Gangs

by Tony Thompson

  After his arrest Anderton claimed he had been told that the Angels had drawn up a ‘death list’, containing the names of several Outcasts who were to be ‘killed on sight’. Anderton had previously been a ‘prospect’ member of the Angels. He left for unknown reasons and was believed to have been placed on the death list because he was considered a traitor. (The two men murdered at the Rockers Reunion were also former Angels associates.) Fearing for his life, Anderton moved from Essex to Dorset and armed himself with the handgun. He claimed the other weapons and the drugs were merely being stored at his property.

  The Outcasts subsequently disbanded and joined forces with the Midland Outlaws who, in early 2000, were awarded a charter by the US Outlaws and officially welcomed into their fold. The multi-feathered headdress has gone, replaced by the skull and crossed pistons.

  Since the start of the new millennium the biker world has been relatively quiet. But there are stormclouds on the horizon. And the biggest battle of all might be waiting in the wings. While the Nordic Biker War was raging and even when it was over, the big question was when the hostilities would reach the UK. ‘You guys in Britain are sitting on a delayed-action timebomb,’ warned Sergeant Jean-Pierre Levesque of Canada’s Criminal Intelligence, one of the world’s experts on biker gangs. ‘I think what is happening in Scandinavia will have to happen in the rest of Europe. I’m surprised that Britain hasn’t been hit yet.’

  At the time the main reason given was that the Bandidos had no representation in the UK. Even with the Midland Outlaws (subsequently the Outlaws) pledging support, the situation was never going to be as tense as it would be if there were bikers riding around with Bandidos colours on their backs on British soil. Even with their numbers dwindling, the combined might of the Angels would still outnumber any single prospect club, making it impossible for the Bandidos to get a foothold anywhere in the UK.

  However, in early 2003 the Bandidos opened chapters on two of the most southerly parts of Great Britain, the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey. The Bandidos arrived in Guernsey after absorbing an existing gang, the Islanders, who were made prospects soon after their clubhouse was raided by police and a significant number of drugs and weapons were found. Guernsey also supports a small branch of the Bandidos’ ‘sister’ club, the Outlaws.

  Nearby Jersey also has branches of both the Bandidos and the Outlaws. The current membership of both gangs throughout the Channel Islands is unknown but, with no Hells Angels on either island, many within the biking world believe this is just the beginning.

  ‘The Bandidos are one of the most formidable and violent biker gangs in existence,’ says the outlaw biker specialist at the National Criminal Intelligence Service. ‘They have strong links to the drugs trade and have shown themselves more than willing to defend their turf with violence. They have been responsible for dozens of murders, many of them committed in broad daylight with no regard for public safety. They have access to military-grade weapons, including rocket launchers and assault rifles. In September 2003 they punished their former leader in Copenhagen for leaving by planting a massive bomb under his car. The blast was so huge it could be heard miles away. The Bandidos have been expanding ever since the sixties and show no sign of slowing down. It is unlikely they will stop at one or two British chapters. The significance of seeing the first Bandidos chapter on UK soil cannot be understated.’

  Detectives in Britain and across Europe are watching events on the Channel Islands with great interest.

  CANNABIS

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Jason points a stubby finger across the street as a heavily laden tram passes by. ‘Just through there, you see it? That’s where it is,’ he says softly. ‘I’m telling you, that’s the Piccadilly Circus of drugs dens. It’s where just about every major gang in the South-east gets their gear from.’

  Jason should know. He spent a frantic eight months working for a major cannabis-trafficking gang based in Essex before deciding to retire. During that time he helped to import more than a tonne of high-quality cannabis and never once got caught.

  Jason and I are in Amsterdam, standing just off the Damrak on the edge of the red-light district looking at a small coffee shop on a corner a few streets away. Jason, who has no desire to see the owners again, waits elsewhere while I go for a closer look. Inside, the smoky interior is tastefully laid out with dark-wood booths and mirrors. A menu at the counter shows that Thai grass is available at four euros fifty per gram, skunk at five euros and the subtly named AK47 at seven fifty while Nepalese hash weighs in at ten euros. The crowd is made up mostly of tourists, some American, most British, whose eyes have glazed over as they enjoy the delights of being able to smoke a joint without fear of arrest.

  Cannabis was first decriminalised and coffee shops introduced in Holland in 1976. The experiment was introduced to reflect what the Dutch see as a fact of life: most young people experiment with illegal substances. If you let them buy and use ‘soft’ drugs in a regulated setting, you can keep them away from street dealers pushing highly addictive ‘hard’ drugs like heroin. The approach appears to be working so far as drug use among the Dutch is concerned – only 26 per cent of the Dutch will use cannabis in their lifetime compared to 66 per cent of Britons – but Amsterdam has become a centre of organised crime.

  In the early days, coffee shops sold mostly imported cannabis resin but now the market is increasingly being dominated by Dutch-grown grass. Although Holland’s climate is not particularly conducive to growing marijuana, the use of artificial lighting for indoor growing has become highly advanced. There are now hundreds of named varieties of seeds available and large-scale cultivation supplies the coffee shops with a good range of exotic herbs.

  As part of a scheme to reduce criminal infiltration of the cannabis market, Dutch law allows anyone to grow up to a dozen plants in their home for their personal consumption. Commercial growing, however, remains illegal, so the vast indoor greenhouses that supply most of the coffee shops keep their locations as secret as possible.

  Today, coffee shops can sell up to five grams of cannabis per transaction, as long as they obey five rules: no minors, no alcohol sales, no hard-drug sales, no advertising and no ‘public nuisance’. They are also limited to holding no more than 500 grams of stock at any one time, but this rule is almost always broken, particularly at the bigger shops.

  Because cannabis is decriminalised rather than legalised, it creates a bizarre Catch-22 situation: coffee-shop owners can sell small amounts of cannabis to customers but it is illegal for them to purchase the bulk supplies they need to keep stock. It’s known as the front-door/back-door problem: if the Dutch government tolerates people going in at the front door of the coffee shop, what about the back door, the supply? Unofficially police authorities allow ‘ethical dealers’ – individual small-scale suppliers supposedly untainted by international trafficking rings – to handle transactions. But the truth is that more than 90 per cent of Amsterdam’s coffee shops are controlled by organised crime.

  Huge quantities smuggled in from abroad or grown on the secret farms are distributed to the coffee shops by gangsters, who sell off the excess to anyone who can afford it. Certain coffee shops – like the one Jason had pointed out to me – are particularly well known for this. Providing you know the owner, you are allowed to enter via the rear door and make your way up to the office above the main bar where you can negotiate for as many kilos as you like of whatever you fancy.

  Living on the edge of criminality, Jason first got involved when he started selling puff for a notorious local villain, Syd. ‘Selling the stuff had shown me how easy it was to make a little bit of money at that end and I knew that the profits from smuggling were going to be much higher. Syd seemed to be doing very well out of it and I wanted some of what he had.

  ‘But Syd had doubts. He was worried about the fact that, at the time, I’d never been abroad in my life – I’d only got a passport for the first time a week or so earlier. He’d decided to sti
ck to his usual team but then Fate lent a helping hand. One of the crew, a guy called Paul, got himself arrested for breaching a warrant banning him from entering Belgium. He had just been caught out by a routine Customs check as he was getting off the boat and they discovered he was the subject of a ten-year ban. It all meant that the gang was one man short for the next trip so Syd called on me.

  ‘We met up with another member of the team, Peter, and made our way to Folkestone. On the way Syd told me that he wanted me to go to Amsterdam with him to meet John, his main contact over there because, with Paul in prison, I’d be making the trips over there to complete the first stage in the smuggling process.

  ‘All I had to do was to pick up the drugs in Amsterdam, having negotiated a good price, then drive them all the way to Belgium – there’s no border between the two countries so I didn’t have to worry about being stopped unless I did something really silly or I was just plain unlucky. Once in Belgium, Syd would meet me at the beach in his specially adapted speedboat. I’d load the drugs in and he’d set off back to England where he would make for a secluded beach and meet his friend Jack, who would help to unload the drugs. Once Syd was on his way, I’d be free to make my own way back on the ferry and, even if I did get stopped and searched, there would be nothing to incriminate me. I have to admit, it sounded like a pretty good plan and the two grand a time he promised me for the work sounded even better.

  ‘We got to Folkestone and Syd pulled out a bundle of cash from his bag to cover the cost of the tickets. “How much you got in there anyway?” I said, as a joke, really. Syd looked at me. “Eighty grand.” He said it so casually, I tried not to sound like I’d never seen that much money before in my life. “Oh. Right. Drinks are on you, then.” I guess until that point I hadn’t realised the scale of his operation.

  ‘We finally got to Ostend in the early hours of the morning and I drove all the way to Amsterdam along the coast road. By the time we pulled into the centre of the city and Syd told me where to park, I was absolutely knackered.

  ‘We walked to the café, which is on a road that runs parallel to the Damrak and nearly opposite a police station. When we arrived John wasn’t there and we waited in the bar. The place was full of English blokes just like us, none of whom were smoking. And in every group, there would be one bloke holding a bag just a little bit too carefully. And slowly I realised that everyone there had come to do a deal.

  ‘This tall blond guy with a pushbike arrived and put his head through the door. He saw the three of us sitting there, stared at us for a minute, and then came over and introduced himself. Syd and John were being really friendly – over-friendly. It was obvious that they hadn’t actually met before. John had been in prison in Britain at the same time as Syd and they had been put in touch with each other through a mutual friend.

  ‘John invited us all upstairs to the flat above the café. The place was full of masses of video equipment with loads of cameras trained on the café below. Apart from that, the room was very basic with a large table, one big corner sofa, a couple of chairs and a ski-machine for exercising.

  ‘We all sat around drinking coffee and chatting about drugs and exchange rates because everything there was bought in guilders. He also explained that he had no drugs for us to buy and could not say when there might be some as there was currently a shortage across the whole of Amsterdam. He simply didn’t know whether it would be soon or not. Syd decided that he couldn’t take the money with him back to England so he decided to leave it with John – I guess he trusted the guy completely by then. It was left that John would contact Syd, and I would go over and do the deal with John to ensure the exchange rate was correct.

  ‘A couple of days later, Syd rang to say that the drugs were ready to be picked up. It was time to go abroad again. I drove over to Syd’s and then followed him in his car to the pub where we had met Pete the last time round. The three of us then went to a cashpoint in Clacton where Syd took out two hundred and fifty pounds – money to cover our expenses.

  ‘It was another overnight ferry so it was nearly ten a.m. the following morning when we met John in Amsterdam. We agreed a price of £1150 per kilo, which gave us just under seventy kilos of top-quality cannabis resin. The drugs themselves weren’t kept at the café so we had to wait for them to be brought to us. One of John’s business partners pulled up outside the café in a brand new Merc about three hours later with the drugs in his boot. Rather than just taking them there and then, I asked him to guide me to the main road out of the city so I didn’t end up driving round in circles for hours. Once I knew where I was, he pulled over and we swapped the drugs over from the boot of his car to mine and then I set off towards Belgium.

  ‘We only made one stop on the way – at a payphone to call Syd and let him know that we were on our way to Blankenberg. He had a four-hour journey across the English Channel and wasn’t particularly keen to leave unless he knew we definitely had the goods. I could hear the excitement in his voice as I told him that everything was fine and that we’d meet up with him as planned. It was the first time he had done any proper smuggling since he’d been sent to prison back in 1990. As far as he was concerned, the good old days were back again.

  ‘We made really good time and got to Blankenberg about three hours early. The area had been chosen because it had a perfect ready-made smuggling spot that Syd had taken advantage of many times in the past. If you stand on the pier and look out to sea, on your left is a beautiful, ten-mile-long sandy beach. On your right there are three or four really ugly great concrete pipes, which take sewage or something into the sea. The pipes stick up out of the water a good few feet and Syd was planning to bring the boat up by the second pipe on the right. That way he’d be hidden from the beach and the pier.’

  The pair had been given a Marine Band radio to communicate with Syd once he got within range. Although he had a satellite-navigation system on the boat it was only accurate to within twenty metres and he would need guidance for the final approach. Jason and Peter planned to flash a torch out to sea to help Syd find their position.

  ‘We soon saw the silhouette of the boat come into view, packed all the drugs in and then Peter climbed on board. Syd turned to me, a big grin on his face. “Call Jack, tell him that it’s all going to plan.” The boat had come so far into shore that it had virtually been grounded, I had to push it back out to sea and the water was coming up to my chest. I pushed the boat as hard as I could but it just couldn’t seem to break free of the waves that were pushing it back to shore. Then suddenly, the propeller caught and it shot off into the darkness. I was soaking wet and walked slowly back to the car where I changed into my tracksuit bottoms and trainers. It was absolutely freezing and so was the water, but I was so worked up with the adrenaline that I couldn’t feel the cold at all. I was shaking, but it was with excitement. All my nerves and fear had gone and all I could think was, Fuck, I’ve done it. I’ve got away with it. I’ve got to admit, it was a great feeling.’

  Jason made the short drive from Blankenberg to Ostend, arriving just in time to learn that he had missed the last ferry. The next one didn’t leave until seven the following morning, which in turn meant he would not be at home until the middle of the following afternoon. Not wanting to spend the night in his car he decided instead to drive to Calais where a ferry to Dover would be leaving at two thirty a.m.

  ‘When I reached the French-Belgian border, I got pulled over by one of the guards and asked where I was going. They searched my car and found my wet clothes in the boot and asked what I’d been up to. I was feeling confident and cocky – after all, there was nothing to link me to any kind of drug-smuggling. I had nothing to fear. I told the guard that I’d been playing around in the sea earlier that day and I’d missed the last ferry home from Ostend so I decided to go back via Calais so that I’d still be home the following morning. He looked a bit suspicious but checked my passport, ran my name through the computer and let me go.

  ‘I got to Calais and, on my way
to the boat, I got pulled over by French Customs. “Fucking hell,” I said. “I’ve already been searched once tonight.” The guy’s face didn’t even break into a grin let alone a smile. “Not by me you haven’t.” He proceeded to give the car a really good going-over but, of course, couldn’t find anything so he let me get on the boat. I tried to get to sleep on the ferry but I couldn’t because the crossing was so rough. Once we got to Dover, the only thing on my mind was getting back home and going to bed as quickly as possible.

  ‘I drove the car off through Customs and, as sod’s law would have it, I got pulled over again. I was so tired, so totally exhausted, that I just couldn’t handle it. I freaked out. I was swearing and shouting and going on about the fact that I must have some kind of guilty sign stamped on my forehead because I’d been pulled over twice already. In the end I think they felt sorry for me. They just photocopied my passport and let me go home.

  ‘We did another run a few weeks later, then another, and before I knew it I felt like a veteran. When it came to the fifth time Peter was off on holiday so Syd wanted me to find someone to go to Amsterdam with me – I’d be running the whole thing. It also meant I’d be the one going back in the boat. For my trouble I’d get double the usual fee.

  ‘The next day Syd gave me seventy grand and strict instructions to try and get grass rather than resin, even though it was bulkier and a lot harder to handle. There was, of course, method in his madness. Syd charged three hundred pounds per kilo to import drugs. It didn’t matter what he was importing, that was the amount he charged. Because grass was a bit cheaper per kilo than resin, it meant we came back with an extra thirty or so kilos, which meant that Syd earned an extra nine thousand for taking exactly the same risk. Clever boy, old Syd.