Gangs

by Tony Thompson

  In the bizarre pecking order of prostitutes, Leanne explains, strawberries and raspberries, also known as chickenheads, are the lowest of the low (high-class, high-price call girls are at the top). Instead of being paid cash for sex, they receive only drugs, often just a single rock. ‘They get so desperate that they can’t even see it makes sense for them to get some money and buy their own stuff. You always swear you’ll never sink that low, but I’ve done it a few times. All the girls have.’

  One coffee turns into two, and then I buy Leanne a sandwich. We’re getting on well, almost flirting with one another as we talk about her life and the way her work affects her relationships. It’s almost like some kind of weird date, although we both know nothing sexual is going to happen between us. Or, at least, I don’t think it will. It’s a cliché, I know, but I can’t help thinking she’s getting off on the idea of someone wanting her for her mind rather than just her body.

  She asks where I’m staying and without thinking I blurt out the name of my hotel. It’s nearby and she suggests we go back to my room and continue our conversation somewhere quieter. For the first time I feel apprehensive. I manage to sneak her past the receptionist and we giggle as we clamber into the lift and make our way upstairs.

  Once inside, Leanne’s true motivation for seeking more privacy becomes abundantly clear. She removes her coat, perches on the edge of the bed, then reaches into her battered black bag and pulls out a plastic water bottle. The screw cap has been replaced with a mass of masking tape and silver foil and there is a short glass pipe, sealed with Blu-tack, poking out of the side. She reaches inside her bra, under her left breast, and pulls out a tiny clingfilm wrap containing five small pieces of magnolia-coloured rock.

  She watches me watching as she loads one of the rocks on top of the foil and heats it with a flame from her lighter. The inside of the bottle fills with a pale smoke, which she then inhales through the pipe. ‘Well, you said you wanted to see what it was all about,’ she says, between puffs.

  I pull up the chair and sit down facing her. I’ve read about taking the drug, but seeing someone do it right in front of me is something else. I’m horrified but at the same time I’m absolutely fascinated. I wait for some kind of transformation, but nothing seems to happen. Rather than becoming manic and running around the room like a crazy woman, Leanne actually seems to become quieter, lying back on the bed as her eyes glaze over. She lets out a low moan. ‘Ah, yeah, fuuuuuuuuck,’ she sighs.

  Is it, I ask, really that good?

  Leanne smiles big and wide. She rolls over and leans forward on the bed, resting her chin on her hands, a Cheshire-cat grin on her face. She pushes a stream of translucent smoke out of her pursed lips and the air around me is filled with a smell that’s something like sweetened burning plastic. ‘Oh, yeah,’ she says softly. ‘It’s good. It’s really good. You ought to try it.’

  And with that she props herself up on her elbows, loads a fresh rock on top of the lid and passes me the pipe.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  No one quite knows who invented crack. There are reports of it appearing in Amsterdam in 1978 but, probably because it was a little too harsh for mellow Dutch tastes, it soon faded away. Two years later it surfaced in the Bahamas and quickly took hold to the extent that, by the end of 1982, there had been a massive increase in the number of psychiatric admissions to hospital on the islands.

  By 1983 the drug was filtering across the water to Miami, then up to New York and beyond, particularly Los Angeles where the black street gangs began pushing it like there was no tomorrow. The first ever newspaper report on crack appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1984, and within a few weeks American law-enforcement officials were warning that within three years crack would have swept across the entire country like a firestorm, a prediction that turned out to be a ghastly underestimate. In August 1985, not one of the tens of thousands of telephone calls to America’s national cocaine hotline concerned crack. By February 1986 every other call was from a user of the new drug.

  Grim accounts of what the drug had done to America’s inner-city ghettos surfaced. There were tales of teenage crack-head mothers selling their own babies to get the money for their next hit, of twelve-year-old dealers involved in shoot-outs with the police, and countless acts of violence committed by those under its influence. In 1988, 73 per cent of all children battered to death by their parents in the New York area were the offspring of crack-users, while around 40 per cent of all homicides in the city were said to be crack-related.

  The speed at which crack spread surprised everyone, with the possible exception of the dealers. They knew only too well that by pricing the new product well within the reach of society’s lowest common denominators there would be no end of takers. At a hundred dollars a gram, cocaine was still having trouble leaving its jet-set roots behind. At ten dollars a hit, crack wasn’t just cheap, it was a miracle of modern marketing.

  And marketing is exactly what was responsible for bringing crack to the masses. Regardless of who invented it, it is now widely accepted that the Colombian drug cartels were responsible for pushing the drug into the ghettos.

  The best of the cartels, and in particular the Medellin cartel during the time it was being led by the infamous Pablo Escobar, treated the cocaine trade very much as a business. At the time 80 per cent of cocaine-users in the United States were white, middle-aged and affluent. There were some younger people, thirty-five and under, who had money to spend, but the main market revolved around the trend-setter industries of movies, television, music and sport.

  Having experienced phenomenal growth, the market suddenly began to collapse and the street prices of cocaine fell, often dramatically. The rise of the 1980s gym culture and other health fads, as well as concerns about the addictive nature of cocaine, led many core users to cut back.

  During a series of brainstorming sessions in the early 1980s designed to find solutions to the fading market elder cartel bosses recalled that during the 1950s and 1960s, when heroin was America’s favourite drug of abuse, the black ghettos had formed one of the key markets. If they could find a way to sell cocaine to the blacks, they could open up a whole new world of profit.

  The problem wasn’t just that the blacks couldn’t afford cocaine but also the hit the drug delivered wasn’t intense enough to pull them out of the social deprivation they suffered in the same way that heroin did. The easiest way to make cocaine more appealing, and provide a more powerful high, would be to find a way to smoke it, but that presented all sorts of problems.

  Although you can smoke cocaine in its powder form – users have long mixed the drug with tobacco to create joints known as ‘primos’ – the process is hugely inefficient. At smoking temperatures, cocaine tends to burn rather than vaporise so the amount of smoke that gets to the lungs is extremely limited.

  One solution was to create freebase, an elaborate chemical process during which the alkalide ether is used to ‘free’ the base cocaine from the hydrochloride powder form. But freebasing was incredibly dangerous – ether is highly flammable and dozens of people had burned to death in accidents. One famous incident involved the actor Richard Pryor, who set fire to himself while attempting to freebase on a plane.

  Another was basuco, a brown paste produced as a by-product of the cocaine-manufacturing process deep in the jungle laboratories of South America. But basuco looked and smelt foul and the only people who used it regularly were the street kids of Colombia, who became zombies under its powerful effects.

  Although it was the Medellin cartel that instigated the search for something as powerful as basuco but more palatable for American tastes, it was a chemist working for the rival Cali cartel that struck gold. Working on a hunch, he dissolved cocaine powder in ammonia, added water and bicarbonate of soda and heated it until the liquid boiled off. Crack cocaine had been born.

  The effect of the drug alone was enough to guarantee its success. The instant euphoria that a rock of crack produces usually lasts forty or
fifty seconds, a few minutes at the most, and a mere flash in the pan compared to the thirty-minute cocaine high or the three- to four-hour trip from a dose of heroin. But with crack, the high has no parallel. There isn’t anything else like it. Around seven per cent of cocaine users go on to develop an addiction, and even then the process can take up to eighteen months. With crack, around 80 per cent of users go on to develop an addiction, usually within two weeks of their first smoke.

  For those destined to get hooked, the first ten-dollar hit at first seems like a bargain but within minutes of their first puff, most users are begging for another hit. With each new intake the body’s resistance rises so that more and more is needed to produce the same effect.

  For its consumers the ultimate curse of crack is that, because the high is so short-lived, it’s almost impossible to overdose. If you could afford it, you could smoke your way through $2000 worth of crack within a day and still come back for more. And even if you couldn’t afford it, you’d still want to and you’d happily rob, steal or kill by way of trying. For dealers, crack is an equally intense experience. An ounce of cocaine will produce around fifty decent snorting lines but some 370 rocks of crack. For the dealer, selling the cheaper product will on average quadruple their profit margin.

  The new drug swept across America within six months, but the journey across the Atlantic took a little longer.

  In the autumn of 1986, Anthony ‘Crumpet’ Lemard choked to death on his vomit, face down in a police cell in west London. He had been arrested a few hours earlier after police were called to a block of flats a few miles away where they observed Lemard ‘going berserk’, brandishing a knife and ‘acting crazy’.

  When pathologists tested his blood and urine, they found the highest concentrations of cocaine ever seen in England. Experts were puzzled by how anyone could have taken such a huge amount. Then one official said Lemard might have been taking a new form of cocaine that enters the bloodstream more quickly and in far higher concentrations. Lemard had become Britain’s first crack victim, though it would be years before the drug itself was seen.

  Crack officially arrived in Britain in May 1988 when a few rocks were found in a council block in Handsworth, Birmingham. The following month small traces of the drug were found in a squat in Liverpool. In September of the same year a reinforced flat on the Milton Court estate in Deptford, south London, was raided and turned up the country’s first crack factory. Dozens more cropped up to replace it and the estate soon became known as Crack City.

  In November 1988 Paul Matheson, a fifteen-pounds-a-week van driver from Kingston, Jamaica, became the first man in the country to be convicted of selling, rather than simply possessing, crack cocaine. Touring the maze of walkways that made up the north Peckham estate in south London, an area once described as the most deprived housing development in Europe, Matheson and his minders would make at least a hundred deals a day. In less than six weeks he had sold more than £105,000 worth of crack until worried residents tipped off the police and he was arrested.

  At his trial Matheson explained how, despite earning thousands of pounds for his bosses, he himself earned only a flat fee of £450 per week. The court also heard how, since his arrest, Matheson’s family back in Jamaica had received numerous death threats. Not surprisingly, he refused to name his backers.

  In February 1989, a monthly youth magazine asked me to investigate the rise of crack in the UK. Despite a few isolated cases I quickly discovered that there was far more hype than hard evidence. Most of the drug-users and drug agencies I contacted had heard of it, but had not yet seen it. A few hadn’t even heard of it.

  But two months later the tabloids were going crack-crazy, an event triggered when the head of the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Robert Stutman, came to Britain and delivered to startled police and Customs officials the following ominous warning: ‘I personally guarantee you that two years from now you will have a serious crack problem – we are so saturated with cocaine in the United States, there ain’t enough noses left to use the cocaine that’s coming in.’

  By the summer of 1989, around the time I started the research for my article, the north Peckham estate’s dealers had gone to ground but I’d heard of crack being offered for sale in a couple of pubs close to Ladbroke Grove, west London, and, somewhat naively, I set off there one Thursday evening to see what I could find.

  It was dark when I arrived in the area and on my way to the first pub I bumped into a dreadlocked Rastafarian shouting and swearing at the barman who had just thrown him out. Rudy, as his name turned out to be, was steaming drunk. Well over six feet six inches tall and in his late thirties, he walked slowly with the aid of a stick – the result of a recent car accident. He was about to fall over when I caught him and listened patiently as he thanked me, then explained that he was desperate for another drink but the landlord had refused to serve him.

  With no other leads to follow up, I offered to buy him a drink in the next pub in the hope that he might know something about the local drugs scene. It turned out to be an inspired move.

  Rudy was celebrating that night because he’d just got out of prison for poncing – living off immoral earnings. Everywhere he went, local prostitutes would come out and hug him and silver BMWs with tinted windows would slow down and salute him with their horns. Rudy, I rapidly discovered, was an old-style ganja-trading Yardie, who commanded great respect around the Grove, even from the younger generation. And in his thoroughly inebriated state I was his new best friend.

  We found another pub and I bought the drinks. We sat down in a quiet corner, chatting about nothing in particular. Periodically young hoods would pass by and stop to say hello. Almost all of them had some item of ‘business’ to discuss and eyed me suspiciously. ‘Who’s your friend?’ they would ask.

  ‘He’s safe,’ Rudy would reply.

  And suddenly I was one of them. Any friend of Rudy’s was a friend of theirs. About two months of undercover work had been accomplished in less than an hour.

  Over the next week I spent every evening at the pub under some farcical pretext of having been offered a job, claiming that I was planning on moving to the area later that month and wanted to get to know my local. Thankfully no one ever thought to question this further.

  I soon became friendly with Desmond, a forty-two-year-old Jamaican fond of drinking brandy and port mixed together, who had lived in the capital for some fifteen years. As the evenings passed he began slowly to open up to me. He told me how he’d spent six years in prison for manslaughter in Jamaica after getting carried away with trying to persuade a floating voter which way to turn; how he ran a cocaine-distribution ring across the south-east of England packing the drug into tins of white Dulux paint and sending young couriers in overalls by bus, train and taxi to deliver to his small band of customers.

  He explained how, despite a makeshift den having opened up above a newsagent’s in Ladbroke Grove, crack hadn’t taken off in a big way yet – the only people who seemed interested were the long-term heroin addicts who no longer got any buzz out of their addiction. ‘But give it time,’ he told me, ‘give it time. Once you get a taste for it, you never gonna want to give it up.’

  Even before Leanne made the offer and I took her makeshift crack pipe in my hand, I knew I wanted to try it.

  I’d spent years researching the phenomenal growth of the crack market in the UK and spoken to dozens of dealers, users and recovering addicts about its effects, yet I still had trouble understanding what it was about the drug that made it impossible to say no. I had listened time and time again to people talk about the ‘intense high’, the ‘profound rush’, the ‘whole-body orgasm’ and I had read every book, leaflet and newspaper article I could find on the topic but somehow still felt I was in the dark. Part of the problem, perhaps, is that while there have been many journalists and writers who have been addicted to heroin or who have taken cocaine and ecstasy or cannabis and written eloquently and extensively about the
highs, lows and in-betweens, the same doesn’t appear to be true of crack.

  Yet the effect of crack on society is fast becoming far more devastating than that of all the other drugs combined – such is the power of the drug that it has turned thousands of addicts into criminals as they desperately search for the cash for their next fix – and the more I looked for the answers, the more it dawned on me that I was going to have to experience it first hand.

  At this point I should say that in spite of (or perhaps as a consequence of) my line of work, my experience of drugs is extremely limited. I’ve never smoked tobacco (though everyone else in my family did) and have no desire to start. I puffed away at a couple of joints as a teenager but didn’t like the feeling of being stoned so never pursued it. I’ve been offered cocaine more times than I can possibly remember but I’ve always passed simply because I never felt the need to say yes. As for ecstasy, magic mushrooms, heroin, LSD, uppers, downers, poppers, Special K, glue, I’ve been around dealers and users of them all but they’ve never appealed to me, even in the slightest.

  My one radical moment came in the late 1980s at a massive outdoor rave in the shadow of Dungeness power station when, for no good reason, I decided to try speed. Unable to find a suitable surface from which to snort the powder, I opted to swallow it instead. The only effect I remember is that I couldn’t get to sleep when I got home so I stayed up all night watching bad TV.

  Long before I met Leanne I mentioned my intentions to a couple of close friends and immediately wished I had not. One in particular was utterly appalled and shocked at what she described as my ‘wilful arrogance’ in believing that somehow I wouldn’t get hooked on a drug so powerful that it was notorious for being virtually instantly addictive.