Gangbuster (17 page)

Although I met loads of West Indians involved in drug trafficking and in firearms, no one ever said they were a Yardie. Nobody uttered the word. But their actions spoke louder than words. There were unexplained revenge shootings, often in front of other people, a sort of power thing, challenging anyone to grass them up. The word ‘respect’ echoed round the West Indian communities. Fear was close behind. There were arson attacks, and all sorts of vicious crimes linked to suspected Yardies. I suppose it was this sort of sinister unknown that made them so dreaded.

One tasty Yardie type who operated around the Lambeth council estates was with me in a car about to do a cocaine deal. There were squats, drug dens, spotters looking out for anyone suspicious, a typical run-down South London estate and I felt the spotlight was on me. But I had got to keep my cool, ignore what was going on around me, get on with the deal and get out.

We were in his car, driving to where the exchange was going to take place and the small talk turned to our mutual hatred of the police. I had to go along with it, of course.

‘I can’t stand the bastards,’ he said with venom, ‘they’ve even put undercover Old Bill onto me twice. But I’ve sussed them out both times. You can smell ’em, can’t you?’

‘Oh yeah, fucking right you can,’ I said.

Five minutes later, he was standing there with handcuffs on and three fucking great coppers dragging him off to a police car.

You didn’t smell this one, matey, I thought. Even though he was nicked fair and square with two other dealers, he was acquitted at Inner London Crown Court, so for legal reasons we can’t use his name. I was actually called on to give evidence in the case and was the first police witness. I stood in the witness box with the jury slap bang in front of me and, like you do after taking the oath, you start scanning along both rows. I mean, you need to look them in the face; it’s them you are trying to convince, they are going to make the guilty or not guilty decision. It was a Monday morning and, as I was looking along the jurors, there was my mate’s girlfriend in the back row with whom, less than 36 hours earlier, I’d been doing the boogaloo at a wedding reception. Her face was a picture. She didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to do. Do I declare it or do I stay
stumm
?
I had to make a split-second decision. I turned round to the judge, who was pissed off enough already because it was an undercover job and he didn’t like undercover policing, and said, ‘Excuse me, Your Honour, before I start my evidence I need to say something in the absence of the jury.’

His look was priceless –
who is this jumped-up fucking nobody? Anyway, when he’d ushered them out and I explained the situation. He dismissed the
whole jury and started again with a fresh one. The second jury was subsequently nobbled and all three defendants got off. I saw my mate’s girlfriend a few days later and she said, ‘It’s a shame you said anything. Once we had heard the opening speeches and knew what the case was about we said, “Well, the old Bill wouldn’t go to all that trouble if they were innocent,”’ so they had all started the trial with a guilty mindset and we could have had three more bad bastards behind bars if I’d kept my mouth shut. But losing one here and there, even through jury nobbling, is something you have to take in your stride. You risk life and limb to get them nicked and the heavies go in to the juries with threats or bribes and they all walk out scot-free.

We know for certain the second jury was got at because one of the women on it subsequently broke down and confessed. She was sobbing uncontrollably after the acquittal and asked to see the officer in the case. She said that on the second day of the trial, she had been followed from court and threatened that if she didn’t acquit them, her kids and other members of her family would be hurt. Other jurors got the same treatment and at the end of the day were too scared to convict any of the accused. This gang were horrors. I really wanted to see them convicted, after all I’d bought the drugs off them so I knew they were at it. But you must never take it personally. We’ll always be back. It’s war out there on the streets and the police will use whatever methods they can to nick the bad guys, so we can’t be surprised if the villains use everything they’ve got, including jury nobbling, to try to stay ahead of the game.

The technology in use by the police, both in undercover operations and more conventional investigations, gets more sophisticated year by year. Call it Big Brother if you like, but it gets results. I’ve been involved in several cases where micro-sized video cameras have been hidden in suspects’ premises and monitored for hours, days or weeks in an attempt to obtain incriminating evidence. It’s the most gutty job sitting and watching a video screen hour after hour but it can be great fun because you truly see people as they are, picking their noses, scratching their arses, taking drugs, whatever; it can be really quite entertaining. Coupled with that, an audio-visual insert can be used to great effect, picking off villains one by one without them having a clue where the information is coming from. ‘Disruptive policing’ they call it. You target people on the periphery of a criminal organisation and take them out one by one, thus disrupting the gang and throwing in a nice bucketful of confusion for them to stew in. You’d see them come in the next morning looking worried.

‘Did you hear Freddie and Billy got nicked last night?’

‘Yeah, but how the fuck did the Old Bill know? Everything was kosher, we knew everyone on the job was OK, yet suddenly Old Bill pops up in the middle of it.’ They just couldn’t figure out how the blokes were getting caught. We used this successfully time and time again, usually at business premises rather than at private flats or houses.

Bugging a business premises required the authority of an ACPO-ranked officer – above a
superintendent – or a Deputy Assistant Commissioner. Each force throughout Britain has one senior officer set aside to make the decisions and he’s kept busy.

Before planting a camera or listening device, you always had to recce the premises to see where the best location was. That could be very exciting. You always did it between 2.00am and 4.00am because that’s when people are at their deepest sleep. You go in kitted out like the Cadbury’s Milk Tray man in dark clothes and balaclava hat, you’re briefed at 1.00am then you’re cutting through fences and creeping under them, tying them up for your escape route, and you’re negotiating quarries, woods or 6ft walls. Criminals put a lot of thought into these premises and they don’t make infiltration easy. You take out the experts in locks and alarms to help you get in undetected. It’s very James Bond. Then once you’re in, you carefully insert your bug or miniature video camera where it’s least likely to be detected but most likely to yield the sort of information you need. You could put them in the roof, the floor, the walls, anywhere the technical experts felt they could get the best response but leave no trace behind. The technical bods would always want you to do your recce first, then they’d pitch in and insert the equipment accordingly and get out fast.

It was terrific once they were up and running because the villains often hadn’t got a flying fuck’s idea of where the leaks were coming from. They’d think they’d got a grass on the firm, they’d start going down blind alleys to see who it was, and it was very frustrating for them but very entertaining to watch.

Nicking villains was not the only way you could
disrupt a criminal organisation. You could make them skint by taking out people on the periphery with whatever commodity they were dealing in – drugs, whatever – so it wasn’t getting to the main players and they were not getting any money in to continue operations. You could see them losing tens of thousands of pounds, making them do more and more risky things, so that finally you can orchestrate them into a position where you can nab them absolutely red-handed, patience rewarded. Villains of long standing found themselves forced into doing things they normally wouldn’t dream of because all their troops or parcels were being taken out, or their money was being lost. You could cause massive disruption to their lives and they just didn’t know why or who was behind their demise.

Sometimes, it was considered prudent just to leave them be once they were on the ropes, feed off them via the bugs and see where they were going next, and maybe come back later and have another go at them. If you’d got their every move covered, you’d taken out their infrastructure, had all their money, made their lives an absolute misery, you might just as well leave them to sweat.

A mains-powered bug properly hidden can keep supplying you with all the inside gen for months. Obviously, you don’t watch or listen day after day, but it’s nice to be able to go back whenever you want to check up on progress, see if they’ve got any new scams on the go.

One very satisfying job I was on involved the bugging of a warehouse in St Albans after a tip off that very large quantities of smuggled cannabis were being distributed from there. We put in audio-visual
equipment, sat back and waited.

Huge quantities of dope were coming into the UK in plastic-lined metal containers. It was a great operation because you’d see the shipment arrive at the warehouse, ready for dealers to pick up, and you could see the gang dancing about singing, ‘We’re in the money, we’re in the money.’

We were sitting watching them on the monitor and we were saying, ‘Uh oh, are you boys in for a real shock!’

Then the various dealers arrived to collect their parcels, drive off a couple of miles down the road, we’d scoop them up and repeat it over and over. We got a lot of dealers from that, as well as the importers, so it was a very satisfying operation.

I remember another observation on a couple of likely lads who were real ‘cor blimey’ villains out of the East End. They had us in hysterics and even though their empire was slowly crumbling around their ears, they never lost their sense of humour. They turned up at their bugged offices one morning and one bloke turned to the other and said, ‘You won’t fucking believe what happened yesterday afternoon when I got home. My Rotweiler had dug a fucking hole under the neighbours’ fence and got into their garden. He’s back in mine when I get home and he’s only got the next door’s pet rabbit, tossing it around and playing with it. I belted the dog, got hold of the rabbit and it was stone fucking dead. It was covered in mud and shit and what have you. I knew it belonged to the little girl next door, so I panicked, shoved it in the washing machine on a short cycle, filled in the hole my dog had made and levelled it all out so nothing showed. Then I’ve bunked over the
fence before the neigbours got back and laid the rabbit in its hutch, all clean and fluffy. I’ve washed me hands and waited. I’m having a cup of tea when I hear this God almighty scream from next door. I thought the woman was upset because she’d found the rabbit dead. So I run out to try and console her. I ask her what’s wrong and she says, “It’s the rabbit, it’s the rabbit. It’s dead in the hutch!” I said, “Oh, sorry to hear that, but calm down, it’s not that bad.” She says, “No, no, you don’t understand. We buried it three days ago.”’

We were rolling about when we heard the story, a real gem. Another incident that gave us a chuckle was when we fitted a tracking device to a villain’s car because we needed to monitor his movements between the West End and Heathrow Airport. He sussed it out very quickly and sent it back to New Scotland Yard, all neatly packaged up, with a note saying, ‘I believe this is yours. Thanks for the loan.’

The police now have an armoury of hi-tech gadgets that would rival M’s store room in the Bond films and secret bugging operations have risen to almost 2,500 a year involving offices, homes, hotels and vehicles. The combination of trained police and skilled technicians makes a big dent in criminal activities and is growing more important all the time in the battle against the villains. They use technology, too, so we’ve got to keep ahead of the game. Until encrypted radio frequences came in recently, the crooks all tuned in to police frequencies to hear what was going on, and whether they’d been sussed on a job. On a number of undercovers, I worked with blokes who habitually had an ear tuned to Scotland Yard frequencies to see what was happening on the
police airwaves.

All this technology made a lot of villains paranoid about their phones being tapped. I knew one bloke who adapted a shoe box, put a nine-volt battery in it, taped it all up to look like a proper bit of electrical kit, added a red light indicator, and a couple of crocodile clips, and he would go round to villains’ houses and for £500 he would check their phones for bugs. He’d unscrew the bottom of their phone, attach the crocodile clips and up would come the red light, because it was the only light that ever came on, which indicated that your phone
was
being bugged. It was a brilliant scam because he could never say no in case they were and, of course, the villains were pleased as punch and recommended him to all their mates to test their phones at £500 a throw. We certainly didn’t want to do anything about it. It was costing the villains £500 a time, so we left him to it.

I
knew this would be a tasty sort of job, in every sense of the word, the second I arrived at the restaurant. The glowering Nigerian doorman, standing casually on the basement steps, was packing a shooter. A 9mm pistol in a shoulder holster, unmistakable to the experienced eye of a Scotland Yard-trained marksman like myself. He wasn’t making a lot of effort to conceal the tell-tale bulge either, and he looked mean enough to use it.

What had started out as a routine undercover operation to nail another cocaine ring – this time involving South Americans and Nigerians – had taken an unexpected twist that put me and my back-up team in immediate peril. Up to this point, there had been no hint of guns, or weapons of any kind. Now I was looking at a bloke a few feet away, armed and dangerous, as I strolled in to do a drugs deal under
my regular guise of hard-nosed London trafficker with money to burn and drugs to buy.

An informant had put me in touch with the middle man in the deal and we had set off by taxi to this restaurant in Bayswater, West London, to discuss business and meet the man controlling the gear.

Well, what a sumptuous place it was. I clocked the tooled-up bouncer within seconds and thought, Fuck me, that’s not in the script. But my game was all about thinking on your feet and staying cool. I showed no surprise that the bad guys would ever pick up on.

We walked down into the plush 40-seater restaurant with me trying to work out how I could get a message to my back-up team, hidden close by, to warn them that this might be a little trickier than we’d thought. I deliberately chose a table near the door and sat in a position where I could see the bouncer. I was trying to manipulate things without arousing suspicion. A million things were whizzing round my head – an armed bouncer … I’m on enemy premises … the threat of kidnap … a possible shoot-out as the other cops came in; the permutations were endless. So I managed to sit with him in my sight pretty much all the time and drinks were ordered all round. I think I asked for a vodka and tonic.

I thought things couldn’t get much worse. I needed to stay cool. Then I sneaked a look towards the bar and the waitress heading our way with our drinks and to my horror I realised it was a Nigerian girl I had nicked a few years earlier for kiting – cheque card fraud – when I was attached to Kensington CID. I’m dreadful with names but I never forget a face. And that face was coming straight
towards our table. I sort of slouched into my right shoulder and propped the other one up to try to hide part of my face, then pretended to scratch my face, then rubbed my eye in the hope that it wouldn’t click with her where she’d seen me before. Then the drinks were on the table and she was moving away. I breathed a sigh of relief inwardly. It was the one and only time I came close to being compromised on an undercover job by someone I’d investigated before. And what a time to be sussed out with a tame bouncer kitted out with a 9mm lurking just a few feet away.

So now in my game plan I’ve got the gunman, a one-kilo cocaine deal is about to go down in this den of iniquity and then a waitress who knows I’m really a copper has popped up out of nowhere. The bloke is sitting there opposite me insisting and insisting that I bring the money into the restaurant to get the deal sewn up so we can all get on our way. I knew I couldn’t do this. My bosses wouldn’t let me do this. I’d got the
£
25,000 in the boot of the money car parked up the road with my colleague guarding it and that’s where the deal had to go down. The car was staked out on all sides by back-up teams. We stayed chatting away in the restaurant and the bad guy was saying, ‘You must bring the money here then we give you the drugs.’ There was just no way I was going to take him the cash and walk out with the parcel and tell the boys, ‘Look, I’ve bought it, didn’t I do well.’ No, this one had to go to plan. We wanted bodies in handcuffs. We then entered a period of fierce negotiations into what was going to happen, about why I was refusing to bring the money inside. I turned the geezer with the gun to my advantage. I said I was very much thinking of walking away from
the trade because I’d seen that the bouncer had got a shooter on him and I was concerned about what might happen. ‘Where did we ever say there were going to be shooters on the plot?’ I said. The negotiations got even more heated. And for once in my life I refused a second drink, for the simple reason that I didn’t want the waitress coming over and complicating the matter even further. Normally it’s nice to have a drink at the height of negotiations to keep your whistle wet, but not that day. Waitress service was off the menu. I enjoy a good drink but I try never to get pissed when I’m working. I always let my company order their drinks first on whatever job I was doing, then I’d normally have what they were drinking. If they had soft drinks I would do the same. But if they were having a proper drink it would have displayed a lack of professionalism not to have joined them.

Anyway it took all my powers of persuasion to work out a solution with the supplier. We decided the go-between on the deal, who was with me, a crook not an informant, being my buddy, was going to earn his money on the deal and take hold of the parcel. He was now middling it where originally he had just intended to do the introductions and get out of it. We were having to think on the hoof again and he seemed the best bet to break the deadlock. He was getting paid handsomely for the introducer’s fee so we all agreed he should earn his corn. He agreed because he could see his fee going out of the window if we reached a stalemate and neither side would budge. Up till now he’d taken a backseat role; now he could see his services were needed. Both sides were at a point where we were getting exasperated and ready to walk
away from it. He could see the deal falling apart before his eyes so rather than lose out he said, ‘OK, I take the drugs to the car for you. We must not waste any more time here.’ That suited the guy supplying the drugs and that suited me because I could now orchestrate the arrest outside the premises away from the bouncer with the gun. At least that would prevent any of my police colleagues getting shot. I thought, ‘Yeah, we can pull this off,’ and in a split second it was all go. The middleman, one Hamid Moore, didn’t know, of course, that by volunteering to be the courier on that short but crucial journey he was volunteering himself for six or eight years in prison.

I was moved to the front of the premises by the villains. The others went to the back somewhere to get the gear. There was a lot of mumbled talk in a foreign language. They made sure I didn’t see where it was stashed or how much they’d got. I understood that but I knew we’d find it soon anyway. Hamid stuck the parcel under his coat and said, ‘Come on, we’re ready,’ and off we went. We walked up the road towards the money car and, as soon as I knew we were in sight of the surveillance people, I gave the signal and waited until I saw the troops steaming in and had it off on my dancers. I jumped into the car as the police grabbed Hamid and the other geezer and screamed off at a rate of knots.

We got to the first set of traffic lights and found ourselves in a fucking traffic jam. Everything was stuck, we couldn’t escape, couldn’t go anywhere. We were sitting there embarrassingly jammed up and trying to look innocent as half-a-dozen burly Old Bill jumped on Hamid, pushed him to the ground and
handcuffed him. He started kicking up like a loony, ranting and raging and there was soon a huge commotion going on. He was really putting up a fight, lashing out at the cops and trying to get away.

Whether it was a coincidence or not, a large Nigerian lady appeared at a second-floor window of a block of flats above the commotion. She started screaming and shouting at the Old Bill and then grabbed a bowl of something and launched it out of the window over the coppers below. Most of them thought it was urine judging by the smell of it. It might have been washing-up water but there were a lot of blokes brushing themselves down shouting, ‘She’s thrown piss over me.’ I don’t think she had any connection with the Nigerians involved, or with Hamid, it had probably just been coincidence that she looked out and saw a black guy in trouble and thought she would put in her penny worth of piss.

In the middle of all this, I had to nip round the back of the premises and make contact with the arrest and search squads to warn them that when they hit the restaurant premises, they had to be careful because the doorman was armed with a shooter. I was conscious all the time that they would have seen us come out of the restaurant and, once they had floored Hamid, would say, ‘That’s where he came from, the deal must have happened there,’ and hit the premises running. I had to tell them to watch out. The bouncer might mistake them for robbers and start giving them some.

I managed to get a word of warning to them in time and they stormed the premises without incident. They didn’t find any more drugs down there, which was a disappointment, because we had thought our
kilo parcel was one of many that had come out of a store and that was possibly the premises for keeping a great deal more gear. But it wasn’t; they just used it for individual transactions and a place for doing the negotiations. The doorman was nicked for illegal possession of a firearm and sent to prison. The drug-dealers also ended up inside. A good result that could so easily have turned very nasty.

Shooters were always a part of my life undercover, for good and for bad. Good when they were looking after my interests, bad when they were in the hands of dangerous villains. So when we had an informant go to the police at one North London nick with a tip about a geezer claiming to be part of a firm of gangland armourers, we were doubly interested and yours truly landed the job.

The informant said these hoodlums had access to unlimited weapons and could supply anything you wanted. So I got briefed up for a big, big weapons job with loads of armed cops on stand-by as back-up. So I went in as a dodgy arms buyer and met them to see what was on offer, thinking in my mind of Uzi machine pistols, AK47s, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, it quickly transpired that our informant had been more than a little imaginative in his description. Far from being international arms dealers to the underworld, they were a team of two-bit burglars who’d done a job and picked up a pump-action shotgun. Just the one gun.

I had to start thinking about what to do now about this big undercover operation that had been started
in anticipation of a big result and was now tin pot. What should I do about this one and only gun on their ‘for sale’ list? I decided the best thing to do was to buy the poxy thing for £500 and get it off the streets. It was an on-the-spot decision and seemed the best solution all round. We probably wouldn’t even prosecute them for it to preserve the undercover involvement and the informant, but the gun had to be binned.

First, I had to go through the whole rigmarole of testing it, chatting to the villains just to make sure there weren’t any other shooters about, that sort of thing. As a registered shot I knew pistols but I wasn’t all that familiar with sawn-off, pump-action shotguns. I needed to look proficient to kid even this ragged mob that I was a genuine gun expert. I knew you could blow your fingers off if you weren’t really careful.

So I went to the police firearms unit and told them I was doing this undercover job and could they teach me how to load and unload a pump-action and how many types were there and what was the best way to use them. I needed to be seen to be proficient with them in front of villains. They were happy to help, so I went along to the armoury and they showed me how to load and unload, load and unload over and over until I was doing it like it was second nature. Then I let a few off to see what it was like, blasting shit out of some targets.

My next step was to go out with one of the burglars to the wilds of Hertfordshire to test the gun for real. He was only a kid, in his twenties, I suppose, and then we met up with one of his mates and went to this field which was littered with half-a-dozen
derelict motors. Of course, I needed to know if the gun worked. He said indignantly, ‘I’ll show you if it fucking works.’ He loaded it up and started pumping rounds into the cars. Doors were having fucking great holes blown in them, every window that was left, BANG, we’d have a pop at that. We’d been in the pub all afternoon and we were all a bit pissed.

‘Do you want a go?’

‘Bloody right.’

And there I was blowing holes in these fucking motors. Flying glass everywhere, Ford Escort shrapnel in the air. What was I going to do, say ‘No’?

There were a few people I wouldn’t have minded having a shot at! It was what the geezers would have expected me to do. And it was bloody good fun.

So I bought the gun, slung it in the back of my car, returned to base and said, ‘Look, these are not really great armourers, they haven’t got access to zillions of firearms, your informant has been prone to a bit of exaggeration, I’m afraid. I’ve bought the only one they’d got on offer and there’s a £500 hole in the expenses.’ I didn’t mention the holes I’d made in the motors in the course of my enquiries. The gun was forensically tested to see if it could be linked with any unsolved crimes, but it was clean. Then it was destroyed. Off the streets for good.

If variety is the spice of life, then variety certainly spiced up my career as an undercover cop. You never knew what was coming up next. Although I became an acknowledged expert in drugs, I was happy to tackle any operation of any nature to the best of my
ability. One of the longest I did involved me posing as the manager of a transport company warehouse in Thurrock, Essex, to nail a gang of cannabis smugglers. It was the nearest thing to a nine-to-five job I’d had. I’d drive there every day through the Dartford Tunnel and clock on like the rest of the staff. I was full-time undercover, lunch breaks and all. I had a sort of managerial post, in the office, but, of course, I had to muck in and help when necessary to keep my cover. We had all the props in there – trucks, forklifts, all that kind of stuff – it looked like a proper
bona
fide
company. We were looking to arrest members of a cannabis ring bringing the gear into Britain in furniture lorries through the docks at Dover, so we needed someone to be at the warehouse full-time so they got to know the face. You never knew when members of the gang might pop in to suss things out. They wanted to use it as a transit station between imports of hash and a distribution network in this country. So it was important we had continuity at the premises, and that they’d see a face they could trust. The firm were bringing in large quantities of puff hidden in furniture and household goods so cleverly they were beating the Customs blokes at Dover on every run.