Apparently, it all got stranger and stranger with Christine becoming more and more butch, wearing men’s clothes when she was off-duty from her business and even buying men’s Y-fronts from Marks and Spencer’s. At the same time, she demanded that Margi wore more feminine sexy clothes, see-through nighties, stockings and suspenders. But it wasn’t what she really wanted. Margi told me she was a gay girl and wanted to make love to another woman, not a make-believe man. The last straw came, apparently, when Christine said she wanted to go the whole hog and have a sex change.
I was pleased with the outcome of the case. Right at the start, one senior officer came into the office and said, ‘Just do enough to keep the relatives happy.’ Now that really pissed me off. She might have been a prostitute, she might have been a lesbian, but she didn’t deserve any more than anyone else did to end up murdered. So we did a little more than keep the relatives happy. We put the men who killed her behind bars for a long, long time.
I still shudder at the depravity of those two women. If I live to be 100, I’ll never understand how anybody could pay good money to have electric nipple clips fitted to their bodies, their testicles beaten or thrashed over a whipping stool, bound by their hands and ankles. Apparently, Christine once had a punter in for slave treatment and set him polishing her floor. Then she went out for the rest of the day and came home at night to find him still hard at work and in possession of just about the shiniest floor in London. He loved it.
5: sleeping with the enemy
I suppose it should have been ‘Not Tonight, Josephine’ or even ‘Not Any Night, Josephine’. But this particular Josephine was irresistible. A slim, superfit, gorgeous aerobics instructor working at the top keep-fit studio in London. Great figure, great personality. The trouble was, she was up to her beautiful armpits in the drug scene, not so much a dealer but a go-between for jet-setters looking to buy recreational drugs. And she was heavily hooked on cocaine herself.
She came on to the scene when a reliable informant of the undercover unit told us he could arrange a meet with a woman who was actively touting for business involving large amounts of cocaine. The snout said she was claiming to be in a position to introduce would-be buyers to a big-league dealer who could supply substantial quantities of good quality coke, or ‘Charlie’ as she called it. It looked like a tasty lead. Senior officers approved a covert operation and I was briefed to go in as a potential buyer.
I was introduced a few days later to Josephine in a pub in Fulham, the normal sort of ‘neutral’ territory favoured by undercover detectives in this sort of operation. I would always nominate pubs, hotel bars, hotel rooms, clubs, restaurants, some public place or other, partly for security reasons and partly for the right atmospere, where all parties would feel comfortable dealing with the business in hand.
There was an immediate spark between us. She was a good-looking woman, intelligent and witty and really toned-up from working at the top health studios in central London. She was a little older than me, but you would have been hard pushed to tell if we stood side by side. We got on well at our first meeting. As far as she was concerned, I was an up-and-coming dealer looking for some coke; she clearly had contacts who could supply it. ‘I’ve got a friend who has plenty,’ she said.
We talked it over in general terms, nothing heavy to start with. She made it clear that she was a go-between and would have to introduce me to the man who controlled the operation, Fernando Perez, who lived in Kensington in a plush apartment and worked for the Peruvian Embassy.
‘You’ll like him,’ she smiled coyly.
Right away, I thought he had got to be bringing the stuff in from South America in diplomatic bags. It looked like a classy operation.
The meeting went well. Josie and I agreed to go ahead and buy some stuff. She said she’d set it up right away. We parted with a kiss on the cheek. The signals were go.
I went back to the Yard and reported the situation to my superior officers. I told them this woman and I were hitting it off so well that, to enhance my credibility as a drug buyer, I’d like to take her out socially after our next business meeting. It was a logical step as we’d really hit it off, and it might make her reveal more than she would about her connections on the drug scene. And, by the by, there was more than half a chance of a serious leg-over. Only I didn’t tell my bosses that. She was a suspect under investigation and I was a copper. A dangerous liaison that had to be treated with the utmost caution. Should I cross that line with the lovely Josephine?
A couple of meetings later and I finally met Perez, the main mover and shaker of this particular cocaine network. Once again, it went well. We got on famously. He was impressed with my phoney gangland credentials — a dealer heading for the top, money to burn. Both Josephine and Perez had liked me, apparently, and Perez was happy to do the business. One thing led to another and I set a dinner date with Jo to get to know each other better. She was fun. A lot better to be dealing with than most of the low lifes I have met on the drug scene.
It soon became obvious that she was very seriously hooked on cocaine. She was taking a lot by any standards. At her home in Fulham, she was habitually smoking it as crack, reducing cocaine to rocks by mixing it with baking powder and cooking it. But doing her brains on crack every day just didn’t seem to gel with her fitness lifestyle. She was obviously in the supply business to fund her habit. But I still couldn’t help liking her.
The extent of her addiction was fully revealed after our meal out at Brown’s Hotel. I’d spared no expense wining and dining her. By the time we were going home, the dinner, the drink, the whole ambience meant we were only going back to her place for one thing — sex. It was the seal on our relationship and I didn’t know anything in the police manuals which prohibited a good shag with a tasty bird. Or perhaps I did in the back of my mind but chose to ignore it. We arrived back at her place both up for it, fired by some good wines and liqueurs. The aphrodisiac for her seemed to be danger. To her I was an up-and-coming gangster taking the drug scene by storm. Pony tail, flash car, big talk, shares in a couple of snooker halls. We went into the kitchen and Jo started pouring us a couple more drinks. We brushed against each other and there was electricity. Then it was into a passionate clinch and we were tearing at each other’s clothes. I couldn’t believe my luck, this was work, I was being paid for making love to a beautiful woman.
We stumbled from the kitchen, leaving our drinks untouched, into the bedroom and fell on to the bed virtually naked. She caressed and kissed every part of my body. It was the most incredible night of passion I can remember. She was insatiable. We’d have sex then she’d be on the bedside pipe, a toot of crack then back to bed for more, rarin’ to go again. This went on all night long. Nothing was out of bounds. She kept going back for another puff on the pipe then leaping back for more sex. She even supplied the condoms, slipping them on skilfully and sensually. She’d done that before! I did a couple of lines of powdered coke. I could hardly have refused, as it could have blown my cover.
I stayed all night, and I must say it was one of the most amazing of my life. Although it wasn’t strictly planned, we both knew it was going to happen. As we’d left the restaurant earlier, I made a coded telephone call to allow the surveillance team backing me up to stand down and go home. I wasn’t going to keep them up all night watching a flat while I was inside enjoying myself. And they might get nosey with their video cameras.
The pillow talk suggested she was warming to me a bit too much, a bit worrying as I knew she was eventually going to get busted. I put it to the back of my mind. She beckoned me back to bed for a final session before breakfast. Forget the cornflakes! Obviously, I didn’t have time to go home to shave or change and headed straight off to the Yard to update my bosses … or tell them as much as I thought they should know.
I dragged myself into the squad office bleary-eyed and bedraggled, completely shagged out. They would have panicked if I hadn’t been there first thing so it was important to put in an appeara
nce whatever my condition. I went into the guv’nor’s office clutching my receipt from the restaurant, one of the best in town, and started the debrief, if you’ll pardon the expression, about how the meeting had gone.
I told them the drug deal was progessing well. It was likely to go off pretty soon. Then came the burning question, which from my appearance they knew the answer to already: ‘Well, did you take her out after the meet?’
I said, ‘Yes, it was good.’
‘Did you give her something to eat?’
‘Yes, Guv.’
‘Plenty of drinks?’
‘Oh yes, Guv, plenty.’
‘You don’t look as if you’ve been home.’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘So you stayed then?’
‘Er, yes, Guv.’
They knew by the smile on my face that they needn’t ask much more. But there was only so much I was prepared to tell them, a lot was personal now. I didn’t feel they needed to know we’d been at it all night in more positions than the Kama Sutra or that she had kept herself fuelled up on crack. Our secrets and lies.
Then came the tricky business of the bill. It was close on £200 and I knew the Yard could be difficult with some expenses. My boss took it from me and said straight away, ‘Oh that’s not too bad, Blex.’ I looked at him a bit surprised, then looked at where his finger was … right by the VAT figure. I said, ‘No, sorry, Guv’nor, you’re looking at the wrong line … that’s just the VAT.’ He just went, ‘Fucking hell.’ So I said with a big grin on my face, ‘It was worth it.’
We planned to do the cocaine deal on a Saturday morning and I’d persuaded Perez to use his basement flat, in Abingdon Road, W8. I’d done a close recce and knew it was a flat that the police could access easily, it wasn’t a Fort Knox. The whole geography of the area suited me and my knowledge of this type of operation. Jo and I agreed that after we had done the trade we were going to Brighton for the weekend to celebrate our first successful deal of many, a new Bonnie and Clyde partnership. Poor cow. She turned up on the day, although she wasn’t strictly a part of the deal, and was scooped up in the raid along with Perez. It was a good nick, a foreign envoy using diplomatic channels to smuggle in cocaine and flogging it all over London. Quite a capture. He was later jailed for possession of a kilo of cocaine with intent to supply.
As Jo was being nicked, I’d legged it off down the road to make it look like I had escaped, hoping she wouldn’t put two and two together and know that it was me who had stitched her up. Guilty conscience, I suppose. My colleagues searched the weekend bag she had packed for going away with me and found a nice batch of freshly-baked hash cookies and two wraps of cocaine. When the team met up later for a drink, it was, ‘Oh, you really were going to have a good weekend away, weren’t you?’
Jo was charged with possessing the drugs intended for our weekend treat but not with the main cocaine conspiracy in order to protect our undercover operation. She got fined for it, and not jailed thankfully. I don’t know whether she ever realised that it was me who had betrayed her. Our paths never crossed again … but she’s a girl I’ll never forget. Betrayal is the name of the game in the world of undercover policing. Sometimes it leaves a bitter taste.
There were times when I was in situations where I genuinely got to like the people I was investigating, like Jo. I felt a real affinity. In different circumstances, perhaps, we could have been real friends. It happens now and again, that you end up liking the people you are setting up. They might be on the other side of the fence, but they can still be likeable people. And at the end of the day, if you are an undercover copper I don’t even know whether you are given the freedom to have a judgement; you only have one choice — you have the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. There can be only one loyalty, to the police service and the public, your paymasters.
You are always walking a tightrope between good and bad to some degree or other, whatever crimes you are investigating. It goes with the territory. But there are no demarcation lines when it comes to murder. And an informant in the Midlands had tipped off the police there that a murder was in the offing, a murder that could only be stopped by the intervention of undercover officers. It was a murder that would have devastating repercussions if we failed to halt it.
I had just been posted back to Carter Street Police Station in Walworth, South London, after a highly successful series of undercover operations with Scotland Yard’s Central Drugs Squad. Under the police rules of tenure, brought in to help prevent pockets of corruption building up after the scandal of the Obscene Publications Squad in the Seventies, detectives weren’t allowed to stay in one squad or at one station for more than three years. I had no choice but to fall in line with this policy though I and many fellow officers thought it was ludicrous, especially in the highly specialised area of undercover work. We would be living this very secretive life under various aliases, only going out to meet people undercover, never letting our real identities be known, building up contacts in the underworld and so on, then suddenly you were put back to being a public domain detective at a local nick dealing with day-to-day burglaries and muggings. By then, I’d had a lot of success with covert operations and our argument against being transferred back to normal duties was quite simply that it placed us in danger. We envisaged a situation where we would be called out to an inquiry, going off to meet someone, saying, ‘Hello, I’m DC Peter Bleksley,’ and them taking one look at you and realising that last time we’d met I’d been a fucking drug-dealer. You’re blown out, the informant’s blown out and a job which might have been running for months is blown out.
Sometimes, an undercover job doesn’t come to a successful conclusion and you just withdraw gracefully. They won’t deal with you, they can’t deal with you, they choose not to deal with you — there were myriad reasons why a job might collapse. You pull out and let them carry on in the hope that you might get another crack at it another time. Then back on conventional CID duties you could potentially meet a suspect from a previous undercover job and be sussed out.
However, the management at the Yard were unyielding in these matters, as they largely are to this day, so it was back to Carter Street for me near where I had started my police career pounding the beat in a pointy hat years earlier. I was told, however, that it wouldn’t be too long before I was back with SO10.
I hadn’t been at Carter Street more than a few days when there was a call from HQ.
‘Blex, are you available?’
I told them, ‘Yes, I’d like to think I am, but I’ll need to square it with the bosses here.’
I walked up to the DCI’s office, a very old-style detective called Hughie Parker. He was out, it was lunchtime. I rang SO10 back and said I couldn’t get permission to get away.
‘We need you,’ they said, ‘there can’t be any ifs, buts or maybes. We need you straight away. Who’s your Chief Super?’
At that time it was Bill Griffiths. So they went right over Hughie Parker’s head to the Chief Super and told him, ‘There’s a sensitive operation coming up and we need his experience. Now.’
Griffiths asked what it was about but the Yard boys wouldn’t tell him. Then I got a call from Griffiths upstairs saying, ‘OK, you can go.’ When Hughie Parker got back, he went ballistic because I’d vanished without his say so.
It was very quickly apparent that this job was something special. They said I’d be away for some time and to go home and pack some bags and get up to the Yard as soon as possible. And don’t say anything to anybody.
I went home, packed a holdall and reported in to the Yard. I met the fellow officer who was to be my partner on the operation, DC Andy Nicholau. This pleased me, he was someone I knew well and had the utmost admiration for. He was more experienced than me, had more service than me and had been one of the trailblazers and innovative thinkers in the setting up of the Yard’s undercover squad. I was happy to be working with him, even though at this stage neither of us had a clue what we were
heading for.
The only briefing we had at the Yard was that we were being dispatched to Birmingham, headquarters of the West Midlands police force on an important undercover assignment. We would meet local officers there who would tell us what this secret mission was all about. We were given the confidential number of a senior police officer to ring as we approached Birmingham on the M1. Then we’d go to an appointed place named by him for the meeting. We were told to book into a particular hotel, leave there, find a secure land-line phone, ring in the details of the hotel and our West Midlands police contacts would come and pick us up. It was the type of cloak-and-dagger stuff I revelled in. We knew the job had to be big.
Within minutes of phoning in, two senior West Midlands detectives came to pick us up — DCS Ron Canter and DI Alex Davidson. They sat down in our hotel room and for the first time told us of the enormity of the job we had been asked to undertake.
They had evidence that one of their own detectives, Sergeant Michael Ambizas, was trying to hire a hit-man to kill his lover’s husband. They had clearly dug deep into the background of Ambizas before calling in SO10. He was, they said, a bit of a flash character who liked the high life — casinos, top restaurants, designer suits and beautiful women. He swanned around town in a top-of-the-range motor, a playboy with charm, guile, and not a little style. Suspicious West Midlands police chiefs had recently transferred him from regular CID duties to their training establishment where he taught young officers the art of detection. Our operation was to come as a salutary lesson in detection for him at the end of the day.
Ambizas, at 34 unmarried but with a string of affairs behind him including a Page Three pin-up, had approached an underworld figure in an illegal gambling casino and asked if he could put him in touch with a professional hit-man from London. The target was to be his girlfriend Anona Murphy’s husband. He was offering £20,000 for a successful hit on Shaun Murphy, a convicted crook and a domestic thug.
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