’s cash in a nearby car and a fellow undercover officer at the wheel. There was plenty of cover nearby from the back-up teams. They knew it was another roving plot and we might go anywhere. I saw Bruno waiting outside holding an umbrella. It was a dark, overcast day with frequent showers and we had both taken brollies. He said, ‘Have you got the money?’

‘Yes, nearby.’

Why hadn’t I got it with me, he wanted to know.

“Cos I’m not taking my dough into some strange place and getting robbed, that’s why. Bring me the parcel and I’ll bring the money.’

He didn’t look too happy as we walked into Russell Road, which consisted of a lot of big, old Victorian houses, and he led me up the stairs to the communal front door which he opened with a key and we went up to flat number 8, right at the top. He unlocked that and we were in a bed-sitter. I had no idea what I might be walking into. All the time, I was looking for possible escape routes, a skylight or whatever; your bottle is screaming, taking chunks out of your underpants, and you are guarding your back
without showing a glimmer of concern.

I saw another Italian standing there who looked like a Mafia hoodlum straight out of Central Casting – swarthy, black moustache, balding, slim, eyes darting everywhere. He produced a Boots carrier bag which he handed to Bruno, who put it down on the kitchen table. Then he took out two bags, heavily bound in masking tape, each containing a quarter kilo of cocaine, the archetypal packaging for powder.

‘Now get the money,’ he said.

‘Hold up, behave yourself,’ I said, ‘not ’til I’ve looked in one of them. Open one up.’

Bruno got some newspaper and laid it on the kitchen table. Bruno gave one of the packages to the other geezer and laid the other on top of the paper.

‘Oh no, not that one, the other,’ I said.

Bruno swapped them over and put my rejected one in the Boots bag. Then he took a knife from the other bloke and started cutting away at the masking tape. Now I was thinking about the other officers coming in afterwards looking for evidence and Bruno was playing nicely into our hands. Every time he ripped off a bit of tape, his fingerprints went on it and he slung it in the bin. When the police came in on a search later, which they would to cover my involvement, there would be perfectly legitimate evidence in the bin. I offered to help him to make sure my dabs would be on the tape as well as further corroboration if I was called to give evidence. If they said it was all fictitious and made up, then I could prove I was there. It was a matter of thinking on your feet all the time.

Once the masking tape was off, there was clingfilm to undo. This is how the dealers protect the powder;
layers and layers of the stuff because you don’t want bags bursting or losing the gear when someone makes a cut to sample it. As we were stripping the packaging away, some brown powder fell on the paper. I looked quizzical, though I had a shrewd notion what it was.

‘Pepper, to put the dogs off the scent,’ said Bruno. Yes, I’d guessed right.

Once all the clingfilm was off I saw a white plastic bag with ‘Holland’ marked on it, no doubt where this consignment was coming from. Bruno opened a final bag and showed me a lump of white powder. I knew instantly it was top quality. When it comes in a lump, it’s always uncut and high grade. I smelt it and tasted it and knew it was the pukka gear. So now I had seen evidence galore piling up in the bin, tape, clingfilm, even the newspaper, all handled by both men. Slowly but surely I was nailing the bastards to the floor, and neither of them knew it.