Gangs (11 page)

Membership of the Firm (which continues to flourish, despite the death of its founders) means instant access to a trusted network of top criminals with international connections. And in an underworld where ‘grassing’ is fast reaching epidemic proportions, the Firm stands out as an organisation that lives by the rules of organised crime as they stood in London in the mid-1960s. Parents, particularly mothers, are to be treated with the utmost respect, women and children are to be kept out of the line of fire, and the police are to be treated with utter contempt.

These are values that Rick holds dear. ‘When I’m grafting, I only ever work with people who I’ve known for a long time or people who have been put on to me through the Firm. Dealing with proper people who I know I can trust, it might mean I end up waiting a little bit longer for the deal to come through but at least when it does, I know it’s a hundred per cent safe.

‘You need to be part of a trusted network. The downside of being somewhere small is that everyone knows who the main players are and you soon get to know one another. You have different levels. If you take the drug scene you’ve got your street dealers, the guys who deal to them and then the ones who import. Up to a certain level, everyone sticks together but when you get above that, when you get to where I am, no one will deal with anyone else because no one trusts anyone else. At some time or another everyone in this town has worked with everyone else and at some point they’ve all fallen out with one another.

‘If you deal with sensible people you are not going to get fucked over. At least, that’s the theory.’ I ask Rick to elaborate. ‘I have always been part of the old school and gone with the old-school rules. You don’t fuck with people and that means you can come back again and again and again. You get a good name for yourself and you get some respect. Your name starts to be given out to other people. But if you decide to rip someone off for twenty grand, you’re only ever going to do it once.’

I ask Rick to take me through the main commodities that he deals with and the relative merits of each. ‘A few years ago everybody was coming out of the drugs game and going into cigs and spirits. The money was good, and if you did get caught, the sentences were nothing. But now they’ve really clamped down on the bootlegging, pushing the sentences so that they’re on a par with cannabis, so people are drifting back into the drugs game again.

‘As far as cannabis is concerned, there’s no money in the resin any more unless you’re involved at a very, very high level, hundreds of kilos at a time. It’s that cheap over here now that it’s just not worth it. A few years ago you could bring it in for six or seven hundred a kilo and get two grand for it all day long. Now you’re lucky if you can get eight hundred for it. There’s still good money to be made in the quality herbal stuff, like skunk, but it’s a lot bulkier so it’s harder to smuggle.

‘Heroin? I can’t comment on that because I’ve never touched it and I never would. I don’t like the idea of going around creating junkies. Es are going for a pound apiece. You used to be able to make good money but not so much now. You have to put a shitload of cash up front and you’re taking a big risk for not that much gain.

‘The cigs business, it’s gone a bit silly now, it’s way too competitive. You have to pay up front and there’s no money to be made unless you’re bringing back containerloads. But once you start doing that the risk goes up tenfold. When I got into it, there were only a few people involved and you could make a good crack out of it. But not any more. Everybody’s selling cigs, you go to every corner shop or every car-boot sale and they’re all over the place.

‘Charlie is where the money’s at. The game has changed a lot since the old days but it’s still the main earner. I once heard someone say that drug-dealing was a thousand times more addictive than drug-taking and they were dead right.’

Rick drains the last of his bottle and I offer to buy him another, fighting my way through to the crowded bar and waiting what seems like an eternity to get served. When I finally return Rick can’t remember the point he was about to make so I ask him what he considers to be the key attributes of a successful smuggler.

‘You have to be a bit of a gambler. The fact is there’s no way in the world that Customs can stop every single container that enters the country – if they did the whole world would grind to a halt. They’ve got their sources, they’ve got their intelligence, but most of all they’ve got their profiles. If they have a plane coming in from Bogota and another coming in from Milan, well, then, it’s obvious where the risks are. So my job is to play their game in reverse, to work out what they’re looking for and do everything I can to make sure my shipments don’t get flagged up.

‘When you get involved in the big shipments, I’m talking tonnes, then you’re in for a lot of sleepless nights. You put your money down and you’re waiting six months before you even know it’s got into the country. And even then you’re a long way from being home and dry. If Customs are on to you, they ain’t gonna pounce right away. They’ll wait until you’ve got it back to your warehouse or wherever. Touch wood, I’ve never been bubbled up – and, more than anything else, that’s the way you get caught these days.

‘I’ve spent time out in Spain, working with people there. There’s a lot of Brits in the area, especially around Puerto Banus on the Costa del Sol because there’s the huge marina there. A lot of the smugglers are using the big yachts to pick the stuff up because they know they’re less likely to get stopped than if they do it with some scruffy fishing-boat. You can bring the stuff right up into the heart of the town, and from there it’s easy. No Customs, no borders, nothing.

‘But there’s a lot of police activity in Spain now so more and more people are doing it through Portugal or flying it direct to the former eastern bloc where you can still bribe Customs and police and whatnot to get it through. Instead of hooking up with the expats, a lot of the gangs are doing their own trafficking now. Once the supply is sorted out, they don’t need to get anyone else involved. That means there’s even less chance of getting grassed up, you can control it, put a real lid on things.

‘Once it’s in Europe it’s just a question of hiding in the HGVs and getting it through the tunnel or sea ports or sometimes just sticking it in the post. But even at my level, more and more people are looking to buy straight from South America. Some of those people who work on the cruise ships, cabin crew and such, are doing very nicely because of that.

‘A lot of the stuff I deal with comes in via Ireland. There’s a lot going on over there because the Irish navy consists of something like two rubber dinghies and one of those inflatable bananas. There’s so much coastline, they just can’t patrol it all. It’s absolutely wide open.’

When I start to ask Rick about the usual quantities he deals with, one reason for his initial nervousness soon becomes clear. A few days earlier one of his former colleagues was arrested in connection with a £15 million consignment of cocaine, heroin, amphetamine and cannabis that was smuggled through the Channel Tunnel from Holland. The route and methods have both been utilised by Rick in the past.

‘His firm is based up in Bolton and basically doing in the North-west what I’m doing in the North-east. They’d done the run ten or eleven times before with no problems. They just got unlucky this time around. They were always careful. The drugs were hidden in containers of chemicals so there was no smell to leak out. The lorry drivers would be given pay-as-you-go phones just as they left and those same phones would be thrown into the sea while they were on the ferry coming back so there was no way they could ever be traced.

‘He had a legitimate business in Amsterdam that wasn’t making any money but gave him plenty of excuses to go back and forth. The people were earning good money, though. The lorry drivers were getting paid ten thousand a time, and that’s on top of what they were earning anyway. That’s why I think they were just unlucky. He hadn’t pissed anybody off, he was working with everyone who might have been an enemy.

‘As well as bringing in his own stuff, he would offer other people a service bringing their drugs to the UK, charging upwards of eight hundred pounds per kilo, which is a good way to make money. You never want to be too greedy but every time a truck comes through without being stopped, your first thought is always, Fuck, I should have put a bigger load on it. It’s the same with a container. Each one can carry up to five hundred kilos of coke but you never fill them up all the way just in case. But once they get through, you’re kicking yourself that you didn’t brim the fucker.

‘They say it was fifteen million pounds but that’s bollocks. That’s final street price and when you’re an importer you never see that. At this level what you’re looking to do is either double or quadruple your money as soon as you get it in the country. If you want to take it all the way and make millions, you can, but you have to get out there yourself and sell ten-pound bags of the stuff. It’s just not worth the risk.

‘If you get caught with a million pounds’ worth of coke, what they basically mean is that they’ve nabbed someone who has just lost two hundred grand. I’m not saying people aren’t making money out of it, of course they are. Just that it’s not quite the same as what you read in the papers. Not unless you’re bang at it day and night. And then it gets difficult because you end up with more money than you know what to do with and the only thing to do is invest it back into more shipments. I know people who’ve made fortunes only to lose it all when some big shipment goes tits up.

‘Once you get the stuff, you pass it on to your dealers. A lot of firms put it out on bail – you know, give it to people on credit. You hand over the drugs and they’ve got, say, two weeks to come back to you with the money. I try not to work that way because it causes all kinds of problems.

‘The rule is, whatever happens, the buyer still owes the money. They can walk out of the gaff, get hit by a car, drop the lot down the nearest drain or get picked up by the police, but they still owe the money. As soon as you take drugs on tick, as soon as you take it on bail, you’re liable. There’s nothing the police love more than catching someone with a few grands’ worth of gear on bail ‘cos they know the pressure the man’s gonna be under.’

Rick runs a club he uses to launder some of his profits and also to provide a ‘secure’ environment for his dealers to trade in. A number of wholesale importers and distributors also own or have some involvement with pubs and clubs and use them as outlets for similar purposes.

‘The people at the lowest level of the pyramid, the guys who are selling grams and wraps, they’re the most visible. They’re the most replaceable and they’re also the ones who are most likely to get caught. It’s not for me. I’ll leave that to the street gangs. I’d rather take the money and run.

‘You need to stay one step ahead. You work on the principle that you’re being followed or watched or listened to twenty-four/seven. You don’t take your eye off the ball. Whether you’re going out grafting or whether you’re going down Morrison’s for a pint of milk, you behave in exactly the same way. When you start doing things different, that’s when you stand out.

‘But as far as I’m concerned, the whole thing with police and Customs is like natural selection. There are a lot of good people in this game but there are a lot of idiots as well. Occasionally they get lucky but for the most part the people they’re pulling in are the weakest and worst that there are. It works out well for us. It keeps the courts busy, keeps the public happy and means there’s more money left in the pot for us.’

I switch off the tape and it is almost as if Rick sighs with relief. He tells me he feels far more comfortable knowing that his words are not being recorded and quickly begins to open up even more.

Rick confesses that the part he finds hardest at the moment is not bringing the drugs into the country but getting the money out to pay for them. He has plenty of ‘friendly’
bureaux de change
that he and his fellow gang members use to change small-denomination notes into European currency, but actually getting the cash out to Spain or Amsterdam or Ireland to pay for whatever is coming in is becoming increasingly problematic.

Getting the money out used to be something that Rick did with the help of a flamboyant restaurateur and club owner by the name of Peter Beaumont-Gowling, known to his underworld contacts as David Simpson. The fifty-two-year-old playboy-entrepreneur was the driving force behind the Joe Rigatoni restaurant chain in Newcastle and he also owned a string of bistros in the Darlington area. Having worked in restaurants in Paris and Denmark, as well as the Four Seasons in New York, his reputation in the highly competitive industry was second to none.

Beaumont-Gowling enjoyed the fruits of his success to the fullest degree. He owned houses across Britain and also in Spain, had several prestige cars, including a Bentley and a stretch limousine, and kept a luxury yacht moored on the Costa del Sol. His work in the entertainment industry naturally brought him into close contact with the gangland elite, which in turn attracted the attention of the police, but although they kept a close watch on him there was never any evidence of wrongdoing.

One night, having tracked their target to a hotel in Chelsea and bugged his room, detectives listened in as Beaumont-Gowling ordered and received visits from thirteen prostitutes, one after the other, and drank so many bottles of Dom Perignon that the hotel bar actually ran out. The following morning Beaumont-Gowling was arrested just as he was about to board a flight to Heathrow to Dublin. He was carrying two suitcases, which, when examined, were found to contain a total of £576,000.

‘Peter was one of those guys, not really a gangster, but someone who fancied the lifestyle, liked the image that went along with it. He made all the original approaches. It was he that wanted to know if there was anything he could do,’ says Rick. ‘It worked well for a while, but then he got careless. And when it all came on top, he just couldn’t handle it.’