Hash (21 page)

‘But it’s not as good as the stuff from further east,’ he says. ‘Most of the hash we produce in Albania goes to the Albanians because it is cheaper.’

Ivan is at pains to describe Jerry as his ‘British partner’ but it becomes increasingly clear as the conversation continues that Ivan is running a vast network of hash smugglers of which Jerry is a small part.

The Albanians who first turned up in Italy in the mid-1990s were used by the Mafia to do their dirty work, the jobs that had previously been done by people under eighteen who would not be sent to jail. The Albanians were willing to kill and they just didn’t take life as seriously. They became the street dealers and the enforcers. ‘The Italians were the brains and the Albanians became their hands,’ said one expert.

I asked Ivan what would happen if the British authorities tracked him down in Albania and demanded his extradition. ‘That will never happen because I have friends in the Albanian politics who can guarantee my safety. In any case, no one in England knows my real name!’

European police and lawmakers cannot mount an effective investigation into the criminal organisations based in Albania because the justice system there is barely functioning. The UK even refuses to have any agreements with Albania because reciprocity would require that UK citizens be exposed to the Albanian court system.

There are long, awkward silences as we sit in the bitter cold while Ivan chain-smokes and carefully thinks over the
answers to each of my questions. Wearing jeans and a thick leather bomber jacket topped off with a skinhead haircut, he pervades coldness and evil. Other people in the pub seem to avoid any eye contact with him – and it is easy to see how he strikes fear into his British counterparts.

Ivan takes a long and deliberate pause while he drags on his cigarette. ‘You know, my friend?’ says Ivan. ‘I do not consider myself to be a criminal. I am a businessman making money for my family. I did not make people take drugs. I am simply feeding a demand like any other business. You understand?’

I nodded and then Jerry blatantly tried to change the subject.

‘What Ivan means, old son, is that if you stitch him up he’ll come looking for you, eh?’

Ivan laughed and heartily slapped my leg. ‘Jerry is so …’ he paused. ‘Dramatic.’

With that Ivan stood up, shook both our hands and strolled out of the pub garden towards the car park. It was only then I noticed a dark BMW 5 series with two men sitting in it. They must have been there all the time.

‘I told you he wouldn’t give much away,’ said Jerry.

Half an hour later, Jerry the Essex-based ‘hash trader’, as he likes to be known, took me down to the seaside to show me how cannabis often reaches these shores. In among the brush oak stood a wildlife conservation area lying between the sea and the main road. It’s a favourite drop-off point for hash smugglers, explains Jerry.

Empty packs of cigarettes lie scattered around piles of discarded clothes and shoes. Jerry emphasises that this is not one of Ivan’s ‘operations’ but a drop-off point for other foreign smuggling gangs. ‘See these clothes?’ he says, poking a pair of women’s blue underwear with his foot. ‘There must have been a woman among them.’ The females are usually forced into prostitution to pay for their journey from Albania.

The hash-smuggling refugees, who arrive at night or early in the morning, are usually picked up by cars and vans waiting nearby.

In the past, they’ve found bodies buried in the sand of these barren, deserted beaches, casualties of the smugglers’ indifference to the lives of their clients as they often force them to swim ashore. I suspect Jerry has himself been involved in some of these ‘pick-ups’ but he talks in the third person to avoid any awkward questions.

The hash trade is a classic example of the drug industry’s globalisation, with the Turkish Mafia often trading hash to the Albanians who then use their international connections to ship it to Europe and the UK.

It’s also said that the Albanian Mafia likes to exert extra power and influence by blackmailing fellow Albanian migrants around the world. ‘The Albanian Mafia has a huge capacity to expand itself. Many times decent Albanians are obliged to help the Albanian Mafia,’ says one expert. ‘If there are no other Albanian criminals in a country, they ask for help from law-abiding Albanians and put pressure on their relatives at home, who have little or no police protection.’

Jerry looks a bit uncomfortable as we get back into his four-by-four to leave the beach area. He turns to me nervously: ‘For fuck’s sake don’t land me in the shit, will you? Those fuckin’ Albanians will cut me head off if they think I’ve grassed them up.’

No book about the secret criminal underworld of hash would be complete without the extraordinary story of Tony, probably the most successful full-time hash smuggler in the UK after the legendary Howard Marks. Tony is the head of a team of smugglers, renowned in the British underworld. Now aged seventy-four, Tony first started organising lorry-loads of hash from India and Afghanistan in the early 1970s. His transport company is run as a legitimate business, which on the surface deals mainly in fruit imported from these countries. But hidden beneath each shipment are millions of pounds’ worth of hash.

Tony is one of the most unlikely people you’ll ever find in the hash trade. In his youth in south-east London and Kent in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he was a member of a gang of professional bank robbers, who even teamed up with some members of the Great Train Robbery
team just before they pulled off the so-called Crime of the Century in 1963. Tony was, naturally, the transport man when these blags were committed. That means he was waiting in the getaway car to drive the robbers at high speed away from the scene of their crime.

‘It was a great time back then. Robbers like us were treated like pop stars and we had the lot – wine, women and song. But I knew it was a risky business, so I kept my eyes and ears out for something else, something more secure.

‘I knew nothin’ about drugs back then. In fact they were the devil’s candy as far as me and my mates were concerned. We’d never touch an aspirin let alone a line of cocaine. We used to sneer at people who smoked pot and label them “stupid hippies” and stuff like that.’

But Tony says the turning point in his attitude towards drugs came when he served a short stretch in prison in the late 1960s. ‘That’s when I first came across the stuff. I even took a few uppers in jail to help pass the time away but I never really got really into them like a lot of other people I came across. I always preferred a pint with a whisky chaser and still do to this day.

‘But what I did realise after being in prison was that drugs were about to explode onto the streets and soon everyone would be after them. I was an opportunist and I wanted a piece of that action, so not long after I got out I put together a proposition with another villain I knew and we arranged to buy a big load of hash from the Lebanon, which was infamous for its Lebanese Gold hash back then.

‘The only problem was we had to get the stuff back from the Lebanon. We believed we were paying rock-bottom prices but we didn’t fancy being ripped off by a bunch of dodgy smugglers who’d end up skimming most of our profit in “transport fees” and probably nick half the hash for good measure.

‘So I looked into what usually got exported from Lebanon and it was oranges back then. Well, that clinched it. I’d send a lorry over to pick up some oranges and we’d hide the hash under them.’

Tony decided the only way to make this work properly was to create a legitimate transport company, which he officially registered and proudly had painted on the side of the Bedford truck he purchased specifically for the pick-up of hash.

‘It went like a dream. Me and my mate headed off to Lebanon by road. It was a hairy old drive through some quite dangerous areas but we never had a sniff of trouble. We picked up the oranges and the hash in Beirut and sailed back through customs in Dover without a worry in the world. I knew then and there this was a much more lucrative business than blagging could ever be.’

But back then, many of Tony’s fellow gangsters continued to disapprove of any dealing in drugs, so he was very careful not to let most of them know what he was up to. ‘Most of my crew were so anti-drugs back then I genuinely feared one of them might grass me up to the law because they would have thought I was scum to smuggle drugs, even puff.’

Tony claims he was one of the first traditional London villains to ‘convert’ to hash smuggling. ‘It was a daring move back then but the profit I made from that first ever hash deal made it
the
business for me. I was hooked. I’d struck gold. After all, it’s so much easier and back then the chances of being caught were virtually nil.’

Within five years, Tony’s company had grown to a dozen lorries and he was even managing to make a profit from the legitimate importation of fruit and vegetables, on top of his vast rake-offs from hash smuggling. ‘It’s funny ’cos none of my mates really cottoned on to what I was up to. They all just thought my legit transport business had hit the jackpot and that’s the way I liked to keep it back then.’

Tony genuinely feared that one of the big criminal families who dominated the London crime scene in those days might try and muscle in on his business. ‘I wasn’t stupid and I knew there were people circling my company and trying to work out how I was doing so well. But I kept on smiling and making out the fruit and veg business was booming and most of them fell for it.’

Ironically, it was actually one of the last truly big heists that was to make things very complicated for Tony’s business. ‘In 1983, some of my oldest mates pulled off the Brink’s-Mat robbery, which copped £27 million worth of gold. It was the biggest crime ever committed and the police went crazy trying to round up any known associates of the gang and of course I was one of their prime suspects, even though I’d been out of the blagging game for years.

‘The cozzers presumed my transport company had been used to take some of the gold bullion abroad and raided my company just as a lorry returned from a run to Turkey. They found the stash of hash, I got nicked and had to close the whole operation down. I got five years for that little caper.’

Tony insists to this day he was innocent of handling any of the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion but he accepted his jail sentence like a true pro. ‘Listen. I may or may not have allowed one of my lorries to be used for some of the gold but at the end of the day, the coppers were after me for anything. They knew I’d been in the smuggling game for years and they were going to get me for something.’

When Tony emerged from prison three years later, he set up another transport company but this time he was even more savvy than before. ‘I ran it entirely as a hundred per cent legitimate business importing and exporting fruit and veg. I did that for at least the first year after I got out of prison. It drove the coppers mad because they raided my premises three times during that period, convinced I was up to no good. But I knew I had to keep my nose clean for a while.’

Tony’s hatred of the police was especially fuelled by that period. He explains: ‘The coppers would harass me non-stop, sit on the gates to my house in cars and generally make a right pest of themselves. They enjoyed putting me through the wringer but I knew that when the time was right I’d set up another smuggling operation and they wouldn’t even get a sniff of it.’

By 1990, Tony’s police ‘shadows’ had pulled away from him after failing to arrest him for any more offences following his earlier release from prison. ‘That was when I knew it was the perfect time to get back into the hash game. Within less than a year we were running as many shipments as before I’d been sent down. It was magic.’

These days, Tony admits he is finally slowing down and two years ago he sold off the main part of his transport business to another criminal, who subsequently got arrested and jailed for smuggling. ‘It didn’t surprise me. This bloke didn’t have a clue how to run a successful smuggling operation and he got blown out of the water by the police when one of his drivers decided to grass him up. It would never have happened if I’d still been running the firm.’

Tony admits he still runs a ‘small smuggling operation’, which uses just two lorries. ‘It suits me fine. I’m still making good money from hash, although the mark-up on the fruit and veg has crashed. God knows how anyone can make an honest buck these days. That’s why I stick to villainy.’

Tony adds: ‘In many ways I owe everything I have to hash. I don’t think it’s harmed anyone that much and I feel that smuggling it isn’t really a crime like it would be if I shipped the white stuff.’

Tony is reluctant to talk about the specifics of his operation today, except to say: ‘I keep it small and tight. That way there are no leaks. I’m not really sure why I’m still in this game, though. I should be enjoying a quiet and peaceful retirement but I like the buzz from what I do. My missus thinks I am
mad and keeps nagging me to close the company but I can’t bring myself to do that as yet.’

Tony reckons the biggest irony of all is that nearly all his old criminal cronies from south London are either dead or in prison. ‘They sneered at me for getting involved in the hash game at the beginning and by the time most of them finally woke up to the money that could be made it was too late and the majority went into the coke business, which seemed to them to be the easy option. But coke’s a different ballgame from hash. The stakes are higher and so are the risks, which is why so many of them either got topped or ended up being nicked for a long sentence.’

Tony adds: ‘I’m an old man now in a much younger man’s profession but I tell you, I know all the tricks of the trade and I’ll probably just do a few more runs and then quit while I’m on top.’

Tony pauses for a moment of reflection: ‘Or maybe not.’

Law enforcement agencies across the globe claim they spend upwards of one billion dollars each year in a bid to stamp out hash smuggling but to little avail.