by Neil Woods
It was a very repetitive story. Pat’s team would make a few buys, but the second they’d enquire about the Burgers, or any other real gangster, they’d hit what Pat’s notes described as a ‘wall of fuck off ’. The Burgers knew our tactics – they weren’t letting anyone get close.
According to Intel, a team of six Burgers had come up from Birmingham, led by a heavy-hitter gangster named Jackson. Jackson’s name had come up in several major investigations and been placed by witnesses in the car when Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis were gunned down. But he had never been convicted.
As I read the file I resolved to myself that it was time this foul bastard was put away. But this crew were ruthless, brutal, professional criminals. I would have to work this hard, from the gutter up.
It was desolate. The casualties were everywhere, staggering around like the walking wounded, frantically trying to beg, steal or scam their way to the next fix. But there was something else at work here, something darker even than what I had seen in Nottingham or Leicester. I walked the streets for days just trying to figure out why these streets seemed so creepily isolated and desperate.
I was trudging through a park, stepping over discarded needles, when it hit me. I couldn’t spot a single little gang, as I had in Mansfield. The street addicts here worked alone. They walked fast, keeping to themselves, their eyes fixed on the pavement. This isolation infected the whole city with a rank air of nervous paranoia.
It also made it hard to establish any kind of initial contact. One day followed another and I couldn’t see any way to even start a conversation that wouldn’t immediately mark me out as a suspicious outsider. It was one thing to walk up to a group of guys who were already hanging out and chatting, but here no one stayed in one place long enough for me to make a realistic approach.
But I couldn’t just hang around observing people. The investigation had to move forward. The DI for the case was an excellent detective named Max Copeland, but the Cover Officer, Gino Rossi, had a real push to get the job done. I could sense a growing impatience, and knew I had to show some progress.
I decided to play rattling. A junkie desperate enough for a fix will approach anyone. I would just have to get the body language exactly right: the shortness of breath, the hands fluttering with nervous energy, the eyes darting around for any scrap of opportunity.
It still took me hours of watching and waiting, but finally I spotted my mark.
He was yellow. Literally. His skin was bright, Bart Simpson-yellow. One look and you could tell he was an intravenous heroin user. This was liver damage caused by hepatitis C from a dirty needle. I could also tell he was on his way to score. There’s a walk that junkies do when they need a fix, a sort of intense, focused stride, trying not to draw attention, but also desperately trying to move as fast as possible towards the gear.
‘Oi mate – mate – you going to buy?’ I rasped to him in my junkie whisper.
Yellow Man just kept on walking, his eyes tracking the pavement. I had to jog to catch up.
‘Mate, it’s just I need something, know what I mean? If you can sort it, I’ll give you half my bag.’
He stopped dead in his tracks. ‘Half a bag?’
‘Yeah man, yeah – I just need something, y’know?’ I rubbed my hands together and fidgeted on the spot, simulating the ragged nerves of the junkie rattle.
‘All right, yeah,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘It’s a bit of a walk, but I can sort it.’
But then, just as we were moving off together, another bloke appeared from round the corner and walked straight up to my new friend. ‘We going to get this gear, yeah… fuck the trek across town, I’ll pay a taxi.’
This was weird. This new character wore a white knitted jumper, with a tidy crew cut and trimmed goatee. He was obviously no street junkie, but there was an intensity about him, a frightening kind of hyper-focused energy that only really serious addicts can attain.
Then the situation got even stranger.
Crew Cut turned and bellowed at the top of his lungs down an alley, ‘Oi, you fucking coming or what?’ Another figure crept up. This guy was deep into his rattle. He was so cramped up he was having trouble walking straight and his clothes were drenched in sweat. Without a word he joined our group, and off we went.
I didn’t like anything about this. We were a freak show of four obviously drugged-out basket cases in a town where the junkies kept themselves purposely isolated. But dropping out now wasn’t an option. No addict backs out on the way to a fix – and I had already waited too long to make a connection in this city.
So we piled into a taxi, Yellow Man up front and Crew Cut, Rattler and I crammed in the back. There was something about Crew Cut. I recognised him. I’d seen him before. But where? It must have been another drug deal in another town, but by now I’d done too many to be sure.
I could see his eyes flicking over to me as well. This was grim. In my line of work having your face spotted by the wrong person means a bullet.
Eventually the tension became too much to bear. ‘Oi mate’, I said, leaning over, ‘don’t I know you from Leicester?’
Crew Cut’s head snapped round. ‘No names,’ he snarled, ‘no fucking names.’ Then, almost under his breath, he growled enigmatically, ‘Yeah, I’ve been to Leicester.’
And that was it. The two of us sat in dead silence, eyes straight ahead, for the rest of the journey, as Rattler slumped between us trembling in the cramped personal hell of his withdrawal.
We piled out, Crew Cut paid the fare and the three of us waited while Yellow Man disappeared to make the score. Crew Cut said he knew some disused toilets, so our ragged band set off once again.
On the way, I managed to get Yellow Man chatting. ‘Yeah, I’ve not scored around these parts for a while. I’ve just been on remand for a week – all my usual guys already changed their numbers.’
‘Fuck, you’ve just come off a week’s remand? So, you’ve done your rattle?’
‘Aye, I’ve done the rattle… but you know what it’s like.’
This was worrying. Most heroin overdoses occur in the first week after withdrawal. People’s tolerances are down, but they shoot their usual dose anyway and their systems just can’t take it. The last thing I needed was for this guy, already weak with hep C, turning from yellow to blue and overdosing on me.
Finally, we crossed a scraggy patch of grass and made it to the derelict toilets where we were meant to do our business. The thick layers of dust couldn’t camouflage the decades-old stink of stale piss. Yellow Man, Crew Cut and Rattler sat straight down and started cooking up. I ended up standing between them, awkwardly explaining how I was going to smoke my bit at home.
At the same time I had to make sure that Yellow Man took his half of the wrap before he handed it to me. If I took my half and then gave the rest to him, it could be argued that technically I had supplied him with drugs, and thus my evidence was obtained illegally.
Just as I was finessing this arrangement, Yellow Man piped up, ‘Ah fuck man, we’ve only got two filters.’
Crew Cut just shrugged. ‘Nah man, I’m fine without.’
Now I was genuinely stressed. Smack addicts cleanse their gear by sucking it through a cigarette filter. Shooting with no filter very quickly leads to blood clots and strokes. So, not only was I now worrying that Yellow Man was going to OD, but also that Crew Cut was about to give himself a pulmonary embolism. In my head I started doing the maths on how long it would take me to sprint back across that patch of wasteland and flag down an ambulance.
Yellow Man and Rattler sucked massive shots through their filters, tapped their veins and slammed their needles home. They were both squirters. I had to sidestep as two jets of blood arced out, splattering on the floor. Each fat drop of blood caused a little puff of dust to rise up, swimming and circling in the grimy half-light.
Then I watched in horror as Crew Cut sucked his own dose right off the spoon, dropped his pants and shot straight into his femoral vein.
When you shoot into the femoral, the wound never heals. It just forms a kind of valve, and you can keep shooting into the same spot again and again. This is convenient as it means there are no track-marks or dead black veins running up and down your body – but it also means that any potential septicaemia or embolism is going straight to your brain. To do a femoral shot with no filter is Russian roulette – there’s about a one-in-six chance you’re going to die.
I kept my eyes fixed on Crew Cut as he held his penis aside and slid the needle into his upper thigh. He wobbled, but didn’t fall. Then his arm shot out and he steadied himself against the cubicle wall.
It was only then that I could exhale in relief. The most disturbing thing was that I could tell he knew exactly what he was doing. There was an element of death wish about this guy that was terrifying just to be around.
I turned round just in time to see Yellow Man and Rattler both lolling into full-on heroin nods, every muscle in their bodies turning to cottage cheese. But as he slipped away, Yellow Man managed to drag his hands, still covered in blood, all over his face.
‘Uhh mate… I think you’ve got a little something there’. My gallows humour got the better of me.
Rattler looked up and slurred out his first words of the entire afternoon. ‘Fuuuuck maaan… your face – it’s got all blood on it… ’
Yellow Man was so high he could barely talk. He just lifted his palms and, in a slow, smacked-out parody of washing, smeared the blood all over himself. He ended up with a grotesque marbled effect of pink blood on yellow skin.
‘Yeah mate, that’s a bit better,’ I said, trying to comfort him.
He immediately fell back into a deep nod, and I had to just stand there for fifteen endless minutes, watching these guys float away while making sure that no one stopped breathing. Eventually I got them to their feet and we all walked back towards town with Crew Cut still giving me the evil eye, and the other two doing the classic heroin zombie shuffle.
We parted company outside the station. As I walked away I realised I hadn’t even managed to get a name, let alone a dealer’s phone number.
Thinking back now, I have no doubt that every one of those three is dead. Yellow Man with his hepatitis, Crew Cut with his death wish, and Rattler sucking such gratuitously huge shots into his needle. That’s what the War on Drugs had turned Northampton into: a city thick with fear, exploitation and death, where the most vulnerable people were forced to isolate themselves in the shadows.
This was the city I was now trying to infiltrate.
It was desperately hard going. People in Northampton knew that to introduce the wrong person to a drug dealer meant getting beaten, shot or worse, so they had become suspicious of any unfamiliar face. In my early jobs I could make a connection in days; now it took weeks of slow legend-building and trying to establish trust.
Very gradually though, I began to weave myself into the life of the city’s drug-addict underworld. Working out of a shabby ex-local authority flat, rented under a false name by EMSOU, I spent day after day begging and shoplifting my way into friendships with several local characters.
There was Joni, the Big Issue seller who we all called Uma because her only outfit was a bright yellow tracksuit, like a street junkie version of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.
There were Ned and George, a young gay couple in their early twenties who had run away from home in North Wales to be together, but ended up addicted to smack in the squats of Northampton.
There was Ellie, a gentle, intelligent woman who worked out of a flat with no heating or hot water, selling the only thing she had left to feed her all-consuming habit.
As before, I worked my way in with the odd gift of a DVD or pair of trainers; I’d say I’d nicked them but couldn’t sell them on. I soon realised that I also needed to target a very specific sort of person: the kind ones.
Anyone selfish or hard-nosed was useless to me. They acted in their own interests, and were too afraid of the gangsters to even talk to me.
What I needed were the generous ones – the people whose resolve would break when I played rattling and they saw another person in pain. Every addict knows the coruscating agony of withdrawal, but only some will reach out a helping hand. My job was to identify those with a generous, sympathetic streak to their characters – then to ruthlessly exploit it.
This was how I got in with Angus and Sara. They were a sweet couple, locked together by addiction but also by genuine love. She got up at dawn to grab the best pitches for selling the Big Issue; he walked with a cane from childhood polio, so begged and hustled as best he could. They were exactly the type of soft touches that I could play on to make the connections I needed.
They were also in trouble themselves.
As a result of his disability, Angus had been given a car by the local authority. Being drug addicts, they immediately decided to fund their habits in the most effective way possible, and started using the car to do a bit of dealing.
But of course, you can’t just pick up and start dealing in a town run by gangsters. It wasn’t that Angus and Sara were ever going to become rivals to the Burger Bar Boys – the threat came from their own customers.
Imagine you’re an addict. Now imagine you get arrested for possession. The cops offer you a deal: they’ll let you off – if you give them information on your dealer. Now you have a choice – you can grass up the Burger Bar Boys and get shot, or you can rat on Angus and Sara, the sweet couple with the red Ford Cortina. The police don’t care – either way it’s an arrest and their monthly statistics look a bit rosier.
Angus and Sara lasted two months before they were ratted out and busted. They were on bail when I met them, terrified of being split up when they inevitably got sent to prison.
This was yet another archetypal War on Drugs story. A tactic is developed to catch gangsters, but ends up directly protecting them, and targeting low-level users instead. The cops don’t even care that they’re being played – on paper they’re still making busts.
But I was able to use Angus and Sara’s worries to gain their friendship. I played even more down-and-out than usual and appealed to them as a fellow sufferer. I knew I was manipulating them and putting their lives at risk. But this was a war, and I had a mission.
I also had commanders – and they were becoming impatient. Max and Gino wanted to start seeing results. As much as I tried to explain that I could buy off as many other users as I wanted, but it wouldn’t get me any closer to the Burger Bar Boys, Gino didn’t care. He wanted to see numbers. How many buys was I making? How many contacts was I picking up?
Gino was a brash, laddish guy who had watched too many movies before joining the force. He was pure Midlands Miami Vice, with a confrontational, hard-man sense of humour that too often blurred the line between ‘banter’ and simply ‘being a prick’. He also liked to drink. Every time I saw him break open that cheeky 5 p.m. can of lager, I knew I was about to get a wave of pressure about the case, accompanied by a string of rubbish, off-colour jokes.
But no matter how much Gino blustered, there was little I could do to speed things up. Gradually, score by score, I was working out how the system in Northampton worked.
The Burger Bar Boys weren’t stupid. What they had done was to insulate themselves with a layer of small-time user-dealers. They would offer some addict a few extra bags to courier their product to other junkies in town. While the police were kept busy busting these user-dealers, the Burgers were essentially shielded, and could just sit back and rake in the money. All they had to do was to beat, shoot and rape enough to terrify anyone out of ever testifying against them.
It was a smart move. It was also the inevitable response to police tactics – yet another example of how the arms race worked directly to target the vulnerable, while actually protecting the real gangsters.
The key to cracking through this layer of user-dealers was Angus and Sara. Their stint with the car had lifted them into a slightly higher echelon. I would occas
ionally hear them refer to ‘the Brummies’ in conversation. All I had to do was work out how to manipulate them into putting their own lives on the line by offering me an introduction.
It was all in the timing. I waited till I knew they were going to be out of town for a few days, then turned up at their door, with tears in my eyes. ‘Ah pet, what’s wrong? Come in.’ Sara rushed me into their living room.
I needed a sob story – so I stole Cammy’s.
I directly lifted his tragic moment from the benches in Mansfield. My best friend from childhood had suddenly died, and I was beside myself, not even wanting to go to the funeral out of junkie self-loathing. Then I looked up through tear-stained eyes. ‘I just really need something right now, y’know – something to get me through… And you guys are leaving tonight… I don’t know what I’m going to do. Is there anyone you can hook me up with? I just need something for the next few days.’
It felt dirty then. It still feels dirty now. But that was the position in which our war put us. The ends had to justify the means. The Burger Bar Boys needed to be caught, and this was the only way the job was going to get done.
And it worked. Sara stroked my head with almost maternal care, looked over to Angus and said, ‘Don’t worry pet, we’ll introduce you to the Brummies.’
‘Right, we’ve got to get our story together’.
Angus was shitting it. I could feel the tension coming off him as he started throwing out questions for us to review: where had we met? Who did we score off? What shoplifting had we done together? It was exactly the same work we did as police when putting together an undercover identity.
The Burger Bar Boys had set up their base at a snooker club in Castle Ward, right in the middle of Northampton city centre. Angus exchanged a nod with a huge geezer in a black bomber jacket. This guy, obviously the security, turned and gestured to a group of six or seven hard-men, lounging in a cloud of smoke in a back corner, illuminated only by the glow of the fruit machines.