Gangbuster (20 page)

She wrote to Richard in prison and told him she was expecting and, what was more, that I was the father. So now the man who hated my guts with a vengeance was about to become uncle to my baby. I could see more flak on the horizon.

Sure enough, Richard went ballistic. He hatched an escape plot from the Isle of Sheppey Prison where he had just been downgraded to a Category C inmate and was only a few steps from freedom. He intended to head on home to London to sort things out. He told the family, ‘I can’t believe this bastard Bleksley is back in my life and about to father my nephew.’

Fortunately, he only made it to the local railway station before he was apprehended. He lost remission and privileges, but none of his simmering hatred of me.

Bradley was born in January 1988 three weeks prematurely weighing 5lb 13oz. And the first thing I said was that there was no way in the world that he was ever going to become a policeman if I had any say in the matter. He’s a keen cricketer, footballer and rugby
player, and he’s a good pal to his dad. We see each other every other weekend and we holiday together. A great kid.

But for Richard, the hatred went on. I’d had Brad staying overnight when Wendy came to pick him up. I made her a cup of tea and put it down. Brad, who was just a toddler then, picked up the cup thinking it was a drink for him and spilt scalding tea all down his chin and his chest. I heard the most almighty scream and went rushing in. I rushed him to the cold shower hose and held him there for ages and ages ’til the pain eased. Then we rushed him up to the hospital for sedation and treatment and fortunately the cold water had prevented any scarring. As we were driving home a couple of hours later with Brad safely curled up in my arms, I asked Wendy, ‘Where do you want to go?’ She said, ‘Let’s go to my mum’s.’ As we were pulling up outside she said, ‘There’s something I ought to tell you. Richard’s coming out today and he’s coming here.’ I thought, How bad is this day going to get? We walked into her mum’s house and Richard was already there. It was the first time I’d seen him since the Inner London Crown Court and been subjected to his tirade of abuse. Well, the atmosphere was unbelievable. I put Brad down and we exchanged small talk for a minute or two. Then Richard said, ‘I think we’d better have a chat, don’t you?’ We walked out into the back garden. He was lean and fit. He’d done a lot of weights inside. You couldn’t have fried an egg on him. I thought it was all going to kick off. Then he turned round and said, ‘Tell me, just tell me honestly, did you go out with Wendy to get at me?’

I said, ‘Richard, you heard what I said in court, that was the truth. The answer is no. I’ll tell you again now,
it was just a dreadful coincidence. That is the top and bottom of it.’

Very magnanimously, and it can’t have been easy for him, he shook my hand. The feuding was done. And although I rarely see him, he is still my son’s uncle, and when we meet we are always civilised. Long may that remain so for all the family.

Now, there’s action with intent, in the line of duty. And then there’s action you don’t really expect or understand. Especially in sleepy Shrewsbury in Shropshire. I’d gone there with close friends who had returned from living on the West Coast of America. We’d enjoyed the heady days of California’s Venice Beach together in the seventies when I stayed for extended holidays with them. We did the surfing, the smoking, the odd line of coke. It was an amazing insight into how the drug culture was sweeping through middle America. And as time went by, an invaluable grounding for my career in the world of drugs investigations. But that was all behind them now and they were back in the UK looking to set up the archetypal small country hotel and bar in Shrewsbury. I’d spent a backbreaking day helping them move in one Sunday in January 1990. Come closing time we all sat down for a well-earned drink. We toasted their new life and wished them well. Then there was a load of noise outside, like the local yobbos on a night out. It passed. Then a guy came knocking on the door and asked ‘Is that your car out there?’

The VW Jetta belonged to one of my friends. ‘Yes, it’s mine,’ he said.

‘Well,’ said the caller, ‘a gang of local hooligans have just smashed it up.’ We looked outside and there was glass everywhere.

I was off duty, I was shagged out and I should have just dialled 999. But no. I went legging it up the road after the yobbos. I caught up with them, right lairy bastards, and said to one of them, ‘Hey, I want a word with you’.

He sneered, ‘Fuck off.’

Charmed I’m sure. So I walked right up to him and said, ‘Did you just smash up my friend’s car?’ With that he threw a punch at me. I ducked. I thought, Right, I’ll have you for that. A full-scale punch-up started outside a church, spilled over into the graveyard and I was trading punches with all three of the yobs, a real bunch of scrotes. I was boxing at light heavyweight for the Met Police at the time so I treated it as a nice bit of practice. Wham, bam, it was fists everywhere. At one point I hit the lippy ringleader a stonking belt in the mouth and he went down on the deck with me after him. I told him I was a copper and was arresting him for assault and criminal damage. One of the others was yelling at me, ‘Let him go, let him go.’

I said, ‘No way.’

He stuck his hand in his pocket and repeated, ‘Let him go. If you don’t, I’ll cut you.’ With that he pulled out a knife. ‘I’ll fucking cut ya,’ he said again. Then I saw my girlfriend and my friends from the hotel coming towards us.

‘He’s got a knife, get out of the way,’ I shouted. I didn’t want them involved with this bunch of shits. The guy with the knife decided not to stab me. Instead he ran at me and booted me right in the head. Then the others joined in a general kicking. I was stunned for a few seconds and the bloke on the ground got up and started to run off. With that the local police arrived in force and started to scoop up everybody they could lay
their hands on. I staggered to my feet and I saw the fucker I’d had on the ground running off along the road. I was after him like a long dog and had my hands on him again after a chase. There wasn’t so much resistance second time around and he was bundled off to the nick.

We all went back to the hotel with some of the local police to make our statements and what have you. Then the uniformed duty inspector strode in and said, ‘Where’s the man who took on the EBF?’

I thought, EBF
—
who the hell are they?

The EBF, he informed us, were the English Border Front, a gang of local toe-rags who had wreaked havoc in the town for years. ‘If you knew how much trouble and disruption they caused in this town. This is a major success in our battle against the EBF.’ He said the gang regularly went on raiding parties over the Welsh border and picked scraps with Welsh lads. In turn, the Welsh would retaliate with raids into Shrewsbury. On their home patch, the EBF had been responsible for thousands of pounds’ worth of damage to cars and windows. My fleeting visit to Shrewsbury, said the local inspector, had cleared up the biggest gang of troublemakers they’d ever known. Not exactly big time on a global scale, but if the people of Shrewsbury can sleep easier, well worth the kicking.

I
knew I’d become dangerously out of control the day I nearly killed a close pal with a bar stool. Ten years of undercover work among the scum of the earth had finally taken its toll. I’d flipped, lost it big time. I knew it and needed urgent help. But I was to wonder long and hard afterwards why nobody else had seen the warning signs and taken pre-emptive action.

My tangled home life coupled with the endless pressures of undercover work and the Zulu Cricket death threat from the Mafia had set me on the slippery slope that was to end the career I loved.

The crunch came one day in 1995 after I’d driven from Scotland Yard and headed south over the Thames towards Epsom in Surrey to be briefed on a new assignment, calling at the National Crime Squad headquarters in Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, to pick up
my evidence book and one or two other bits and pieces. I needed petrol and pulled into the garage opposite Tintagel House, another Scotland Yard admin block, on the Embankment South Side, to top up. Out of nowhere, a youngish bloke suddenly came up to me on the forecourt and in a broad American accent said to me, ‘Do you want to buy some speakers?’

I’ve been offered moody
schmutter
in the job and out but never by an American on a garage forecourt in South London.

‘Er, no thanks, mate, I’ve just got a new music centre,’ I said.

‘It’s the deal of a lifetime,’ he replied.

‘Well, thanks, pal, but I don’t want to know.’

I walked into the petrol station to pay my bill when this voice boomed out right over my shoulder, ‘Well, not in this lifetime then, eh?’

It was him again. All I could think to say was, ‘Yeah, righto.’

Now it was becoming a bit unnerving. Was this just a quirky coincidence or was this the Mafia’s threat to have me killed over the Zulu Cricket heroin bust at Gatwick Airport about to become reality? The bloke I’d had nicked, Alan Johnston, was safely away doing 15 years but he had plenty of pals out there. My mind was working overtime. If the intention had been to unsettle me it was working. I thought, Fuck this, and straight away threw all my anti-surveillance tricks into losing the bastard. I knew how to make him — or them — show out if they were really on my tail. I drove from Vauxhall to Epsom utilising every scrap of anti-surveillance knowledge at my disposal. On Clapham Common there is a big sweeping right
turn going towards Tooting. I knew it well because I had lived in Clapham for a couple of years. I got there and I was not happy. I’d still got this distinct feeling I was being tailed. I did various back-doubles through Clapham and I was picking up motors behind me. I thought someone was definitely on me. There was a sure way to find out. I went up to the junction and did the most outrageous red-light jump you have ever seen. A real wrong ’un which only someone trying to commit suicide would follow me on. I wasn’t doing it to jeopardise other road-users, but I was trained and I had the experience and knew what risks I could take. I pushed it right to the limit, screaming across the front of cars heading straight at me.

I saw someone had come with me, a little Ford Fiesta with two geezers in it. I made it by the skin of my teeth, and they had a real job avoiding a crash. They caught up with me a few hundred yards further on and pulled up alongside me. I thought, Fuck me, this is right on top now. Both geezers were giving me the eyeball. I braked to let them pass. They stared back. I was expecting a shooter to appear and I was thinking it had to be a Mafia hit. The American in the petrol station, then someone tailing me, it was all slotting in.

I slammed on my brakes and they had to go ahead of me. I was behind where I could see them but they couldn’t see me. Then at the next set of lights, they roared off.

Coincidence? I don’t know. But the whole incident made me very very jumpy. And that’s how I had been for months. I didn’t know it, but I’d become a bit of a monster to live with and work with. My girlfriend had even attempted suicide by drinking crushed
paracetamol in a pint jug of wine because she couldn’t bear the strain of my petulance and irritability.

Anyway, I continued on towards Epsom convinced that I’d had a narrow escape from assassination. I then met the blokes from the operational squad who were going to brief me up about the new undercover job — I was to meet the informant, go out and get the lie of the land. They saw I was in a bit of a state by now. This wasn’t the rough, tough, undercover cop with the red-hot reputation they’d been expecting. I rang the boss of the operation, who hadn’t turned out for the preliminary briefing, and told him, ‘I’ve had people on me, Guv. Don’t know who, don’t know why, but I’m not happy and I really don’t want to go out and do this job tonight. There’s something going on. I can’t put my finger on it.’

The DI responded immediately. ‘Right, no problem.’

He didn’t ask questions. Such was my reputation at that stage that my word would not have been challenged.

‘Are you all right? We’ll get you out of Epsom in the back of a car and take you wherever you want to go.’

I was driven out, hiding under blankets like a fucking murderer, and taken to my home. I said ‘Take me to the boozer, I need a fucking drink.’

I was totally hyped up and in a state of huge anxiety; my head felt like it might explode, and I foolishly thought a few pints would help.

I was sitting in the pub trying to fathom things out, like whether I was about to meet my maker, and
what the fuck was going on. A drinking mate came up and started talking about another pal of mine who was going out with one of my ex-girlfriends. He said, ‘When he took her out, you know, he did nothing but slag you off to her all night.’

Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have given a toss. But with everything that had gone on that day and the fact that my mind was getting screwed up more and more by the day, it assumed an importance totally and utterly out of proportion. I finished my drink, put the glass down and walked straight across to the other side of the bar where my pal was sitting. With no further ado, I went BASH and gave him a fucking right-hander that knocked him flying right off his bar stool. It was a belter, the like of which had not been seen in that pub before.

He rolled over and over on the carpet and I then picked the bar stool up and raised it over my head. Now I was really going to do him. He was face down and I was going smash him on the back of his head. If I had, neither he nor I would be here to tell the story. He’d be dead and I’d be doing life. But literally in mid-swing, as I was bringing it down on him, someone shouted, ‘NO … NO.’ At the very last second, I brought it smacking down into the middle of his back. That still hurt him a lot but, thankfully, it wasn’t his bonce. People grabbed hold of me to pull me back. I was fired up and fighting them off. It wasn’t me at all. I don’t mind a good tear-up if it’s part of the job or gloved-up in a ring, but I was never a pub brawler. I’d gone potty. At that moment in time, I was just a lunatic. I’d cracked and didn’t know it. They managed to bundle me out of the back of the boozer and get me home out of harm’s way.

I didn’t sleep too well that night. There was too much going on in my head. Phantom assassins, untrustworthy friends, women trouble. I woke up next morning, took a long hard look at myself in the mirror and said, ‘You need help … you need fucking help … urgent.’

I sent another pal round to see my mate I’d smashed up to say sorry, ask him not to call the police and to say I was straight off round to the doctor’s for treatment.

Perhaps I should have seen it coming. Only a few months earlier, I had fucked up badly on a job in Manchester, a job that would normally have been a piece of cake.

I’d been called in by one of the out-of-town offices of the National Crime Squad who had an informant giving them a lead into a gang of cocaine and cannabis dealers on Manchester’s Moss Side, a district rife with gang warfare and savage murders. The informant was totally different to the usual run of snouts I had dealt with, a bit of a country bumpkin, but that didn’t make his information any the less valid.

I met up with him in turnip territory in Norfolk after he’d talked to the National Crime Squad and we got on OK. His info looked good and we set off for Moss Side ready to get stuck in. He was going to introduce me to a geezer who was ready to supply large quantities of cocaine or cannabis, whatever I wanted. We did the usual, got our background stories together, tested ourselves, checked each other. The five-hour journey up the motorway became a sort of classroom lesson on how to con a drugs gang and get out alive. I kept him on his toes, made sure he’d
remembered what we’d rehearsed. Some of the informants were not the brightest people in the world and it was vital we’d got our act together. He was going to introduce me as a London drug-dealer, my tried and tested cover yet again, and we were going to do a £3,000 buy as a taster for bigger things in the future.

We arrived in Moss Side, inner-city decay at its worst, parked the car up, did the usual, but the geezer wasn’t there so we were sent to the pub to wait. They left us for an hour, and came and spied on us a bit to see if they liked the look of us. Depending on your performance there, and it is a performance, you’re summoned up to see the main man. We were led through the back of this pet shop, and talk about a run-down, shitty street in Moss Side — there were a couple of half-dead canaries and a moth-eaten parrot for sale but it was obviously a cover for drug-dealing. As I was taken out the back there were faces everywhere looking at me: they were all in on it. We really were in the heart of bandit territory. I went up the stairs at the back of the shop to a small office and there was a geezer sitting in a chair with a fucking 9mm pistol smack bang in front of him. I went through the door and he picked up the gun and pointed it first at me, ‘Right, you sit there,’ and then at the informant, ‘You sit there.’ I thought we were in trouble. I went right against all my better judgement. In all those years of being undercover, I should have known, should have turned round and said, ‘Fuck you, pal,’ and walked away from it. I thought I knew my stuff. I should have said I wasn’t dealing with some arsehole waving a gun. But no, I went ahead.

I analysed it time and time again afterwards. Now
I know it was because I wasn’t well, I wasn’t myself, I had completely lost my sense of judgement.

Anyway, I didn’t know then that I was cracking up. It’s not something you ever want to consider. So I stupidly decided to carry on negotiating a drug deal with a gun-waving maniac. And he was a fucking nutter. Aged about 50, local Manchester accent and built like a bulldog. And if we were talking mental illness at that stage, he would have left me standing. He would suddenly go off in long rambling statements in the middle of a conversation, about why we couldn’t do the trade, this, that and the other. Not much of it made any sense. He was a horrible fucker, and I mean a really horrible fucker. Again, I had committed a cardinal sin in undercover work — I had taken a dislike to him. I’d let my personal emotions get in the way of the job. So now my motive to get him nicked was because I disliked him. That was wrong, and foolish. You’ve lost it when you do that.

We carried on with the deal despite my intense dislike of the man and agreed that the only way we could talk about him supplying big quantities of drugs, like hundreds of kilos of puff and kilo upon kilo of cocaine was to start with a trial purchase, a tester. He offered me a kilo of puff. Well, he didn’t exactly offer me, he told me exactly what was going down. Then he told me there would be an ounce of cocaine as well. The coke was about a grand and the puff about £1,800. The bastard was charging me street prices instead of wholesale prices. But I agreed to it and thought I could persuade the management to spend that amount of money to put him in the frame on bigger deals later on. This fucker did need
nicking as far as I was concerned, and I wasn’t too fussed how I did it. But the operation was becoming fatally flawed by now because I was riding a grudge.

We arranged to make a meet and do the trade a few days later at a service station on the M6 just outside Manchester. I pulled a colleague out from the squad to act as my driver. As we arrived, I could see the place was heaving with opposition. I could pick them out; I’d developed a technique over the years to spot the wrong ’uns. I’d just look around and see them immediately. You weigh up the enemy before you start the trade. Again, I should have pulled out. The cards were stacked against us. We were horrendously out-numbered. The fuckers could have done what they liked to us. But still I went ahead. I went in and met nutty bollocks and he made a very distinct point of letting me know he still had the shooter on him. He was sitting there in the café area with this lunatic henchman of his beside him. These were not business people, they were thugs and robbers, men of violence. No fucking business acumen whatsoever. Lo and behold, against the odds, we did a transaction. He handed me an ounce of cocaine and kilo of cannabis. Only it wasn’t. They’d dummied up some parcels to make it look like coke and puff. I just took them. I was so keen to get out of there I didn’t test the gear in my usual way.

There was an underpass there and they followed us in; they had people plotted up at each end, and I became convinced we were going to be shot. I thought they were going to rob us for the three grand and leave us for dead. It seemed a lot of trouble for a miserly £3,000 in drug-deal terms, but the main man was so unpredictable and so frightening that I really
wouldn’t have put it past him. The atmosphere got increasingly threatening. I got hold of the parcels, gave them a quick feel and said, ‘Yeah, seems OK,’ and handed them the money my colleague had in the car plotted up close by. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I slung the parcels in the car and got in myself and told my driver to get the hell out of it. If I’d been myself I’d have carried out quick tests on the gear. Then, of course, I’d have been calling their bluff. And I honestly don’t think I’d be here today to tell the tale.

‘Look, mate, who are you trying to con?’ wouldn’t have gone down a bundle. Perhaps fate was on my side that day after all.