Hash (17 page)

Tom’s voice veers from a soft mid-Atlantic right-on hippy drawl to an upper-crust public school accent, depending on what he is talking about and whether he is puffing on a joint. But it is clear he has few worries in the world and enjoys his ‘job’ immensely. ‘I get real job satisfaction because I am proud of my produce and a lot of my customers have become my friends. I get to fly all over the world at other people’s expense. What more could you want?’

Tom’s base is in a small coastal town with a good rail connection to London. His waterside apartment is filled with classic furniture and knick-knacks brought back from his numerous trips abroad. Rugs from Morocco. Hash pipes from India. Buddhas from Thailand. Turbans from Afghanistan.

While we are chatting he brings out four small bags, each containing a different colour and texture of hash. He pulls
each small brick out and smells one at a time as he tells me where it has come from and why it is popular with certain customers.

‘Take this hash from Afghanistan. It’s mellow to smoke and slides down your throat like velvet but it’s got an amazing kick-in about thirty seconds after you inhale it. I recommend it for people who’ve got all day on their hands because once you get stuck into this stuff, you’ll barely be able to walk.’

Then he pulls out a much darker slab of hash. ‘This is Indian. It’s much gentler and many of my business clients like it because they can snatch a toke between meetings and still operate on a “normal” level. They say it makes them more relaxed for presentations and stuff like that.’

Tom lives with his twenty-seven-year-old Latvian girlfriend, despite having a wife and three children living nearby. ‘I told you I was a typical old hippy at heart. Free love and all that. I still look after my wife and kids but I can’t handle living with them.’

And unlike many of the other members of the secret underworld of hash, Tom says his wife and children as well as other friends and relatives all know what he does for a living. ‘Why should I hide it from them? I consider myself to be the ultimate hash professional. I am proud of what I do.’

But what about his children? Would he mind if one of them ended up in the same ‘profession’?

Tom sits back, takes another suck on his joint and then answers: ‘That’s a tricky one because I really want them to
be doctors and lawyers and stuff like that. If they screw up their exams and don’t get into university like I did then maybe being in the hash business might be their best choice. But first of all I want them to try and make it in the “real” world.’

Tom’s backstory provides a fascinating insight into the so-called ‘acceptable face of drug dealing’ in the UK in the twenty-first century. He has carefully nurtured an image as an above-board character with nothing to hide and that has undoubtedly helped his business continue to thrive.

But surely, I ask him, there have been a few problems with suppliers along the way? Tom smiles somewhat more nervously than earlier. ‘Now that’s a good question. My customers simply don’t want to know about the “other” side of this business. I actually think they like to imagine that I only ever deal with nice, smiley-smiley farmers who give me a hug and slab of hash and then we’re on our way. Well, of course that is utter bollocks.

‘I have to deal with some really horrible characters sometimes and it’s the one side of this game that I loathe. One time I tried to get a millionaire customer to agree to finance me for a year, so I could set up a complete supply chain in order to avoid the troublesome criminal elements but he chickened out in case I ever got arrested. Shame because I’d love nothing more than to control my supply of hash from start to finish.’

So who are these gangsters he deals with? ‘They’re the guys in the middle. The ones who shift the hash from the
back of beyond to the UK. Without them this stuff would not be sitting here in front of us today. Sad but true. And the only problem with supplying such a vast range of hash is that I have to deal with a different set of gangsters for each “brand”. There is a bunch of Turks out of north London who smuggle the best hash from Afghanistan. There’s a team of west London Sikhs bringing in the hash from Nepal and there is a gang of French mafia importing the majority of my hash from Morocco.

‘It’s when I deal with these people that I really earn my money. They are mainly erratic, paranoid characters, often with trigger-brain tempers. I usually make sure I’m stoned when I meet them because then I stay calm and there is less risk of winding them up. But only the other day, one of the Turks lost his rag with me and stuck a gun in my face because he thought I was trying to avoid paying him.

‘I fronted it out with him because you cannot ever show them you are scared otherwise they will start bullying you and ripping you off. The funny thing is that the really heavy characters don’t really know how to handle me because I don’t fit into the usual stereotype of a dope dealer. It actually gives me a bit of an advantage over them just so long as they don’t think I am looking down my nose at them.’

Tom admits that at one time in the late 1990s he got involved in buying hash through one of the UK’s most notorious criminal families, based in north-west London. ‘That was a nightmare because the police were after them for murders and coke deals and stuff like that. I had no idea
at first I was actually dealing with this particular gang because they used an associate to cover their tracks. It was only when I spotted this bloke in a club in the West End with the oldest brother of this fearsome family crew. His face had been plastered all over the newpapers only a few days earlier in connection with a hitman killing. I somehow managed to pull away from them, even though they tried to put enormous pressure on me to continue buying my hash through them.

‘I wriggled out of it by saying I thought I was being watched by the local police. Somehow they swallowed it and we parted ways reasonably amicably, although I remain convinced to this day that if I ever bumped into those characters again they’d probably beat me up just for the sake of it. People like that hate to even suspect they have been conned. They think it’s bad for their reputation.’

Tom then paused for a moment while taking another toke. His girlfriend Maria appeared at the bedroom door sleepy eyed and with a silky dressing gown barely covering her body. Tom looked up smiling. ‘Shall I tell him about those Croatians, baby?’

Maria shrugged her shoulders. ‘Yeah, sure. Why not?’

Tom sucked what remained out of his joint and then dropped it in a huge onyx ashtray on the coffee table in front of him.

‘This country is turning into a bloody cesspit filled with eastern Europeans,’ says Tom. ‘And they all think they have the right to muscle in on businesses like mine. Only a couple of weeks ago, I got a call from some foreign-sounding chappie
who claimed he wanted to buy some hash off me. I don’t usually take new callers but this guy mentioned a mutual acquaintance, so I told him to come round. Well, he turned out to be a right nasty piece of work from Croatia and he arrived with two meathead friends. They sat down here calm as anything at first and told me they had a proposition to make to me. I could see what was coming from a mile away but I sat there and listened politely all the same. In reality though, I just wanted them out of the front door pronto.

‘Anyway, this one guy spoke in very fluent English and told me that he was going to supply all my hash to me and I was going to give him 50 per cent of all my takings. It was a classic. They actually thought they could just come in here and take over my business. I guess it was a bit like the Krays in the 1960s taking over a pub and telling the landlord who owned it that if he objected he’d end up in a rubbish tip some place or inside a car which had been crushed at a scrap metal yard.

‘Well, I knew I had to tread gently with these guys so I told the Croatian frontman that I’d be delighted to consider his generous offer and would he please give me forty-eight hours to get things into order, so I could make all the necessary arrangements. This guy looked at me like I was bonkers. I reckon he was expecting me to object on the spot and then his two sidekicks could shove a gun in my face. Well, I haven’t survived this long by being completely stupid.

‘The moment they left, I contacted my Turkish suppliers in north London and told them that a bunch of Croatians
were trying to take over my business. They hit the roof because Turks hate Croatians. My Turkish friend immediately volunteered to take care of them. I didn’t hear another thing about what happened to the Croatians but they never came knocking on my door ever again.’

So. Even ‘gentle old hippies’ like Tom had to occasionally resort to violence in order to survive in the secret underworld of hash. In some ways it was quite a relief to hear that, after all, he was no different from any of the others.

Tom predicts an uncertain future for the UK underworld. ‘Soon it’s going to be crawling with so many bloody foreigners that the police are going to lose control and it will be back like living in the Victorian times with crooks and pimps on every street corner trying to make a quid. A lot of these people from abroad are much more desperate and hungry for cash than the Brits. The cities will soon be overflowing with them and that’s when the real problems will begin. I’m just hoping I will be safely retired and living on some Caribbean island by then with a joint in one hand and a lovely fair maiden in the other.’

Street dealers in hash have two clear priorities – easy money and personal autonomy. Though they do face risks other people struggle to relate to, if a dealer conducts himself well and quits while he’s ahead, he might avoid the law or a knife in the gut.

Take ex-Marine Len. He is living proof that whatever class of hash dealer you happen to be, it will fuck you up one way or the other. Len was a hash dealer from the age of fifteen until he joined up and then when he bailed out of the services three years ago, he simply started up in the ‘business’ once again.

Len says it all began when he bought his first baggie of hash as a schoolboy, in his hometown of Newcastle: ‘I bought it and flipped it for double the price to someone else,’ he says. These days, Len has a professional pride in his product. He even insists that he always tries his hash before he sells
it to anyone. ‘I don’t want anyone to get sick on my supply,’ he says.

Len is even careful about not spending his hash cash in big amounts. ‘That would flag me up as someone dodgy and I’d soon get a pull,’ he explains.

Len claims that many former soldiers have ended up dealing in drugs because ‘there is nothing for them when they get out. No one cares about you so it’s hardly surprising many of us end up flogging gear.’ But Len provides a fascinating insight into his ‘profession’. He claims one of the biggest misconceptions about hash smokers is that they are all middle class and he is certainly living proof of it. Len works on the gritty streets of west London where he visits pubs and clubs on virtually a nightly basis in order to sell hash to his hardcore of customers, virtually all of whom are either unemployed or working in menial, poorly paid jobs.

Len calls his hash ‘pub grub’ because, he says, that is what it is. ‘Buying a lump of hash is no different from ordering a pint or buying a packet of fags these days,’ says Len. ‘In fact, it’s often a lot cheaper.’

Len openly admits his hash is cut with other ingredients to ‘stretch it out’ in order to maximise profits. But he even has a pet theory as to why that doesn’t seem to matter at his end of the hash game. ‘People just want to know they’re having a smoke. If it turns out that the lump they’ve just sprinkled in a ciggie consists of 50 per cent tree bark they don’t really seem to care. It’s all about the ritual. Buying the
hash off me, ripping open a ciggie, spreading the tobacco out on a paper and then crumbling the hash into it. People love the idea they are doing something naughty, something illegal.’

Len provides £10 and £20 bags of hash to more than 200 regular customers. He reckons his high earnings are down to quantity, not quality. ‘Oh, I’ve heard all the crap down the years from the so-called “posh end” of this business. They talk about hash as if it’s some kind of art form. It’s a drug, simple as that. And I’m a drug dealer who makes a good living out of it.’

After meeting Len at his home twenty miles south of London, we head out to the west of the city for one of his ‘drop-offs’. He explains: ‘There aren’t many places I’d let you come with me but this boozer we are going to is wall to wall with spliff merchants and they don’t seem to give a toss who I walk in with.’

Len is right. As we wander into the nondescript pub close to a noisy dual carriageway, no one seems remotely interested. Len jokes under his breath: ‘Stupid fuckers. They’re all so stoned in here they can barely remember who I am.’

We go to the main bar and order two drinks before a middle-aged man with a beer belly and a bright red face approaches. Len immediately recognises him and the two of them walk to a darkened corner at the other end of the bar. Less than a minute later Len is back alongside me.

‘He buys two twenty-quid bags off me at least four times a week. Now those sort of regular customers I love! If I had
two hundred of them on the go at any one time, I’d be rich enough to retire from this game within a year.’

But, Len admits, a lot of customers come and go. ‘It’s hardly a seasonal business but sometimes I think that’s how it feels. A lot of my customers are such stoners that I think half of them lose my phone number. That’s the other reason why I pop into pubs like this. It reminds people who I am in case they are so off their heads they’ve forgotten! I am being serious here.’

We sup our two halves of cider gently while Len’s eyes snap around the bar just to make sure none of his old customers have shown up. ‘It’s quiet in here today. Maybe they’re all at home sleeping off that last lot of hash I flogged ’em.’

Just then, a much younger man in his early twenties walks in. He looks straight at Len and nods. Len moves alongside the man. Then the two of them walk outside.