Good Cop, Bad War

by Neil Woods

  My theory is that most addicts are running away from something. They run and run, then they hit the sea and there’s nowhere left to go. It’s something I’ve observed in seaside towns across the country. Brighton was simply the largest.

  As usual, I made no buys at first. I didn’t even attempt to strike up a conversation. I was just observing, taking the city’s ragged pulse. Again I felt the overwhelming sensation that the entire homeless community in the city was suffering from some deep collective trauma. There was something sick about this city, something festering, secret and vile.

  When I got back to HQ, the wolf pack turned on me.

  ‘What, you didn’t buy anything?’ The DI gasped incredulously.

  ‘Well, no. I’m observing first. I’m building a picture of how the city functions. That’s how good undercover work happens.’

  ‘I thought undercover work meant buying bloody drugs,’ he replied. The rest of the room broke into guffaws.

  ‘Yeah, but you haven’t done any undercover work, and I have. So why don’t you have a sit-down and I’ll explain it you, yeah?’

  I knew instantly that I’d fucked up. I’d let myself get angry.

  ‘Ooh, touchy,’ mocked the DI, mimicking the voice of some neurotic housewife.

  The entire squad tittered. They reminded me of a group of kids encouraging a playground bully in the hope that he won’t turn on them.

  I forced myself to take a breath. I’d faced down speed-addled gangsters with samurai swords; I’d sent ruthless gun-wielding thugs to prison. I wasn’t going to let this lot get under my skin. I flashed the DI a condescending smile, turned and left the room.

  Out on the street I stuck to my own schedule. That pack of desk police at the office could run their operations however they wanted – I was the guy in the field.

  I spent several more days just watching from street corners and shopfronts. Looking at how the city functioned. It wasn’t until a few weeks in that it felt right to approach Frank.

  He was a Big Issue seller who held the prime pitch in town, just under a pedestrian footbridge on the slope up to the main station. He rocked a wild ginger Afro and, like Ali up in Leicester, had a charming salesman’s patter.

  It turned out he had once been a successful club promoter, making his name in Ibiza as part of the mid-90s rave gold rush. But he also suffered from childhood trauma. Ecstasy was his first self-medication of choice, but he soon followed the well-worn path towards heroin, and had drifted in and out of prison before washing up on the streets of Brighton.

  As well as English, Frank spoke five languages fluently. He sold his Big Issues in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. He was in the process of learning Polish and Latvian from a couple of newly arrived homeless guys in town. Once again I was overpowered by the thought of what a guy with this intelligence and creativity could have achieved if he had been given a little support instead of turned into a criminal.

  After he sold out of magazines we shared a couple of cans of lager on a bench looking out over the sea. I carefully let him draw from me that I was an on-and-off junkie who had dropped out of art school, got busted shoplifting and was now back living on a court-ordered Subuxone prescription with my dad in Southwick.

  After a couple of hours, and a few more cans, I thought the time was right.

  ‘So, mate,’ I ventured timidly, ‘you think you could help me out getting a bit of brown?’

  Frank just rolled his eyes and gave a disappointed sigh. ‘Oh, so you’re a cop, then?’

  It was enough to almost make my heart stop.

  ‘You what?’ I sputtered in feigned incredulity.

  ‘Come on mate, I know the drill,’ Frank intoned, more in boredom than in anger. ‘Some new bloke shows up and wants a bit of gear – then it turns out he’s a cop and you go to fucking jail.’

  ‘Mate, mate, that’s not me – seriously. Look, don’t bother if it’s a hassle.’

  ‘Uh huh.’ Frank just sipped his beer in total indifference.

  I pleaded my case, filling in any weak links in my story and dropping in details that only a real junkie would know.

  My head was spinning. Had the Brighton team overused undercover operations to the point where any new face in town was automatically assumed to be a cop? Was that even possible?

  Eventually I did manage to win Frank over, but more out of his own nihilistic fatalism than any genius on my part.

  ‘Look,’ he explained, ‘I’m about ninety per cent sure you’re not a pig… but, to be honest, I don’t fucking care. Put me in jail. I don’t give a shit – you might just save my life… Another winter sleeping in the underpass will probably kill me anyway. At least in prison it’s warm.’

  There was no melodrama in his voice, no sense of exaggeration or self-pity. His rational calculation was simply that it was September, cold weather was on the way and he was probably too weak to survive. The uncaring, blasé tone in which Frank discussed his likely death was as horrifying as anything I’d heard or seen as an undercover.

  Frank told me to wait on a corner, then disappeared for fifteen minutes before returning with the gear. Obviously, this was useless to me. I needed to at least catch a glimpse of his dealer. But having already raised suspicions, I couldn’t afford to press the point. I told myself that once again I would just have to patiently build trust and wait for the right moment.

  We went off to a deserted bit of scrubland so he could fix up. I was able to claim that I was waiting till my Subuxone had worn off, otherwise it would block the skag and the gear would be wasted. This was completely legitimate junkie logic, and actually served to back up my story.

  I held a lighter so Frank could aim properly as he spiked his vein, then watched his head roll back in pleasure and relief. As he collected himself, he leaned forward in a smacked-up haze.

  ‘Listen,’ he mumbled, ‘I don’t care if you’re a cop or not, you’re a nice bloke. I don’t want you to fucking die, so listen – I’m gonna tell you how it works.’

  He proceeded to lay out, in skag-slurred speech, the appalling reality of exactly how the street drugs trade in Brighton operated.

  There had been so many undercover operations in the city that the gangsters had developed a failsafe system to thwart them. Each dealer would choose one or two addicts as a designated point of contact, and conduct all their business through them. If anyone else wanted to score, they had to go to that one courier. No one else would ever even see the dealer.

  This was why the Brighton cops had stopped being able to catch real gangsters. They could arrest points of contact all day long, and never get close to a real criminal. The gangsters didn’t care. As soon as one point of contact got busted, another would step forward to take their place. No resource is more expendable in the War on Drugs than the life of an addict.

  Every suspicion I’d ever had about how the drugs war functioned as an arms race was being confirmed right in front of me.

  But the real horror was still to come.

  Frank pulled me close, slurring into my ear. ‘… And if you fuck with the system they kill you. If I was to even bring you within sight of a dealer, I’d be fucking dead. No questions – nothing – just fucking dead.’

  ‘What?’ I gasped incredulously, ‘they shoot people just for letting someone see them?’ I pointed my fingers at my own head, miming gunshots.

  ‘Nah… They don’t bloody shoot you. It’s fucking easy to get rid of a smackhead, isn’t it – they just give you a bad shot… they let you do it yourself.’

  I suddenly felt nauseous. It was like the ground had fallen away and suddenly I was staring into the dizzying abyss. In a flash everything I had felt about Brighton made sense. This was pure horror. It was no accident that there were so many heroin overdoses in the city. It was murder by narcotic.

  From the gangsters’ point of view, it made perfect sense. Make it look like an accidental overdose and the police will never even investigate. Make the addicts live in a constant st
ate of terror that their fix – the one thing they need more than anything else in the world – might kill them, and they become your slaves. You instantly create an entirely obedient, terrorised population.

  Now I knew I could put a name to that deep, fundamental wrongness I had sensed in Brighton. It was fear. The addicts couldn’t stop using, but they had to deal with the continual knowledge that each shot could be their execution. The entire city was rank with terror.

  It was all I could do to nod along as Frank spoke. My mind was racing. I needed to investigate this – I needed to uncover real evidence and break this whole scam open. And to do that I would need support.

  It quickly became clear I wasn’t going to get any.

  ‘You want us to do what?’ roared the DI. I saw his face reddening in astonishment.

  ‘I need you to help me go through the files on every overdose death you had last year. There are indications that at least some of them may have been murders.’

  ‘Aren’t you undercover agents supposed to bring back drugs?’ he smirked. Once again, I heard a round of mocking sniggers sweep across the room.

  ‘What I’ve just brought you is the single most important piece of operational intelligence of your career.’

  ‘Yes well,’ he responded in what seemed a mock-serious tone, ‘that’s duly noted. I’ll inform the higher-ups and we’ll see what we can do, yes?’

  I knew a bureaucratic brush-off when I heard one. This was hopeless. I rolled my eyes, and went back to trying to actually get things done.

  I scored off Frank several more times. He never let me anywhere even near the line of sight of a dealer. Rules were rules, and inasmuch as Frank valued his own life, he stuck to them.

  All Frank’s friends were dead. He had no doubts whatsoever that they had been murdered by overdose. He was just waiting his own turn – marking time until he slipped up and transgressed some unwritten rule he didn’t even know, and the gangsters decided his time had come for a dirty shot.

  Homeless people survive by forming tight-knit networks, little gangs like my park bench crew in Nottingham who can help each other out, and sleep in pairs for security. Frank had seen his entire network picked off one by one, and it had broken him inside. Behind the snappy show he put on to sell his Big Issues, there was a fathomless sense of despair that sometimes made him hard to even look at.

  One time he had the possibility of getting some sheltered accommodation in Hove. The train fare to do the preliminary interview was £5.40, but he just couldn’t see the point. He needed that cash for his smack and Special Brew, and he assumed he’d be dead in a matter of months anyway, so why waste the money? There’s no other way to say it – it was fucking heartbreaking.

  In the end though, what stopped me from hanging out with Frank wasn’t existential despair; it was my own bosses.

  ‘Time to move on now, we’ve got him, don’t we?’

  ‘What do you mean we’ve got him?’

  ‘This guy, Frank – we’ve got him. We’ve got enough evidence to arrest him.’

  ‘And why would we want to arrest him?’

  ‘Well… he’s a drug dealer.’

  ‘Is that what you call a drug dealer?’ I asked in disbelief. No wonder these amateur-hour play-police weren’t catching any real gangsters.

  ‘Well… he sold you drugs.’

  ‘No. Frank’s not a drug dealer. Frank is a user who has been coerced into supplying other addicts on the street. If you want to arrest an actual drug dealer, you don’t arrest Frank – you use him to get to a gangster.’

  ‘Yeah, but he sold you drugs – he’s a drug dealer. If we arrest him, we’ve arrested a dealer.’

  I sighed in defeat. This was useless.

  ‘All right, do whatever you need to do. Just don’t arrest him until I say, yeah. Right now I need him on the street.’

  I wanted no part of this. I needed the bosses off my back, but I also didn’t want to give them any more evidence against the poor guy. Frank deserved better than that. From then on I just tried to avoid him as much as possible.

  But, to keep the mission going, I would need some new targets.

  I moved through the city’s homeless like a lab-rat through a maze, covering a lot of ground but always hitting the same dead end. Everyone was happy to take money off me to score, junkies always are, but no one would let me anywhere within eyeshot of a dealer. No matter what manipulations I tried or tricks I pulled, it was just never going to happen. These people were terrified. In any case, most of them weren’t even scoring off gangsters, but off other addicts who had been designated points of contact.

  My primary concern was corroborating Frank’s allegations about people being murdered by overdose. I was a detective and I knew one homeless addict’s theory wasn’t enough to build a case on.

  Every single person I encountered repeated the claim. It was just a simple fact of life on the street – even a suspicion that someone had transgressed the gangsters’ law meant they would be found dead with a needle in their arm. Everyone had at least one friend they knew for certain had been murdered.

  I had seen the knife-edge existence of the addicts in other cities, but this was something else. The sheer tissue-thin fragility of these peoples’ lives, the corrosive underlying terror in which they lived, the casual and matter-of-fact assumption of their own execution, was appalling on a fundamental human level.

  The psychological pressure was only increased by the weird juxtaposition of this pretty seaside town – full of tourists and rich Londoners down for a lark – and the grinding daily horror endured by the city’s underclass. Seeing these two worlds coexist in the same space day after day was not just unsettling, it was a form of cultural schizophrenia that ran like a seam through the entire city.

  There was one couple who made a particular impression. When I first met Sophie and Gregg, she was living in a women’s shelter and he was sleeping rough. Somehow they managed to get hold of a tent, and pitched camp together in a little copse of trees on one of the green spaces near Union Road. Gregg was a point of contact for one of the local gangs, and they supported their habit by scoring for other users.

  They were completely head over heels, and very protective of each other. The first time I scored with them, Gregg slipped the gear out of his mouth and into my hand. Sophie immediately sprang up and grabbed my arm. ‘Now you put it in your mouth.’ She wouldn’t let me leave until she saw the wrap under my gums.

  She was making sure that if I was arrested, Gregg’s DNA would be covered by my own. Those were the rules. The gangsters made every point of contact mouth-carry to cover their DNA, and Sophie was protecting her man in the same way. I had to take that wrap, which had just been passed from the mouth of a drug dealer to the mouth of a homeless smack addict, and place it in my own. A wave of disgust scudded through my guts at the taste of stale beer and cigarette ash.

  But for all that, there was still never any question of Gregg introducing me to a dealer. The few times I even hinted at it, Sophie would immediately cut in. ‘No way! Just no – I don’t want him to die… I need him.’ Then she’d give a weak smile and tousle his hair. The way they protected each other was deeply touching, but heartbreaking – it was as if they both knew their days were numbered, and yet they held together, each one counting on the other for survival.

  Week after week I tracked the city, moving from false start to dead end, making endless scores from vulnerable addicts that would never lead me any closer to an actual gangster.

  Essentially, I was becoming just another Brighton undercover operative.

  This wasn’t what I had joined the force to do. It simply wasn’t what I thought of as real police work.

  Eventually, I just stopped.

  I started going out looking only for intelligence. Occasionally I’d make a buy, but mostly I would just talk to people, trying to figure out if there was any angle, any tactic, that could actually open the investigation up.

  I knew that any user I
scored off would be classed as a dealer and slung in prison. What was the point when they weren’t leading us to real criminals? It’s one thing to claim the end justifies the means, but here there wasn’t even an end – just more misery for vulnerable people. That being the case, I chose not to keep buying drugs with police money.

  Of course, this created problems with the squad.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be making some bloody buys?’ the DI demanded.

  ‘Well – yes and no. What I’m meant to be doing is laying out an operational strategy that might lead us to some real criminals. When that involves making buys, I’ll let you know.’

  I could sense that the DI didn’t appreciate the challenge to his authority, particularly in front of the other guys. A few days later, I walked into headquarters to see two new faces. ‘Oh hi, Neil,’ he said. ‘We saw you were having some trouble, so we thought we’d bring in Sandra and Mike here to help you along.’

  On her second deployment Sandra actually managed to speak to a user-dealer one tiny step up the food chain. This involved her being dragged into a disused warehouse, strip-searched and assaulted. She had been trained for this, and there was a backup team nearby, but she still returned to HQ badly shaken. I couldn’t help feeling the DI and his team were secretly pleased – see, a girl managed to do it.

  I just stood there and watched the scene, thinking to myself, yep – just wait and see what happens when you get out on the street again tomorrow.

  Of course she never got anywhere near that user-dealer again. The strip-search was just an initial test to see if she was wearing a wire. From that point she was thrown back into the same mix as the rest of us. The entire ordeal had been a complete waste of time.

  As the weeks dragged on, the situation became ever more depressing and hopeless. There was no way this strategy was going to take us anywhere, and the atmosphere among the team was becoming intolerable for me.