The Criminal Alphabet (33 page)

See
Mong

A
mule
is someone who is
paid, usually a pittance, in order to transport drugs on their person. Quite often
they are people living in poverty in countries where the drugs are produced. Drug
mules carry the drugs either on their person or internally, by swallowing packets of
them. There are many drug mules serving long sentences in the British prison system.
Mules are the lowest rung on the illegal drug ladder.

The naughty
is heroin.
It got this name because up until the heroin revolution in British prisons in the
late 1980s, mainly caused, I would say, by then Home Secretary Michael Howard's
introduction of Mandatory Drug Testing (MDT), heroin was considered to be a dirty
drug, used only by hippies and scumbags (according to the serious-criminal
fraternity). It was believed that any criminal who used it could be a liability, as
the police would be able to manipulate them into
grassing
by
withholding the drug. No serious criminal would openly admit using heroin or
having it
with anyone who used it.

It was only after the introduction of
MDT in prisons that heroin really took hold in the criminal fraternity. Cannabis had
been the drug of choice for the majority of prisoners up until then, but heroin can
be flushed through the body in forty-eight hours, whereas traces of cannabis can
remain for up to fifty-six days, so using heroin lowered the risk of proving
positive for drugs. If a prisoner proves positive for drugs, they may lose
remission, privileges, be placed on closed visits or in solitary confinement –
usually for a period of fourteen days. These days, prisoners who do not take heroin
are seriously outnumbered by those who do, and it's the non-users who are viewed
with suspicion.

To
neck
something is to
swallow it in order to retrieve it later. This is a popular method of smuggling
drugs into prison. A prisoner can then either ‘chuck it up', usually by swallowing
obnoxious potions such as washing-up liquid and toothpaste (whatever happens to be
available) or have
a ‘cave in', brought on by taking large amounts
of laxatives. Necking parcels of drugs can be very dangerous, particularly if they
are opiates, which is why prisoners are in a hurry to get them out of their bodies
rather than waiting for nature to take its course. Most necked drug parcels will be
wrapped in several layers of clingfilm and then tied into a condom or rubber balloon
for extra safety.

See
Balloon (2)
,
Bottle

A
return
is an exchange
of drugs between prisoners. If two prisoners have social visits on alternate weeks,
they may help each other out, with one giving the other a small amount of drugs with
no charge, with the proviso that the other does the same the following week. A
return can be mutually beneficial and assure a supply of drugs for both users for
the bulk of the time. The problems come when one of the parties misses a visit for
any reason, or fails to
cop
; then they have to pay for the drug
return or suffer the consequences. This can be anything from being blanked and
losing the beneficial arrangement to actual physical assault, depending on the
relationship between the two parties.

If you use drugs like heroin, crack or
powdered cocaine, then the chances are good that you will end up with a
Roger
(rhyming slang: Roger Rabbit = raving habit), after the
cartoon character in the 1988 film
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.
Once someone
is addicted, they can spend days and nights in pursuit of the drugs themselves or
the money to buy them.

See
Clucking

A
stash
is something
illegal, usually drugs, that is being stored or stockpiled. To stash something is to
hide it for later retrieval. Drug dealers have a stash of drugs which they sell
portions of at a time.

See
Lodge

Weed
is herbal cannabis.
‘Have ya got a weed, lad?' is a common question in northern prisons, meaning ‘Are
you selling cannabis?'.

As well as specialist words for crime
and criminal acts, there are also everyday slang words which have become the norm
for a lot of people, whether they're connected to the criminal world or not. Many of
the following may be quite familiar to the straight-goer, having crept into
day-to-day language. Words and phrases such as
bung
or
bang to rights
have entered the straight-goers' consciousness through their
use in tabloid newspapers and popular television programmes and, often, phrases fall
out of favour with the criminal fraternity just because they have become so widely
accepted.

A term meaning smelly (rhyming slang:
Abraham Lincoln
= stinking), sometimes shortened to ‘Abes', as
in ‘That khazi is absolute Abes!'

See
Reels of

Ackers
is old-fashioned
cockney slang for money, taken from the Egyptian currency the akka and possibly
brought into British usage by returning servicemen. A lot of slang words were
brought into popular usage by ex-service personnel.

See
Jank

A synonym for ‘believe' (rhyming slang:
Adam and Eve = believe), as in
‘Would you
Adam
it?' Mainly
used by cockney criminals and prisoners and often heard on television and
the radio throughout the 1970s and '80s in such programmes as
Only Fools and Horses
and
Minder
. Some people use the full
rhyme, as in ‘Would you Adam and Eve it!', usually as an expression of disbelief or
exasperation.

All right?
is the
universal greeting among criminals and prisoners, who tend to be paranoid by nature
and always want to be reassured that everything is okay.

A word for socks (rhyming slang: almond
rocks = socks), as in ‘When is
kit
change in this
nick
? These
almonds
are
reels of
'
or ‘I need to change my almonds, they're proper Abes'.

See
Reels of
,
Abraham
Lincoln

The
anchors
are the
brakes of a vehicle, as in ‘I saw the security van in me rear-view mirror, so I
slammed on the anchors'.

An
ankle-biter
is any
small child that can't yet walk, as in ‘Yeah, I've got a visit on Sunday; me missus
is bringing the ankle-biters'.

An
apple
is £20 (rhyming
slang: apple core = score; twenty is a score), but the more common usage among
criminals
and prisoners is as a coverall for knowledge or
information, as in ‘What's the apple?', meaning ‘What's going on?' or ‘Tell me the
news'. It can also be used as the opener to a threat: for example, ‘You know the
apple, now pay up or nasty things will happen' (or words to that effect). Screws
tend to use it a lot in a mildly threatening context in order to solicit compliance
from mouthy prisoners, particularly when they're about to carry out some routine
indignity like a strip search or piss test. The subtext is that if you argue or kick
off in any way, the screw will be forced to get nasty. In the past tense, it's used
to imply that a victim is to blame, as in ‘He knew the apple. If he didn't want his
face slashed then he should have kept his nose out.'

An
archer
is £2,000 in
cash, and is named after the amount of money paid to prostitute Monica Coughlin by
lying toad and piss-poor plotmeister Jeffrey Archer in order to ensure her silence.
Archer eventually went to prison for perjury and spent his time there writing three
volumes of prison memoirs. Three volumes is quite a feat, considering he only spent
two years of a four-year sentence in prison, and the majority of this was at HMP
Ford, an open prison sometimes known as ‘the country club' because it's such an easy
regime. It's the prison where those with fame, money and clout go when they're
sentenced. A ‘double archer' is £4,000.

A
baby mother
is any
female who has had a child by someone. The term is of West Indian origin,
particularly Jamaican, and is widely used by young black males to
describe the mothers of their children, as in ‘Later,
bredrin
,
man haffa go an check my baby muddah'.

If you were going on a dangerous criminal
mission, to front another criminal or to collect on a debt, then you would take at
least one other person to back you up in case things got naughty. The people who go
with you are known as your
back-up
, but it can also be a term for a
weapon hidden about your person for use in emergencies.

A
bag man
is a member of
a professional robbery team whose job it is to gather up the cash and bag it. Each
member of the team will have a specific task, and the bag man will normally be
unarmed. The bagman will also carry the
happy bag
, which is the
slang name given to the bag or holdall armed robbers use to transport guns and
disguises (masks, gloves, etc.) to and from robberies.

See
Happy bag

Bail bandits
are serious
criminals who are granted bail on a case and then decide that there's a good chance
they'll be found guilty at trial so they commit more crimes in order to keep them
and their families going financially while they are serving their sentence. Before
the PACE (Police And Criminal Evidence) Act was introduced in 1984 it was quite
common for criminals to bribe the police, or offer them details about other
criminals, to ensure that they raised no objections at a
bail
hearing in front of magistrates, no matter how serious the charge. If someone is on
bail for armed robbery and it looks as though there's a chance they'll be found
guilty and jailed, it becomes worth the gamble to go out and commit more armed
robberies. If they're caught for these robberies, it will add very little time to
the eventual sentence, and if the criminal gets away with them, he's quids in.

Bake
means I'll see you
later (rhyming slang: baked potato = later). It only works due to the cockney
pronunciation ‘potater'.

A
banger
is a gun,
though it can also be stun and fragmentation grenades, which are increasingly being
used by criminals for hits and armed robbery. It's taken from the sound a gun makes
when it's fired. Although this is a fairly obvious word for gun, a lot are less so:
criminals must be secretive when talking about firearms as just being in possession
of one without a licence is cause for an immediate prison sentence.

To be caught
bang to
rights
means to be caught in a situation in which you have little or no
room to manoeuvre. For example, if the police surround you when you're coming out of
a newly robbed bank, clutching a firearm and a bag of money, you've been caught bang
to rights. Some criminals will throw in the towel and plead guilty
when something like this happens, but others will fight the case by running a
cut-throat defence. In the example above, you could say that you did it under
duress, under threat of violence. This is really the only defence under British law
for the crime of armed robbery.

To have a
Barney
is to
have a fight or argument (rhyming slang: Barney Rubble = trouble). Barney Rubble is
a character from
The Flintstones
, a cartoon about a Stone Age family very
popular with the baby-boomer generation. ‘Barney' has the same meaning in Polari
slang.

To have a
beef
with
someone is to have an argument or fight
.
It's an American word that
has made its way into the lexicology of young criminals and prisoners. Many young
gang members who have been jailed for crimes of violence against rival gang members
consider it their duty to carry on their beef while they're incarcerated.

A
bell
is a telephone
call, as in ‘Give Eric a bell and see if he's up for a bit of wet work', and is
taken from the days when telephones actually had a bell. It was used a lot in the
past and is now making something of a comeback as more people download old-fashioned
bell ringtones on to their mobile phones.

To be
bent
means to be
dishonest or corrupt, or homosexual. It all depends on the context. A bent
copper
is one who will take bribes from criminals in order to
weaken a case, or ‘lose' vital evidence for a price. A bent brief is a solicitor who
will commit illegal acts in return for payment from criminals. If you're as ‘bent as
a nine-bob note', you are totally corrupt, as there is no such thing.

See
Hooky

Despite the origins of
Berk
(rhyming slang: Berkshire Hunt = c***), it has been a
favourite term of abuse on family comedy shows since the 1950s and still is up to
the present day.

Big up
is a West
Indian/Jamaican phrase meaning to praise someone or boost their ego, short for ‘big
up your chest', meaning you should feel pride in something and stick your chest out.
Similarly, to ‘big up yourself' means to boast or make outlandish claims about
yourself. At one period in the 1990s ‘big up' became a greeting amongst West Indian
youths.

Bins
was originally
slang for binoculars but in recent years has come to mean spectacles or glasses, as
in ‘Get on the geezer in the bins; I think he might be
Old Bill
'.

Serious career criminals describe armed
robberies or any other criminal enterprise that nets an illegal profit a
bit of work
, as in ‘I see Fingers had that bit of work over in Luton: nice
few quid there'. Career criminals class their activities as their job, so it's only
natural for them to describe such goings on as work.

The black
is blackmail,
a criminal offence involving unjustified threats to make gain or cause loss to
another unless a demand is met. It can be coercion, involving threats of physical
harm for example, and is a form of extortion. To put the black on someone is to
threaten to expose something they would rather keep hidden in order to obtain
money.

See
Strong-arm

To
blank
someone is to
act as though they are not there, something done by criminals and prisoners to
people they don't like: screws, informers, sex offenders, and so on. It can also
mean a refusal, as in ‘I was up for
jam roll
, but the Board gave me
a right blank' or ‘I pulled the shooter but the bank staff gave me a blank and
ducked down behind the counter.'

See
Jam roll

Blaze
is mainly used by
the young to describe the act of smoking cannabis or crack cocaine, as in ‘Yeah,
man, I
stayed in my crib blazing ganja wid me
bredbins
', after the blazing end of a joint or crack pipe.

Blitzing
is committing
lots of crimes in a short space of time, after the Blitz. To ‘go on a blitz' means
to really go to war with robbing or thieving. The term is very widely used by those
addicted to heroin or crack cocaine who need to feed their habits every day. Life
becomes one big long blitz as they strike hard and fast to get money for drugs.

See
On the UPS

Lead sheeting from church roofs is known
as
bluey
from the blue sheen of the metal, as in ‘If they catch you
nicking that bluey from the church roof, the beak will give you a
carpet
and God will not forgive'.
It's
also
slang for a £5 note, which used to be blue.

A
boat
is someone of
rank and importance in the criminal world. It's an extension of ‘face' (rhyming
slang: boat race = face).

Short for the word ‘body', and widely
used by criminals and prisoners to describe any male person whose name they don't
know, as in ‘I went over to B wing and some
bod
started giving it
the Barry
.'

To give someone a
bollocking
is to give them a severe talking to; it's the next
best thing to a kick in the
bollocks
. It's now mainly used by
uniforms, such as the police or prison officers, so it's fallen out of favour with
criminals.

Usually used to refer to the testicles
but also to describe something that is untrue or crappy, as in ‘That stereo is a
load of old bollocks; it don't work' or ‘Stop talking bollocks, you
mug
, it's boring me'.

See
Pony (1)

A synonym for ‘rate' taken from the motor
trade, as in ‘I
book
him as an iron'. There's a book,
Glass's
Valuation Guide
(now an online service) that's known as the bible of the
motor trade and gives prices for all makes and models of used cars. When traders buy
used cars they will see what the vehicle is ‘booked as', i.e. the list price, by
looking in
Glass's
. If you think a car is worth less than what the seller
is asking, you'd tell him at what price you ‘book it'. Criminals now commonly use it
to add weight to their own opinion, as in ‘Charlie reckons the geezer's okay, but I
book him as a slippery bastard'.