Gangbuster (8 page)

I don’t know whether she knew about Dave’s informing, his philandering, or where he’d got his money. She loved him anyway. But informing had become like a drug to him. He was absolutely hooked on it, a serial grass who couldn’t stop. He got a real buzz out of it, always wanting to be around the police, and know the outcome of his tip-offs. His murder, I’m afraid, was as certain as night follows day.

The two motorbike assassins and two accomplices are all serving life for Norris’s murder. Scotland Yard had at first denied that Norris was one of their paid informants, but several of the better-informed daily paper crime reporters knew it and used it in their headlines the day after the killing. The Yard were finally obliged to confirm it once the case came to trial.

Norris was the second informant of mine to be murdered. I’m surprised there haven’t been more. They play a dangerous game. A grass called Peter McNeil put up a large cocaine importation job to us in which we nicked two guys with known and confirmed links with the Mafia. Any kind of grassing is perilous in the extreme, but double-crossing the Mafia is suicidal. We knew there would be a contract out on McNeil but it wasn’t until years later that anyone finally got to him; whether it was the Mob or not, I don’t know. McNeil was another who was almost blatant about his informing. He had this sort of
laissez
faire
attitude towards it all and was another for whom his past was always going to catch up with him one day. He was shot as well. I never got to know exactly who did it, but you could have lined up the usual suspects from London to Llandudno.

The fact that so few grasses end up dead is probably a tribute to the police witness protection schemes and the expertise they employ in putting would-be killers off the scent. A lot of time and thought is given to that. There was a time, while informants and supergrasses were big news in the national press, when people said that if the underworld crime bosses managed to bump off just one of them, it would be enough of a warning to stop any others turning informant. But in my experience the fear of assassination is considerably weaker than the lure of what they see as easy money from the police and a nice protection package for themslves. Far from diminishing, the number of informants, and above all, the quality of informants, has continued unabated over the years. They are crucial to keeping the lid on organised crime.

If you were a gangster thinking of killing an informant, you’d need to be very sure of covering your tracks because you can be absolutely certain that the police are going to leave no stone unturned to find out who’s done it. The big boys probably think it’s not worth the risk of a life sentence for wiping out a heap of shit and simply write it off to experience. They’ll be more careful in future. I’ve never shed a tear for any misfortune that’s happened to any grass I’ve known. They play at Judas, they take the consequences.

I’ve been severely warned off talking about David Norris by a senior Scotland Yard police officer. It was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that I shouldn’t drag all this up again. It’s always going to be a sensitive issue within the police force but I’m afraid the Norris incident is relevant and material to my life and I refuse to be gagged over it. Norris was a top-grade informant and his story is a first-class illustration of the level of informing the police now handle, as well as all its complexities, its dangers, and its consequences. Norris is dead, but there’ll be someone to fill his shoes.

I have spent many hours with many informants of all colours and creeds, male and female. I treated every one of them with the utmost caution, fearful in the knowledge that there are a lot of Old Bill languishing in prison now because of inappropriate relationships with informers. You must never let the tail wag the dog, or be seduced into their clutches by the lure of easy money and a glamorous lifestyle. Discipline is the name of the game; discipline with yourself, an emotional detachment which allows you never to lose sight of the fact that you are doing a job on behalf of the British public who rely on you to
sweep the sewers clean.

The style of hit which took out Dave Norris was a classic gangland assassination which originated in Colombia among the feuding drugs cartels. Two men on a powerful bike, the pillion rider to do the hit, the driver skilled enough to be able to make an escape through even the most congested streets.

I had many dealings with various factions of the Colombian drug trade as they targeted European markets in the Eighties. They had emerged as the most powerful and ruthless drugs suppliers anywhere in the world. They protected their empires ruthlessly, killing judges, lawyers, police and rivals with impunity. The US markets were saturated.

The drug barons of Bogota set their sights on other outlets worldwide. They sent various people to Britain looking for fresh buyers, fixers and would-be dealers, to prepare the ground work for the huge surge in cocaine and heroin which was to follow up to epidemic proportions. The advance guard had no real UK base and were probably a little less careful than they would have been if they were established career criminals from this country. They put themselves out on a limb a little bit too often trying to make new contacts in the drug world. So they frequently came to our attention through the informer network. We were able to scoop up several Colombian-linked gangs before they could get established. But we were only stemming the tide if you look at the fantastic amount of cocaine that’s about in London and other parts of Britain today.

Informants came out of the woodwork all the time. It could be from a number of sources; local cops, for example, executing a search warrant at
somebody’s house, finding a load of gear, and that person then facing a hefty jail sentence and choosing to turn grass to bail themselves out of trouble. A confidential word would be passed on to the judge in court enabling him to know of how much assistance the suspect has been and hopefully get a lesser sentence. It could be an aggrieved fellow villain who wanted to level the score after he’d been had over by some other crook, so he came forward and volunteered information. It might be your established informants like Norris, motivated primarily by greed; it might be a local nick who’ve got someone a bit out of their league and want us to take over. Occasionally, you could have a cold caller come in off the street, walk in and say, ‘I want to talk to someone about so and so,’ and then you suddenly find you’ve a got a live runner out of nowhere. In every case, you get the necessary authorisation, submit the paperwork and go and check it out thoroughly.

What you have to be most careful of in dealing with every informant is that they aren’t actually setting up a job just to get a police reward for informing. It’s the bread and butter of the investigation to get the ground work right. You have to be mindful at all times that you are dealing with the most treacherous dregs of society, and be aware of any potential scams that could leave you with egg on your face or worse. And there were occasions in which informants would be putting up work to you where they were trying to entice you to bend the rules, like saying, ‘I know that in Fred Bloggs’ deep freeze he’s got 10kg of cocaine. Can we go in and find five?’ They want five for themselves to make it a
double-earner.

I’ve had a job put up to me where my informant said there was £70,000 cash in a suspect’s home and he was inviting me to act as a legalised burglar to go in and nick the money. Part of it would go into the police report, the other into his back pocket. I told him to get lost. This was the tail wagging the dog and I didn’t want any part of it.

Because of my reputation in the world of undercover operations, I would get called to all parts of the country to assist in different inquiries. I and my colleagues were effectively on hire to any force that needed our expertise. Sometimes you would even be requested by name if you’d met someone on another job or they had received a recommendation from somebody who knew you. We had regular national training seminars at which undercovers from all over the country would meet for updates on techniques, exchange experiences and so on, so a network was formed through which you became known throughout the country as an expert in your field.

Between regular covert assignments, I used to lecture to other forces both in Britain and abroad on training techniques for would-be undercover operatives. I was fortunate to be selected to go to the finest criminal investigation and intelligence unit in the world, at Quantico in Virginia, USA, where the FBI and American Drug Enforcement Agency share a joint headquarters, the very cutting edge in the worldwide fight against organised crime. I spent my time predominantly with the DEA and US Customs
learning new aspects of detection and investigation. It was a rewarding and fascinating experience and a frightening insight into the sheer magnitude of the global drugs problem.

At Quantico, we saw the DEA Operation Snowcap guys in training – a military unit to all intents and purposes – who were going down to Colombia to bomb drugs factories in pre-emptive strikes against the drugs cartels. Hard bastards every one of them. Tough, fit, totally committed to hitting back at the Colombian drug giants, and doing a great job.

I remember Colin Baker, the ITN reporter, telling me once over a drink just what a lawless and terrifying place Colombia was. He’d been there only a few weeks earlier after some bombing incident or other during the drugs wars and had witnessed a motorbike team assassination which was later copied in London for David Norris’s killing and several others.

Apparently, one of the big gangs had targeted a rival dealer and had found someone who lived in a similar block and had a similar lifestyle. They’d watch for a while and if the similarities were close enough to the intended victim, they would hit the other poor bastard for practice. They’d take out a totally innocent bloke in a trial run. It never made me keen to visit Bogota. I don’t think the Yard would have allowed us to operate in Colombia anyway, for security reasons. They did have a certain regard for our safety. I limited my dealings with Colombians to Earl’s Court. There were enough to practise on, trickling in every year looking at the market place.

The police play the financial dealings with informers very close to their chest; after all, it’s public
money they are paying out to criminals. But I have been involved in several cases where five-figure sums have been handed over – £10,000 is not unique or even overly unusual. I had one very good informant – I’ll call him Sebastian to protect his real identity – who was so profilic he must have grassed up just about everyone he’d ever worked with over a ten-year period. Everything he was paid was salted away in a high-interest bank account and when he’d accumulated enough he set himself up in an antiques business, did very well at it and has never ever grassed up anyone since. He’s the exception – most just blow it on drink or drugs or flash motors.

The money is always paid in cash by a senior officer. You’re never going to get a grass to accept a cheque, are you? Sometimes, an undercover operative like myself might be there to see the grass collect, if he chooses, but I normally avoided it like the plague. By then my job had been done, you’re out of it. Whatever amount of payment is due is normally set by a senior officer. You can nominate a figure if you think the information has been a bit special, but usually it’s out of your hands, and a good thing too. A senior officer, like a Deputy Assistant Commissioner or a Chief Superintendent, would count the cash out, the informant would stuff it in his pocket and then get a warning about not sharing it out with his police handler. They are the successful jobs. While the police actively encourage the recruitment of grasses they give you no back-up support or help if it all goes tits up. It is a sphere which is open to a lot of abuse, as there is a great deal of potential for having a swindle of one form or another with an informant. And much as the bosses love the good results, they
are more than ready to jump on you like a ton of bricks if there is any suggestion of impropriety in relation to one.

All in all, it’s a pretty thankless task being an informant handler. You only really get the personal satisfaction of locking the bad guys up. I remember my police colleague, who attained the rank of Superintendent despite a high-profile internal investigation into his links with a top North London supergrass, being asked at a CID drinks party what he thought about all the allegations that he might or might not be a rascal. He replied, ‘Some call me corrupt and some promote me.’ Amen.

D
anny Smithers – not his real name – was not a man you could ever say was at ease with the world. Big, sinister, angry, the threat of violence never far away. He was suspected of running a vast drug empire with tentacles in London, Liverpool, Amsterdam and half-a-dozen other big cities. He was a busy ‘networking’ criminal with nationwide links in the underworld here and abroad, a serious pro. He had a well-documented history of violence, was thought to have regularly ripped off other drug-dealers in brutal attacks and his name had cropped up in relation to a number of savage murders. An altogether nasty bastard.

I knew from the start this was going to be one of those undercover jobs with more than the normal quota of risks, and I wasn’t wrong. We’d got a lead in to Smithers’ activities through informant Dave Norris
and I went undercover, in my favoured jeans and ponytail role of cool drug-dealer, to meet various contacts on the fringes of drug crime in London to worm my way slowly into the Smithers inner circle of associates.

They weren’t people we could instantly identify by name or criminal records, but were, and this was not unusual, people known only by their nicknames, or even just descriptions – Mick the Limp, Fat Alf, that sort of thing, people who were said to be selling a bit of gear or looking to find buyers for gear. We had vague leads like, ‘He’s a bald bloke who lives at so and so and drinks in such and such a pub,’ you know the sort of thing, all part of the jigsaw. These guys don’t make a habit of proffering their names, addresses and phone numbers. But you have to start somewhere. It’s a matter of digging, piecing all the scraps together to make your way up the ladder to the big guys at the top. It all adds to the uncertainty of the job because you just don’t know who you are going to meet on the next rung, or who might try to throw you off. But being a bit scared wasn’t a bad thing. It kept you on your toes, kept you alive. It was the old swan syndrome – on the surface you’re cool, calm and serene but underneath you’re paddling like fuck to stay afloat. You had to retain your cover at all costs, keep your composure, set up your credibility, try and pull the job off successfully. Most of all, stay in one piece. The adrenalin that coursed through my veins with each new assignment was addictive. I was hooked on the danger. And it was no less so than when they sent me after Danny Smithers. The buzz was there.

Initially, your informant is your lifeline to get the
operation up and running. He is the link with suspects and will initially give you your credibility as he introduces you into the criminal circles he’s planning to blow apart.

‘Yeah, I know this geezer, he’s kosher,’ or something like that. Nothing over the top. With Norris, we’d worked together so often, we had almost a set routine like Morecambe and Wise, gags and all, if I thought a laugh helped my credibility. We’d only have to polish up on it and change a few details with each new target. If I was meeting a new informant, and didn’t know them from Adam, I would need to get their background and preferences together – things like tastes, beers, food, habits, hobbies – that would give us some common ground to work on. Conversation lines would always include the obvious, like ‘Where were you born?’ ‘Where have you lived?’ ‘Where were you brought up?’ ‘How much bird have you done?’ ‘What well-known crooks do you know?’ that we could have a mutual chat about. But you’ve got to be careful; if they check you out with some top villain you’ve mentioned and he says, ‘Never heard of him,’ you could be in deep shit. All the time, the villains might be wanting to keep the informant in on the action while you are desperate to get him off the plot so that he can’t be sussed out.

Undercover work was play-acting in a real-life drama and it worked best if you’d got a bit of a script to stick to. I liked to keep a couple of funny stories up my sleeve to break up conversations, keep it light, get them to like you as a bit of a funny guy, a crook with a sense of humour. You can’t have it all heavy nose to nose, eyeball to eyeball confrontation. You have to try to take out any tension between you and the villains.
You’re trying to set up a business arrangement that’s hopefully going to make you both loads of money. You want them to be comfortable with you. You’re one of them.

It’s vital that your snout has briefed you as best he can so that the enemy doesn’t get suspicious. The villains will always assume you are an undercover cop. You have to convince them otherwise. And they don’t hold back in checking you out. I’ve been thrown against lavatory walls and searched for hidden wires a good few times before they’d accept I was kosher.

I eventually met Danny Smithers after Norris and I had done the ground work around various boozers in South London. He was not an easy man to deal with. He oozed suspicion, wary of everyone. He operated around seedy, run-down pubs, and there was an air of constant menace about his lifestyle that made people uncomfortable in his company. I wasn’t any different. He was a difficult character to deal with, to say the least, and I had to dig deep in my undercover box of tricks to convince him that I was a genuine drug-trafficker of some considerable muscle. I could speak the language, I knew the scene. We agreed a trade involving a kilo of high-grade cocaine.

I was now breaking new ground in covert police work in establishing a ‘freedom to roam’ policy rather than a static operation controlled by senior officers. I needed to be able to move with the action without having to gain consent from my DI or other controlling officer. I had to be able to improvise, move the goalposts if necessary. I’d found that if you
were too stuck in your ways, refusing to leave a particular premises, for instance, because that wasn’t in the game plan, the villains were going to say, ‘Hold on, there’s something wrong here, why won’t he leave?’ Perhaps they wanted to pull out and go to the pub up the road. They might want to move to a pub five miles away to meet someone or have a drink. You could argue that your money was on the plot so you didn’t want to take it on to some other manor you weren’t sure about because of the threat of robbery. This was often true, because the prospect of being ripped off in the drug world was ever-present and the Commissioner of Scotland Yard would not take kindly to you going back and saying, ‘Sorry, boss, I’m £40,000 light on the drug-buy money.’ So I needed this flexibility, a right to roam in pursuit of villainy.

When the evening of the cocaine trade arrived, Danny Smithers was his usual brooding self. You could tell he was a hard bastard. I had to be careful. Don’t say the wrong thing. Should I raise my game and portray myself as hard as him? That could easily lead to a clash of styles – not a good move.

Should I pay a bit of due deference, the ‘respect’ the West Indians are so fond of. ‘Don’t diss me, man.’ OK by me. This could help massage his ego perhaps and, if he was feeling great about himself, and you’d made him feel great that a trade was on and that he was going to make some nice money, then you had the ability to maneouvre him a little bit in the way you want the job to proceed. You were aiming for all the key factors to be in place without arousing the suspicions of this very distrustful man; 1, that he would be nicked, 2, the gear was on the plot and 3, that you could make good your escape. If you’ve got
him feeling happy, it makes things that bit easier.

‘Another drink, Danny?’ I paid my due respects without letting him take me for a mug. The deal was on. We were now on a ‘roaming plot’, moving with the action. It could sometimes be difficult for the supervising officers to keep tabs on. You work to a broad plan; you go here, you go there, wherever is neccessary. You are basically working on the hoof and they must alter plans at a second’s notice to make sure you are still in their sights. The surveillance teams and the attack teams backing you up, always invisible in the background, have to have the brains and the flexibility to change the game plan with all changing locations and environments, a very difficult job which I really appreciated on so many occasions. I knew it could be difficult for them, and dangerous for me, if contact was lost, so I always tried to make matters as easy as I could for them, never doing anything in too much of a hurry, if we were on the move. I’d get to my car door and stop for a chat, either with my driver or one of the bad guys, or light a fag, blow my nose, any sort of delaying tactic to allow the back-up teams to keep with me. But this was not always possible. There was always a margin for error and black holes to fall into.

The trade was scheduled to take place at a pub in East London, just off the Commercial Road, at Smithers’ request. Smithers was orchestrating the situation throughout, nipping in to see me, nipping out to make a phone call and, of course, wanting to see the money. I’d drawn £35,000 of the Commissioner’s money for the deal and had it all bundled up in £100 lots. Whenever I drew big sums, I insisted, much to the annoyance of everybody on the
squad, that it was all rolled up in the drug-dealers’ special way. If it was in twenties it would be four notes then one wrapped over so that everything was in £100 rolls. It made it much easier to count out and it was what the dealers expected to see. If you were sitting in a car with a dealer, you didn’t want to be counting out every bloody note. It would take forever, so it was a case of ‘here’s some I prepared earlier’. When it came from the Yard cashiers, it was all in neat bundles of £5,000. I’d get some of the lads to fold it all down in £100 wads for Charlie Big Potatoes because that’s how I wanted to take it out. I knew the style because I was spending more time being a
drug-dealer
than a cozzer and this was how it happened in the badlands. I was totally into the lifestyle of a top drugs baron. I acted like a drug-dealer, talked like a drug-dealer, thought like a drug-dealer, behaved like a drug-dealer. That’s what made it work.

Danny Smithers was satisfied and had his lieutenants in place. He called the cocaine on to the plot ready for the handover. I was given my directions to go out of the pub and down an alleyway and wait underneath a lamp-post where I could be seen. Then I would be approached.

I was standing there looking the part, big-time drug-dealer, heart racing, adrenalin pumping. It was dark and it was cold and nothing happened for several minutes. You start wondering about a rip-off, a couple of big blokes appearing out of the murk and kicking shit out of you and legging it with the money. It happens a lot but you never hear about it unless some poor bastard gets shot. You just don’t get
drug-dealers
pitching up at police stations saying that they’ve been robbed of a large sum of drugs money. I
was very aware of the risks and getting a tad lonely out there.

Then one of Smithers’ cronies came shuffling up the alley, a little white fella with a woolly hat pulled down over his head. He looked half-pregnant because he’d got the gear shoved down the front of his jacket. He came down the alleyway – he knew who he was looking for, he’d been given my name and description – and he suddenly presented me with the package from under his coat, as they always do. He wanted me to take it quick. It was often pass the parcel with charlie or smack in case of a bust.

‘The money, where’s the money?’ he asked.

I said, ‘Hang on, all you’ve done is present me with a bag of powder here, I’ve got to test it.’

‘You know it’s quality gear, it’s real quality gear, now where’s the money?’

‘Now, calm down,’ I said, ‘settle down, we’re talking about a lot of money here. I’m going to test this before you get to see a penny.’ I opened up the package in the middle of the alleyway because there was only one way I could test the cocaine; you can’t take a line, so you have to dip into the powder with a wet finger and then rub it on your gums. Because cocaine has anaesthetic properties – just like novacaine which dentists use – you can tell pretty well instantaneously whether it’s good gear or rubbish by how quickly your gums go numb. It’s like the early stages of a dental injection, a tingling then an anaesthetic effect. It hit me very quickly. I thought I
was
in the dentist’s chair. This was quality gear. Creamo.

We were all set for the bust and I gave my signal to the waiting back-up squad; off with my Kangol cap
and hold it in my right hand. That’s what they’d been told to watch for and I expected the heavy clump of police boots to be thundering up the alley, guns drawn for action. Nothing happened. I waited. And I waited. Nothing. Houston, we have a problem. At this point, I have a couple of options. I can break cover and nick him. But that jeopardises the informant, risks losing the arrest of Smithers, could blow the whole operation. Alternatively, I can stall for time. So I told the geezer, ‘No, I’m not sure, I haven’t got a feeling yet. I’m gonna have to have another dab, mate.’

So I do it again, playing for time. The quality of the cocaine was never in doubt but I was having to buy a bit more time. I was thinking that I’d had a bloody great surveillance team on me all day but they sure don’t seem to be with me now. In fact, they’d lost me when I went down the alley and they didn’t have the nous to send somebody down to see what was happening. So I had another dab. And by now, my mouth is so anaesthetised I thought I’d copped a right-hander from Lennox Lewis. You could have ripped my teeth out one by one and I wouldn’t have known. I wouldn’t have felt a thing. I thought, If I have to take another dab I’ll seize up. It was like my top lip was stuck to my gums. Then they finally sent someone down the alley to see what was happening. The bad guy and I got into a sort of huddle and lit up a fag as if nothing was going on, like we’re just having a chat. But chatting had become near impossible. My mouth was like after you’ve had a tooth out. I could hardly speak a word it was so numb. I managed to mumble that I wasn’t happy and I was going to have to give the gear back to him. He knew it was good
gear, he’d probably had a toot himself before the trade – so what sort of twat he thought I was I don’t know. I had no choice but to pull out. If back-up couldn’t be there on time to nick him, it would have to be one that got away. I started to move off muttering, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ under my breath. I was fuming. I’d set the job up, I’d got the gear on the plot, where were those tossers?