Gangbuster (9 page)

I was disappearing into the night and the dealer was walking out of the alley when all hell broke loose. The heavy mob arrived. Someone was shouting, ‘A
TTACK
,
ATTACK
,
ATTACK
.’ They chased and caught him nearby. Then he nearly died from an asthma attack in the street. They ended up calling an ambulance for him and it was touch and go for a couple of days. He subsequently sued the police for damages but lost his claim. Talk about chancing it – he’d been caught
red-handed
with a half kilo of coke!

Smithers ran a spurious defence after his case went to a retrial and was eventually acquitted of conspiracy to supply drugs and possession of drugs. There is a Scotland Yard report in existence which called it an ‘outrageous defence which totally confused or at least misled the jury’. Smithers is now in prison for other offences. If he wants to sue me for mentioning his involvement in the East London case I’ll see him in court.

Like many of the cases I was involved in, I was not asked to give evidence because my guv’nors wanted to retain my anonymity for future operations. If they had a strong enough case without me, they’d keep me
out of it altogether. That way, the villains would never know I was an undercover cop. If it was necessary, I’d do it from behind a screen if the trial judge was amenable.

On another job involving a big cannabis ring, I found myself negotiating with a small army of villains. I’ve never known any job in which so many people were involved.

I was again posing as a buyer and the gang reckoned they could supply me up to 40 kilos of good-grade hash. As it happened, they didn’t have the ability to get the full quota and they only brought 10 kilos on to the plot.

We were again on a fluid, roving brief and went to North London for the trade. Suddenly there were six, seven, eight people involved, a bloody battalion of fingers in the pie. I wasn’t negotiating with one of them, I was negotiating with the whole fucking lot of them. I couldn’t hear myself think.

I’d spent days working around the Holloway Road, getting dragged round pubs here, there and everywhere, meeting other people, trying to penetrate the gang. I finally ended up in a shop somewhere. Again, it’s late at night and it’s dark and I’m involved in a lot of heated negotiations over the cannabis with the bloke who’s running the place. The whole place is adorned with knives, machetes, swords, every sort of weapon.

Anyway, it was gone 9.00pm, the place was closed to the public and I was locked inside with this mad bastard and his fearsome choppers. Tempers were getting frayed; it was boiling up into a nasty situation. They were insisting that I brought the money into the building. I argued that I wasn’t bringing in the cash in
case it got nicked and I was thinking, Fuck me, I’m in a knife shop, I’ve got to be careful here. The bloke I was talking to was a daunting fucker; shaven-headed, big, tall fucking lump. He ran the place and was basically putting the deal together. I wasn’t budging from my standpoint until I’d seen the hash. They were getting shirtier and shirtier.

Then, suddenly a car screeched up outside the shop and I was bundled out and slung into the back seat. As we were driving round the block, they produced the cannabis and said, ‘Right, there’s the fucking gear, where’s the cash?’

They’d expected me to do it all nicely nicely on trust and weren’t happy that I’d insisted on seeing the stuff. But I had to satisfy the police criteria for making an arrest. I had to risk needling them. I looked at the hash and it seemed fine. And just as quickly as I’d been bundled out of the place I was shoved back in it, and the car drove off with the gear inside. I thought the Old Bill shadowing me would have missed all that and wouldn’t know where the cannabis was being kept. I thought they would have considered that too risky. So now I was totally incommunicado. The bloke turned round to me, bolted the place back and front and said, ‘Right, if you don’t bring the money in here there’s only one way you’re going to leave this shop.’ ‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘With six of them in your back,’ he continued. He was looking at the knives on the wall, and proper fuck-off knives they were. So I thought, It’s only a poxy job and not worth dying for, and told him I’d call up the money from my mate who was round the corner with it in his motor. I rang my pal –
another undercover officer, of course – on my mobile and started talking
utter fucking gobbledegook. He was asking me questions and I was giving him stupid answers hoping he’d twig that I was in bother.

We had agreed one pre-arranged danger word at the start of the operation. If I mentioned it, he would know it had all gone horrendously wrong and he would need to alert the cavalry. I gave the password – in fact it was two: ‘poxy BMW’, which you could slip easily into a conversation – and told the knife loony the money was on its way. I said my mate was a little way away and would be there in a few minutes. That was a bluff upon which my life could depend. I knew the money wasn’t going to come round. The tension in the shop became absolutely unbearable. Everyone was hyper, him and three or four other guys, they were all on edge, jittery. I made another call on the mobile. ‘Are you on your way, get a move on?’ I knew he wasn’t in a BMW but I said again, ‘Are you in that poxy BMW?’

That left him in no doubt we had a crisis. I managed to get myself slightly away from the front door because I knew what was going to happen next. And it did.

B
ANG
!

It was like a fucking bomb going off as the Old Bill launched into the front of the shop, taking out doors and windows with sledge-hammers. One of the biggest blokes you’ve ever seen took out the reinforced front door with a couple of mighty swipes. The drug gang thought they were about to be ripped off.

‘Are these yours? Are these yours?’ they asked.

‘They’re fuck all to do with me,’ I lied. With that, they all start legging it to the back of the shop which
was great because it was bolted and barred like Fort Knox and they were all desperately trying to get the door open. The attack team ploughed through the front door and captured them all at the back of the shop, trapped like rats. With that, I was out through the hole and scarpered off the plot.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a big stash of drugs in the shop, just a couple of little bits which were samples and that was all they got charged with possessing. The bloke round the corner with the main drugs was arrested and identified and stood trial separately. The bad bastard who had threatened my life never stood trial because no drugs were found on him, but he was the real orchestrator of the deal.

We wanted to protect the undercover operation and our source. My giving evidence in court would have given it away. I must say I was a little bit aggrieved because he’d held me captive and had threatened to stick fucking great knives in my back. I’d been kidnapped, in essence. I did make my feelings known to the management and said I was willing to give evidence, but they said ‘No’. I just had to bite my tongue, walk away and hope to God I never met him on another job.

That is always one of your greatest fears. You walk into a drugs operation and there in front of you is someone you’ve met before on a previous job who’s either served their bird or hadn’t been arrested. They don’t necessarily know or suspect you are Old Bill, but when it all went wrong last time you were there, and you’re tainted. You keep a register of everyone you come across and try to cross-reference them with every new job that comes along, but it always remained a risk. In the drugs world, there are
thousands and thousands of people at it out there. That’s the depressing side of things. You would have thought that in the ten years I was doing undercover drugs work, one of those compromising situations would have cropped up. But it never did, partly through luck and partly through the care we put into researching each operation. Drugs involve people right across the social strata, from toerags in the gutter to members of high society. I’ve even been in the homes of TV personalities, famous and notorious personalities, orchestrating drugs deals, not necessarily with their knowledge but in their houses with people close to them. I’ve crossed every strata and met people from virtually every walk of life, educated, gentrified even, during my drugs investigations.

It’s quite phenomenal how many people are at it. A ton of cannabis is smoked in London every night. Kilos of cocaine are snorted up people’s noses every week or smoked as crack. Millions of Ecstasy tablets are taken every weekend across the country. And people do it because it’s fun. That’s how it all starts – for fun. Then comes dependency and addiction and suddenly it’s not fun any more. But that old dope dealer is still out there and willing to sell you the gear you’ve got hooked on and then you’ve got to find the cash to pay him. That’s the start of the rot. You’re on the slippery slope to ruin.

Personally, I’d like to see the decriminalisation of certain drug offences. If you are nicked with an eighth of cannabis, a gramme of cocaine or one Ecstasy tablet, I cannot see the point of the police hauling you off to a police station, taking about four hours to process you, costing plenty of money and reducing police resources.
I would like to see that level of drug-taking reduced down to the level of a parking offence. If a policeman stops you on the street and finds you in possession of a drug for personal use, he should be able to issue you with a parking-type ticket with a £40 or £50 fine which you must pay within a month or something similar. That would free up the cop to go about his business again after 15 minutes as opposed to four hours spent in the police station plus any subsequent court hearing. The more people a copper is able to deal with in the course of a day, the more chance he has of pulling someone with drugs who will say, ‘Actually, I’m willing to tell you where I got it from,’ and then you could be into the dealer, then possibly on to the importer and the international gangs.

These were the big fish I was after now and every lead into the gangs could be vital. I did a lot of work in South London and met a lot of black guys involved in, or on the margins of, the drugs business. A person’s colour or race had by now become unimportant to me. There are good guys and bad guys, end of story. But it had been difficult to erase the memories of my early days pounding the beat on those South London streets – I’m talking late Seventies, early Eighties – when racism was not only institutionalised, it was bloody compulsory.

The first day I ever went out on the streets I was exposed to impropriety of the highest order. I was totally naïve and inexperienced in the ways of policing that existed among some officers at that time. I went out with my ‘parent PC’ and other officers to raid a blues party at a disused premises in Peckham. It was the big thing among the West Indian community at the time. Find the premises, get in
stacks of booze, a DJ and some really loud reggae music, plenty of ganja, charge a tenner a head on the door and dance the night away. It was OK if you’re part of the scene, but a real bummer if you lived nearby and got Bob Marley thumping through your walls for eight hours.

I knew Peckham was a lively nick when I was posted there after Hendon and was chomping at the bit to get some action. I had testosterone coursing through my veins and I wanted to get out there and make my difference. Because I badgered and pestered so much, I was eventually allowed to go out on this raid. And what an eye-opener it proved to be.

I was solemnly told to stick to my parent PC – my puppy walker, in effect – and not let him out of my sight. ‘Don’t get involved in nicking people because it’s your first day out. Do what he does and, if he needs help, give him help.’

So we went crashing in through the doors of this blues party, pandemonium all round, drugs hitting the deck so people don’t get nicked in possession. I stuck tight to my parent PC and he went straight up to the fucking great sound system and pulled what looked like a long hat pin out of his kit. Then he systematically pierced the speakers with it, wrecking the system with barely a mark showing. Better than belting fuck out of it with a truncheon, he reckoned. Then he went to the record collection and started smashing that up, too. What do I do? This is my baptism of fire on my very first operation. Do I say it’s wrong, do I partake in it? The pressure was such that I went along. Then I quickly learned about ‘flying ganja’; drugs which have been dumped on the floor mysteriously find their way back into the pockets of
the suspects, most of them black, and they are charged with possession. It was unbelievable, but it was common practice in those days. They might have got lucky and put the drugs back in the right pockets sometimes, but you can bet your life they didn’t always and they certainly didn’t care.

Derogatory words like ‘coon’ and ‘sooty’ were bandied about all the time. If you didn’t join in the banter, which I now have to admit to, to my great shame, then you were looked on as an outsider, you’d be ostracised and distrusted, your career would go nowhere. Then, years later, some of those people who’d been with you doing those things go on to have glittering careers and end up being holier than thou and telling people how they should or shouldn’t behave towards the ethnic minorities. Some of us have very long memories. The sooner there is an independent body for investigating police complaints, the better for everybody.

W
e were parked up right near the Royal Court Theatre just after Christmas and I was giving a performance to be envied. A deal was about to go down for a £14,000 package of cocaine. Then the dealer started hinting that I might be a copper trying to set him up. On the basis that attack is the best form of defence, I rounded on him angrily.

‘If you’re insulting me by saying I could be Old Bill then you can just fuck off out of this car now. Go on, fuck off.’

I was hurling it at him from the top of my voice. Desmond looked startled. In his rich West Indian patois he tried to calm the situation.

‘No, no, no, man, I’m not insulting you, but you know we have to be careful.’

I retorted, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know, but just grow up
and let’s get on with the trade.’

It was a risk I had to take. He might have pulled out and cleared off. But he didn’t. The lure of £14,000 persuaded him to put the thought of underhand dealings to the back of his mind. He looked greedily at the wedge of cash we produced from the boot of our maroon 5 series BMW, one of SO10’s pool of luxury motors we used on undercover operations.

‘OK, let’s do it,’ he said and sprinted off to collect the package of cocaine that was up for offer.

Desmond should have gone with his hunch. Minutes later he was flat on his face on the deck in Sloane Square with Customs Officers and police on top of him. It was another nicking which emanated from my favourite location for sting operations, the Royal Court Tavern, opposite the Royal Court Theatre. There always seemed a nice irony about staging our operations among London’s theatrical clientele, blissfully unaware of the real life dramas going on under their noses as they sipped their G and Ts before curtain up.

The Christmas decorations were still inviting goodwill to all when I was first introduced to Desmond the dealer, and leg man for a far bigger cocaine racket spread throughout London. I’d gone in through the side door in Sedding Street and walked up to the bar where my colleague Richard was waiting. We had just ordered a couple of pints when a tall, slim black man in his mid-thirties came in. He was wearing a black cardigan, grey patterned trousers and black Kangol flat hat. Cool dude. He walked over and Richard introduced us.

‘Desmond, this is Peter who I told you about.’

We shook hands. Desmond said, ‘Hello, Peter, it
was you I was expecting to meet. Sorry about the time. I couldn’t find this place.’ His voice was rich and deep.

‘Well, at least we’ve met now,’ I replied with a touch of nonchalance that I hoped would put him at ease.

‘So, you want business?’ he said.

‘Yeah, if it suits me,’ I told him. He was keen.

‘Me tell you, man, this is the best coke you’ll find. Come, let’s talk.’

We walked outside.

‘Look, you can have 16 ounces today and then 2 kilos at the weekend. Is that OK?’

I told him, ‘Look, I’m on wages you know. It’s not all my money, so I’ll have to speak to my people. We can handle 16 ounces, no problem. How much do you want for it?’

He wanted £16,000.

‘Too much,’ I said, ‘we’ll only pay 15 maximum.’

Desmond went into sales mode. ‘Try some,’ he said, ‘take this sample and see what you think.’

He reached down and pulled a small plastic bag of powder out of his right sock and handed it to me. I slipped it in my coat pocket.

‘You check it out and if you like it and want to do business, I’ll call you later.’

I said, ‘All right, call about six o’clock.’

Too late, said Desmond, could we make it about 4.00pm and do the trade that night? I agreed. ‘Sweet,’ he said as we parted company, and I set off for Scotland Yard to get the cocaine tested.

Desmond rang at 4.30pm. I was with another undercover officer who was pretending to be part of my cocaine network. My colleague, Graham said the
gear was not of the quality we normally dealt with. Because it was poorer strength, we’d need more of it, and the top price we’d pay was £12,000. After a bit of haggling, it was agreed we’d stump up £14,000 cash. We agreed another meet at the Royal Court Tavern for the trade.

‘You will have the money?’ asked Desmond.

‘Definitely, no problem,’ I said.

‘Good, so it will be quick?’

‘Yeah, nice and quick and no fuck-ups.’

‘Cool, no fuck-ups.’

I arrived with Richard just before 8.00pm and we parked in Sedding Street. In the boot was a Christmassy silver carrier bag with £13,500 stuffed into it in used notes from Scotland Yard’s undercover fund. I went into the pub and bought a drink. Soon Desmond came in and beckoned me with a nod of the head. I followed him to the rear door of the pub.

‘So you got the money?’

‘Yeah, it’s here. You got the coke?’

Desmond said it was close by. So was our money.

‘Do you want to see it?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’

I told him that once he’d seen the cash he’d got two minutes to bring me the cocaine or I’d fuck off.

‘I’m not going to sit about when you know where my money is,’ I said.

We walked towards the BMW.

‘When you’ve seen the money, I ain’t going to sit around like a plum so you can blag me,’ I insisted.

‘No, man,’ he said.

We got into the back seat behind Richard.

‘I thought you were on your own.’

‘Don’t be fucking stupid; Richard has an interest
in this as well.’

I told him again that once he’d counted the cash he’d only got minutes to produce the coke before we cleared off.

‘It’s very close by,’ he said.

I said I’d go with him. He looked shocked. ‘My other people will see you,’ he said, getting agitated. ‘I’ll go an’ get it.’

I said I’d wait in the pub. ‘You bring it to me there and we’ll do a quick exchange there and then at the car.’

Desmond agreed. ‘We must be careful,’ he said, ‘I don’t know you, and we have to be careful of the police, you know.’

He was looking round for imagined danger.

‘Once I’ve got the parcel the risks are all mine, so don’t start that bollocks,’ I said testily.

‘I’ve been speaking on the phone and the police could have intercepted and put you in, see what I’m saying?’ he added nervously. How close you were, Desmond. My angry response to his suspicions seemed to placate him and the deal was back on course. Richard produced the goody bag with the cash in.

‘There’s 13-and-a-half thousand in there,’ he said.

Desmond raised his eyebrows. ‘But I agreed 14 thousand.’

I said, ‘Yeah, but I’ve taken £500 out for me to have a drink out of this and that’s that.’

Desmond grinned. ‘OK,’ he said, flicking through the wads of notes and seemed happy.

‘Off you go and get the coke … I’ll be in the pub,’ I said.

He was gone no more than two minutes. He came
in and said, ‘Come, let’s go.’ He looked around the bar again, failing to pick up on any of the surveillance team dotted around with their beers and crisps. We went out of the side door into Sedding Street.

‘Let me see it then,’ I demanded. From inside a long coat he was wearing against the cold December night he produced a black-and-brown ladies’ handbag with a long strap. I took it into a stairwell adjacent to the pub, pulled out a sock and a rag and saw the coke in its plastic wrapping.

‘Yeah, seems all right,’ I nodded. ‘You walk up to the car and throw it in and Richard will give you the cash.’

Desmond said, ‘Yeah.’

‘If this gear is light or shit,’ I warned him, ‘you’ll be hearing from us one way or another, you understand.’ I was in drug-dealer mode and this is what he would expect to hear.

‘Yeah, there’s no problem with this,’ he said.

At this I heard the heavy clump of Customs Officers’ boots and saw them right behind Desmond with back-up cops not far away. I legged it. And the curtain came down on Desmond’s big deal. He was later jailed for cocaine trafficking.

For success in the complex arena of undercover policing, it was necessary to move in with streetwise conviction, to hone your cover story to perfection, to make the opposition believe in you as a real person. I had to be more than just a bloke buying some gear. I needed flesh on the bones of my character.

To that end, I built up a series of background
stories that would stand up against the the most intense scrutiny. I love a pint. So whenever I was in a pub, I endeavoured to learn as much about the licensing trade as I could. Peter the ex-publican was always a good cover. I learned how to change a barrel, how much a barrel of ale cost, what your profit margins are, how to feed spirits from the off licence through the optics without the brewery and VAT man knowing. Or sometimes I’d pretend to be a former free-house owner and I’d talk about the scams I’d worked, like ‘skimming’ off the top or buying dodgy bootleg gear and selling it. I could say, ‘Yeah, I was in the pub trade for years,’ if villains were asking, and know that I could keep up that front.

I also used the cover story of being a former pop group manager. I had a friend who had a relative involved in the management of various groups and had recently taken over rock legends Status Quo, one of Britain’s most durable groups. He felt there were some serious financial irregularities in the accounts and came to me as a friend for advice. I was never a fraud investigator and never could be. But I knew a man who was, a good pal called Bob Webb stationed at the Yard’s fraud squad in Holborn at the time. He was a financial expert, and knew his subject inside and out.

We went in our own time to meet the Status Quo management team and Bob went through the books. He advised them where there might be a bit of a black hole and what action they should take.

I was amazed at how comparatively little they were worth after all their years in the pop business. I think they pursued civil action to recover some of the missing money. This was wonderful material for me.
It gave me a great insight into the workings and pitfalls of pop management. I was firing questions all the time, learning about royalties, percentages, live shows and so on, building up yet another cover story in my repertoire of authentic-sounding characters for my underworld forages against crime.

I was never one for mixing with other Old Bill all the time and I kept a wide circle of friends outside the police force – car dealers, publicans, builders. And all the time I listened and learned as they talked about their work, paid a lot of attention to what they said and, unbeknown to them, would go out next day on an undercover job and purport to be a builder, or whatever. I’d know about costs, what a day’s wages for a plumber was, a chippie, a sparks or a labourer. Terrific cover. You’d make sure, of course, that the villain you were looking at wasn’t a master builder himself. That could have got tricky. But it was horses for courses. You chose your cover story to suit the villains you were dealing with.

The SO10 undercover unit was setting up businesses itself at the time. There were second-hand shops staffed by undercover officers to nick villains and fences selling stolen gear. They nicked hundreds of people selling bent goods. They set up a mobile phone shop on one occasion. Cloning phones had become such a major industry they wanted to get at the guys behind it. I spent a good deal of time with the lads running the shop so that I could learn the machinations of the mobile phone industry and its various scams. ‘Yes, I’ve got a mobile phone shop.’ Another great cover. And the bonus was that if the villains then wanted a phone cloned or new chips fitted, I could go back to the shop and get it done.
That would put me in well with the villains and set me up nicely for bigger deals in drugs or whatever.

I’d try to get hold of snide gear – fake designer wear that is, confiscated in police raids – and take that along to meets with crooks.

‘Here you are, mate, a couple of nice Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts for you. They’re snide but who cares?’

They end up thinking, Not only is this geezer a drug-dealer but he can fix your mobiles and get moody T-shirts. Ace bloke.

I gave some T-shirts to a couple of blokes trying to sell me counterfeit currency. They loved it. They were selling me counterfeit notes. I was giving them counterfeit clothes.

Another favourite cover was ex-football pro. I said I’d fallen on hard times after a bad injury and was now carving my way through life doing a bit of drugs, this, that and the other. I’ve always been bonkers about football and I could rattle off footballers’ names, matches and times and places. I’d never claim to have been a QPR player because they were my team. I’d always profess to be a former player with a club I didn’t like and I’d slag them off something rotten all the way through the conversation – what a bunch of arseholes they were, the chairman was a slag, the board were shit-arses who’d let me down and fucked up my insurance pay-out. My career was ruined, they just left me on the scrap heap and now here I was a drug-dealer. It all made the wheels of deception grind that little bit easier.