Bodyguard (19 page)

I had to step out of it at this point – what followed wasn’t my call. My job was undercover and security. London thought that if we showed the original gun coming back through Dover unchallenged, then we had a story.

I suppose we did. It wasn’t enough for me though, and I couldn’t let my frustration at budget control or lack of vision in the bigger picture bother me. The need to get Allan out to Sierra Leone on another story also meant this was the end of the line. These things happened.

My friendly copper Nick also advised me not to get further involved. ‘That’s serious crime,’ he said. ‘My advice is to withdraw.’ And he knew how capable and experienced I was and how badly I wanted it. I expected all these answers, of course, before I rang him. He also pointed out that we didn’t have the support of the
Czech police: after what had happened when we handed everything over to the Bulgarian authorities, who could know how much help we would get here?

Claire made the decision to pull the next morning. I knew it was over. That meant if we were done, we needed to get out of there quickly. There was a meeting in Prague to be avoided – inevitably our phone would ring soon. Plus, what would happen to David? Could he really be safe as our middleman? We were about to sell him down the river. I was chuffed though – this was as good and as close as it got. We just couldn’t get any further. I still held up hope that Daniel would call. If he asked for a meet earlier in the evening, we could get him on film.

It was a lost cause. My phone never rang.

To be safe, we then took the decision to turn all the phones off. We cut our losses and made for Dresden, then headed back to the Channel ports. Allan’s role had been small, by his own admission. At Dover, Tony Fallshaw was waiting to pick us up on the long lens from high above the port. He had flown home ahead to make the shot. The general shots of the white cliffs inevitably set the scene – an image everybody would recognise as Dover. Once out of the port, we pulled up high on the cliffs so Allan and I could park up on a bench to mock up some more theatre. We hadn’t bothered to film coming through Customs – that border was so casual, we were pretty confident we would sail through without needing to produce our press cards. Allan did no more than explain the journey of the replica pistol and how we had breezed through British border control – just like many before and many more since.

The word from London was ‘no more’ – do not pursue. The story was dead. Daniel or whoever never rang that Saturday night. The only piece left in the jigsaw was to call David. Surely, the gang would ring him to see what happened.

‘They’ve gone,’ he had told them on the Sunday. ‘Their boss was not happy with how you treated him in the toilet. As though you didn’t trust him. He’s going to take his business elsewhere.’

‘Well tell him if you speak to them,’ came back the reply, ‘that if he wants to do business he is welcome back any time.’

We had stumbled upon serious gangsters after all. I later learned that in the town of Litvínov, where just some 27,000 people lived, there had been violent demonstrations by neo-Nazis towards the Gypsy community. It had become infamous for its violence. A
three-year
investigation also showed that people with controversial pasts had infiltrated local politics, and corruption went straight to the top. Long before we turned up in 2001, pop singer Martin Maxa was shot in front of his music club – he was one of the few who had dared to defy the ever-growing trend of staged fights on the bar scene, quickly followed by a visit from the organisers of the scraps, who would then provide bouncers for your club. Maxa refused the offer and was shot in the head. Much of this ‘business’ controlling this small town and linked to multiple murders and random violence followed a trail to companies owned by another man called Martin. This was the one of the three I met in Litvínov.

We’d had literally no idea what we had walked into. Dom and Paul’s intelligence had been perfect – better than they could have ever known. David had delivered. I had levelled with the meanest of the mean. That others didn’t have the time, resource, budget or drive to see the story through was simply ‘
katastrofik
’.

A
lmost immediately, Paul and Dom were back in touch with David. Guns were no longer on the agenda. It was November 2007, and David now knew that we worked for the BBC. We all knew from Varna and Litvínov that one crime led to another. We had to probe David for more.

Girls were being sold as prostitutes, earning their money and then being moved on as sex slaves. The sex trade was very much alive and kicking.

On this occasion, I was going to buy women and traffic them into the UK. Richard Bilton would be my reporter. I couldn’t know that this time we would be in for the long haul. In complete contrast to Guns, this was a story we would stick with. My new cover story was simple.

I owned a couple of houses in Hounslow and I needed girls. Around Slough and Southall, there was a hidden illegal community called the Faujis. Often living twenty-plus to a house, they worked for peanuts, sending the money back home to India or spending it on alcohol and sex. My new property would be high-end brothels run by a madam – I needed a couple of really good-looking girls to come and work for me. My clientele didn’t want trash.

The story had now moved to Slovakia, an appalling borough of Košice named Luník. It was the worst council estate imaginable. High rise after high rise, burned-out cars in the street. Designed for 2,500 inhabitants, it had three times that number – many with illnesses
ranging from head lice to meningitis. There was just one school and most of the residents were so poor that they didn’t pay rent. As far as the developed world was concerned, it was hell on earth.

Košice itself had a very small airport. Dom and Paul again met me with all the usual bullshit. We hired the biggest fuck-off Mercedes we could get our hands on to show credibility. You drive a car like that around and you show you mean business. Clearly, no two-bob whore would do for us.

If we got lucky on the first trip, we would come back for a second, when Richard would join us and film overtly. We made our plans in the four-and-a-half star Hotel Dukát. (Our options were severely limited, given the poverty of the region.) There was already a meet on for that first evening. David was bringing ‘Peter’ and his nephew to the hotel. Despite the cock-up recording in Litvínov, we stuck to the rules – no filming first time around. We knew that if we could pull this one off we would be heroes; this was definitely worth sticking with and we weren’t under the same kind of constraints as we had been in the Czech Republic.

David’s phone rang. ‘Yeah, they’re coming. He speaks some English,’ he confirmed.

This immediately made me suspicious. If they spoke a bit of English, had they been talking to anyone before us? People from this region didn’t really speak English, especially the Gypsies. I couldn’t be sure who I was meeting.

Then a couple of scrotes in shell suits walked in. They told me they can get girls, and they are already working the train station. That was not what I came for.

‘Can I keep the passports or do you control them?’ I asked. That is a pretty standard pimp question.

‘You do what you like with them,’ one of them replied.

We had come to report on girls who unknowingly had been forced to enter the sex trade – not those who had been banged so hard they could no longer hear the InterCity coming. This wasn’t the story
we were after and I told them straight. ‘I don’t want girls who have been fucked three or four times a day and are hanging around a train station.’ I was speaking the only language they knew.

Daniel in Litvínov had set a new benchmark for the premier league of gangsters – I couldn’t take these guys seriously. In terms of how much I respected them, they were closer to the grandfather who tried to sell me his grandkid behind the mother’s back in Bulgaria. There was me, sitting inside an almost five star hotel with the sound of Christmas in the air outside, talking to a couple of low lifes who looked like they should have been kicking a football around Moss Side.

Thirty-five-year-old brass that hung around railway stations – this was not high-end stuff. David had introduced us to trash, but when was it any other way. First rung always disappointed. Once rejected, inevitably we would get told we would be introduced to someone else who may help us. And they soon delivered.

‘We’ll introduce you to someone … but he’s in England at the moment.’

That was no good at all. ‘My flats are going to be ready in the New Year,’ I tried to press them. More to the point, what the hell was he doing in England? Immediately that told me this may be a player, or perhaps they were about to expose the route. That would take us to the heart of the sting without even trying. If he was the man, he was clearly on a deal right now.

We were promised top of the range – no munters – borderline models. We had a lead.

Conscious of previous battles in the office, trying to get various departments to chip in to fund a story, I decided to withdraw. Did I want to stand around a railway station looking at old birds riddled with God knows what? There was no point staying until we had more. After two days, I pulled the team. Yet something in these two did give me a small hope. They were prepared to show us the way – or maybe that was always their role. Probably it was because I was flashing the cash. I loved it, too, peeling off the notes for Dom so I looked the big
cheese once more. He would then hand them a few euros and settle the bill. In the role, I was too important to cross their palms with silver myself. My dual methods of accounting were at work here – I would never waste BBC money by outstaying my welcome when a job was done or on hold, but if the gig was on and I needed to get in the part, I would spend it like there was no tomorrow. Sometimes flashing my wad backfired.

David didn’t stay for dinner. ‘We know where you’re going,’ we all joked. ‘Gumar girl, hey?’ (
Katastrofik
, I’m sure you will agree, if he caught something down at the station.)

We were almost alone. Only the odd American visiting to do business in the local steel industry was in the restaurant. Clearly we stood out, and the maitre d’ saw us coming. ‘Because you have spent well at dinner, I would like to offer you a really nice glass of brandy,’ he flirted.

I didn’t drink brandy. Ever. We got the whole history of the bottle, then he poured three glasses at the table. David re-entered bang on cue. That made four.

David was giving me the
katastrofik
eye. Maybe he had seen this one before. I took a sip. It was good but not for me. We let Dom down the lot then called for the bill. And there it was, right at the bottom.

Fuck. Five hundred quid – and we had to pay for the whole bottle.

‘What’s going on?’ I summoned him back.

‘The brandy, Sir.’

‘No, no, no,’ I told him straight. ‘You offered us the brandy.’

‘You’ve got to pay the bill,’ he insisted.

Bloody
katastrofik
indeed. I had gone from one extreme to the other, from being the Boss to having my BBC hat on. How could I justify that? ‘We didn’t ask for it and you didn’t tell me the price. Get the manager.’

‘No, no, no, I know the maitre d’ very well … he’s very trusted here,’ the manager said.

Then they went off for a cosy chat before returning to deliver the punchline.

‘I’m very sorry. You have to pay, Sir.’

I agreed but only to fob him off. Then I called the boys together. My plan was to check out at 05.00 – our flight wasn’t until eleven. I had spent so many nights in hotels, checking in and out at all times of the day, that I knew that if we got out early, the bill would still be sitting there in the morning. A barely computerised Slovakia wouldn’t be working that quickly. I knew the receipts would be sat there on the side. At five, I marched downstairs.

A young girl, who had been there all night, was working the reception. In reality, she was bored stiff playing on her phone. She asked me in average English if we’d had anything from the minibar so I added a few vagaries for authenticity.

‘Could you check the bill, please?’ They hadn’t put the dinner on. ‘That’s it?’ I said.

‘Yes, that’s it – did you have dinner last night?’

I denied all knowledge! She swiped my card and we left via the back, never to return. They were crooks – it was probably their
standard
trick each Saturday night for every naive fat American in town. I loved blowing them out of the water.

We returned home. Step one was over.

We had been told to wait for Peter’s call – a different Peter. We would react to whatever came next. At Television Centre, we agreed that only one thing mattered – buying clean girls who didn’t know that they were going on the game. A call from Paul suggested that Peter would be back in Košice in ten days time. He had gone to Ireland. Ireland – was that part of his network? Then, out of the blue, David called Paul to tell us about Kent. There was already a booming trafficking operation there. Kent again. Always Kent. The guns from Prague had shown how easy it was to get into Britain there.

Did we try to force the issue with Peter in Košice, or did we take it on a plate in Kent? And was there a link between the two? I needed to complete a deal in Košice, with the girls being handed over and me being given the passports. Equally, there was every chance we
could work the story backwards if we got lucky over near the ports. My decision was to run both stories – grasp anything we got a sniff of. We could have unearthed a goldmine here. Enter Štefan the Boss, Štefan the Translator, and Rudolf the Muscle – no really! Paul had done the dirty work on the phone with Štefan the Translator – he was around eighteen years old, the only one who spoke good enough English. They would meet us at 15.30 on 4 December at the Holiday Inn in Rochester, Kent.

It was time to get back in the role, so I rang the Prestige Hire Company at Heathrow and booked the best damn car I could. Craig Summers didn’t do things by half. I picked up the top of the range VW Touareg – it was in immaculate condition with just forty miles on the clock, which made sure there was no sign of it being a hire car – this would be my vehicle in their eyes. I tossed a couple of magazines on the back seat so it looked lived in, and whacked it on my credit card so it couldn’t be traced to the BBC. Then, I booked two rooms at the Holiday Inn – there was nowhere better locally according to the map. We would collect the two Štefans and Rudolf at the retail park down the road.

Our plan was to use the bar area in the hotel and to keep it short and sweet. We didn’t know much about these guys – three days ago we hadn’t even known they existed. This was only about establishing contact and credibility. As ever, I rearranged the tables to control the meet and dressed for the part in my leather jacket, Rolex, jeans and boots – of course I had plenty of cash on board. When we met them for the first time, Dom heard them call me the ‘British Mafioso’ in Slovak. I loved that.

As I floored the two miles from the retail park back to the hotel, the tyres were smoking. I drove like a gangster, too, bragging about my new car. There was no way Paul and Dom would be getting their hands on the keys. Had I ever been happier in a role? Definitely not. Out of the car, we introduced ourselves properly. The pick-up at the retail park had been over within a minute.

Inside, I told them I needed to trust them before we could do business. ‘Have you done this before?’ I asked. They had. ‘Where are the girls from?

Slovakia, again, was the hub. ‘Slovakian girls are very beautiful,’ Štefan told me. The girls were between eighteen and twenty-one.

‘Were there any problems bringing the girls in to the country?’

Last year they had brought eleven in. All those girls were now working in Cambridge and Peterborough; Štefan had family there. Already he had more proof of form than Peter. This was looking very tasty. We gave them fifty quid for the calls and taxi fare and agreed to meet again soon. Suddenly we were back in the game. Then things just got a whole lot better – Peter had been back on. We now had two live stories running out of the one cover story. We had to get straight back out to Košice. Peter was home.

We booked the Hotel Bristol and went straight back out but not before I had checked their brandy prices online! There was no way we could go back to the Dukát, plus the Bristol might impress. Richard Bilton and the cameraman Julius Peacock hired an apartment and put all the gear in there. Everything was ready to go.

At the bar of the Bristol, sipping on my latte, I could see this was where dodgy people met. All of a sudden, a top of the range black BMW pulled up. Against the backdrop of the glass-fronted exterior, two guys appeared dressed in black, with hair shaved at the side, cropped on top. They were the spit of Martin and Milan from Litvínov. You could tell they weren’t normal – their eyes scanning the bar area.

‘Who are the people?’ David translated their conversation with the barman.

‘They’re English,’ the waiter said.

Then a huge guy walked in, smartly suited and carrying a briefcase. The three got in a huddle at the smoky bar. I knew we were in the right
place. I told Paul straightaway that we needed to call our contacts, my worst fear being that they disappear. David made the call.