Gangs (38 page)

But even though the Bassis are behind bars, the rest of the Bhatt gang is still active and now the Kanaks have the upper hand. The tensions are as high as ever.

As evidence of this, Jas points out that the shooting at the Glassy Junction pub that led to him giving up his life of crime took place in June 2003, more than a year after the Bassis were first arrested. ‘Nothing has changed. The situation on the streets is as bad as ever. There are places round here where you find syringes on the street all the time. The problem with something like heroin is that it doesn’t just go away. When you get a gang who come into town and start selling it, people get addicted. When that gang goes to prison, it does nothing to stop the addicts wanting their next fix. All the police do is create a vacuum for the next gang to fill.’

The Asian-on-Asian violence seen on the streets of Southall is far from unique. Keighley, on the outskirts of Bradford, Yorkshire, where one in five of the population is of Asian origin, has been the scene of a bloody turf war between gangs supplying heroin in the area and beyond.

In parts of the town wraps of heroin sell for as little as two pounds – easily affordable by even the most cash-strapped teenagers. Such low prices have assured healthy sales and huge profits, which the dealers invest in scanners, wireless microphones and automatic guns in a bid to protect themselves from police action. When rival gangs clash, they do so violently.

In February 2002 twenty-four-year-old Qadir Ahmed, a convicted drug-dealer, was beaten and stabbed to death in the street after his killers shunted his car off the road as he drove home from a football match. By the time of his murder the local police were carrying out thirty-four separate investigations into drug-related violence, which included four murders and a full-scale street battle during which several shots were fired.

The most public violence is generally confined to those at the bottom of the ladder in the gang structure. These include the young teenagers who make the drug deliveries, often on specially bought mountain bikes. Above them come street dealers, supplying runners and customers with their fixes. Above them are the murky upper echelons of the gang world, often using family ties with Pakistan to arrange the courier routes that bring the drugs back to Britain where they masquerade as legitimate businessmen.

In nearby Bradford forty-six-year-old Waheed Akhtar was just such a man. Nicknamed ‘the Colonel’, he used his contacts in London and Pakistan to become one of the area’s biggest heroin-traffickers. Akhtar portrayed himself as a respectable businessman who bought and sold cars and imported bottled water from Pakistan, but the businesses were just a front for his drugs empire. With a wide range of contacts in the criminal field, both in the UK and beyond, Akhtar had moved quickly up the ranks of the underworld and soon found himself at the head of a powerful trafficking syndicate.

It was a position he was determined to hold on to, and when five kilos of heroin worth more than £250,000 vanished from the boot of his car, it was clear that someone would have to pay. To allow the thief to go unpunished would make him appear weak and his reign would soon come to an end.

Although the actual theft came as a surprise, Akhtar had been warned that something like it might happen. His associate, Daniel Francis, had warned of a plot to rip him off and all the clues pointed to someone in his own gang being responsible. The car containing the drugs had been parked directly outside Akhtar’s home and had not been damaged during the raid. Whoever had stolen the drugs had somehow managed to obtain the key, which meant the culprit was almost certainly someone he knew.

The chief suspects – drug-users Naveed Younis and a woman known as Petra – were summoned to his terraced home where they were quizzed, but then released. The following day, the woman returned to Akhtar’s house to clear her name once and for all. But his right-hand man Azhar Mahmood had already assembled an ‘interrogation squad’ from Manchester who bundled her into a car and drove her to a house in Burnley. There, Petra was stripped, beaten, forced to take heroin and drink alcohol before their brutal questioning began.

Meanwhile Younis, widely known as ‘Niddy’, was again summoned to Akhtar’s house where, the moment he walked through the door, he was attacked with baseball bats and sticks. The gang shoved their bleeding victim into the boot of Akhtar’s Mercedes and drove to Niddy’s house in nearby Girlington, where a search for the consignment proved fruitless.

Akhtar, now becoming increasingly desperate, ordered that both ‘suspects’ be brought to a dingy warehouse he rented where they were immediately tied to chairs. One man, Sagir Alam, shouted at Petra, ‘Where are the drugs?’ and hit her with a heavy wheel brace. When it bent with the force of the blow he burst into laughter. At the same time, the gang began ‘working’ on Younis with a scaffolding pole, a snooker cue and batons. The interrogation and beatings lasted more than six hours. At one point, the gang even tied a noose around Younis’s neck and carried out a mock hanging.

Convinced that either Niddy or Petra knew where his drugs were, Akhtar decided to sit the pair opposite each other and told them to argue out between them to see who was telling the truth.

It was then that the name of Francis, who had been watching proceedings, was first mentioned. He immediately became a suspect and the others began beating him to a pulp. He was knocked unconscious but when he fell to the floor they continued hitting him with a scaffolding pole and whipping him with a length of wire. At one point, a gun was pointed at his head, but when the trigger was pulled, it only clicked.

Francis had all four of his limbs broken, both his hands were smashed and his jaw fractured. Akhtar only stopped the beating when Francis stopped responding. He had suffered kidney failure and passed into a coma.

By seven a.m., Akhtar needed to get rid of the bloodied trio before neighbouring businesses spotted them. They were bundled into cars and dumped at various spots across the district. The woman found herself close to Bradford Royal Infirmary while Younis was left near his family home in Girlington.

Francis, whose huge loss of blood had led to hypothermia, was thrown out behind a mound of earth at a rural spot in Wilsden. Detective Sergeant Walker said: ‘It was nine thirty a.m. before a passer-by spotted him totally by chance. He was very close to death at that time and would not have survived much longer.’ He was so badly injured that when he was finally taken to hospital, medical staff thought he had been run over.

The missing drugs were never found.

Back in the pub, Jas and I start talking about heroin, its effects, its addictive qualities and the devastating effect it has on so many of those who take it.

‘I always told myself I’d never inject. No matter what. I don’t ever want to get to the stage when I’m injecting. Once you do that, you’re on the steady slope. That’s when all the real problems start,’ he tells me. ‘You’re risking HIV, hepatitis, abscesses and all sorts. But now that I’m not dealing I don’t know if I have any choice. When you chase the dragon, you spend a lot more money than you do when you mix it up and inject it straight in your veins.’

The problem, Jas explains, is that the first time you take heroin is always the best. Every subsequent experience with the drug is slightly less intense, less pleasurable. This is because the body rapidly builds up a resistance to heroin and needs more and more to produce the same effects. Once addiction sets in, users rarely feel high but instead need a certain amount of heroin just to feel ‘normal’ and stave off the first signs of cold turkey – withdrawal. The vast majority of users start off smoking it, then move on to injecting, partly because of the costs involved and also because injecting heroin produces a faster, more intense high, particularly in those who have built up a degree of tolerance.

Having already sampled crack cocaine and come out of the experience relatively unscathed, I decide to try heroin. As with crack, I want to see if I can better empathise with those who become addicted to the drug. They are, after all, the end users for those who smuggle heroin into the country and they are also linked to much of the petty crime like burglary and car theft.

There’s no question of me injecting – that would be going a step too far and be completely unnecessary as the vast majority of Asian users shun needles. Instead, like Jas, I will ‘chase the dragon’.

We head back to Jas’s bedsit, a dingy upstairs room in a road alongside the main railway station. As we sit down he rummages through a box of cereal sitting on the counter of the kitchenette and pulls out a deflated balloon with a knot tied in the end. ‘I always like to have one or two wraps around,’ he explains. ‘I guess this is as good a hiding-place as any but the police have seen it all. They’re pretty good at finding stuff.’

Jas opens the paper and shows me the contents. It looks like fine sawdust, the sort of thing you find on the floor of a hamster’s cage. There is no smell, so far as I can tell.

I sit on the edge of the bed and Jas squats on the ground in front of me, giving a running commentary on everything that he does. ‘I sprinkle some of the powder on some foil, on the dull side so it heats more quickly with a lighter.’ With the foil folded into a rough half-tube shape and clasped between his fingers, Jas fires up the lighter with his one free hand and runs the flickering yellow flame along the length of the powder. ‘You don’t inhale right away. You burn off all the impurities first. Let the powder melt, let it become liquid. And then it’s ready.’

He hands me the foil but I’m so distracted by the look of the dirty yellow brown sludge at the bottom of the foil that I hardly hear what Jas is saying. He seems to be asking me if I want to eat anything and I shake my head, wondering how he can be thinking of food at a time like this. I set the lighter under the foil and smoke pours off so quickly that it catches me by surprise. I put the tube into my mouth and suck in the hot air.

At first there’s nothing to write home about. A slight fuzziness to the eyes. A feeling of relaxation. I reapply the flame and smoke a little more.

But just as I start, the effects of my first attempt come flooding through. Now I’m feeling it. A sensation of floating. It’s that feeling you get just before you drift off to sleep after great sex, and you know that you don’t have to be at work the following day. Total bliss.

There’s a glow, a feeling of warmth and then – to borrow a description common to heroin users – I feel as if I’ve been wrapped in cotton wool. It’s all as far away from the experience of crack as it is possible to be. The two drugs are complete opposites. With crack, for a short time at least, you feel as though you could conquer the world. When you’re on heroin, the world could be about to be conquered and you wouldn’t care.

Then there’s a feeling of acceleration. It’s that feeling you get when you’re drunk. It’s as though I’m standing still and the world is moving faster and faster. Oh, fuck. I know this feeling.

I start to stand up and ask Jas for directions to the toilet. His stupefied smile beams up at me but he says nothing. I manage to get to the sink and throw up violently. It is only later I realise that Jas was not asking me if I wanted to eat something, he was asking me when I last ate. Nausea is such a common effect of irregular heroin smoking that practised users avoid food for several hours beforehand to lessen the urge to hurl.

The inside of my mouth tastes bitter, the effect of my own bile and the heroin itself. My teeth feel like I’ve been chewing toffee. I stumble back to the bed and sit down. Jas is still on the floor, now leaning back against the wall, eyes closed, a burnt-out match and the ragged piece of kitchen foil still in his fingers.

Part of me feels like I should be doing something – making notes, asking questions – but the larger part of me wants to do nothing at all. The nausea is passing and, apart from occasionally feeling incredibly itchy all over, only the feelings of gentle bliss are left.

I lean back on the bed and fall asleep.

For those seeking the ultimate ‘natural’ high, heroin will always be there. For those who seek something more, they need look no further than their friendly neighbourhood lab technician.

 

Kenny takes another swig from his bottle of Bud, then wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘I’m telling you,’ he says, shaking his head slowly, ‘if people knew just how dangerous this stuff was, if they had any fucking idea of the risks involved, they’d give the people behind it a hell of a lot more respect.’

I’m sitting in the upstairs section of a plush wine-bar-cum-nightclub in the centre of Liverpool with Kenny, a long-time drug-dealer. Kenny looks younger than his thirty-four years and his dark eyes dance like candle flames as he speaks, but he insists he’s completely clean. We’ve spent the last fifteen minutes talking about the dangers of the dance-drug ecstasy. Not the potential and highly debated risks of long-term use but the very real risks associated with manufacturing it.

‘I just help out every now and then but the guys who really make the stuff are seriously fucking clued-up and they have to be. It’s fucking dangerous. You can’t fuck about with it. Some of the fumes that come off the stuff are deadly. I’m talking about cyanide, I mean fucking cyanide, and you get shitloads of it. It’s a real risk-your-life venture. Some of these guys make fortunes but they’re worth every penny in my book.’

While some 80 per cent of the world’s ecstasy is made in clandestine laboratories in the Netherlands this figure is declining rapidly as increasing numbers of gangs opt to boost their profits even further by setting up on their own. More lucrative than either heroin or cocaine, and more popular than both drugs combined, the market for ecstasy-type drugs is growing rapidly and shows no signs of slowing down. At any one time there are at least fifty ecstasy and amphetamine labs in the UK, a number of them dotted in and around the Liverpool area.