Gangs (12 page)

Gowling crumbled under questioning. He admitted being paid £35,000 a time to take cash-filled cases to Ireland and said he had already completed around ten such trips, either from Heathrow or Newcastle, by the time he was caught. He also confessed that the south London-based drugs-smuggling syndicate he was working for was making at least £500,000 per week, but stopped short of naming any members of the gang.

Jailed for eleven years, Beaumont-Gowling was ordered to handover £310,000 from his bank account, £50,000 in shares, and £12,000 pre-paid on a credit card, crippling him financially. The money he was carrying was also confiscated.

The day he left prison, Beaumont-Gowling told his local paper, the
Newcastle Evening Chronicle,
that he craved more success: ‘Irrespective of how I felt in relation to my sentence and an excessive fine, I have conducted myself very gracefully throughout. I believe my debts to society have been paid in full. I’m determined to leave the past behind and I am looking forward to continuing my life in a productive and sensible manner.’

It wasn’t to be. Just before midnight on Valentine’s Day 2001, Beaumont-Gowling’s girlfriend arrived at his flat in the trendy Jesmond area of Newcastle and found him slumped in a corner of the living room. He had been shot repeatedly at point-blank range in the head, chest and back.

With no signs of a struggle and no evidence that someone had forced their way into the flat, police concluded that Beaumont-Gowling had almost certainly known his killer and had willingly opened the door to him. He died less than a month after his release from prison.

Rick won’t reveal anything about why he was murdered but says that an anonymous letter, sent to police more than a year after the shooting, hit pretty close to the mark. Photocopied and written in thick black ink it read, ‘It seems that someone is going to have to explain why Beaumont-Gowling had to go. He thought he could walk straight back into the business. He was special once and made us lots of money, but he couldn’t keep his head down. He had to be seen with the birds and play the big spender. It was all bad publicity. When he went down it was bad news for both producers and investors. We had to fill the void. Confidence had to be restored. Sacrifices were made. Whatever plans he made couldn’t be allowed to happen. We couldn’t take the chance. The decision in the end was easy and best done quickly. Who was going to miss him? Just his women. No loss, really.’

With Beaumont-Gowling gone, getting the money out has become more problematic than ever. ‘That’s the hardest thing right now. The police and Customs, although they make a lot of noise about street values, they know the truth about what we pay for the stuff. They know that if they hit the money on the way out, it’s gonna hurt just as bad as if they get the drugs on the way back in so now they’re getting two bites of the cherry. They’re putting more and more resources into it: you’ve even got sniffer dogs going up and down fucking train platforms looking for people with money. Once you didn’t have to worry about it, now it’s become a big deal.’

Holding on to the cash is simply not an option. Attempting to spend it in the UK draws too much attention and state-of-the art forensics techniques mean that notes contaminated with certain batches of cocaine can be used as evidence to link those found with the money to the rest of the smuggling operation.

The way the gangs get round it is to use the same methods for getting the drugs in to smuggle the money abroad. It is strapped to the bodies of couriers, hidden in false compartments of suitcases, inside the spare wheels of cars and vans and sometimes even split into small bundles, stuffed into condoms and swallowed.

‘But getting the money out is a problem in itself because it gets bulky real quick,’ says Rick. ‘You see all these films where people talk about having a million quid in a little briefcase, but that’s bullshit, you’d never fit it in. The money from street sales comes to you in small, used notes and they add up pretty quickly. If you sell a kilo of coke at street level, you get back six kilos of banknotes.’

Rick drains the last of his bottle and gets ready to leave. ‘This whole business is about identifying the problems and finding solutions. For me that’s a big part of the buzz.’ He pauses and grins. ‘That and the money, of course. They can make it harder – which will only put the price up – but they’re never gonna stop it ’cos it’s just getting more and more popular. You go to the northern working-men’s clubs, and all the lads, they’re all at it in the toilets, having a line in between their pints of Newcastle Brown.

‘People have a lot more disposable income these days so they can afford to indulge every now and then. I’m not putting people out on the streets, I’m not leading anyone astray. I’m just providing a service. It’s just another form of entertainment.’

But while those operating at the higher end of the trade may justify their actions by claiming to be providing nothing more than adult recreation, the truth is that much of the momentum behind the cocaine market comes from the ever-increasing demand for its far more sinister, deadly and far less socially acceptable derivative: crack.

 

Hidden behind deeply tinted windows, the Black and White café in the St Paul’s district of Bristol has a tiny mock-marble counter where you can buy traditional Caribbean fare, like ackee, salt fish, curried goat and jerk chicken. But almost no one comes here for the food.

In a society where open dealing is no longer out of the ordinary, the Black and White café stands out from the crowd as one of the most blatant hard-drugs dens in Britain. By all accounts, the café has been raided more times than any other premises in the UK. One single weekend in the summer of 2003 saw three separate raids, which resulted in seventeen arrests and the recovery of thousands of pounds’ worth of Class A drugs.

The drug deals around the café are now so frequent and so open that locals refer to it as the hypermarket. Open selling also goes on at the local pub and a nearby branch of the Tastee takeaway, but the Black and White is by far the most popular and best-known venue. The scene of countless shootings, stabbings and armed robberies, the café is at the epicentre of the increasingly violent gang activity surrounding the global trade in crack cocaine.

The first time I hear about the Black and White and its formidable reputation I’m nowhere near Bristol, I’m not even in Britain but more than 4500 miles away in the run-down streets of the Jamaican capital, Kingston. Even on the outer edges of the local drugs scene, the Black and White is widely talked about as the place to go to score, deal and meet the local dons.

For twenty-six-year-old Michael Andrews it was spending time at the Black and White that got him into dealing in the first place. When I met him he had been back in Jamaica for five weeks, having been deported for a number of drugs offences. In England he was feared and respected as a ruthless operator. A hugely successful crack-dealer, he had money, a nice car, fine clothes and plenty of women. In Jamaica he had nothing. In a quiet roadside bar in uptown Kingston, his tongue eased by a near-endless supply of Red Stripe and Swiss-style pork chops, Michael told me his story.

‘My experience,’ he said softly, ‘is just an unlucky one. I have some family in England, in Bristol, and my dad used to live there so my gran said she’d pay for my ticket so I could have a holiday. That was how it all started, just a holiday.

‘I got there and saw it was a very different kind of living. Life was nice and easy. When a man migrates, especially when he is from a certain section of Jamaica, the life he sees in England – it’s like heaven. I know many people who didn’t even know what a toilet was until they came to England. One man who visited me said on day one, “Bwoy, that toilet is nice, for when it flush it bring you back clean water with which to wash your hand.”

‘Right away I met a nice girl and we were having fun, but after two months she got pregnant. I thought to myself, Okay, you’ve got responsibility now – this was my first child – so I thought, Why not stay? I had a visa for three months and it was about to run out. I wasn’t thinking of marrying, I wasn’t thinking at all. I just thought that somehow everything would be okay.

‘You’ve got to live, you can’t expect your family to support you for ever so I went out and found work. I was doing a bit of plastering for a guy, mixing the muck for him, doing some skimming. I was learning quite a bit, but after a little while the recession hit and the building trade was doing nothing much.

‘I didn’t have a National Insurance number so I couldn’t get any other kind of job. But I had to do something to survive. One portion of chicken and chips might cost less than two pounds but when you can’t even buy that for yourself, you feel bad, especially when you’ve got a kid coming. The baby was only a few weeks away and I was suffering. The girl was on the social, but that money, you can’t do nothing with it.

‘I was living in Bristol and I used to hang around in the Black and White café with a few guys I knew from Jamaica. Some of them used to sell stuff on the front line. They knew I had nothing and one of them said to me, “Come and sell some weed, it’s easy.”

‘I’m gonna be honest with you. The first time I went on the line, I bought just an ounce of black hash. I didn’t want to get too deep. But within the space of an hour that was sold out and I bought two more ounces and went back on the line. I’d just doubled my money in an hour. At the end of that first night I went home with about two ounces of black, an ounce of weed and three hundred pounds in my pocket.

‘So I say to myself, “Yeah, a few hours and I get this! Come on, I’m going to do this full time.” So I start waking up in the afternoon, going on the line, coming back at six in the morning, sleep until midday, then hit the streets again. After about a month, life started to get nice, real nice. I was making money, wearing pretty clothes and ting. The girl was all right and we were ready for the baby. Everything was sweet.

‘Then a friend of mine, his name was Squitty, he used to deal coke on the same line as me, he approached me. And now a bit of greed got caught up in me. I said to myself, “Why not sell some cocaine?” The first time I bought a sixteenth of an ounce, the smallest portion, for a hundred and fifty quid. I got on the line at five p.m. and the first man that came up to me five minutes later bought four grams. In the space of ten minutes it was all sold out and I had made one fifty on my one fifty.

‘I started dealing coke big-time. Then I started cooking crack and selling that too. And that was the best business of all. The cash comes in so fast you don’t know what to do with it all. I was making big money – four, five thousand a week – but still, even then, I wasn’t thinking. I had a flash car, flash clothes, flashy girls all over the place. I might have been living in Bristol but I would drive up to London or Birmingham or Manchester just to go clubbing. I was all over the place because I had money.

‘And ting was cheap. A lot of people who smoked crack would go out and shoplift and steal and rob, then give you ting in exchange for the drugs. And they’d be desperate. I got a Rolex, a brand new Rolex, for less than a hundred quid’s worth of crack, then I just sold it on for five hundred quid to a man that wanted one. Other times people would go out ram-raiding or hire girls to go out shopping with stolen credit cards and bring back televisions and hi-fis. You could get everything and anything and never pay full price.

‘And then little by little I had people working from me. Some of them were friends that I knew from Jamaica who had heard what I was doing and wanted a piece of the action for themselves. Others were people that I met here and decided that it would be better to work with them than to go to war with them.

‘But war was always a possibility. I got a gun, a Magnum .357 Python, and I didn’t have to pay for it. I was driving with some friends one day and the gun was brandished. But as a rougher man than them, as someone more ragamuffin, I held on to it and said, “Hey, lend me dis.” You see, they were my posse, my crew, and I was the leader. So there was a pecking order and because I was the Don, anything like that would be taken by me. Then I’d be out there on the line selling my drugs, and one of the guys from my crew would come up to me and say, “I’m skint, man, give me a bit of change,” so then I’d give him fifty quid, twenty quid. Little money, little money, until he stopped asking and the gun was mine. Guns were always a priority for me, but at first it was for niceness, not to kill or such. We would be at a dance and a nice Jamaican sound like Stone Love would come up and we would take out our guns and salute and ting like that. But gun was for other ting too. Trouble was always just around the corner. I remember one time there was no coke in Bristol, none at all. I drove up to London. I had my piece on me. When I got there I went to see my friend Clive in Brixton. I said, “There’s nothing in the country, man, I need some coke.” So he sent me to a restaurant close to the Atlantic Road, a black restaurant. I went up to the counter and said I was looking for some stuff. The guy was a Jamaican, but you could see he had been in England a long time. He went around the back, and five minutes later he came back and told me to wait. I said okay, but then I saw a man come in and lean on the table to one side of me. I watch him and he watch me but still nothing.

‘So I’m thinking, Maybe these guys think I’m playing with them so I reach in my pocket and pull out my money, big wad of cash, and slap it on the counter. “Don’t worry, I’m serious,” I say. “I need some stuff, there is none in Bristol.” And right away I see the guy’s eyes light up when he sees the money. He was thinking, Bristol’s the country, so I’m a fool because London is the city and he’s a Don.

‘Fifteen minutes later, still nothing. I went up to the first guy and said, “What are you playing at?” Then a second man come in and lean on the table on the other side of me. Then I realised the man was calling down his friends, trying to get a team together. He had sent word. – “Come, there is money and a fool” – but they were scattered, they were taking time to get there.