Gangs (18 page)

At least seven other cases in the court on the morning I visited involved couriers arrested
en route
to London in the previous week. They included a woman who had swallowed ninety-nine pellets of cocaine, and a man who had attempted to smuggle cannabis in a false compartment in his suitcase.

Since I returned to London Jamaican Customs officers have also been posted to Heathrow airport to help interview suspected mules. Officers at both of Jamaica’s international airports have also been given hand-held detectors that are able to pick up traces of cocaine in the body, on clothes or in suitcases. The introduction of the new equipment has led to an 80 per cent fall in the number of people trying to smuggle drugs into the UK by this method but officials admit that, in reality, the problem is as bad as ever. Instead of the drugs flying direct from Jamaica they are now being routed via non-traditional destinations including Belize, the Bahamas and St Maarten.

And as long as there are women desperate enough to risk everything on a flight to London, the problem will remain.

One Customs officer recounted the tale of Barbara, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of six who is now serving three years and nine months for carrying just 341 grams of cocaine. A street seller in Kingston, she was approached by a young woman who told her she could make much more money doing something else and led her to a little house just outside Kingston.

There, Barbara was shown piles of little parcels, containing 100 per cent pure cocaine. Each parcel was an inch or so long, made from the fingers of latex gloves and secured with tape. She was told to swallow a hundred and given six bottles of juice to wash them down, but managed to ingest just fifty-two.

She was paid the equivalent of £400 on the spot and told she would get another £1600 when she arrived in England. While on the plane she was told of a woman who had died with drugs in her stomach because one of the packages she swallowed had burst. It was the last straw. Stopped by Customs officers as she came off the plane, she immediately told them what she had done.

But she did not realise the high price she and her family would pay for her getting caught. Since she failed to meet the person she was supposed to deliver the drugs to in a café at Heathrow’s terminal three, the gang who supplied them in Kingston assumed that she had stolen them. As punishment, they kidnapped Barbara’s brother, stabbed him, then burned him alive.

As the price of cocaine continues to fall, so the use of crack continues to grow, often with alarming repercussions.

Crack is increasingly being used by the middle classes, people wealthy enough to fund substantial habits without resorting to crime. (This is ironic, considering crack was conceived and aimed at the working classes after the Colombian cocaine cartels found they had lost the middle-class market.) In the City of London, crack is increasingly being treated almost like a form of dare. Dozens of brokers and other financial workers take it every weekend, believing it to be the ultimate buzz and a natural release for the high-pressure lives they live. Experts worry that, although figures for crack use are showing a considerable increase, they mask the true picture as the wealthier, middle-class users who manage to avoid both the criminal-justice system and drug-treatment agencies are never counted.

As seen in Bristol, crack is also sweeping through the sex industry with devastating effect. Drugs workers in Hull say dozens of teenage prostitutes are now offering sex for as little as five pounds to feed their crack habit. In London’s King’s Cross, many women offer passing men unprotected sex for ten pounds – the price of a single rock in the capital.

One drugs liaison officer told me, ‘When you mix crack and prostitution it becomes a twenty-four hour cycle. You go out and you work long enough to get a rock, then you go away and use it, and then you go out and do the same all over again. Eventually you need some sleep, so you take heroin in order to come down. Then you wake up and it starts again. Crack has become the new pimp and the girls are working harder than ever for it.’

Unlike heroin, with its trackmarks and pasty complexion, crack offers no obvious evidence of use or other signs that might put off the clients of a drug-using prostitute. Crack also reduces inhibitions and acts as a stimulant, allowing sex workers to operate for longer hours. The two industries increasingly operate hand in hand, with many prostitutes purchasing drugs on behalf of their clients and sharing them.

The first ever round of compulsory testing of offenders in Bradford in the summer of 2003 found that half of all those charged with theft, burglary and robbery had taken either heroin or crack cocaine. Half of those found to be using drugs have both heroin and crack in their bloodstream when they are arrested.

Increasing popularity is also affecting the way the drug is made and marketed. Crack cocaine has traditionally been produced in small quantities and sold on to street-level dealers and users, but more recently, gangs have produced crack in larger quantities to feed the growing market.

The drug is also becoming more common among clubbers. According to leading drug charity DrugScope, more young people are being pushed into experimenting with crack because there are so many fears over the effects of ecstasy use. ‘There is growing evidence that clubbers are under the mistaken belief that cocaine is a safer option,’ said a spokesman for the charity. ‘Because they haven’t seen scare stories about cocaine or crack, they believe that it is a better option than ecstasy.’

Experts say the shift in patterns of drug use has directly affected the type of crimes being committed at street level. Heroin addicts, previously identified as being responsible for the vast majority of property-related crime, traditionally fund their habits through activities such as burglary, breaking into parked cars, shoplifting and credit-card fraud. Crack, however, leaves heavy users edgy, paranoid and dangerously desperate. Because of this they are more likely to get involved in violent, opportunist crimes, such as mugging, mobile-phone theft and carjacking.

And there is no end in sight. With increasing numbers of crack addicts looking for an even greater buzz, drugs agencies across the UK report that, rather than simply smoking their rocks, the most hardcore addicts are now injecting them, which produces an even greater and far more addictive high.

Once described as the ultimate in ‘disorganised organised crime’, the Yardies and those who mirror their activities are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Money-laundering schemes have come in to replace wearing your wealth round your neck. Alliances are being formed with Turkish and Asian criminals to provide inroads into the heroin business (partly to increase profits but also so that heroin-users can ultimately be switched to the more profitable crack). The ‘disorganised’ tag is unlikely to last for ever, but the powerful association between Jamaica and brutal gun violence seems set to remain in place for the foreseeable future.

Although they continue to dominate the market for the time being, Jamaican criminals are ultimately set to be replaced by their British counterparts as the dominant force in the crack-cocaine business. Until this happens, however, Jamaicans will continue to be associated with drug-related gun crime, and any Jamaican with a criminal record will be referred to as having ‘Yardie’ connections.

It’s a label the vast majority of law-abiding Jamaicans do not care for but admit, particularly while the murder rate on the island continues to be one of the highest in the world, that they can do little about.

Although Colombia has the cocaine trade, Italy has the Mafia and Turkey has the heroin barons, Jamaicans can take some comfort in that they do not occupy the number-one slot in the league of countries associated with organised crime. That dubious honour goes to none other than Nigeria.

 

Tao Savimbi’s voice cracks with emotion as he recounts the day his father was brutally murdered right before his eyes. ‘They killed him, shot him in the body and head sixteen times because of who he was, because of his position,’ Tao tells me, in his thick African accent. ‘I had to flee, I had to. My mother told me to run so I fled and sought asylum. If I had stayed . . .’ there’s a pause as Tao swallows hard ‘. . .  if I had stayed, I would not be here to talk to you. I would be a dead man.’

I’m sitting in my office, both elbows on the desk, the phone pressed hard against my ear. I’m listening intently to Tao and trying oh-so-hard to stifle my giggles. Despite his best efforts to convince me otherwise, I know that his carefully constructed tale of woe is nothing but a sham. Normally I would dismiss the whole thing out of hand but this time I have decided to play along and see where it leads me.

It all started a month or so earlier when the following email popped into my mailbox with the subject line: ‘Urgent Assistance Needed’.

Although it is true that a certain Jonas Savimbi, infamous head of the UNITA guerrilla movement, was killed in an ambush by Angolan government troops in early 2002, the email I received did not come from his son. Instead it was sent out by a gang of highly sophisticated Nigerian fraudsters, a small part of a worldwide network that is believed to earn more than £200 million each year from Britain alone.

Officially known as advance-fee fraud, it is most often referred to as the ‘419 scam’ after the sub-section of the Nigerian penal code that criminalises the act of obtaining money by deception.

419 fraud started life in the mid-1980s when thousands of handwritten letters, supposedly written by doctors, lawyers or accountants but always in pidgin English, were sent asking for details of the recipient’s bank account and a few sheets of their headed company notepaper to be sent back to the Nigerian capital, Lagos. The reason given was that a large sum of illicitly gained money needed to be transferred into a Western bank account. In return to playing host to several millions of dollars, the bank-account holder would be promised a substantial commission. The reality was that, having obtained all the details of a victim’s bank, the fraudsters would use the headed notepaper to forge a letter requesting that the bank transfer the entire balance of the account to them. Now, thanks to the magic of email, the number of approaches has risen considerably in recent years. At first glance this scattergun approach may appear a waste of time, but if only one in every hundred thousand produces a response, the scam has paid for itself many times over.

The variations are endless but invariably there is something illicit about the funds: they have been smuggled out of the country illegally, are part of an accidental overspend that someone has managed to divert or they are assets being hidden from prying government eyes.

Apart from the supposed illegality of the enterprise, the other catch is that something always goes wrong before the money can be transferred. The only way round these bureaucratic hurdles is to stump up some cash – a relatively small amount compared to the vast wealth that is just around the corner. One hurdle leads to another and requests for money continue until the victim either gives up, goes bankrupt or both.

Although they almost always originate from Nigerian gangs, growing public awareness of 419 fraud means the emails now purport to come from elsewhere in Africa and the rest of the world. Requests for money often ride hard on the back of topical events: as with Savimbi, the death of any prominent African figure will lead to a rash of emails from sons, daughters and wives of the deceased, all claiming to have access to fortunes that were somehow squirrelled away. In recent years people have received emails from special-forces soldiers fighting in Afghanistan who have stumbled across piles of cash belonging to Al Qaeda and need help in getting it out of the country, from cousins of Iraqi chemical-warfare experts who fear their assets may be frozen, and from Kosovan charities desperate to find a new home for their enormous bank balances.