Gangs (15 page)

But two months later the tabloids were going crack-crazy, an event triggered when the head of the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Robert Stutman, came to Britain and delivered to startled police and Customs officials the following ominous warning: ‘I personally guarantee you that two years from now you will have a serious crack problem – we are so saturated with cocaine in the United States, there ain’t enough noses left to use the cocaine that’s coming in.’

By the summer of 1989, around the time I started the research for my article, the north Peckham estate’s dealers had gone to ground but I’d heard of crack being offered for sale in a couple of pubs close to Ladbroke Grove, west London, and, somewhat naively, I set off there one Thursday evening to see what I could find.

It was dark when I arrived in the area and on my way to the first pub I bumped into a dreadlocked Rastafarian shouting and swearing at the barman who had just thrown him out. Rudy, as his name turned out to be, was steaming drunk. Well over six feet six inches tall and in his late thirties, he walked slowly with the aid of a stick – the result of a recent car accident. He was about to fall over when I caught him and listened patiently as he thanked me, then explained that he was desperate for another drink but the landlord had refused to serve him.

With no other leads to follow up, I offered to buy him a drink in the next pub in the hope that he might know something about the local drugs scene. It turned out to be an inspired move.

Rudy was celebrating that night because he’d just got out of prison for poncing – living off immoral earnings. Everywhere he went, local prostitutes would come out and hug him and silver BMWs with tinted windows would slow down and salute him with their horns. Rudy, I rapidly discovered, was an old-style ganja-trading Yardie, who commanded great respect around the Grove, even from the younger generation. And in his thoroughly inebriated state I was his new best friend.

We found another pub and I bought the drinks. We sat down in a quiet corner, chatting about nothing in particular. Periodically young hoods would pass by and stop to say hello. Almost all of them had some item of ‘business’ to discuss and eyed me suspiciously. ‘Who’s your friend?’ they would ask.

‘He’s safe,’ Rudy would reply.

And suddenly I was one of them. Any friend of Rudy’s was a friend of theirs. About two months of undercover work had been accomplished in less than an hour.

Over the next week I spent every evening at the pub under some farcical pretext of having been offered a job, claiming that I was planning on moving to the area later that month and wanted to get to know my local. Thankfully no one ever thought to question this further.

I soon became friendly with Desmond, a forty-two-year-old Jamaican fond of drinking brandy and port mixed together, who had lived in the capital for some fifteen years. As the evenings passed he began slowly to open up to me. He told me how he’d spent six years in prison for manslaughter in Jamaica after getting carried away with trying to persuade a floating voter which way to turn; how he ran a cocaine-distribution ring across the south-east of England packing the drug into tins of white Dulux paint and sending young couriers in overalls by bus, train and taxi to deliver to his small band of customers.

He explained how, despite a makeshift den having opened up above a newsagent’s in Ladbroke Grove, crack hadn’t taken off in a big way yet – the only people who seemed interested were the long-term heroin addicts who no longer got any buzz out of their addiction. ‘But give it time,’ he told me, ‘give it time. Once you get a taste for it, you never gonna want to give it up.’

Even before Leanne made the offer and I took her makeshift crack pipe in my hand, I knew I wanted to try it.

I’d spent years researching the phenomenal growth of the crack market in the UK and spoken to dozens of dealers, users and recovering addicts about its effects, yet I still had trouble understanding what it was about the drug that made it impossible to say no. I had listened time and time again to people talk about the ‘intense high’, the ‘profound rush’, the ‘whole-body orgasm’ and I had read every book, leaflet and newspaper article I could find on the topic but somehow still felt I was in the dark. Part of the problem, perhaps, is that while there have been many journalists and writers who have been addicted to heroin or who have taken cocaine and ecstasy or cannabis and written eloquently and extensively about the highs, lows and in-betweens, the same doesn’t appear to be true of crack.

Yet the effect of crack on society is fast becoming far more devastating than that of all the other drugs combined – such is the power of the drug that it has turned thousands of addicts into criminals as they desperately search for the cash for their next fix – and the more I looked for the answers, the more it dawned on me that I was going to have to experience it first hand.

At this point I should say that in spite of (or perhaps as a consequence of) my line of work, my experience of drugs is extremely limited. I’ve never smoked tobacco (though everyone else in my family did) and have no desire to start. I puffed away at a couple of joints as a teenager but didn’t like the feeling of being stoned so never pursued it. I’ve been offered cocaine more times than I can possibly remember but I’ve always passed simply because I never felt the need to say yes. As for ecstasy, magic mushrooms, heroin, LSD, uppers, downers, poppers, Special K, glue, I’ve been around dealers and users of them all but they’ve never appealed to me, even in the slightest.

My one radical moment came in the late 1980s at a massive outdoor rave in the shadow of Dungeness power station when, for no good reason, I decided to try speed. Unable to find a suitable surface from which to snort the powder, I opted to swallow it instead. The only effect I remember is that I couldn’t get to sleep when I got home so I stayed up all night watching bad TV.

Long before I met Leanne I mentioned my intentions to a couple of close friends and immediately wished I had not. One in particular was utterly appalled and shocked at what she described as my ‘wilful arrogance’ in believing that somehow I wouldn’t get hooked on a drug so powerful that it was notorious for being virtually instantly addictive.

Now, I have second thoughts, but after seeing Leanne in action, I am determined to go ahead. But as the pipe moves ever closer to my mouth, two separate sets of warnings echo around my head. The first came from a long-time crack addict who told me, ‘If you’ve never touched drugs before, taking crack will do to your mind what lying in bed for a year and then running a marathon would do to your body. It’s seriously heavy duty.’

The second is a dinner-party conversation with a friend, Humphrey, who works as a commissioning editor for a publishing company. He described at length the best proposal for a non-fiction book he ever received – a work by a man living on a notorious estate in north London who wanted to understand how so many lives had been devastated by crack. ‘It started with lots of interviews and him spending time in crack-houses,’ Humphrey told me, ‘then, of course, he ends up taking crack himself. It was an incredible proposal but he’s never going to finish the book. Once he tried it, he found he liked it and now he’s an addict like the people he was writing about.’

I chase the thoughts out of my mind and focus on what’s right in front of me. That’s when I look at the glass pipe sticking out of the side of the bottle and see tiny specks of Leanne’s saliva and lipstick clinging to it. I find myself wondering if she’d be offended if I wiped them away before putting the thing into my mouth.

I look over and see that she has her eyes closed so I reach across with my other hand and rub the end of the pipe between my finger and thumb. And at that moment a tiny, involuntary giggle bubbles up out of me. Here I am about to smoke crack – an act that could completely ruin my life or even kill me – and I’m worried about what? Catching a cold?

I pick the lighter off the bed and, copying Leanne’s action, hold the flame just above the rock while placing the end of the pipe in my mouth.

And then I inhale.

And . . . oh, my God  . . . it’s . . . it’s everything. It’s absolutely everything. It’s having great sex, it’s finding out that you’ve won the lottery, it’s getting promoted at work, it’s finding a fifty-pound note lying in the street. It’s being pissed at your favourite pub with all your best friends while the funniest comedian in the world does a show on stage. It’s lying on a beach with the sun on your back, it’s someone bringing you breakfast in bed, it’s all the chocolate you’ve ever eaten in one single bite.

Smoking crack is all of these things, all at once.

I feel it in my stomach first, a warm buzzy glow that spreads through my body like a hot shiver. Then it hits my head and everything kind of explodes. I feel so alive. I feel incredibly alert, enormously powerful, like I could take on the world. My chest is pounding, hard, and there’s a kind of rushing noise in my ears but it all feels great. It feels fucking amazing. I feel fucking amazing. I am fucking amazing! Fear, doubt, worry, concern – I don’t know what any of them are any more. I could do absolutely anything and whatever I did I would do brilliantly. For the first time in my life, I understand the true meaning of euphoria. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to feel like this all the time?

But as I sit there, mouth open in shock and surprise, I sense the best of the feelings starting to drain away. So soon! I still feel amazing but not as amazing as I did ten seconds earlier and, oh, shit, it’s fading fast. The lighter is still in my hand, a tiny fragment of rock remains on top of the foil. All I have to do to make it all right all over again is to take another puff . . . oh, God, I really want another puff . . . just one, just for a minute . . .

And now, at last, I understand just how dangerous this stuff truly is.

I’m lying on my bed in my hotel room. Leanne and her crack pipe are long gone and I have what promises to be a pounding headache building up at the front of my skull. I feel exhausted, like I’ve been running around for weeks.

I know I’ll never touch crack again but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to. And the fact that I can’t is starting to annoy the hell out of me. I take a deep breath, shut my eyes and massage my temples.

Outside, back on the streets of Bristol, the police may well have prevented a bloodbath by arresting all the members of the Aggi crew, but as a consequence they have left the crack trade entirely in the hands of the Jamaican gangs. It is part of a pattern that is emerging across the country.

Although London remains the centre of black-on-black violence, Yardies who now feel unable to compete there are moving out to new fields. Their usual trick, according to one Drugs Squad officer, is similar to that practised on Bristol’s prostitutes. They arrive in a town and, through extreme force, take over the bulk of the heroin street dealing. They then begin to give away free crack with the smack until, having created a whole new addict base, they rake in the profits. In England and Wales, drug seizures rose in 2003 by 10 per cent, but the amount of crack cocaine seized during the same period more than doubled.

In early 2003 Jamaicans David Curling and Andrew Morrison were convicted at the High Court in Glasgow of setting up just this kind of drug-dealing operation in Edinburgh. Other Yardies have been arrested in Aberdeen, and police in Scotland say use of crack is rocketing. During the whole of 1999 there were four seizures of the cocaine derivative throughout Scotland. In the first six months of 2001, there were thirty-four, by 2003 seizures were showing an increase of 500 per cent with no sign of slowing. In Scotland in 1999, only two per cent of drug-users said they used it. By 2002 this had increased to seven per cent.

In South Wales the M4 has become known as the ‘crack highway’ because of the vast quantities of the drug being driven along it. According to the Swansea Drug Project, crack is regularly seen on the streets of the city, with Jamaican gangsters said to be behind the bulk of the trade. They are also believed to be present in Newport and Cardiff.

In Bolton, Lancashire, police found forty-eight-year-old Jamaican-born Denis Reid selling crack on the streets. He had entered Britain through Gatwick two weeks earlier, officials had confiscated his passport and ordered him to return home. But instead of flying back to Jamaica he absconded and ended up in Bolton.

Even in Gloucestershire, often portrayed as a rural bolt-hole full of quaint cottages in chocolate-box villages, crack has made an appearance. Following an influx of Jamaican criminals and an explosion of gun crime, the local police force has been forced to introduce an armed-response team to the area for the first time.

As the effects of my one and only crack pipe wear off completely, I find myself wondering how it could be that one tiny island so many miles away could have such a phenomenal impact on law and order here in the UK. There is only one way to find out.

 

I know I’ve been in Jamaica too long when I finally stop flinching at the sound of gunshots.

I’ve returned to the island for the first time in three years and, as soon as I land in the capital, Kingston, I realise I’m in the middle of a bloody civil war. It’s the second week of October 2002, just five days to go before the polls open for the general election, and Jamaica is living up to its reputation as having one of the highest
per-capita
murder rates in the world.

So far forty-three people have been shot dead since the election was called nine days ago and the sound of gunfire echoes through the city at all too regular intervals. Flicking through the local paper as a taxi speeds me from the airport to my hotel I read that residents in the poverty-stricken downtown districts have taken to barricading their streets with abandoned cars, concrete posts and tree stumps in an attempt to prevent drive-by shootings.