by V E Rooney
Reynolds’ indefatigable nature has undoubtedly helped her to cope with rigours and routines of prison. I ask her for a snapshot of daily life as one of the UK’s most high-profile prisoners. She snorts with laughter again.
“I wish you’d stop calling me that, love. The other girls’ll get jealous, you know…Well, when I’m not working on my case, I keep busy. Been reading a lot of literature while I’ve been inside. I’ve been helping some of the other girls with their reading and writing, helping them with maths. What about Jenny, eh?” Reynolds calls to the prison guard behind me. I hear a murmur of agreement over my shoulder. “Left school with no qualifications, thought she was a dunce. So I started sitting with her and showing her basic arithmetic and all that. A year later? What does she get? Grade C in GCSE maths. Oh, she was made up. Crying with happiness, she was. Because she thought she was stupid and she wasn’t. She just needed to learn in a different way to most other people. Makes me think what kind of life she’d had if she’d had that, maybe she wouldn’t have ended up in here at all. I’ve helped some of the girls get off drugs as well. When I first arrived here, all I heard was a constant barrage of ‘have you got any weed’, but I was honest with them all. I may have popped a few pills on a night out but I said I never smoked my own stuff and if they had any sense about them they’d stay away from the harder stuff. Because I’ve seen it happen so many times. Once you have that first line of Charlie, that first sniff of the dragon? You’ve fucked yourself. Because you’ll keep doing it, trying to recreate that first high but you can’t. You can never get that first time again. It’s not about the quality of the chemicals. It’s about going somewhere on that drug that you’ve never been to before. And that’s how people get hooked.”
I ask Reynolds whether she has any plans for the future once she leaves prison.
“No. Nothing firm. Well, the world could be a very different place by the time I get out. The world I used to live in? I don’t even know if it exists any more. It’s very easy to get used to prison. To use one of your fancy words, it’s very easy to become institutionalised. The longer you stay, the more you feel at home. And then there comes a point when prison does become your home and you’re scared to go back to your real one. Your jailers,” she says, saluting the two guards in the room, “become the people you look forward to seeing. The girl in the next cell? OK, yeah, she stabbed her husband in the throat one too many times, but then you get chatting to her and you start thinking, oh, isn’t she a nice girl. You want to talk about moral relativism? Come live in prison for a week, love, you’ll have moral relativism coming out of every orifice.”
Later on in our conversation, I ask Reynolds to give me more details about the cumulative hauls of drugs she was actively involved in. “So,” I begin, “given your head for figures, can you give me an estimate of the quantities of drugs you brought into the UK overall?”
Reynolds sits back and puffs out her cheeks. She looks to the ceiling and then to the floor. After a period of silence, she sits forward.
“Total drugs tally? Christ…come on, brain,” she says as she rubs her head. “For coke? Over the nearly four years with the Mendez cartel, 3,790 kilos of coke from them. 28 shipments in all. And mixed in with that was the odd kilo of amphetamines here and there, I would say about 150 kilos as far as I can recall. Ecstasy? Well, we were still organising runs of that alongside coke. In total, between 1991 and 1996? I reckon a good 8.5 million pills overall. Hashish coming into Spain and then sent on to the UK? About 680 kilos of that. And in amongst all that lot? The odd cache of weapons, explosives. A lot of that was freebies from our suppliers, you know, part payment.”
“Wow. You were a busy little bee, weren’t you?”
“You asked, love.”
I am trying to do a rough tally of the money that all of these shipments brought in. Reynolds sees me scribbling down numbers in my notebook and she laughs.
“Oh, get a load of you, Carol Vorderman. You want the grand total, eh? Fucking hell, love.”
“Maybe it would be quicker if you could tell me. Are you really worth £350 million?”
At this, Reynolds laughs again and shakes her head.
“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers. You’re the bloody journalist, you should know that better than anyone.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“Listen, love. A girl’s got to have some secrets, hasn’t she?” she says, winking at me.
It is towards the end of our third meeting that I ask the question that I have been reluctant to put to Reynolds. The question which, although necessary for any journalist with a modicum of objectivity and impartiality, could erect an immovable barrier in what have been engaging and at times friendly conversations. My initial reluctance to put this question to her came from a professional fear that she might call a halt to our meetings or that she would censor what she has to say. During our meetings, I realise (with some horror on my part) that I am reluctant to ask her the question because I am personally afraid that she will tell the truth.
“Do you feel guilty?” I ask in what I hope is as neutral a tone as possible. Reynolds pulls a frown, although whether it is genuine or an affectation is, as ever, hard to gauge.
“That’s quite a wide-ranging question with several possible answers,” Reynolds replies. “Think you could narrow it down a bit for me, love?”
“When you look back at your life, going from the time you were selling weed as a schoolgirl, all the way through to where we are now, do you feel any guilt about any of your activities as a dealer or smuggler?”
“Are you asking if I have guilt? Or regrets?” Reynolds says, cocking her head to one side and narrowing her eyes.
“They can be one and the same thing or mutually exclusive,” I respond.
Reynolds chuckles and leans forward, placing her elbows on the table. From the tapping of her foot on the floor, I would say she’s impatient to get out of this room. I wonder if I have pushed too far with my question but then she looks up at me.
“Well…let’s go with 16 years of age being the standard adult threshold, right? From the age of 16 onwards, when I properly committed to growing and dealing full-time? Do I feel guilty about selling drugs to people,” she says rhetorically and a little too dismissively for my liking.
I am about to commit a cardinal sin for a journalist. I’m about to insert myself into Reynolds’ story. Her nonchalance irritates me.
“Do you feel guilty about shipping in the drugs which kids get hooked on?”
Reynolds stares at me.
“Do you? Do you think about the schoolkid who gets egged on to try heroin for the first time?” I press.
“I never dealt heroin…”
“Oh, come off it, Alison!” I snap. She looks startled but I carry on. “Yes, OK, you may not have dealt in heroin, you may not have brought it into the country yourself, it may come through a different pipeline but it was you who opened up these pipelines for people. It was you who generated the cash to procure these drugs. It was you who made the contacts and organised distribution. It was you who flooded this country with millions of pounds worth of drugs which have destroyed people’s lives!” I finish my impromptu tirade and sit back in my chair. I begin flicking through my notes as I wait for my anger to subside.
“This is personal for you, isn’t it?” Reynolds asks.
“People like my cousin,” I respond instantly. “She lived in Huyton. She was a good girl, did well at school, was liked by everyone. Her loser boyfriend got her hooked on smack when she was 17. She OD’d when she was 19.”
Reynolds is silent. She looks down at the table for a long time.
“You know what?” I say, unable to stop myself. “When your solicitor got in touch with me and asked me to meet you, I wanted to say no. Because I have no interest in people like you. I’m not interested in the drugs, the deals, the shady characters. The only possible relevance your story has to me is the money side. How you were able to move
money around and keep it hidden. But I wanted to say no. When I told my editor about your invitation, he practically came in his pants on the spot. And he made it very clear to me that if I didn’t meet you, I would lose my job. That’s how big a deal you are, Alison. So forgive me if I don’t have any patience with your moral relativism.”
Reynolds sighs. She is rocking herself slightly as she sits in her chair.
“Well, isn’t that a turn-up for the books, eh,” she says quietly. Then she looks around the room. “Neither of us wants to be here.”
***
Do you think I’m callous in the way I’m describing all this? Do you think me a heartless parasite corrupting young kids and pointing them to a life of crime? Do you think I’m feeding off other people’s misery? Am I scum to you?
It’s yin and yang, that’s what it is. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. OK, maybe I’m doing that moral relativism thingy again, maybe my worldview is far more bitter and cynical than most people’s. Maybe I’ve convinced myself that my own brand of bullshit smells sweeter than your bullshit. But when you boil what I do down to its essence, it’s a business like any other. OK, maybe not like most others, but essentially it’s run like a business.
When I was a kid, when I first realised that I could make these plants grow to their optimum condition, it was a hobby, really. When I realised that these plants could make money, that’s when it became a business. For some crims, it’s about the buzz of doing the deal, the adrenaline that surges through your body when you hear a Police siren, the ducking and the diving, all with the ultimate aim of getting one over the busies. Me? I only ever had pound signs in front of my eyes.
Just like life has a cycle of birth, growth, death and rebirth, depending on which flavour of God you believe in, so too does the economy. Doesn’t matter which country’s economy you’re talking about because in our increasingly globalised world, all economies are interlinked. To some degree, businesses are interlinked. And it only takes one domino to fall to bring down the others.
Just as society needs the economy to grow, society also needs the economy to shrink from time to time so that it can return to an equilibrium, although you wouldn’t think that reading the news with all the doom-mongering about recessions and falling GDP and all that. Not that I’m trying to minimise how devastating recessions can be to the poor sod in the street, but the world doesn’t stop turning in a recession. Life has to go on. Business has to go on.
Bailiffs and debt collectors always do well in recessions, what with all those unpaid bills, repossessed houses and defaulted credit agreements to chase up. The happiness of bailiffs is inversely proportional to other people’s misery, and their profits are inversely proportional to other people’s debts. Dealers love recessions in the same way that bailiffs do because the more miserable people are, the more skint they are, the more they’ll want to get off their faces and forget everything for a few hours. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling. Weed, pills, speed, smack or crack – if you’ve got it, the paying public will sniff it, inject it, swallow it and smoke it to escape from the grind. Then there’s the newly unemployed, given the two fingers by their offices and factories, and who now have nothing better to do with their time than to sit in their underpants watching shite daytime television. They can now overindulge in their drug or drink of choice without worrying about getting to work on time. You don’t need me to tell you how badly Liverpool and the rest of the northwest was affected by unemployment, but up there we’d had plenty of time to get used to it. It’s a fact that dealers enjoy a surge in business during recessions.
The second line of business that does well in recessions is banking, for reasons mostly pertaining to the first line of business. Those fuckers rake it in during a recession, contrary to popular opinion. The high-interest loans they make to people who need the money to keep paying the mortgage. The interest they make off the credit cards that people use to pay for the necessities of life when the cash runs out. Charging people for missing loan and credit card repayments at rates that are fucking extortionate to what people actually borrowed in the first place. And when the money finally runs out and people are on the bones of their arses? No sweat, in swoops the bank to repossess people’s property and flog it on. Bankers fucking jizz in their pinstripe pants like geysers when there’s a recession on.
What’s the similarity with dealing? Simple. Dealers get people hooked on drugs, bankers get people hooked on easy credit and debt. And no matter how bad things are, dealers and bankers still get paid. Now, I don’t pretend to be shit-hot at economics or any of that, I know my own business and that’s it. But I reckon at some point in the future, all this debt will come back to bite the bankers right on their arses. If the bankers keep pushing easy credit onto people, encouraging them to gorge themselves stupid on new tellies, cars and holidays, at some point everyone will be in so much debt that there’ll come a point where none of it can be paid back, and then the banks will have to go cold turkey themselves. Whenever that happens, it’s going to be fucking painful for everyone.
When I say the two business lines are interlinked, and how they benefit people like me, the thing I used to get asked all the time was, “Don’t you feel guilty that you’re feeding the misery of addicts?” No, not so much. I have had the occasional pang of guilt, but I don’t feel any more guilt than the landlord in the pub or the fella in the off-licence who sells booze to alcoholics. No more so than the lovely old lady in the sweet shop who sells ciggies to the dying woman with emphysema or loose ciggies for 5p to schoolkids alongside their crisps and cola. No more so than the doctor who doles out Valium or Temazepam prescriptions to a procession of zombie housewives, knowing full well that they’re already addicted thanks to him and his pharmaceutical company sponsors, because it makes his job easier to just to give the patients what they want rather than actually listen to their tales of misery, which are the root cause of their addiction anyway.
The zombie housewives are nothing new, of course. Thanks to the wonders of modern corporate pharmacy, bored housewives have been getting off their tits in ever greater numbers since World War II. It’s a global growth business. Doesn’t matter where you live – London, Liverpool, New York, Tokyo – bored housewives at some point realise that what they had been trained for their whole lives, the holy grail of marriage and kids, didn’t turn out to be the completely fulfilling endless well of happiness they had expected it to be. Wouldn’t you want to get off your face too? I’d want to shove handfuls of Temazepam, Valium, Mogadon and more down my throat if I was stuck in some shitty council flat with a horde of screaming brats, with nothing to look forward to except a smack from my old fella when he staggered back pissed from the pub. Or I could just buy some weed.
I hate to come out with the old demand and supply cliché, but it’s true. If human beings want to get off their faces, they’ll find a way to do so. Even if by some miracle all the illegal or even legal high-inducing substances in the world disappeared overnight, people would soon be trying to smoke, sniff or inject anything they could get their hands on, just to see if they could get high from it.
People have been doing it since humans were first able to walk on the earth and it’s a time-honoured tradition found in all cultures, primitive and evolved, third world and first world, from the first cavemen who took the time to illustrate their happiness with all those pretty pictures in their caves, to the native Americans and their big pipes, to the African tribes and their witchdoctors. You think those guys can really do magic? No, they’re dishing out happy potions, just like I am. Let’s not forget the Victorian doctors who experimented with opium or psychedelic concoctions on unsuspecting patients, to the World War II generals and chemists who used early forms of LSD and Ecstasy on battlefield troops, thinking they would make the soldiers more aggressive, only for the soldiers to have a mind-bending psychedelic trip into the gateways of their consciousness, or have an inexplicable urge to dance.
You
really think governments want to win the war on drugs? Governments are the biggest dealers on the planet. If I could draw you a flowchart showing how various governments around the world have turned a blind eye to smuggling – and even facilitated it – your arse would drop. How do you think state-backed thugs like the CIA and Interpol and all the others fund their nefarious activities when they’re not sucking the taxpayer dry? Arms for drugs, drugs for arms, a backhander here, a bribe there, a shipment waived through here, a private plane discreetly landing there. Governments only come down on the dealers and the cartels that they’re don’t control already.
It’s in the governments’ interest to lose the war on drugs, never mind the drugs they’ve already legalised and taxed themselves, like tobacco and alcohol. If everyone actually heeded those perfunctory health warnings about smoking and drinking overnight and got clean and sober, governments all over the world would collectively shit themselves at the thought of losing all those billions in taxes they reap from tobacco and alcohol. And when you think about how governments and pharmaceutical companies are mutually stroking each other’s dicks, what I do is small time, I mean fucking microscopic by comparison. I don’t mean the drugs they produce that are actually helpful – many a time I’ve needed an aspirin after a bad headache. I mean the drugs they produce which they push as a cure for a non-existent problem, and then convince the target consumers, the GP’s patients, that they have this problem that only this drug can help with. But in reality, the drug becomes the problem, and an addictive one at that.
Of course, if the government ever legalises the stuff I dealt in, there goes my business model and my clients. Would you rather buy off someone in a dark alleyway at night for way more than what it costs to actually produce the stuff, or would you rather walk into the supermarket and pick it up at the cigarette or pharmacy counter at a regulated, taxed and cheaper price? It’s unlikely that the government would ever legalise the soft stuff, never mind the hard stuff like coke and smack. After all, where would they get all their compliant obedient little worker bees from, slaving away to pay more tax, if everyone was monged at home or E’d off their tits in some club night after night, or comatose on their couches with needles in their arms? Nah, tobacco and alcohol are the government’s drugs of choice.