Hash (14 page)

Much to the disappointment of her academic father, Tina hated school. ‘I was a bit of a Tomboy. I just wasn’t interested in all that girly stuff. I didn’t even want to wear the stupid pleated skirts that were part of our uniform. I mucked around in class all the time but I was pretty good at sports, so they never actually kicked me out. But I must have been such an embarrassment to my poor old dad.’

From the age of fifteen, Tina claims she regularly drove cars illegally. ‘I used to “borrow” my dad’s old Rover whenever he was working at the school and drive it round the fields near our home. Then, as I got more confident, I started taking it out on the roads without my parents’ permission. I loved the feeling of being in charge of that car and driving held no fear for me.’

By the time Tina left school at eighteen with poor ‘A’ level results she knew exactly what she wanted to do for a living. ‘I was determined to be a pilot like my granddad. He’d died by then but I felt his spirit urging me on to do it. My parents were appalled and sneered at my plans but I didn’t care.’

In further defiance of her mother and father, Tina initially got herself a job in a local supermarket and saved ‘virtually every penny’ to put towards flying lessons. ‘My parents refused point blank to pay for flying lessons. They said they were a waste of time. But eventually my dad recognised just how determined I was and, to his credit, gave me some money for my birthday which, combined with my savings, gave me enough cash to book twenty flying lessons at a local airfield near our home in Ipswich.’

Within two years, Tina was fully qualified as a pilot and making a modest salary crop-spraying for local farmers, as well as offering a chauffeuring service for owners of small planes whenever they needed their aircraft to be picked up from other airfields. Another sideline was delivering people’s new planes back from France, Holland and Belgium.

‘It was a dream come true for me to be earning a living from flying but the money was pretty poor. I could hardly afford the rent for a bedsit and after an initial burst of excitement I didn’t even find it very challenging.’

Then – in her mid-twenties – Tina agreed to travel to Holland to pick up a plane for a local Suffolk businessman. ‘God, was I naive back in those days!’ she exclaims. ‘This guy paid me cash up front to fly the plane back to Suffolk. I thought nothing of it at first. I got the ferry over to Holland, stayed overnight in a hotel and then headed to the airfield first thing the next morning.’

She continues: ‘The customs people at the airport were really suspicious of me at first but I presumed that was mainly
because I was a female pilot. There weren’t many back then. I had nothing to hide, so I told the customs officers I was flying the plane back to England. They checked my passport and flight plan and off I went.’

As she flew across the Channel, Tina got a radio message from the Suffolk businessman asking her to land the plane in a field a few miles inside Suffolk and pick him up because he was desperate to see his new plane. ‘My papers clearly stated that I was flying into an airfield near Ipswich but since he assured me I would still eventually end up there, I agreed to pick him up.’

After what she described as ‘a bit of a hairy landing’ in the field, Tina’s client was waiting by a car with three ‘large looking gentlemen’. ‘They were all very charming but I did start to wonder what was going on. The client took me to one side and said he had a “bonus” to pay me as his three associates walked straight to the plane.’

Tina noticed the other men unscrewing panels inside the plane. She asked what was going on and her client laughed and added another £100 to her fee. ‘I still didn’t quite get it.’ Then she saw that they were removing brown bricks tightly wrapped in clingfilm. ‘It was strange, because instead of being outraged, I accepted the “bonus” and ignored what the three men were doing. This man never mentioned what was in those packs but he made everything sound such a laugh that I kind of forgot to ask him.’

‘Ten minutes later I took off with the client beside me and we headed for an official touchdown destination
near Ipswich. Naturally the customs men were none the wiser.’

Tina later discovered that her client was one of the area’s biggest drug barons. Within a few months, Tina had not only become his lover but she’d also decided that a career as a smuggler beckoned. ‘It was all so simple and the money was out of this world. And if I am to be honest about it, I liked the feeling of knowing I was getting away with it. Funnily enough I’ve never taken drugs in my life but I guess the high I got every time I completed a smuggling flight was similar to what people experience from a line of coke or a good hit of hash.’

Tina and her drug baron lover continued their affair for five years, during which time she worked exclusively as pilot for his gang. But when they split up after a row over his refusal to leave his wife, Tina decided she’d be better off making her services available to the highest bidders. ‘I was lucky in one sense because he wished me well when I told him my plans. I could so easily have decided to then tell the police all about him but I never even considered that.’

By this time, Tina’s reputation as a trustworthy pilot was well known in the criminal badlands of south-east England. Her services were soon in very big demand. ‘They all knew I’d been working for this man. I was reckoned to be a half-decent pilot as well as being someone who could be trusted.’

Tina admits she always worked on a ‘no need to know basis’. ‘I really didn’t give a toss what was in the packages I was smuggling. As far as I was concerned, I was the pilot.
End of story. It was much easier that way. I guess I was also avoiding responsibility for the criminal enterprises I was involved in which, on reflection, was a complete cop-out. It was also madness to think I would get away with it for ever.’

But Tina had one golden rule when it came to the smuggling game. ‘I always stuck to hash. My lover convinced me that with hash the risks were much lower and the prison sentences much more lenient.’

In late 2007, Tina flew over a shipment of hash with instructions to drop it on a cornfield just inside the Essex border with Suffolk. ‘All I had to do was release a lever and two big boxes would drop onto the field.’ But instead of approaching the field directly she swooped over the area as a safety precaution. That’s when she spotted two white Land Rovers half hidden under a clump of trees in a small wood.

‘Alarm bells went off instantly in my head.’ Tina pulled the plane back up and swept up high over the vehicles before anyone even realised she was there to make a drop. ‘I reckoned they had to be the police and radioed to the gang to say what had happened. There was no answer, which was even more worrying. Here I was running short of fuel with a load of drugs on board. What the hell was I going to do?’

Tina eventually landed at another isolated field about thirty miles away and quickly started unloading the boxes. ‘They seemed much lighter than the hash I’d run in the past so I ripped one open and took a look inside it. It was cocaine. I’d have probably got a minimum of ten years in prison if
the police caught me. I’d been paid just £3,000 for that flight. I was furious.’

Tina hid the boxes in a rundown barn next to the field. ‘I rang the bastard who’d commissioned the job and said I wanted ten thousand pounds because of the risks and the earlier incident or I wouldn’t tell him where the coke was hidden. He started threatening me but I knew he wouldn’t do anything because he wanted that coke more than anything. He held his temper and I arranged a meet, took the money off him and then told him where to find his coke.’

Tina says that was a ‘pivotal moment’. She explains: ‘I decided to take control of my life. How fucking stupid had I been? All that time I’d thought that by not knowing what I was smuggling I would somehow be considered innocent. It was self-deluded bollocks and I’d finally realised it.

‘I got in touch with all the villains I’d worked for and told them in no uncertain terms I would never do another drop for them ever again, unless I was guaranteed it was hash and not coke. They were all surprisingly understanding about it and said that there would be loads of work because most of them preferred dealing in hash in any case.’

Tina knows the dangers only too well, though. She talks about the murders, the close shaves and the network of gangs behind the smuggling rings and how she has survived them all – and emphasises again how she’s never smoked hash in her life and has no intention of ever doing so.

‘My biggest regret is that here I am, fifty-three years of age, and I’m single, unmarried and never going to have a family
of my own. I’ve thrived on the excitement of what I do while forgetting there is a normal world out there.’

These days, Tina flies ‘about half a dozen’ hash runs each year between Europe and the UK for three different drug barons based in the south-east of England. ‘It’s not so hectic as it once was and I feel I’ve cut back on the risks by sticking to a handful of flights each year. To be honest about it, I don’t feel the same “high” as I used to, just a sense of relief when I get back home in one piece after dropping off a load of hash in some field or other.’

Tina believes that her activities have long since been flagged up by authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘Since 9/11 pilots like me are looked at by the authorities regularly.’ She claims that a few years ago she was visited by two officials from America’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

‘These two Yanks turned up at my house one afternoon and said they needed to know about some of the characters I had worked for over the previous couple of years. They didn’t have any evidence against me but they were hoping I’d help them on the basis I was a weak link, a woman in a predominantly male world. That got me very pissed off and I refused point blank to confirm anything to them and it soon became clear they did not have any evidence to pin on me. They were on a fishing exercise.’

Tina remains convinced to this day that she was only cut loose by the DEA because of the US’s obsession with prioritising terrorism. ‘Once they realised I was not a terrorist they sort of pulled back, even though they are a drugs agency. That’s
where hash smuggling can help. If I had been importing coke or arms then they would have come down on me like a ton of bricks.’

Tina takes me to a deserted landing strip just inland from the Suffolk coastline. It’s a one-hour drive from Ipswich and the area is deserted and sparsely populated. As the silver birch trees bordering the field rustle and bend in a strong breeze, Tina picks up a small branch and draws a map in the mud as she explains how the smugglers take it in turns to ‘hire’ this same landing strip from a local farmer.

She then takes me over to the far corner of the field beyond a clump of oak trees, laurel bushes and thick bramble. Just behind it is the twisted remains of a twin-engined Cessna crumpled up alongside a burned-out barn. ‘We never did find out why this poor bastard crashed. I think one of the other gangs decided he was getting greedy and tampered with his landing gear,’ explains Tina.

Just then a farmer on a tractor appears in the field next to where we are standing. ‘Time to go,’ says Tina. ‘The farmers hate our guts but they’re happy enough to take our money when it’s on offer.’

Besides the barons, dealers and smugglers who’ve made fortunes from hash down the years, there is a small army of ‘part-timers’ – people who dip in and out of the secret underworld of hash and often pay the ultimate price for their involvement. These are the Mules – the characters who often risk their own health in a desperate bid to make a few thousand pounds, if they’re lucky.

Wherever there is plentiful, cheap hash there are mules prepared to risk their lives and liberty to carry it. Every year dozens of people are either arrested or die after swallowing balls of hash tightly packed in plastic.

These so-called ‘eggs’ usually hold about five grams of hash apiece. And most mules are expected to swallow around fifty of them at a time. Many are forced into it by human traffickers and other criminals. Others are students hoping to make some extra money by reselling the product once they get
home. There are even a handful of hardened drug smugglers who seem willing to take the risks.

In 2012, one such mule called Edward Myatt, 54, from Ballarat, in Victoria, Australia, was stopped as he arrived at Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport on a flight from India after he aroused the suspicions of customs officers. He was later found to have swallowed more than seventy plastic casings containing 1.1kg of hashish and four grams of methamphetamine, otherwise known as ice.

Myatt was told after his arrest that he faced the possibility of a death sentence under Indonesia’s harsh narcotics laws. He was lucky. In the end he only got eight years and a 1.5 billion rupiah fine.

So when I met someone who knew a British woman who’d worked as a mule, I reckoned her experiences would offer a completely different angle on the secret underworld of hash.

*

The first time British nurse Jane worked as a mule was when she was a penniless eighteen-year-old student in Tangier without enough money to get home to Birmingham. She swallowed thirty pellets of hash in exchange for £1,000 and made it back to the UK to deliver the hash, despite one of the pellets bursting in her stomach.

Now in her mid-thirties, Jane has revived her career as a mule in a desperate bid to support her family. Since 2010, Jane has returned three times to her Moroccan lover in Tangier to swallow hash pellets. She says: ‘I can’t fully explain
why I let myself be sucked back into all this but I guess it’s down to a combination of things. My husband lost his job. My salary as a nurse simply doesn’t cover the costs of bringing up my family and, if I am to be completely honest about it, I liked escaping the drudgery of my life and meeting my lover to do something exciting.’

Jane’s story is both harrowing and fascinating as she unravels her involvement in the most dangerous side of the hash industry of all.

‘I first went to Morocco as a student in the late nineties. It seemed a wonderful place and when my two girlfriends whom I was travelling with decided to go home, I opted to stay on my own in the city of Rabat. I’d fallen head over heels for this Moroccan waiter in the hotel where we’d stayed. It was a classic; he saw me as a great way to smuggle hash and I saw him as the love of my life.