The Criminal Alphabet (32 page)

See
Tosser

A
wigger
is a white or
Asian person who acts and speaks as though they are black, particularly Jamaican or
West Indian. The word is a combination of ‘white' and ‘nigger' and has been in use
since the 1970s.

See
Jafaken

To be a
window-licker
means that you are mentally deficient. It comes from the myth that whenever you used
to see a blue bus (the favoured mode of transport for days out from mental
institutions), at least one of the passengers would have their tongue on the window.
The insult is on a par with
mong
. Some criminals class all of
straight society as window-lickers, in the belief that straight-goers are idiots and
must be mentally ill for going to work and doing things the hard way.

A
window warrior
is a
prisoner who is either on drugs, unable to read or write, or bored and wishing to
stir up
trouble during a lockdown period in prison. The window
warrior will try to disguise his voice and shout threats and abuse at other
prisoners through his cell window, hanging on to the bars and trying to wind up
other prisoners in order to get them shouting threats back. Before the introduction
of in-cell television in British jails, window warriors were a big problem, causing
untold aggravation with their verbal antics and creating a dangerous and violent
atmosphere, as, when the cell doors were unlocked, most prisoners would go looking
for whoever had been dishing out the verbal abuse and try to physically assault
them. Prisoners are volatile enough without all this abusive prompting. The
introduction of televisions has meant that window-warrior behaviour has all but died
out now, as even the dimmest con can't be bored when there are soap operas by the
dozen and daily documentaries on killer sharks or Nazis to keep them occupied.

The drug world is littered with slang,
both obscure and well known, as you would expect. The trouble is that it changes so
quickly: no sooner does someone think up a code for a product than the authorities
crack it and everyone goes back to square one. Most street-level dealers now call
their product ‘food', which implies that it's something users can't live without.
This section of the book would be as long as the Bible if I were to list every
single slang word there has ever been for drugs and drug dealers, so I'll limit
myself to the more common and perhaps more interesting ones connected to the
denizens of this shady world.

Acid
is LSD (lysergic
acid diethylamide), a hallucinogenic drug that was very popular in the 1960s and
'70s. It had a renaissance in the late 1980s due to the acid-house craze, where
young people would gather in fields and empty warehouses to take acid and ecstasy
and dance the night away.

See
Bumbles
,
Cheesy
Quaver

A
balloon
is a packet of
drugs that has been placed inside a rubber balloon and swallowed. Cocaine and heroin
are the main drugs smuggled in this fashion, as they come in powdered form. The
smuggler will normally double or triple up on the parcel, so the drugs will be put
inside the
first balloon and then two or more put over the first.
(Rubber can be corroded by stomach acid and the balloons have to be held in the
smuggler's stomach, sometimes on very long journeys halfway around the world.)
Smuggling drugs in this way is very dangerous; if even one balloon bursts inside the
body, it can lead to death. Some people use condoms rather than balloons, but the
principle is the same.

Billy
is amphetamine
sulphate, or speed, a drug, usually in powder form, that is a powerful stimulant and
appetite suppressor. The term is taken from a character in
The Beano
, Billy
Whizz, who moves so quickly he leaves clouds of dust behind him.

To a lot of intravenous drug users the
prospect of contracting
Billy Ray
(rhyming slang: Billy Ray Cyrus =
The Virus (AIDS)) is very real. Billy Ray Cyrus is an American country singer who
had a big hit in 1992 with a song called ‘Achy Breaky Heart'.

In the drug world a
bomb
is powdered speed (amphetamine sulphate) wrapped in a cigarette paper and
dropped into a drink. This means that the drug enters the blood system more quickly;
the practice is known as ‘bombing' it.

Boot
is a word you will
hear a lot in our prisons, given that approximately 70 per cent of the prison
population are heroin users. It's rhyming slang for smoking heroin off a piece of
foil (bootlace = chase, as in ‘chase the dragon'). Needles are quite hard to get
hold of in prison, so most heroin users will put the powdered drug on a piece of
tinfoil and light a taper under it, causing the drug to liquefy and run along the
foil. The resulting fumes are sucked from the foil using a ‘tube', also made from
tinfoil. First-time users of the drug (it has been estimated that up to 60 per cent
of users have their first taste of heroin in prison) prefer to smoke rather than
inject, as they believe it is harder to get addicted if the drug is smoked. This is
nonsense.

See
Jimmy
,
Skaghead

To
bottle
something is
to secrete it in your anus for later retrieval. This is quite common in prison,
where there are many rub-down searches for contraband.

Some criminals and drug users refer to
Afghan heroin as
brown
. This is to distinguish it from Chinese
heroin, which is white in colour and is referred to as
China white
.
In 1981 the punk/new wave band The Stranglers released a song called ‘Golden Brown'
about the joys of Afghan heroin, and it became a hit all around the world. Initially
the band said the song was about Marmite, and it wasn't until songwriter Hugh
Cornwell released a book about The Stranglers' songs
in 2001 that
he finally admitted publicly that the song was about heroin.

See
China White

Bumbles
is Ecstasy
(rhyming slang: bumble bee = E), as in ‘Send another thirty bumbles, the
cheesy Quavers
are up for it'. Ecstasy is usually taken in pill
form and contains MDMA. It made its debut on the acid-house rave scene of the late
1980s and became the drug of choice for people who fancied a wild weekend of
dancing. The drug had many nicknames – disco biscuits, the love drug, E – but the
criminals who dealt them called them bumbles.

See
Acid

Cheeking
is a popular
prison method of smuggling or concealing drugs. It involves placing the
elephant
(parcel of drugs) between the buttocks so it won't be
found in a rub-down search. It's used as a temporary measure for people who normally
bottle
, but also by those too squeamish to force something up
their anus. The standard prisoner search involves a rub-down or pat-down search over
the clothing on the outside of the body. It is only during a full strip search that
prison staff might force the prisoner to squat and visually inspect their buttocks.
If you have an illicit item cheeked, the odds are good that it will pass a rub-down
search, but it will rarely pass a strip search.

See
Dry bath
,
Elephant

This rhyming slang was in widespread use
during the acid-house dance craze and is still in use today. The people who went to
illegal raves (all-night drug and dance parties) were known as ravers initially, but
in London and the south-east ‘ravers' had homosexual connotations so was
preferred.

China white
is
high-grade Chinese heroin that is white in colour, as opposed to Afghan heroin,
which is brown.

See
Brown

To be
clucking
is to be
suffering withdrawal from any drug, but particularly heroin. It's taken from the
jerky movements and cries that junkies – and chickens – make. Those addicted to
heroin find it hard to bear when they don't have any, and this is when they cluck.
Also, when they are coming off heroin, voluntarily or involuntarily, clucking is
part of the process.

See
Roger

A
Colombian necktie
is a
pretty extreme and bloody method of dealing with suspected police informers.
Pioneered by Colombian drug cartels in the 1970s and '80s, it involves cutting the
person's throat and then reaching into the wound to the base of the tongue and
dragging the entire tongue through the gaping wound so that it hangs
down on to the chest like a gruesome necktie. This is a warning
to anyone else who might think of informing.

Cop
has several
meanings, but the one related to drugs is a verb – ‘to cop' – meaning to obtain
drugs.

Crack
is a form of
cocaine. The powdered cocaine is ‘cooked' with various chemicals until it forms a
solid lump, which will then be broken down into small rocks for sale by street
dealers. Crack cocaine is much more addictive than powdered cocaine and the high
only lasts a couple of minutes, meaning there is an immediate need for more. Crack
is usually smoked in a pipe. In the 1970s this way of cooking the drug was known as
free-basing, but it was an expensive habit as some of the powder was wasted in the
process. In the 1980s the Colombian drug cartels and the Jamaican yardies found a
cheaper way of creating the drug and it became a relatively inexpensive way to get
seriously addicted.

See
Crackhead

A
devil's
is a measure
of drugs, usually a quarter of an ounce (rhyming slang: devil's daughter = quarter),
as in ‘Give me a devil's and I'll pay you on Friday when I get my
elephant
'.

A
dreadlock holiday
is a
trip to Jamaica in order to pick up and smuggle drugs back into the UK. Many drug
dealers will pay single mothers to take one, asking them to pick the drugs up from
one of the dealer's accomplices in Jamaica. Cocaine is usually liquefied and put
into bottles of suntan lotion, shampoo or even champagne, which the
mule
packs into their luggage for the return trip. Some
ruthless dealers will pay several people to smuggle the drugs on each trip and then
inform the authorities that one of them is carrying drugs in the hope that the rest
of the smugglers get through with their parcels and the authorities will be kept
happy, thinking they're doing a great job of guarding the borders. The term comes
from a 1976 number-one hit by 10CC.

See
Mule

An
elephant
is a parcel
of drugs that can be concealed on the person (rhyming slang: Elephant and Castle =
parcel). Elephant and Castle is an area in South London. A typical example of the
incomprehensibility of prison slang can be found in this statement: ‘Got me Richard
on a v this avvy with a pukka elephant, I'll be off me tits by six bells bang-up!'
(Translation: ‘My girlfriend's coming to visit me this afternoon and she's bringing
me a parcel of drugs, so I should be high as a kite by six o'clock lock-up!'). If
someone in prison tells you that they have an elephant coming, do not automatically
assume a pachyderm is visiting the prison!

Between the 1960s and '90s cannabis was
the main black-market currency in British prisons and the
half-ounce deal
was the standard unit of that currency, the amount of cannabis
given for a half-ounce packet of tobacco. For this you would get enough to make two
spliffs. Almost every item on the prison black market was priced in half-ounce deals
or multiples of it. For example, a litre of good
hooch
would cost
three half-ounce deals, and a well-made
chiv
might cost five
half-ounce deals. Before cannabis became popular in prison, tobacco was the king of
prison currency. Since the introduction of Mandatory Drug Testing the new currency
is £10 bags of heroin.

See
The Naughty

Hep
is short for
hepatitis, a disease that is fairly prevalent in British prisons. This isn't
surprising, given the high number of intravenous drug users.

Used mainly in the juvenile prison system
and of West Indian patois origin,
ickle preps
is a small amount of
cannabis usually given for free. It's usually enough for a joint or a ‘one-skinner'
and the term is a corruption of ‘little preparation'.

See
Return

To
jack up
is to inject
drugs intravenously, usually heroin. A prison refinement is that the ‘syringe' is
usually homemade, from the outer casing of a ballpoint pen, and far from being
sterile: both syringe and needle will be kept, when not in use, up the prisoner's
anus. As any kind of disinfectant is banned in prison (as well as syringes), these
homemade syringes are passed from person to person with only a cursory attempt at
cleaning them. The British prison system is awash with heroin, though most prisoners
prefer to smoke it rather than inject. For obvious reasons …

The younger criminal element, enamoured
of all things American and heavily influenced by gangsta rap, use the term in
another context. To them, a jack-up is a street robbery or the theft of a luxury or
expensive car. Jacking is stealing, usually with threats or force.

See
Billy
Ray
,
Boot
,
Bottle
,
Jag
,
Skaghead

To
jag
yourself is to
inject drugs intravenously. The word is of Scottish origin and refers to the jag of
the needle as it enters the vein.

See
Jack up

A lot of heroin users believe that
smoking the drug, rather than taking it by intravenous injection, makes it less
likely that they will become addicted. This is quite wrong: heroin is an addictive
drug no matter how you take it. The criminal world and UK prisons are full of heroin
addicts and they have their own language for their habit.
Jimmy
is
rhyming
slang: Jimmy Boyle = foil. When smoking heroin (‘chasing
the dragon') the user will empty the powdered drug on to a strip of jimmy and then
hold a lighted taper under it to build up enough heat to liquefy the drug. The
liquefied heroin, or ‘beetle', is ‘chased' up and down the foil with a ‘tube' and
the fumes are sucked deep into the lungs. It's ironic that heroin users have adopted
this term, named after infamous Scottish hard-man prisoner Jimmy Boyle, as he is
notoriously against heroin and has campaigned against the drug in his native
Glasgow.

See
Boot
,
Skaghead

To be
monged out
is to
have taken a lot of drugs and as a consequence be sitting around staring into space
and dribbling. People who take heroin will usually have a period soon after taking
the drug where they are monged out. It's also known as gauching, or nodding, as the
drug taker's head tends to droop. Some drugs seem specifically designed to mong you
out, in contrast to those that make you very active, such as cocaine or speed.