Gangs

by Tony Thompson

  ‘He had a legitimate business in Amsterdam that wasn’t making any money but gave him plenty of excuses to go back and forth. The people were earning good money, though. The lorry drivers were getting paid ten thousand a time, and that’s on top of what they were earning anyway. That’s why I think they were just unlucky. He hadn’t pissed anybody off, he was working with everyone who might have been an enemy.

  ‘As well as bringing in his own stuff, he would offer other people a service bringing their drugs to the UK, charging upwards of eight hundred pounds per kilo, which is a good way to make money. You never want to be too greedy but every time a truck comes through without being stopped, your first thought is always, Fuck, I should have put a bigger load on it. It’s the same with a container. Each one can carry up to five hundred kilos of coke but you never fill them up all the way just in case. But once they get through, you’re kicking yourself that you didn’t brim the fucker.

  ‘They say it was fifteen million pounds but that’s bollocks. That’s final street price and when you’re an importer you never see that. At this level what you’re looking to do is either double or quadruple your money as soon as you get it in the country. If you want to take it all the way and make millions, you can, but you have to get out there yourself and sell ten-pound bags of the stuff. It’s just not worth the risk.

  ‘If you get caught with a million pounds’ worth of coke, what they basically mean is that they’ve nabbed someone who has just lost two hundred grand. I’m not saying people aren’t making money out of it, of course they are. Just that it’s not quite the same as what you read in the papers. Not unless you’re bang at it day and night. And then it gets difficult because you end up with more money than you know what to do with and the only thing to do is invest it back into more shipments. I know people who’ve made fortunes only to lose it all when some big shipment goes tits up.

  ‘Once you get the stuff, you pass it on to your dealers. A lot of firms put it out on bail – you know, give it to people on credit. You hand over the drugs and they’ve got, say, two weeks to come back to you with the money. I try not to work that way because it causes all kinds of problems.

  ‘The rule is, whatever happens, the buyer still owes the money. They can walk out of the gaff, get hit by a car, drop the lot down the nearest drain or get picked up by the police, but they still owe the money. As soon as you take drugs on tick, as soon as you take it on bail, you’re liable. There’s nothing the police love more than catching someone with a few grands’ worth of gear on bail ‘cos they know the pressure the man’s gonna be under.’

  Rick runs a club he uses to launder some of his profits and also to provide a ‘secure’ environment for his dealers to trade in. A number of wholesale importers and distributors also own or have some involvement with pubs and clubs and use them as outlets for similar purposes.

  ‘The people at the lowest level of the pyramid, the guys who are selling grams and wraps, they’re the most visible. They’re the most replaceable and they’re also the ones who are most likely to get caught. It’s not for me. I’ll leave that to the street gangs. I’d rather take the money and run.

  ‘You need to stay one step ahead. You work on the principle that you’re being followed or watched or listened to twenty-four/seven. You don’t take your eye off the ball. Whether you’re going out grafting or whether you’re going down Morrison’s for a pint of milk, you behave in exactly the same way. When you start doing things different, that’s when you stand out.

  ‘But as far as I’m concerned, the whole thing with police and Customs is like natural selection. There are a lot of good people in this game but there are a lot of idiots as well. Occasionally they get lucky but for the most part the people they’re pulling in are the weakest and worst that there are. It works out well for us. It keeps the courts busy, keeps the public happy and means there’s more money left in the pot for us.’

  I switch off the tape and it is almost as if Rick sighs with relief. He tells me he feels far more comfortable knowing that his words are not being recorded and quickly begins to open up even more.

  Rick confesses that the part he finds hardest at the moment is not bringing the drugs into the country but getting the money out to pay for them. He has plenty of ‘friendly’ bureaux de change that he and his fellow gang members use to change small-denomination notes into European currency, but actually getting the cash out to Spain or Amsterdam or Ireland to pay for whatever is coming in is becoming increasingly problematic.

  Getting the money out used to be something that Rick did with the help of a flamboyant restaurateur and club owner by the name of Peter Beaumont-Gowling, known to his underworld contacts as David Simpson. The fifty-two-year-old playboy-entrepreneur was the driving force behind the Joe Rigatoni restaurant chain in Newcastle and he also owned a string of bistros in the Darlington area. Having worked in restaurants in Paris and Denmark, as well as the Four Seasons in New York, his reputation in the highly competitive industry was second to none.

  Beaumont-Gowling enjoyed the fruits of his success to the fullest degree. He owned houses across Britain and also in Spain, had several prestige cars, including a Bentley and a stretch limousine, and kept a luxury yacht moored on the Costa del Sol. His work in the entertainment industry naturally brought him into close contact with the gangland elite, which in turn attracted the attention of the police, but although they kept a close watch on him there was never any evidence of wrongdoing.

  One night, having tracked their target to a hotel in Chelsea and bugged his room, detectives listened in as Beaumont-Gowling ordered and received visits from thirteen prostitutes, one after the other, and drank so many bottles of Dom Perignon that the hotel bar actually ran out. The following morning Beaumont-Gowling was arrested just as he was about to board a flight to Heathrow to Dublin. He was carrying two suitcases, which, when examined, were found to contain a total of £576,000.

  ‘Peter was one of those guys, not really a gangster, but someone who fancied the lifestyle, liked the image that went along with it. He made all the original approaches. It was he that wanted to know if there was anything he could do,’ says Rick. ‘It worked well for a while, but then he got careless. And when it all came on top, he just couldn’t handle it.’

  Gowling crumbled under questioning. He admitted being paid £35,000 a time to take cash-filled cases to Ireland and said he had already completed around ten such trips, either from Heathrow or Newcastle, by the time he was caught. He also confessed that the south London-based drugs-smuggling syndicate he was working for was making at least £500,000 per week, but stopped short of naming any members of the gang.

  Jailed for eleven years, Beaumont-Gowling was ordered to handover £310,000 from his bank account, £50,000 in shares, and £12,000 pre-paid on a credit card, crippling him financially. The money he was carrying was also confiscated.

  The day he left prison, Beaumont-Gowling told his local paper, the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, that he craved more success: ‘Irrespective of how I felt in relation to my sentence and an excessive fine, I have conducted myself very gracefully throughout. I believe my debts to society have been paid in full. I’m determined to leave the past behind and I am looking forward to continuing my life in a productive and sensible manner.’

  It wasn’t to be. Just before midnight on Valentine’s Day 2001, Beaumont-Gowling’s girlfriend arrived at his flat in the trendy Jesmond area of Newcastle and found him slumped in a corner of the living room. He had been shot repeatedly at point-blank range in the head, chest and back.

  With no signs of a struggle and no evidence that someone had forced their way into the flat, police concluded that Beaumont-Gowling had almost certainly known his killer and had willingly opened the door to him. He died less than a month after his release from prison.

  Rick won’t reveal anything about why he was murdered but says that an anonymous letter, sent to police more than a year after the shooting, hit pretty close to the mark. Photocopi
ed and written in thick black ink it read, ‘It seems that someone is going to have to explain why Beaumont-Gowling had to go. He thought he could walk straight back into the business. He was special once and made us lots of money, but he couldn’t keep his head down. He had to be seen with the birds and play the big spender. It was all bad publicity. When he went down it was bad news for both producers and investors. We had to fill the void. Confidence had to be restored. Sacrifices were made. Whatever plans he made couldn’t be allowed to happen. We couldn’t take the chance. The decision in the end was easy and best done quickly. Who was going to miss him? Just his women. No loss, really.’

  With Beaumont-Gowling gone, getting the money out has become more problematic than ever. ‘That’s the hardest thing right now. The police and Customs, although they make a lot of noise about street values, they know the truth about what we pay for the stuff. They know that if they hit the money on the way out, it’s gonna hurt just as bad as if they get the drugs on the way back in so now they’re getting two bites of the cherry. They’re putting more and more resources into it: you’ve even got sniffer dogs going up and down fucking train platforms looking for people with money. Once you didn’t have to worry about it, now it’s become a big deal.’

  Holding on to the cash is simply not an option. Attempting to spend it in the UK draws too much attention and state-of-the art forensics techniques mean that notes contaminated with certain batches of cocaine can be used as evidence to link those found with the money to the rest of the smuggling operation.

  The way the gangs get round it is to use the same methods for getting the drugs in to smuggle the money abroad. It is strapped to the bodies of couriers, hidden in false compartments of suitcases, inside the spare wheels of cars and vans and sometimes even split into small bundles, stuffed into condoms and swallowed.

  ‘But getting the money out is a problem in itself because it gets bulky real quick,’ says Rick. ‘You see all these films where people talk about having a million quid in a little briefcase, but that’s bullshit, you’d never fit it in. The money from street sales comes to you in small, used notes and they add up pretty quickly. If you sell a kilo of coke at street level, you get back six kilos of banknotes.’

  Rick drains the last of his bottle and gets ready to leave. ‘This whole business is about identifying the problems and finding solutions. For me that’s a big part of the buzz.’ He pauses and grins. ‘That and the money, of course. They can make it harder – which will only put the price up – but they’re never gonna stop it ’cos it’s just getting more and more popular. You go to the northern working-men’s clubs, and all the lads, they’re all at it in the toilets, having a line in between their pints of Newcastle Brown.

  ‘People have a lot more disposable income these days so they can afford to indulge every now and then. I’m not putting people out on the streets, I’m not leading anyone astray. I’m just providing a service. It’s just another form of entertainment.’

  But while those operating at the higher end of the trade may justify their actions by claiming to be providing nothing more than adult recreation, the truth is that much of the momentum behind the cocaine market comes from the ever-increasing demand for its far more sinister, deadly and far less socially acceptable derivative: crack.

  CRACK

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hidden behind deeply tinted windows, the Black and White café in the St Paul’s district of Bristol has a tiny mock-marble counter where you can buy traditional Caribbean fare, like ackee, salt fish, curried goat and jerk chicken. But almost no one comes here for the food.

  In a society where open dealing is no longer out of the ordinary, the Black and White café stands out from the crowd as one of the most blatant hard-drugs dens in Britain. By all accounts, the café has been raided more times than any other premises in the UK. One single weekend in the summer of 2003 saw three separate raids, which resulted in seventeen arrests and the recovery of thousands of pounds’ worth of Class A drugs.

  The drug deals around the café are now so frequent and so open that locals refer to it as the hypermarket. Open selling also goes on at the local pub and a nearby branch of the Tastee takeaway, but the Black and White is by far the most popular and best-known venue. The scene of countless shootings, stabbings and armed robberies, the café is at the epicentre of the increasingly violent gang activity surrounding the global trade in crack cocaine.

  The first time I hear about the Black and White and its formidable reputation I’m nowhere near Bristol, I’m not even in Britain but more than 4500 miles away in the run-down streets of the Jamaican capital, Kingston. Even on the outer edges of the local drugs scene, the Black and White is widely talked about as the place to go to score, deal and meet the local dons.

  For twenty-six-year-old Michael Andrews it was spending time at the Black and White that got him into dealing in the first place. When I met him he had been back in Jamaica for five weeks, having been deported for a number of drugs offences. In England he was feared and respected as a ruthless operator. A hugely successful crack-dealer, he had money, a nice car, fine clothes and plenty of women. In Jamaica he had nothing. In a quiet roadside bar in uptown Kingston, his tongue eased by a near-endless supply of Red Stripe and Swiss-style pork chops, Michael told me his story.

  ‘My experience,’ he said softly, ‘is just an unlucky one. I have some family in England, in Bristol, and my dad used to live there so my gran said she’d pay for my ticket so I could have a holiday. That was how it all started, just a holiday.

  ‘I got there and saw it was a very different kind of living. Life was nice and easy. When a man migrates, especially when he is from a certain section of Jamaica, the life he sees in England – it’s like heaven. I know many people who didn’t even know what a toilet was until they came to England. One man who visited me said on day one, “Bwoy, that toilet is nice, for when it flush it bring you back clean water with which to wash your hand.”

  ‘Right away I met a nice girl and we were having fun, but after two months she got pregnant. I thought to myself, Okay, you’ve got responsibility now – this was my first child – so I thought, Why not stay? I had a visa for three months and it was about to run out. I wasn’t thinking of marrying, I wasn’t thinking at all. I just thought that somehow everything would be okay.

  ‘You’ve got to live, you can’t expect your family to support you for ever so I went out and found work. I was doing a bit of plastering for a guy, mixing the muck for him, doing some skimming. I was learning quite a bit, but after a little while the recession hit and the building trade was doing nothing much.

  ‘I didn’t have a National Insurance number so I couldn’t get any other kind of job. But I had to do something to survive. One portion of chicken and chips might cost less than two pounds but when you can’t even buy that for yourself, you feel bad, especially when you’ve got a kid coming. The baby was only a few weeks away and I was suffering. The girl was on the social, but that money, you can’t do nothing with it.

  ‘I was living in Bristol and I used to hang around in the Black and White café with a few guys I knew from Jamaica. Some of them used to sell stuff on the front line. They knew I had nothing and one of them said to me, “Come and sell some weed, it’s easy.”

  ‘I’m gonna be honest with you. The first time I went on the line, I bought just an ounce of black hash. I didn’t want to get too deep. But within the space of an hour that was sold out and I bought two more ounces and went back on the line. I’d just doubled my money in an hour. At the end of that first night I went home with about two ounces of black, an ounce of weed and three hundred pounds in my pocket.

  ‘So I say to myself, “Yeah, a few hours and I get this! Come on, I’m going to do this full time.” So I start waking up in the afternoon, going on the line, coming back at six in the morning, sleep until midday, then hit the streets again. After about a month, life started to get nice, real nice. I was making money, wearing pretty clothes and ting
. The girl was all right and we were ready for the baby. Everything was sweet.

  ‘Then a friend of mine, his name was Squitty, he used to deal coke on the same line as me, he approached me. And now a bit of greed got caught up in me. I said to myself, “Why not sell some cocaine?” The first time I bought a sixteenth of an ounce, the smallest portion, for a hundred and fifty quid. I got on the line at five p.m. and the first man that came up to me five minutes later bought four grams. In the space of ten minutes it was all sold out and I had made one fifty on my one fifty.

  ‘I started dealing coke big-time. Then I started cooking crack and selling that too. And that was the best business of all. The cash comes in so fast you don’t know what to do with it all. I was making big money – four, five thousand a week – but still, even then, I wasn’t thinking. I had a flash car, flash clothes, flashy girls all over the place. I might have been living in Bristol but I would drive up to London or Birmingham or Manchester just to go clubbing. I was all over the place because I had money.

  ‘And ting was cheap. A lot of people who smoked crack would go out and shoplift and steal and rob, then give you ting in exchange for the drugs. And they’d be desperate. I got a Rolex, a brand new Rolex, for less than a hundred quid’s worth of crack, then I just sold it on for five hundred quid to a man that wanted one. Other times people would go out ram-raiding or hire girls to go out shopping with stolen credit cards and bring back televisions and hi-fis. You could get everything and anything and never pay full price.

  ‘And then little by little I had people working from me. Some of them were friends that I knew from Jamaica who had heard what I was doing and wanted a piece of the action for themselves. Others were people that I met here and decided that it would be better to work with them than to go to war with them.