Hash (15 page)

‘Anyway, about a month into the relationship, I told him I had to go back to England but I was broke. I needed to get a job and get started on the next stage of my life. He was furious with me for planning to abandon him and we had a massive row and I stormed off into the night.

‘He came after me and we reconciled and he told me how easy it would be to earn a couple of thousand pounds smuggling hash as a mule so I could afford to get home and have some money to spare. I was appalled when he first told me. How on earth could anyone swallow all those pellets and then have the front to walk through customs at the airport? It sounded horrible. The idea of
plucking those pellets out after going to the loo was even more disgusting.

‘But my boyfriend promised me that if I did it, not only would I get paid but he’d also come out and join me back home in Birmingham and then we could set up home together and live happily ever after. What a load of old bollocks that turned out to be!

‘When I look back on what happened, I cannot believe how gullible I was. It was as if all he had to do was look at me with those dark brown eyes of his and I’d melt. I even convinced myself that he was only doing this for us! So I agreed to swallow forty pellets and deliver them to a guy in a cafe near the Bullring in the centre of Birmingham a few hours after my flight touched down from Morocco.

‘Just swallowing them was horrible in itself. I kept feeling like I wanted to vomit after putting each pellet in my mouth and swallowing. But with my lover standing there urging me on I continued. Then I picked up my bag and headed to the airport alone. He’d told me it was safer that way and I believed him. I never questioned anything he ever said.’

Jane recalls that the trip went off without incident. She got her £2,000 but her Moroccan lover changed his mind about coming over to Birmingham to set up home with her. ‘I was heartbroken about his decision. It only dawned on me that he was using me when he asked me to come back to Morocco to do another mule run. I told him to get lost and that was the end of that.’

Jane says she then put her brief experience as a mule firmly
behind her and took up a career in nursing, met and married a man she’d known at school and they had two children. ‘For more than ten years I barely gave Morocco a second thought and I’d pushed those experiences firmly to the back of my mind. As far as I was concerned it was all in the past and I never once mentioned to my husband what had happened. He was a pretty straight bloke, so he’d have been horrified if he knew what I’d done.’

Then Jane went on a hen-night trip to Morocco with five of her best friends. ‘I was like an over-excited kid about going back after all those years. It stirred up all these feelings about that guy in Morocco and all the exciting things that happened there in my teens. I even looked back on my experience as a mule as being such fun.’

A three-night stay in Casablanca with her friends proved even more raucous than any of them expected. ‘Two of my girlfriends got off with young Moroccans on the first night and I got really jealous about it. I wanted one for myself. So on the second night I made sure I got picked up in a local nightclub by this gorgeous young Moroccan lad who looked about twenty. I was like an over-excited schoolgirl. Even my mates were a bit shocked when I started snogging this boy within about five minutes of meeting him.’

She continues: ‘I completely pushed my husband and kids to the back of my mind and decided to really go for it that night. I ended up in bed with this lad and had the best night of sex since I’d been in Morocco as a teenager all those years earlier. Next morning, I started to seriously wonder if all this
was fate. Maybe I should never have left Morocco in the first place? If I’d stayed with that first Moroccan lover we’d have a beautiful family by now and I’d probably have a damn sight better life than the one I had back in Birmingham.

‘It was all a form of madness, I suppose. I was being swept up in exactly the same way I had been all those years earlier. My girlfriends kept trying to make me see sense but I literally couldn’t see the wood for the trees. I thought I was in love again. I didn’t want to go back to my sad life in Birmingham.’

What followed next was painfully predictable but it didn’t stop Jane from falling into a duplicitous trap. ‘I’d told this guy about my family back in the UK and how we were struggling financially and how my husband had lost his job. He seemed terribly empathetic for someone so young. Then he mentioned how he had a cousin who smuggled hash into Europe. My ears pricked up with excitement. All those memories of my earlier trip to Morocco came flooding back. I knew perfectly well what he was going to say before he even said it.’

On the morning of the hen party’s departure back to Birmingham, Jane only just made it to the airport. ‘I’d stayed the night with this lad and then it had taken me so long to swallow all the pellets that I only just got to the airport about ten minutes before the flight took off. But the funny thing was that I wasn’t at all frightened. I’d done this before and there had been no problems, so I knew what to expect.’

‘What to expect’ involved swallowing fifty small hash eggs. Jane described it as being like swallowing sandpaper. ‘At first
you have to suppress your gag reflex. But I soon remembered how to do that and they all went down surprisingly easily.

‘During that cab ride to the airport it didn’t feel all that weird, though. Just like I had a very full tummy after a big meal. I had drunk a lot of water though, so I kept wanting to go to the loo, which was a bit of a pain.’

Settling down next to one of her girlfriends on the plane, Jane admits she then had a pang of guilt. ‘They just thought I’d had a good shag and nearly missed the plane because of it. I felt bad because the girl who’d been getting married had paid for all our air fares, so if I got caught with the hash pellets she could be in trouble.’

But the flight went off without incident and Jane, in her own words, ‘waltzed through customs in the UK as if I didn’t have a care in the world’.

She then went to a hotel room, which had been pre-booked for her in the centre of Birmingham and waited for a couple of hours for the pellets to pass. ‘I used a plastic bag as a glove to pull them out of the toilet bowl and throw them in the bathtub. I washed them and counted them. They were all there. And none of them had ripped.

‘That’s when it really hit me that what I had done was enormously risky. I handed over the bag filled with pellets to this fella, who insisted he really was a cousin of the lad I’d slept with back in Casablanca. He gave me an envelope with £3,000 cash in it and mentioned that he’d scribbled his mobile number on it as well and that I was to call him next time I wanted to do another run.

‘More importantly, he said that my lad in Casablanca was desperate to see me. My heart melted. I was hooked in. I didn’t really care if it was all a con to keep me onside. Just having those memories of what had just happened would keep me going for the moment. But I wanted more of him and more of that cash, so I could keep my family afloat.’

Jane has since been back twice to see her young lover and done a mule run each time. But she said that for the first time she was starting to have serious doubts about whether to return to Morocco ever again. She sensed her ‘lad’ was cooling on her. She explains: ‘Last time I went over to do a mule run, he seemed much more cool and businesslike with me and it felt like he was just going through the motions when we slept together. Maybe that was a good thing because I knew that in reality I could never abandon my husband and kids for a Moroccan gigolo.’

But, Jane admits, giving up being a mule may not be as easy as she hopes. ‘I’ve had daily calls from the lad in Morocco and his cousin here in Birmingham also won’t stop phoning me. The lad says he loves me and wants me to visit him but he probably doesn’t mean it. His cousin sounds much more threatening about everything and keeps saying, “You must go and see him and bring me back more hash.” I don’t like the tone of his voice but what can I do? I am a little afraid this man might tell my husband what has been happening and it will break his heart. I couldn’t do that to him and the kids. They don’t deserve any of this.’

But Jane is equally pragmatic about what might well
happen if she succumbs to the pressure and does another hash run. ‘I’m a realist and I feel that eventually one of those bags will burst inside me, or someone in the Moroccan gang will inform on me to customs. I know they often do that with mules just to make the customs people stay off their backs the rest of the time.

‘If a bag bursts inside me it might kill me. If I get arrested I’ll end up in prison. So either way, I will lose my family and destroy them in the process. I know that the best thing to do is refuse to go on any more runs.’ She hesitates for a moment. ‘But then I think about him. His smile. His body. It’s hard to resist when you have bugger all else to look forward to in your life.’

Meanwhile, Jane’s husband has dipped into clinical depression so severely that when we next met she revealed that he had had to be coaxed down from the roof of a local shopping centre car park after threatening to jump. Jane seemed to have hardened to everything since our first meeting: ‘He knows there is someone else in my life and it’s literally killing him. I don’t know what to do. I can’t tell him the truth but I know I should split from him in the best way possible for the kids. However, neither of us can afford to be apart because of the expense of having separate homes. It’s a horrible situation and it is entirely my fault.’

Jane admits that she often feels tempted to call her lover in Casablanca or his cousin. ‘I know I’m only looking for an escape route from my responsibilities. I know I’m being a coward but worst of all, I know in my heart of hearts that
I’d probably end up dead or in prison if I agree to another mule run.’

With that, Jane looks at her watch. ‘Shit. I’m going to be late picking up the kids from school. Back to reality, eh?’

East Londoner Micky, 29, used to deal cocaine, but he ended up snorting more than he was selling, breaking the golden drug-dealing rule – don’t get high on your own supply. He deals hash these days because the money is good and the risk of a long prison term is not as great.

He explains: ‘I had to stop dealing coke because I was getting seriously hooked. It’s fine having the occasional joint but that white stuff does yer head in after a while. I was making stupid moves and taking big risks. I knew it was time to move to the softer stuff. Thank fuckin’ God I did it before it was too late.’

Micky operates out of a swish apartment in a block close to Canary Wharf, in London’s bustling Docklands area where the majority of the capital’s bankers work and play. ‘It’s the perfect spot for this game. Most of these people do very stressful jobs and they like to unwind after a hard day at
work and that’s where I come in. It’s always better to deal with rich bastards than poor, desperate types. The people round here treat me with respect and always show good manners. Some of them even buy me the occasional drink because they like to think I am their friend but first and foremost I am their dealer and I don’t really want them to forget it.’

Micky has been introduced to me by a old-time villain I know called Teddy, who despite being almost eighty years of age, still enjoys the occasional puff on a joint as well as dipping into all the other traditional recreational drugs, such as cocaine and MDMA or ecstasy. When he first told me about Micky, Teddy was full of praise. ‘He’s a good lad. Never pushes his luck and he’s not afraid to talk to someone like you.’ Teddy tended to judge such characters on their ability to be a ‘true professional’ and he undoubtedly placed Micky in that category.

Micky himself comes from a long line of east London villains. His father was a chauffeur for the infamous 1960s London criminals, the Kray Twins. His uncle spent ten years in the slammer for armed robbery. But Micky is an altogether more reluctant villain, as he explains.

‘I was brought up in the underworld but I always promised my mum I would avoid being a villain and do something useful with my life. She hated it all and was always trying to get my dad to get a so-called “proper job” but it never happened.’

Micky’s first job after leaving school was as a clerk in a law
firm in the City. He had high hopes that he’d end up being a trainee solicitor but things didn’t quite turn out like that. ‘I was a sharp kid and the lawyer I worked for knew that only too well. But I made a fatal error by pulling one of the clients, a savvy Essex bird who was up for fraud. She got off the charges eventually but I was given the axe for knocking her off. It was all most unfortunate.’

Micky says he then drifted into the cocaine business through a cousin. ‘My dad would have killed me if he knew what I was up to because he was well aware that my mum would blame him for any criminality I was involved in. So I didn’t tell anyone in my immediate family what I was up to.’

But after a number of near-death experiences and a lot of ‘heavy pressure’ from a gang of south London drug barons, Micky stepped back from the coke game for ever.

However, the switch to dealing in hash brought an altogether different list of complications. Micky explains: ‘Hash is harder to smuggle because it is obviously bigger in size and it smells a hell of lot. When I first started dealing in it, I kept it stored in my flat but it stunk the place out and I had to find a lock-up with plenty of ventilation. In any case, it’s madness to keep a lot of it in your own home.’

In a dark area at the back of that very same lock-up, Micky cuts up a ‘9 bar’ (a slang term for a 9oz block of hash). He smokes a large joint as he works, carefully cutting down the large block into smaller deals, which he weighs on a set of small digital scales and then wraps in cellophane.

‘I sell 10s and 20s – which is basically a sixteenth or an
eighth of an ounce. I have my customers and I deliver to them so no one knows where I live. You got to be careful and not be stupid.’

Micky travels carefully through the London streets and he always sticks to the speed limit. As he drives his mobile rings; it’s another customer. He answers on the hands free so he doesn’t get pulled over by the police. ‘That’s the other problem with hash. The coppers can smell it a mile away, so I only ever keep small quantities in the car and it’s always very tightly wrapped in clingfilm.’