‘The short-term ones are worrying too. I don’t like the hangover. If I have a big weekend I can get really tearful on the Tuesday or Wednesday for no reason, or I get really snappy. But not everyone thinks like that. It’s so cheap now that some people are downing them like there’s no tomorrow.’
Some experts say the rise in ecstasy production and fall in price is directly responsible for an increase in fatalities. Experts at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London linked the rise in the number of UK ecstasy deaths to the falling price of the drug, which in turn has led to increased consumption. There were twelve deaths in 1996. By 2001 this number had climbed to seventy-two and the annual death toll continues to rise.
Some of the deaths have been linked to tablets containing toxic ingredients of higher than normal concentrations of MDMA leading to accidental ‘overdose’ when the user’s body can’t cope with the effects going on for far longer than expected. In Amsterdam, users are able to have their pills tested outside clubs, a scheme said to prevent several deaths each year.
There is pressure to introduce pill testing in the UK but there are concerns that this might be seen as encouraging some to take more drugs. ‘Say you have a situation where a first-time clubber is offered a tablet by a friend,’ says one drugs officer. ‘He refuses because he doesn’t know what it contains. So the friend offers to accompany him to the testing line where they find out the tablet is pure MDMA. The whole testing process assumes that somehow pure MDMA is safer than any of the variants, but no one knows for certain if that is the case and some people are always going to be predisposed to suffering a bad reaction.’
The number of deaths is still tiny compared to the number of pills in circulation – according to the National Criminal Intelligence Service at least two million ecstasy tablets are consumed each week but this is thought to be an underestimate. Figures from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime suggest that at the start of the 1990s, one per cent of the UK population consumed ecstasy. Within little more than a decade this figure had doubled to 2.2 per cent.
But when deaths do occur they are so shocking that they always receive massive media coverage. An overheating body goes through epilepsy-like seizures, slips into a coma and bleeds through every major organ. It is, by anyone’s standards, a terrible way to die.
In July 2002 ten-year-old Jade Slack approached a friend at a house-party in Galgate near Lancaster and explained she was feeling unwell. Kim Speak rushed over. ‘She just looked different. Her pupils were massive. Her lips started to change colour to, like, a purple colour. She sat down for a few minutes but when she got up she began banging into things. She was really hot and we tried to cool her down by putting her in the shower and running her head under cold water.’ It was then that Jade admitted taking a couple of tablets. Kim asked her what they were and she replied, ‘Ecstasy.’
The ordeal continued. ‘She started slapping herself and then saying, “Stop slapping me.”’ As the horrified adults looked on, her body temperature rose from the normal 37.9°C to 42°C. Jade’s brain swelled, she suffered a heart-attack, and within a few hours had become the youngest person in the world to die from taking ecstasy.
The United Nations report published in 2003 paints an astonishing picture of just how big the industry, now producing 125 tonnes of ecstasy a year, has become in only a decade. The UN estimates that eight million people in the world now take ecstasy, a rise of 70 per cent on five years ago. The combined ecstasy and amphetamines market is worth $65 billion a year, and more people consume so-called designer drugs than heroin and cocaine combined. And the trend shows no sign of slowing down: the report found that ecstasy use was growing by 27 per cent each year. This compares to a growth rate of 8 per cent for heroin and just 1.5 per cent for cocaine.
‘The danger posed by synthetic drugs is advancing relentlessly,’ the report noted. ‘Access to chemicals, growing demand, corrupt officials, poor law enforcement, lack of extradition and/or light sentencing . . . has led to a greater involvement of criminal groups with ruthless forms of marketing.’
Which means that for men like Kenny, who have a hand in the manufacturing process, the future is looking brighter than ever. Dr Shulgin is continuing his research into psychedelics, and tens of thousands of devotees are eagerly awaiting his findings. At the same time, dozens of other researchers are attempting to synthesise ever more potent stimulants, many of which will ultimately find their way on to the street.
‘Some people are always going to be looking for a buzz and the great thing about synthetic drugs is that they can be designed to give specific effects,’ says Kenny. ‘They design the individual molecules just like architects design houses. They reckon synthetic cocaine is about forty times stronger than the real thing. I heard about five people died the first time they tried it because they didn’t realise how powerful it was going to be. It’s not big now because there’s no need for it, but who knows what’s going to happen in the future? This is where the future is. Even if they manage to get rid of every poppy field in Afghanistan, torch every coca plantation in Bolivia, we’ll still be here and our market will be bigger than ever.’
PEOPLE-SMUGGLING
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
As soon as David Bell pulled open the heavy metal doors, he knew that something was terribly wrong.
The Dover-based Customs officer was carrying out a routine inspection of an articulated lorry that had just disembarked a ferry from Zeebrugge. The manifest said the vehicle was transporting fresh produce so the interior should have been chilled, but as the doors swung open Bell was hit by a blast of intense, fetid heat.
At first the interior of the fifty-foot long container offered no explanation. Boxes of tomatoes on wooden pallets were piled ceiling high and nothing more could be seen. Bell climbed a ladder and tried to see what lay beyond, but when that failed, he called on two freight supervisors, Barry Betts and Darren Bailey, to help unload the lorry’s cargo.
And that was when they found the body.
The Chinese teenager was sprawled across the corrugated metal floor, half naked and half buried by the scattered crates and boxes. It looked as though he had been trying to reach the main doors by squeezing through a gap under the pallets, but they had collapsed on top of him.
As Betts climbed in and began clearing crates from around the man’s body, he saw another, that of a young girl, lying on her back with her mouth open and eyes closed. He pulled out his torch and pointed it into the darkness. At first he thought the floor was covered with more crates. Then, as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he realised he was staring at a sea of bodies.
Some looked as though they had died peacefully, holding hands and lying down as if they were simply going to sleep. Others had spent their last moments in agony, their fingers torn and bloody as they had tried desperately to claw their way out of what had become their tomb.
As his torch beam picked out the individual figures, Betts caught a movement. One man was weakly tapping on the side of the container, trying to attract his attention: he was barely conscious and gasping, ‘Bang wo, bang wo’ – ‘Help me’. Then another young man, bare-chested and dripping with sweat, moved towards the open doors, climbing over the bodies to get there.
Within an hour the team had removed a total of fifty-eight corpses – fifty-four men and four women. The two men they had seen moving were the only ones left alive.
In the words of the head of the National Crime Squad: ‘People-smuggling is not a crime, it is the crime, the crime of the future.’
At present at least six hundred thousand people enter the EU illegally each year and around 80 per cent of them are brought in by criminal gangs. With conservative estimates putting the value of the business at around £20 billion, people-smuggling is easily as lucrative as the drugs trade, but even with recent increases in sentences, the penalties for those who are caught remain far lower. And it’s a business experiencing rapid growth. In 1991 a mere sixty-one people were discovered trying to ente
r Britain clandestinely. In 2002, 21,000 were caught. Despite millions spent on additional security measures, thousands still slip through undetected.
At the turn of the millennium the world population stood at around 6.5 billion. By the year 2025 it will be 8.5 billion. In forty-two countries, twenty-four in Africa, ten in the Middle East, the population doubles every twenty-five years. India increases its population by the size of the population of Iceland every four days, and by the size of Norway’s every three months.
What all this means is that the greatest growth in world population is set to come from the poorest countries. This in turn means that in the future, as now, the people-trafficking gangs will have a never-ending supply of ‘clients’ who, for purely economic reasons, will pay them handsomely to be smuggled from one country to another.
The vast sums to be made mean the gangs are able to invest heavily in the latest technology to stay one step ahead of the authorities. ‘The gangs have infrastructures, communications and surveillance capabilities far in excess of anything that the law-enforcement agencies in transit and source countries can muster,’ Stephen Boys Smith, head of the UK Immigration Service, said in a written submission to Parliament in 2002. ‘The ease with which they operate across international boundaries means that the chances of their activities diminishing are negligible.’
The tragedy at Dover alerted many to the scale of the problem, but it wasn’t the first time lives had been lost. In 1995, eighteen Chinese suffocated in a sealed trailer as it crossed Hungary. A year later, five bodies were found in a truck crossing the Austrian border, and in January 2002, a container ship docked in Seattle with eighteen Chinese in the hold. Three were dead and had sunk down into the filth at the bottom of the container, while the remainder were only hours from starvation.
In each of these cases, responsibility for the deaths falls to members of one of the largest, most sophisticated and most powerful criminal organisations anywhere in the world: the Triads.
In 1985 the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee on the Chinese Community in Britain reported the total absence of Triads in the UK. ‘The myth flourishes despite the absence of any evidence whatever to sustain it,’ their report concluded. ‘It is true, of course, that any Chinese criminals in Britain are likely to have contacts in Hong Kong but no one was able to provide us with any evidence or even reasonable suspicion of links between criminal activities or organisations in Britain and Hong Kong and Macao.’
The Triads have been a presence in Britain since the beginning of the twentieth century and, as one of the oldest of all the criminal gangs, they are undoubtedly the best established of all the international groups currently operating in the UK.
Triads were originally established as secret societies set up to overthrow the unpopular Han dynasty in China that ruled from 206 BC to AD 220. As with many other organised-crime groups, in time the Triads went from being protectors of the people to running protection rackets within their midst. Today they are a significant presence in every city with a sizeable Chinese population. Traditionally their main criminal activities have been extortion, loan-sharking, credit-card fraud and video piracy. The vast majority of the extortion takes place within the Chinese community, the victims being restaurants and other businesses. Even though the practice is widespread and occasionally, when payment is not forthcoming, results in violence or acts of criminal damage, only a handful of cases are ever reported to the police.
In recent years the Triads have become heavily involved in the far more profitable business of people-smuggling, bringing tens of thousands of Chinese into the UK, some of whom claim asylum but most of whom simply vanish into the tight-knit community, working in the back rooms of restaurants, sweat-shops and food-processing plants. It is estimated that more than four hundred thousand people have paid the gangs up to £20,000 for a ticket to the UK in the last ten years.
Full members of the Triads undergo an elaborate initiation ceremony where they swear thirty-six oaths of allegiance to the organisation and pledge to accept death ‘by myriad swords’ should they ever betray their Triad brothers.
It is for this reason that acts of violence carried out by Triad ‘soldiers’ usually involve the victim being ‘chopped’ – attacked with meat cleavers or melon knives – to maintain the ancient symbolism. Such attacks are rarely intended to be fatal: the principal targets are the main muscles, including the calves, thighs, forearms and biceps, though the scalp is often slashed too. The hideously scarred amputees who survive are a living warning to others in the community that the Triads are not to be crossed. But knives have also been the weapon of choice for murder.
According to the National Criminal Intelligence Service there are four main Triad gangs operating in Britain: the Wo Shing Wo, the Sui Fong (also known as the Wo On Lok), the 14K and the San Yee On. For the most part they manage to live in reasonable harmony, but every now and then violence flares up, sometimes for the most unlikely reasons.
In June 2002 alleged Triad leader Mann Chung Li, also known as Michael Lee, head chef at the Tin Tin Cantonese restaurant in Wolverhampton, was brutally murdered during a mass brawl between his own men and a rival gang. The battle, which took place in a crowded casino in the heart of Birmingham’s Chinatown, had been arranged because Li was accused of ignoring another alleged Triad leader, Phillip Hung Chan, at a wedding earlier in the year.
With his smart tailored suits, dapper moustache and slicked-back hair, Phillip Hung Chan looks every inch the successful businessman. As manager of the popular Happy Gathering restaurant in Northampton, the softly spoken fifty-six-year-old had built a reputation for being polite and attentive. He played host to visiting dignitaries and local VIPs, ensuring his high standing in Britain’s tightly knit Chinese community.
‘Face’ is a key notion in Chinese society. Loss of face, which usually comes about as the result of being embarrassed or humiliated in public, brings shame not only to the person concerned but to the whole family, including its ancestors. At the wedding Li refused to talk to Chan, who lost face as a result. What to Western eyes appeared a trivial dispute quickly escalated into something far more serious, and over the next few weeks the tensions between the two men grew to the point at which it was agreed that their differences could be sorted out only with extreme violence.
On the afternoon of 25 June 2002, after a bout of heavy drinking, Chan made a number of calls to London and put together a group of fighters who were to travel up to Birmingham as quickly as possible. Within two hours a two-car convoy of nine heavily armed thugs was racing up the Ml. Chan called Li to tell him what he had done and set up a meeting. Li immediately began to assemble a team of his own, and more than a dozen hardened fighters from Birmingham’s Chinatown collected weapons and made their way to the casino.
Just before midnight Chan and nine others entered the China Palace and immediately sought out Li, who was waiting in the bar area. Violence erupted almost instantly. Terrified gamblers ran for cover as around thirty men from the two gangs pulled out their weapons and rushed at each other.
The members of both gangs had clearly been told to target those at the heart of the dispute. Within ninety seconds Li had been stabbed and slashed at least sixteen times. As he collapsed near the casino entrance in a mass of blood, Chan screamed and staggered back, the handle of a ceremonial dagger sticking out of his stomach. The fighting continued. Another member of Chan’s gang, Feng-Ching Lim, was stabbed five times, three others were stabbed and one man was badly injured after being bludgeoned with an ashtray.
One man tried to flee, but was set upon by two men with machetes who hacked into his body again and again. One blow penetrated his skull. Witnesses saw several men running out of the casino, hiding bloody knives and swords in their clothes as they climbed into cars to make their escape.
Police arrived within minutes and saw a scene of mayhem. ‘There was blood everywhere, and a full box of chef’s knives that were to have been used as weapons,’ said Detective
Sergeant Dominic Kennedy.
During a three-month trial, the dock at Birmingham Crown Court was crammed with defendants, interpreters – translating into Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka – and security guards.
In his defence, Chan, who made a full recovery from his injuries, claimed that Li was far more than a chef. ‘He was a very dangerous man. He had many men under his control. He was involved in running prostitution, illegal gambling clubs and in bringing illegal immigrants to the UK. He was a leader of the Triads. I was very frightened of him,’ he told the court.
Police uncovered evidence that Li was linked to a Triad human-trafficking gang and regularly provided accommodation and work to illegal immigrants who had been smuggled into the country. Other defendants said the exact opposite was true and that it was Chan who was the Triad leader. This, they explained, was the reason that his restaurant was so favoured by dignitaries and why he was able to recruit a band of fighters within the space of a few hours. They said Li’s murder was part of an attempt by one gang to take over the people-smuggling operation of the other.
Where once drug-trafficking and extortion were the big money-spinners, the trade in human cargo is now just as lucrative. And whenever there is money to be made, there is potential for conflict. At first it seemed as though all the fighting was confined to the long-established Triad gangs in the UK whose roots are in Hong Kong. But now there is a new, far more deadly enemy.
Gangs Page 31