Gangbuster (15 page)

The trade had been arranged to take place at Darlington railway station. Normally, stations were a good place to meet and conduct drug deals because of the volume of people who would be about and you could mingle with the crowd. They also had left-luggage lockers for stashing drugs or money. That was, of course, until the advent of wall-to-wall CCTV cameras which is so prevalent in all public places now. I believe the statistics suggest that an individual can be picked up on a CCTV camera over 200 times in a normal working day. But that’s now. In the Eighties,
there weren’t nearly so many, and a station was still a good, sensible place for doing criminal business.

We settled into our seats for the Darlington trip, coffee and sandwiches to hand and Diane keeping a wary eye on £16,000 in a case. I was met at the other end by one of the heroin dealers by the name of Mushi – or ‘Mushy Peas’ as we called him – and we started the transaction with me acting the big-shot dealer from up the Smoke and Diane as my gangster’s moll. Then there was the usual hiccup – the drug parcel was not there yet, we’d have to sit and wait, blah blah. The times I’d heard that.

Almost at once, Mushi was alerted by a bloke standing on the opposite platform. He took a second look then ducked out of sight and asked me, ‘Do you know that geezer over there?’ He pointed out a guy in jeans and a casual jacket standing there apparently just minding his own business and waiting for a train.

‘No, don’t know him from Adam,’ I said.

‘Well, I fucking do,’ he replied, ‘he’s Old Bill. I know that for sure because he trains in a gym in Middlesbrough where I train.’

I could see the alarm bells ringing in his head. He insisted we left the station and I had to tell Diane to stay put in the buffet with the money. I wasn’t too happy about it but she was cool with the situation. We went out of the station and walked about a bit doing a lot of anti-surveillance around the neighbouring streets ensuring that neither of us was being followed. Mushi seemed satisfied everything was OK and the gear finally arrived on the plot. By that time, thankfully, the bloke on the opposite platform had disappeared and Mushi assumed he’d just been waiting for a train. But he was, in fact, one
of the surveillance team put in by the local police to back Diane and me up. It was either a stroke of luck, or a canny move on his part, that he’d disappeared off the plot when the time came to do the deal or it wouldn’t have gone down and everyone’s time would have been wasted. He must have realised that if he just stood there and trains came and went, he was going to stick out like a sore thumb so he’d backed off.

He wasn’t the only back-up cop there. There were undercover officers in British Rail clothes with the fluorescent vests tinkering about at the end of the platform; we had a bloke dressed up in the full BR porter’s uniform complete with peaked hat. There was plenty of support still safely in place. We finally went back to the station, looked for a toilet where we could do the business and checked that Diane was still OK with the cash.

It was a typical run down neglected station; only half the bogs had a lock on them and we had to test each of them ’til we found a cubicle with a secure lock where I opened up the parcel. It was wrapped in the standard drug-dealer’s way, a bag within a bag within a bag and so on. I pulled down the toilet seat, put the package on it and carried out my tests to see if it was OK gear. I sampled a little bit by burning it on the silver foil I always carried with me on these jaunts. I nodded and told him I was happy with it and pulled out some masking tape to make the package secure again for transportation to London. Then, much to his delight – and with his help because I wanted to get his fingerprints all over it – I started to shape the parcel into something which could be concealed on the female body, i.e. a fucking great cock, a dildo. We
were in this tatty bog together and I couldn’t stop him laughing.

‘My girl’s got to courier it for me so I’ve got to make it into a shape so that she can stuff it,’ I told him, very much tongue in cheek but he didn’t know that. We were wrapping more tape round this huge dick-like object and he was in fits. He said, ‘It’s impossible, she’ll never get that up there.’

‘Don’t you worry,’ I said, ‘she’s on the game and she’s had bigger than that up there.’

By now we were both pissing ourselves with laughter.

‘It’ll make her eyes water,’ he said and fell about again.

‘And she’ll have a smile on her face all the way to London,’ I said.

We finally got this huge dildo-shaped parcel neatly taped up and I asked him to hold it until we got back to the buffet to get the money from Diane for the swap. Of course, we never made it back to the buffet. As we strolled along the platform, I gave the signal and Mr Station Master and half-a-dozen hairy-arsed Old Bill jumped him and carted him off to Darlington nick. I made my escape in customary fashion by diving into nearby back-streets then linked up with Diane later.

I must say, she wasn’t overly impressed with the scenario I’d put forward to Mushi. What if, she said, it had all gone wrong and she had ended up with the elongated parcel and had an excited Mushi waiting to know if she’d managed the concealment?

‘Well,’ I said, ‘when duty calls …’

If I remember correctly, the gist of her reply was along the lines ‘You must be joking, Blex,’ but a tad
more colourful. Good girl was Diane.

Mushi, whose real name I never knew because my role was to go in undercover then vanish and not to concern myself with the prosecution side and the paperwork, was charged with drug trafficking and jailed for a substantial period. We had a laugh but, at the end of the day, it was another bit of scum off the streets.

On another job, I was sent on a ‘romantic weekend’ in Bruges in Belgium as part of an undercover infiltration of a drug gang run by some German and Belgian crooks. A female member of the team and I had to carry out a recce of the city so that I could be seen to be familiar with it when we met the gang there for negotiations. I’d told them I knew Bruges, but in fact had never been there in my life, so it was important to buff up quickly, get to know some bars, a hotel, some clubs. It was the kind of detail that made SO10 such a potent crime-fighting force. We needed to get our faces known a bit and get the lie of the land so we knew what we were talking about. So a good recce was essential before meeting the bad guys to talk drug-dealing.

We went in our undercover roles as a trendy young couple, a bit flash, money to spend, on a weekend trip to a very lovely city, much like thousands of others who go to Bruges every year. We hoped we’d be noticed. It would be convincing cover if we returned and a barman said, ‘Hi, Peter, hi, Sue, nice to see you again.’ Because it was just a recce, we took our official police ID as well, which we kept carefully concealed in our car but which we could produce if we hit a snag. We needed to have an each-way bet on this one.

We drove out there on the ferry from Dover in a lovely Jag from the Yard’s pool of undercover motors, enjoyed a really pleasant weekend and achieved our goal, ready to move the drugs operation on to a further step. I think we must have done the job too well because on the way back we got a pull at the Customs at Dover. They obviously thought we were at it in some way or other. I don’t know whether they’d been tipped off by the police in Belgium or something of that sort, but they were determined to give us a tough time by searching the Jag inch by fucking inch. Fucking marvellous, I thought. I could just have produced our police ID and sorted it out in minutes. But I thought, Fuck ’em. They were being really stroppy, tearing all my bags apart, really giving us the third degree. They’d seen our fake IDs we used for the Bruges trip so I started spinning them a token yarn about where we’d been and why. I knew it was only a matter of time before they would eventually find our police ID. My female colleague Sue started off looking a bit apprehensive about why I hadn’t just shown out to the Customs boys. Then she started getting a bit panicky.

‘What are you doing?’ she said. She had been expecting me to take the lead and produce the ID cards and tell the Customs who we were, save everybody’s time and get on with it. But because I hated the Customs so much I just sat there and let them get on with it. I thought, Bollocks, I’d got nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon and I was beginning to enjoy sitting there and watching the Customs blokes waste their time. They demolished our fucking car and, of course, after about an hour, found our warrant cards securely hidden under the
spare wheel in the boot. This Customs geezer looked at me and you could see he really wanted to rip my fucking head off.

‘Why didn’t you tell us from the start who you were instead of wasting our time?’ he demanded.

‘I like watching people work, actually,’ I told him.

They were really, really pissed off. OK, it was a bit of a laugh at the expense of Customs, and you will have gathered there was no love lost between them and us, but the downside was that the Jaguar had to be abandoned as an undercover vehicle and taken out of the Scotland Yard pool, and our false identities used in Bruges had to be scrapped because everything was now on the Customs computers. If they had seen us going out again they would probably have stopped us again wondering what we were up to. We had to kill every scrap of identity involving that trip. But it would have happened anyway, even if I had declared our true status from the off. They’d still have had everything on computer and there was always the danger that we might be compromised some time in the future. You don’t want any false identities on record anywhere. Or genuine ones, come to that. In my line of business, you could never be too sure.

I’ve got tremendous respect for the women in the undercover unit, as you will have gathered. They do a fantastic job. It’s about a 70:30 ratio of male to female but they are equal in ability every time. Apart from classic cases like Lizzie James in the Wimbledon Common murder inquiry, undercover women officers are brilliant against fraudsters and white-collar
crime. If you are doing a job in a plush hotel, an attractive woman on your arm can often allay suspicions. If you are there smartly dressed with a fashionably dressed woman, people aren’t going to give you much of a second glance.

When we were on the trail of The Dutchman, for instance, we knew he was a bachelor living alone in London and I asked him if he fancied a night out on the town. I said my girlfriend had got a mate and we could make up a foursome if he fancied it. He was pretty keen on the idea, I got it OK’d by the bosses, then picked the two best-looking girls on the undercover section to come along. I told them the score, that The Dutchman was involved in a big-time drug gang and I was purporting to be a top banana drug boss here with hundreds of thousands of illicit pounds to spend, and they were happy with that. It was all part of adding to the credibility of the role I was playing, to get The Dutchman convinced he was on to someone with big bucks.

I told the girls we were going to a top-notch venue for the night and when they turned up at the Yard ready for the off, they looked absolutely fucking magnificent. They had really put themselves out.

I’d picked the Windows on the World restaurant on the 28th floor of the Hilton Hotel for our night out. I loved the place anyway – I’d been a few times before – and I’d booked a nice window table with fantastic views right across the capital at night. Basically, if I was ever going to impress a top drug-dealer, this was the place and the girls were the business. The Dutchman was hopping. We had a fantastic meal with loads of champagne. Top stuff. The girls looked such crackers that, as soon as they
went to the loo, he said to me, ‘Her mate, is she a working girl?’ and was sex with her going to be nailed on?

That posed a bit of a dilemma for me.

‘Oh, no, no,’ I said. ‘She’s not a hooker, but you know, play your cards right and you never know your luck!’

I know she’s not going to shag him, that
is
beyond the call of duty. But I was hoping she would be able to flirt with him, give him an enjoyable evening, give him a promise for the future which would never happen because I was expecting to have him nicked by then.

We had a fantastic night; the Dutchman was putty in our hands, but the boss running the job nearly choked when I showed him the bill – nearly £550 for the four of us. We’d had bubbly and the works, I’d successfully convinced The Dutchman I was a major-league drug-dealer and it was money well spent in my opinion. You certainly couldn’t have taken a crook of that stature into a McDonald’s and had a Happy Meal for four. All in all, it was one of the more pleasurable evening’s work in the often sordid world of drug-dealing. One theory was that, when the investigation fell flat over in Amsterdam and The Dutchman was left free in London, was that he’d fallen head over heels in love with our undercover girl and became more interested in getting into her knickers than dealing in drugs. It’s ironic, I suppose, after all that expense, that neither the job nor the police girl’s knickers came off.

P
osing as an IRA henchman brought me solemn respect in my underworld dealings. But it didn't stop me getting poleaxed by one of my own mates in the middle of a huge drugs bust. It was probably stupid, on reflection, to infiltrate a heavyweight drugs mob by saying I was buying the stuff on behalf of the Provos but it made sure nobody ever asked too many awkward questions. Even my Cockney accent didn't seem to ring any alarm bells.

It was well known that the IRA were into drug-dealing on a massive scale to launder cash to buy guns, so it was an acceptable ploy. The north London firm I was into were selling consignments of speed – ‘whizz' or ‘billy whizz' as it is known – like it was a supermarket special offer.

I moved in undercover after a tip-off that they were ‘at it' on such a scale they were producing
literally millions of amphetamine-based tablets every week. They were hitting the London nightclub scene or wherever else there was a ready market for pep pills. The mob were fronted up by a bloke who was being referred to on the underworld grapevine as Mr Speed. It was known from intelligence reports and tip-offs that they were supplying big, wholesale batches of the tablets, thousands at a time, to
middlemen
dealers. The supply was so consistent they were either making the stuff themselves or were very close to the machinery and chemicals that were being used in some secret drugs factory.

Finding a pill machine and putting it out of action was regarded as a premier prize. It was with this object in mind that I got myself involved with the firm. It was, like most undercover ops, a ‘gently, gently' job, getting yourself accepted by the villains, establishing your credibility, building up the character you were supposed to be, acting the role of bad guy. It sometimes got so effortless it was worrying. Getting ‘in character' had become so second nature to me I sometimes reckoned I was more convincing as a villian than Frankie Fraser. But that had to be good, not bad. That's what I was paid to do.

I didn't say in as many words that I was working for the IRA. A few casual mentions of ‘the boys over the water' and people drew their own conclusions. I met members of the gang at various North London pubs and slowly got bits of intelligence and information out of them over a few beers and a bit of calculated chat but there was no hint as to where the pill machine was hidden. As word leaked out that I was supposedly a dealer acting on behalf of the
Provisionals, I earned enough respect to stop them getting too nosey about my background, though Christ knows what the IRA would have done if they had known I was using their name in vain. A bullet in the back of the head or a shot through the kneecaps would probably have sorted it for them. The villains in my sights were a bit older than me and believed I was a young, up-and-coming criminal star who was up to laundering considerable sums of money for the terrorists through drugs. The sort of bloke you wanted to keep in with for the future. Obviously going places in gangland.

Mr Speed and his cronies agreed to supply me with 16,000 speed tablets as a start to our ‘business' arrangements. When a deal like this was arranged, it took a team conference to set up the details, such as back-up, armed or otherwise, arresting officers, drivers and so on, to make sure it all went smoothly. We were dealing with top crooks and we'd got to be on top of the situation.

When the day of the trade came down, I required a driver who would pose as one of my IRA associates on the deal. Out of the blue, I was asked by the undercover unit if I would be prepared to take out an inexperienced but highly-rated cop who they reckoned might have a big future in the squad. No problem. So I met the guy, got to know him in what short time we had available and, yes, I felt he was up to the job. He looked like a hoodlum, spoke like a hoodlum, conducted himself like a hoodlum, all bonus points in our line of work. I felt I would be able to take him on this job with little risk of disaster, briefed him up a bit, and gave him a spot of quick-fire training – a few handy tips on keeping a step ahead of
the villains, that sort of thing. It was agreed that we'd do the trade in a pub car park in Holloway, North London. We all turned up at the agreed time. The villains were shown the money we had brought along to buy the drugs, supplied by Scotland Yard, of course, and they brought the parcel of drugs on to the plot. We had agreed a pre-arranged signal with the back-up team for them to steam in and make the arrests. In this case, it was me scratching my right ear, something that could easily be seen by any watching cops – or so I thought. My new driver, my minder as the villains thought, was sitting in the car while I was doing the business. I got into the back seat with one of the bad guys and examined the parcel. I obviously couldn't count out 16,000 whizz tablets one by one, it would take all fucking day. I took a sample count of what 100 looked like and compared it to the rest of the bags, gauging it by eye and by weight. You weigh 100 and then weigh one of the big bags and calculate it accordingly. It all looked genuine stuff and the bust was set to go. I gave the signal expecting the troops to come storming in and nick the whole team red-handed. But nothing happened. There had been some sort of problem getting their act together. A familiar story, unfortunately, which had dropped me in the shit before.

So now I had to play for time, drag the scenario out. I had to take the geezer to the boot of the car and show him the £15,000 in used notes, with a view to actually giving it to him if necessary, but it was merely tactical time-delaying. The object was not to go out actually buying drugs but purporting to buy them, don't let go of the dosh until the cavalry have
charged in.

So I was standing at the boot of the car, things were getting a bit tense, and I'd gone into deliberate slow motion as we wondered where the hell the sodding back-up had got to and calculating how much longer we could string it out before it became a monster cock-up.

I was at the back of the car with the boot open when it suddenly happened, late but welcome. The back-up swarmed in. But my new trainee's judgement went right at that very moment. All he had to do was sit tight, wait for the arrests to take place, then get us out. Merry hell broke loose with people arriving from all directions, running everywhere, shouting orders, waving guns. The villain obviously thought it was a rip-off or a robbery.

I was leaning in the boot trying to delay showing him the cash in case he made a grab for it. Mayhem broke out on all sides with people shouting and running. With that, the villain made a grab at the money and tried to make off with it. So I grabbed him and we got embroiled in a ferocious tug of war over this bag of money. I managed to wrestle the bag off him and sling it back into the boot.

With that, my trainee partner hit the accelerator and the boot lid came smashing down, straight on to my head. The boot corner hit me right over my temple and my head just pinged open. I was seeing stars and there was blood spurting everywhere. My driver braked again almost immediately so I was able, even in my concussed state, to get the money back in the car and shut the boot. Part of the agreed scenario was for me to leg it and now I had a chance to escape which I did before anything else went amiss. I was
still under surveillance by the back-ups and they saw me running up the road with blood pissing out of a gaping hole in my head. They thought I'd been shot or stabbed or hit with a cosh. Messages were flashed back to the Yard saying I'd been badly hurt and ambulances were dispatched to find me. But I found my own way to the Middlesex Hospital in central London and had six stitches put in the wound and was left with a headache for a week. And, strangely enough, I never worked with my inexperienced driver again and his glittering career in the undercover squad ended before he'd cleared the bottom rung.

The incident proved once again the importance of trust on undercover missions. You get to know the guys you'd trust with your life and those you wouldn't trust to carry your shopping from Safeway's. Trust and comradeship play a massive role in the police force, particularly in small, specialist units like COG. And they can come into play when you least expect it.

When I was at one nick, I worked with a mate who had a reputation as big as a bus in the Old Bill. We got on like a house on fire. We were great friends, on or off duty.

Much to everybody's surprise, the nick where we worked had a little gym down in the basement and after work we used to go down there and beat fuck out of each other in the boxing ring, have a shower then go out on the piss together. People could never suss it out. We were real buddies. His great boast, repeated to me not long ago, was that there wasn't a policeman on earth who'd spent more on prostitutes than him. I mean, he was notorious. And this was while he was a serving police officer. We used to do everything together – work together, drink together,
fight together, fuck women together.

One night, we were at a leaving function together – they were always coming up as people were posted about in the job or retired – and my mate said to me, ‘You'll never guess what happened to me last night.' Now, with this guy, you don't even start to guess because it could have been anything. All I knew was I'd seen him for a drink the previous night and he'd said, ‘I've got the raging horn, Blex. I've got to go down Earl's Court and find a bird.' Not unusual. So he told me what happened.

He'd gone down to Earl's Court, picked up one of the local brasses and gone back to a hotel room. But because he'd taken a load of booze on board, he wasn't able to get it up. As far as he was concerned, ‘If I can't perform, I don't have to pay.' That was his thinking and he wanted to keep his £50. She had different ideas and started screaming at him to hand over the money. A big row broke out and suddenly he was surrounded by her pimps, three big geezers, Maltese or Cypriots. He managed to bluff his way down on to the street, where he felt safer, and continued arguing the toss. One of the pimps pulled a knife and held it to his throat and told him he'd got to pay whether he'd had a shag or not. At this point, he pulled out his warrant card and said, ‘Do you know who you are doing this to?'

They didn't give a toss and demanded that he paid up. So he got the money out of his pocket and pretended to drop it on the floor accidentally. One of the pimps bent down to pick it up and my mate hit him with a belting right cross. He was a good boxer, and the blow knocked the geezer spark out. Then he had it on his toes, leaving the £50 behind.

The pimps chased him all round the back streets of
Earl's Court, still keen for some aggro, but he managed to give them the slip.

But, all in all he was not best pleased and he now wanted to go back down there and exact some retribution. And, of course, who did he want to go along with him, but yours truly.

We hadn't really got a plan and I didn't know what we were going to do, but I thought I'd better trundle off with him.

When we'd worked together once, a defence barrister asked my mate in the witness box, ‘Is it right to say you are the brawn of this partnership, and DC Bleksley is the brains?'

He replied, ‘Oh, no, no, no … Blex can smack 'em as hard as I can.'

He always was a fearsome handful and one of the older and wiser detective sergeants who had seen us having this agitated scrum down at the leaving do had immediately suspected that something dodgy was afoot. He came over to us and demanded to know what was going on. So we told him the brief story of what had happened to my mate and he said, ‘Well, all right, just leave it, don't do anything rash, don't do anything quickly and we'll hatch a plan to sort things out in a sensible and proper way.'

He wanted to set up a proper observation and nick the girls for soliciting for prostitution and the pimps for living off immoral earnings. That's what the wise old sage decided and we nodded our agreement. But once we were outside my mate said, ‘Bollocks to that, let's go and sort them out.'

We were trundling down the Earl's Court Road a bit later when he nudged me and said, ‘That's her.'

The tom was hanging about at the entrance to
Earl's Court tube station, where a lot of them touted for punters, and my mate was on his way over to her before I could stop him. I thought he was just going to go over to her, remonstrate and get his money back. But he walked straight up to her and with no further ado went
BANG
and slapped her straight in the mouth. I thought, Oh, fucking hell, this is not in the plan.

The pimps appeared from everywhere – doorways, the drains, whatever – and we were surrounded by the vice bosses of Earl's Court all steaming angry. My mate was fuelled up and I'd got a drink on board and so we were suddenly going at it like maniacs trading punches with the pimps, putting the boot in. A couple of them then ran off into a newsagent's-cum-convenience store with a fired-up copper in hot pursuit. Well, he was my mate, I was in it to the hilt now so I had to leg it behind him. We steamed into the shop and it was literally like a scene from a movie. There were punches being thrown, shelves of goods being sent flying across the floor and we were giving them a right pasting, I mean we were both good boxers and they got our best shots. I dug one and he went straight back into a shelf sending cans of beans, tins of tomatoes and whatever all over the place. My mate got hold of another one and was banging his head into the fucking frozen food cabinet. The geezer running the shop was screaming and playing merry hell. It was absolute carnage, total chaos.

After a couple of minutes, my mate obviously felt we had exacted suitable revenge and we'd better get out. The shop owner was still kicking off and a crowd was beginning to gather. We came out into Earl's Court Road where the traffic was jammed solid in the one-way system. The tart was running up ahead of us
and there was a police car stuck in the jam. I grabbed hold of my mate, trying to be sensible, trying to be the brains of the team again, and said, ‘Come here, let's just see what happens before we do anything.' With that, we could see her bending into the police car obviously telling them she'd been duffed up by some lunatic. She was followed by the pimps, holding heads, limping, giving it all that, showing them what happened. She was pointing up at us and nodding and saying ‘That's them.'