Gangbuster (14 page)

I think a lot of informants assume that because you are playing the part of a villain, you must be a bit of a villain. The better the undercover guy is, the more likely he is to find himself being offered dodgy dealings. They think you really are one of them, not just Plod playing the bad guy.

I must admit, I’ve seen systematic corruption and suspected even more. But what do the public perceive as bent? What do they regard as a bent copper? There are many different levels as to what people will accept. They will tolerate having a box of paper clips
and a packet of A4 out of the office. Every level of society has a tolerance level regarding corruption in whatever walk of life.

But bent cops are always a no no. The police are expected to be paragons of virtue in everything they do. But what people often fail to remember is that the police are plucked from society. They are not a separate society; they are a reflection of society. So to expect that there won’t be any misdemeanours taking place, and expecting some sort of idealistic,
whiter-than-white
police service, is pure naïveté on the part of the public and foolhardiness on behalf of the police authorities.

My area of expertise, the deep undercover mission, was more prone than most police departments to the spectre of corruption and it sometimes took great strength of mind to turn down the offer of easy money or the temptation to ‘go native’ and join the villains in money-making enterprises. On the face of it, they always seemed to be having a much better time than anyone else – better homes, better cars, better holidays and didn’t even have to get up in the morning to clock on for work. But underneath you always had a sort of satisfaction that it wasn’t going to be Easy Street for them much longer because you were there to see to it. I was there to take them out. That’s the way I liked it.

But what can happen, even when you resist all temptation, is that you can still get tainted because some other bastard on your team is doing a
double-reverse
ferret.

A pal of mine on the undercover squad did a job on a dealer in possession of 30,000 tabs of LSD. He went back to the nick and wrote up his evidence
immediately after the event in accordance with police procedure.

His statement said, ‘I saw and counted 30,000 doses of LSD, 30 sheets each containing 1,000 doses,’ and it was all done and dusted and he submitted it to his supervising officer for his signature. When the arresting officers came up from the charge room a couple of hours later, they said, ‘Right, we’ve charged him, 20,000 tabs of LSD, all done.’

What could he do, what could he say? His evidence had been totally compromised, and he could see what was likely to happen. Six months up the line, he would be standing in the witness box at the Old Bailey telling how he saw 30,000 tabs when the accused is charged with possessing only 20,000. ‘How can this officer’s evidence possibly be believed, members of the jury?’ Acquittal, internal investigation and his name tarnished throughout the job. We were, effectively, the cops’ own crooks in our game, playing the part of villains to catch real villains. We knew the risks. We knew the temptations. I was always gutted if I knew blokes were going over to the other side and letting us down.

I often found myself the ‘tail-end Charlie’ on operations when my knowledge of the drug involved required special expertise. Another undercover officer might have already infiltrated a drugs gang but wanted me pulled in at the last minute to be the tester. Everybody knew that I was experienced in handling all types of gear. Some undercovers were equipped to go in and infiltrate but when the parcel arrived on the plot they didn’t have the confidence in their own abilities, or sufficient knowledge of the drug involved, to test it themselves to see if it was the
real stuff. I would arrive as the trusted ‘mate’ who knew about these things and would sample the drugs and give an honest opinion. I’d pop along with my hold-all containing my scales, all the drug paraphernalia, the weights and what have you, and do what I had to do in the way they wanted to see it done, by an expert. I was the professional at this. My bag and I got called all over the show. With us travelled the spectre of temptation. You might meet an undercover cop who was already inside the gang and he’d say, ‘It’s going to be eight kilos of heroin they’re bringing you this afternoon, but, er, between you, me and the gatepost, we’ll say five, eh? Don’t worry about it, we’ll call you in a week’s time and we’ll meet up and all have a nice drink.’

His proposition got short shrift from me. ‘We haven’t had this conversation,’ I replied in
time-honoured
fashion. And the deal, I’m glad to say, usually went through straight without any gear going AWOL and with the villains all getting banged up without the knowledge of being stitched up by bent Old Bill. I couldn’t help thinking over the years there should have been one or two police officers doing bird with them.

Whatever my knowledge or suspicions I never grassed any of my fellow officers up. That’s the way I was. I didn’t mind what names people called me as long as one of them wasn’t grass. I knew the temptations out there. How easy it would have been just to say OK and make more money in an afternoon than I was likely to earn in a year as a straight copper.

Huge sums of money were part and parcel of my everyday life and the opportunities were there, the enticement factor immense. They had a cash room at
Scotland Yard where you’d go to pick up the dosh and I was a regular customer. I was always drawing big sums, £50,000 and up as regular as clockwork. And the distrust within the police always used to entertain me. The money had to be signed for, counted, and signed for again by the commanding officer. It was then counted again to make sure that what you’d been given by the cash room staff was all there, then you’d go out and use it on the plot and it’s all got to be accounted for and signed for again at the end of the day when they want to put it back. You had to be so careful to prove the continuity of who you gave it to because, on more than one occasion, it would get back to the cash room and they’d say, ‘No, we haven’t got £50,000 here, we’ve only got £47,500.’ Then the shit would hit the fan and everybody would come to you straight away as the officer dealing and have a little look. Fortunately, because of my reputation I never used to get seriously grilled over it and I’d say, ‘Well, you’ll just have to work backwards and find whose hands it’s passed through. But don’t look at me.’

I don’t think they ever managed to nick anyone for thieving the Commissioner’s cash. The perpetrators would have been too careful.

If you were handling these huge sums of money almost every day, and you’d got bills, or a mortgage to pay or needed a holiday or whatever, you had to be straight, and strong. You could find yourself spending months and months targeting someone suspected of running a major scam, who lived in a fucking great house, drove a top-of-the-range Merc, ran what appeared on the surface to be a successful business, and lived the life of Reilly. After months of tedium,
and sometimes some danger, it all ended in a huge search of the place and there was a fucking great Joey full of scratch. The Old Bill were resentful of the fucker anyway; he’d got all these ill-gotten gains, so was it to be on-the-spot fining? Into the cash stash and away with a nice wedge of spending money. It was hardly surprising that a bit of dough went walkies now and again. I knew it happened, but it wasn’t my scene. Where’s my big Jag and mansion?

Although the job was great if you judged it on the mind-blowing adrenalin rushes which were part of the territory, there was certainly no cash incentive to stay on the straight and narrow. My basic rate of pay as a detective constable was peanuts compared to many of the geezers I was put in to investigate. There was no extra five or ten grand a year for going undercover. Fuck all. No danger money, nothing for putting your head on the block day after day, nothing for being the leading specialist in my field. You took home the same as any other similarly ranked officer who walked out of the nick in the morning and spent eight hours plodding the streets looking at his toecaps. Same with the desk wallahs who sat doing fuck all all day while I’d be out there getting shot and stabbed and infiltrating the bad guys.

There were expenses but, as often as not, you’d be out of pocket on a job and have to do a bit of creative accounting on your expenses to balance the books. They always wanted provable expenses but you can’t do that when you are cruising round with villains; you can’t ask barmen for receipts or suddenly demand that the taxi driver gives you a signed tab. The villains are going to suss you out double quick. There was a bit of overtime once, but that got
whittled away eventually in financial cutbacks. The penny-pinching became unbelievable in the end. I told them, ‘Excuse me, I’m out there pretending to be a fucking high-flying, hard-case gangster … I can’t do it on a tenner a day.’

Several members of the squad made approaches to the powers that be for more money – at least a clothing allowance to help us do the job in as professional a manner as possible. If you were in a position where you were frequenting high-class hotels and eating expensive meals as part of an undercover job you had to look the part. If you pitched up in a Marks and Spencer suit you’d look suspicious right away. Dressing up or dressing down was important; people judge you on first impressions. And you never get a second chance to make a first impression, do you? You always had to be very aware of that, and dress according to the people you were mixing with. Be one of them.

There was always some bitching and whingeing about some sort of allowance and eventually the police very graciously let us go up to the prisoners’ property store in Cricklewood in north-west London and have a root through to see if there was anything there which might be useful. It was stuff that had been confiscated, marked ‘not claimed’; a lot of it was a load of old tat, a right load of old garbage. It was laughable, some of the most skilled detectives at Scotland Yard rummaging through old bin bags for something to wear.

I was described in several of the Yard’s annual appraisals as ‘an imaginative dresser’ which was sort of true anyway. I always liked to dress stylishly – some might say a bit garishly – so the clothing
problem didn’t affect me so much. If I looked the part on an undercover job, it was out of my own pocket and not through the largesse of Scotland Yard. My old grandad always used to say you judged a man by his shoes. I don’t know how relevant that is today, but when I went out on a mission I was very conscious of everything I was wearing, from my Gucci watch to my favourite make of Dolce and Gabbana designer-label jeans. They had to be right if you were going to convince the bad guys.

Several blokes on the squad had relationships with friendly jewellers where they could go to borrow some decent kit. If you went to a meet wearing 10 or 15 grands’ worth of jewellery it was good for your kudos. I was never a great one for jewellery so I never bothered with it myself, but it certainly helped a few of the others establish their credentials.

I heard various rumours about corruption at high levels at Scotland Yard but nothing I could ever prove, not that I’d go running to the CIB boys anyway. One incident I am sure is true involves a colleague who went undercover to infiltrate a notorious North London criminal gang suspected of being involved in all sorts of villainy from murder to robbery to drugs. The twist was that he’d managed to convince the gang bosses that he was a bent cop prepared to help them out when in fact he was as straight as a die with every intention of getting evidence that would put them behind bars for 20 years minimum. He spent a lot of time drinking with them, getting close, convincing them he was bent and up for any sorts of deals. He came back into the office four weeks later shaking and told me, ‘I walked into the pub today, Blex, and they said, “We know you’re
not a bent copper and we know you’re working undercover. Now consider yourself lucky, get out of here, fuck off and be grateful we haven’t put our hands on you.”’

He was shell-shocked, absolutely fucking gobsmacked; he knew how close he’d been to taking a dip with a concrete overcoat or propping up a motorway bridge. What he did tell me sickened me to my boots – the gang had been tipped off about his undercover role by a senior officer at Scotland Yard who’d been paid a £50,000 bung in cash. It blew the whole fucking job right out of the water and put an officer in grave danger. That senior officer was never questioned, never arrested, never charged and has now left the force. He’s no doubt got a nice retirement home on the Costa with a fair bit of added bunce in his retirement kitty. But I wonder how his conscience is.

I
’ve got a scar on my face that serves as a permanent reminder always to expect the unexpected. The knife that sliced me just under my chin came within an inch of severing my windpipe or puncturing my jugular. It all happened in a split-second as we raided the headquarters of a drugs gang in Tooting, South London, when indecision almost proved fatal.

I had been drafted into the job, not as the undercover man this time, but as back-up to a West Midlands undercover cop investigating a team of Indians suspected of dealing in heroin. I knew the squad was short of troops and volunteered my assistance. The uniformed senior officer running the job hadn’t had a lot of experience in covert work so I was there to offer him any expertise I could.

The operation went like clockwork to start with; a
police hit team moved in and scooped up two of the gang in the street as cash and drugs were exchanged. The heroin package was safely retrieved. So far so good. Premises had been identified during surveillance from where the dealers had been seen toing and froing. It needed checking, and quick.

I suggested to the operational head, a lovely fella but new to this kind of job, that this was a place which had to be searched as a matter of some considerable urgency. In fact, I was pleading with him to get the placed turned over right away. ‘Let’s attack now,’ I said, ‘we know the villains have been in there, we mustn’t wait another minute. Let’s go now. Right now.’

But he was still reluctant to launch a full-scale attack. ‘Let’s wait and see, let’s hold on a bit longer,’ he said.

I knew what might have been going on in those premises. If somebody had been left in there, another member of the gang, he would be expecting his colleagues back by now with all the money. They’d gone off and done the deal as far as he was concerned, and should be coming back with the cash pretty soon to divvy it up. The longer we left the attack, I argued, the more likely anyone in there would start to get jittery. These were premises we should attack without a minute’s further delay.

Under considerable pressure, I finally persuaded the operational head to allow us to move in. It was now a full half-hour since the bust had taken place. The dealers should have been back within ten minutes with the money. Anyone left in the flat could be getting severely twitchy.

Without further delay, I led the assault up to the
fortified front door. It was a flat over a shop and access was via a metal staircase to the rear. I went clunk, clunk up the dimly-lit stairway trying to make as little noise as possible. It was difficult on the metal stairs. I wanted to check out access, and decide what the best method of attack would be – kicking the door in, or if we’d got another Fort Knox on our hands then we’d have to withdraw to get battering equipment to storm in. I felt I could do it OK myself.

Suddenly, the door flew open and … wallop! The flicker came at me with a knife and stabbed me in the neck just under my chin. It happened in a flash.

I acted instinctively and reached out and grabbed him, dragged him out of the house and wrapped him over some metal railings on the walkway. I got hold of his hand and he was still clutching the knife, all covered in blood – my fucking blood. I was thinking, Oh shit I wonder how bad it is, and kept him pinned down until there were enough troops behind me to hold him and stop him doing any more damage with the knife. I’d exercised proper caution, but the bastard had still caught me unawares.

I put my hand to my neck and it was pouring blood. I didn’t know whether this was it, the end of the line for P Bleksley, detective constable. I didn’t know whether the knife had cut the jugular or what untold damage he had done. He had really lunged at me, really hit me one. I reckon he had thought we were robbers on the stairs after the heroin money, shat himself and panicked.

The wound was throbbing and the pain was getting worse. I was a bit in shock. I needed medical attention and I needed it quickly. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get in a retaliatory blow on my
attacker but, as I sat down waiting for the ambulance to arrive, I could hear all these screams and wails coming from round the corner as they carted him off to the nick. If he got a pasting, I didn’t waste any sympathy on him.

Because I didn’t know how bad the injury was, I didn’t want to breathe in and inhale any blood. Somebody had grabbed a scarf and wrapped it round the wound and I kept it pressed tight ’til the ambulance came and I went off to St George’s Hospital. They were on emergency standby at the A and E department because the message they’d got was that a policeman was coming in with a knife in his neck.

The duty doctor, a somewhat hard-faced lady, took a look and said, ‘Oh, you’ll live, don’t panic. Just a few stitches.’ I was mightily relieved to hear that. The knife, which had a 6in double-edged blade, had fortunately hit me a glancing blow under my chin, ripping open a 2in gash. It could so easily have been another story. It gave me a severe bit of grief for several weeks and my face came up black and blue and the scar, on the underside of my left jaw, will be with me for life, a salutary reminder that you never know what’s round the next corner or behind the next door.

The knifeman was charged with causing me grievous bodily harm with intent and sentenced to five years in jail. Ironically, the two other members of the heroin gang were acquitted at their trial of conspiracy to supply drugs. If my bloke had kept his cool and not gone for me like a madman, he’d probably have got off the drug-dealing as well. Tough, ain’t it?

I got my first taste of learning to expect the unexpected on my very first job with the Central Drugs Squad undercover division. And what a baptism of fire it turned out to be.

It was 1985 and I had arrived at Scotland Yard bright-eyed and bushy tailed, the new kid on the block anxious to do well. I knew I had a vast amount to learn about the workings of Scotland Yard. It was all very well being a detective at a local police station, but now this was premier league. I was confronted by things I never even imagined the police did, let alone knew how they did them. It was a vast new arena to enter.

The job carried a lot of kudos; I was a young man who had made it to a Scotland Yard squad at a relatively early age, 24, and I couldn’t wait for the action. It came after just three days.

‘Right,’ said the DI, ‘there’s an undercover job going down in Regent’s Park this afternoon and you are on it.’

I sure was. I was briefed as to what the job was all about – so and so from the unit had infiltrated this massive drug network operating in central London and the gangsters were going to supply the officers with three or four kilos of heroin in the car park of Regent’s Park zoo and when the gear arrived we would all leap out and arrest the villains. I thought, Fuck me, this is real cops and robbers. There was a suspicion, said the boss, that some or all of the gang might have firearms, so caution at all times. There were going to be armed officers dotted about in
various disguises, from road sweepers to porters and although I was firearms trained, I wouldn’t be carrying a weapon myself. It was the policy for an officer to go out unarmed on his first ever job for the squad.

It was a biggish team going out on the operation and the plan was for most of them to be hidden away in a big bus, ostensibly an executive-style tourist coach visiting the zoo with a party of day-trippers. It had smoked glass windows for extra cover. We would all be lying hidden on the floor or upstairs out of sight of the gangsters or anybody else curious about our activities.

Fuck me, I thought as we waited expectantly for the action to start, this is a rush. This was my initiation into the world of undercover operations. Pure excitement.

I was crouching in the bus with the other officers, and I’d got my radio tuned into the events, listening to the commentary second by second, minute by minute, to what the baddies were doing, what the police were doing. We seemed to have the situation buttoned up tight. Then, all of a sudden, the shit hit the fucking fan.

‘A
TTACK
… A
TTACK
… A
TTACK
.’

Events had suddenly gone haywire. The bad guys had decided that they were going to rob the undercover police, thinking they were a team of second division crooks, and blag the £70,000 that was supposed to be used to buy the drugs. What had prompted them to change tactics I don’t know, but I did discover that suspicions had crept in during a previous meeting between the two sides when the villains had asked an undercover woman detective to
take her bra off as they checked her out for hidden devices like a mini tape recorder or transmitter, and she had refused. Her modesty had decreed that she stayed fully clothed. I think the gang probably went away from that meeting thinking, Well, she won’t get her tits out, that’s a bit iffy, a bit prudish for a drug-dealer looking at a £70,000 trade. They probably thought they’d be an easy touch and decided to roll them instead.

The gang approached the undercover police team, two men and the woman, sitting in their car at the appointed meeting place in Regent’s Park. Suddenly one of them produced a plastic squeezy bottle and sprayed ammonia directly in the face of the driver through the window. They opened the boot, grabbed the £70,000 and legged it. This hadn’t been anticipated at all, a huge chunk of the Commissioner’s cash being robbed from his own police officers.

We all poured out of the bus and various other strategic hiding places and stormed into action. There was absolute fucking bedlam. The injured driver was lying on the ground clutching his face and screaming in agony thinking he’d been blinded; the four villains had all scarpered in different directions; the police were panicking because the bag with £70,000 in it had vanished; and people were legging it all over the show in complete chaos. I was in the thick of it, just loving it. This was what I’d joined the cops for. I was young, fit and mega keen and I soon caught up with one of the villains bolting away from the car park, past the zoo visitors, mums, dads, kids and tourists. I got to within a few feet of him as he headed for some trees and bushes, low-level cover for
him, where he probably hoped to hide. I was gaining on him stride by stride. Then he turned and levelled a gun at me. He hissed, ‘Fuck off, you bastard,’ and I thought, Shit, he’s going to shoot me. But I’d got up such a head of steam and was travelling like an Olympic fucking sprinter so there was no way I could stop. I ducked to one side and just carried right on straight at him. He could see I wasn’t going to stop and started running again, and then – crunch – I hit him with an almighty fucking bang and sent him crashing to the deck. He slammed down like a sack of King Edwards. That was it, he was nicked.

Firearms officers examined the gun and it turned out to be a loaded .22 pistol, a lower-calibre gun but quite deadly enough to have killed me from that range. That was my first day in action with the undercover unit.

I learned a lot in a very short space of time. It was a wonderful education for me in my chosen career, but sadly it involved another officer receiving serious injuries to his eyes. It was painful but there was no lasting damage done. He received treatment at Moorfields Eye Hospital but was later able to resume his police duties after a period of sick leave.

The police squad were also fortuitous in not having to suffer the massive embarrassment of having to admit to losing the £70,000. The tabloids would have loved that. The cash was recovered from under a tarpaulin inside the zoo where one of the villains had slung the bag as he legged it. He’d seen the opportunity to dump it as he fled and obviously hoped to return later in the dead of night to retrieve it. But there was bedlam for a while. Once the crooks had been handcuffed and bundled off to be charged,
there was a collossal fucking panic to find the missing seventy grand. People were looking everywhere. Blokes were running round for about 20 minutes shouting, ‘Find the money, find that fucking money.’ After it had been found and some sort of normality had returned, I remember the DI who ran the job, Mark Leyton, saying at the debriefing, ‘Gentlemen, today is the day that I discovered adrenalin runs down your leg.’ That did sum it up for all of us. And Mark Leyton, of course, had been looking at the prospect of his entire career ending in humiliation if the £70,000 had not been recovered.

The whole incident taught me that things are never black and white and if Sod’s Law can strike when you least expect it, then it will.

I sat drinking a few pints with a pal later that night and I said, ‘I can do this undercover stuff, and no fucker is ever going to rob me.’ I just couldn’t wait to go undercover myself. It wasn’t very long coming, just a matter of days. They wanted someone to volunteer for a drug infiltration and my hand shot up like an Exocet missile.

In the years that followed, I worked all over the UK and abroad, often with female police officers in undercover roles, and I can’t praise them enough for their skill and courage. It could be an arduous enough job for experienced male officers; for some of the female officers, it could sometimes be nightmarish. I wasn’t surprised, for instance, to hear that the girl who went undercover in the Rachel Nickell murder investigation in Wimbledon was forced to retire because of stress. I knew Lizzie James, although that wasn’t her real name, and had every admiration for her abilities. To ask her to go undercover and
befriend the man suspected of the murder, Colin Stagg, must have tested her emotional capabilities to the limit. I know she was deeply upset when the case was thrown out at the Old Bailey and the undercover ‘honey trap’ was branded reprehensible by the judge. I’m glad she’s now got a decent damages pay-off from Scotland Yard.

Another female detective I worked with – we’ll call her Diane because that was the undercover name she normally used – travelled with me to Darlington in Durham on a drugs job, pretending to be my courier, taking the money up north and bringing the heroin back down south to London. It was a job we’d been asked to do by the local police who’d been tipped off about an Asian gang dealing smack in a big way – or big, at least, by their standards – and wanted an experienced undercover unit to go in and do a buy of half a kilo of heroin. In London, we probably wouldn’t have rated half a kilo a major job. To a provincial force it was a serious and worrying element in an upsurge of drug-related crime. So it was ‘call in the Yard’ and Diane and I headed north by train.