Gangbuster

by Peter Bleksley

  Norris was, by and large, in the informing business for money, coupled occasionally with a desire to take out the opposition on his patch. He was originally a coalman as a young man but he soon decided that lugging sacks of anthracite around was far too hard a way of earning a crust when there was villainy as an alternative. He was suspected of involvement in armed robberies, though not convicted. He would do anything, in the ‘Arfur Daley’ sense, that would be a ‘nice little earner’. He knew the ‘right’ people. He’d handle counterfeit currency or stolen goods, and he would be involved in drug deals; there was nothing that was off limits to him. He was utterly ruthless in the way he eliminated other criminal gangs by informing on their crooked activities.

  Towards the end, he was doing so much work with the police that it became an open secret in south-east London that Dave Norris was a grass. It was an odds-on certainty that some day one of those rivals would take revenge. His name had been on a bullet for a long time. He had grassed so many people up that the police ran out of ideas on how to protect him from being identified as the source. He got careless. He didn’t give a toss. He didn’t think it out. He was so desperately keen to grass more and more people up and make money out of it, which he did handsomely, that with every passing day he was putting himself in more and more danger. I’ve always been a gambling man and I wouldn’t have given him better than even money of making his next birthday.

  Just half-an-hour before he was shot, he was fixing the meet with me to grass up yet more villains, another drugs gang. The word had been out for him for a long, long time. He was so active the police had had to set aside two batches of officers to deal with him. A colleague and I were handling him more or less on a daily basis for his drugs work and long-standing colleague Jim Clarkson, a DI on the Regional Crime Squad at East Dulwich was handling his other crime stuff – counterfeit currency, stolen gear of every variety, art thefts, this, that and the other. That’s how prolific Norris was.

  He was discussing a future job with Jim Clarkson over a few pints in the Fox in Belvedere on the night he died. I rang him in the bar there to check that he was OK for the next day’s breakfast meet on a new drugs job he was putting up. That’s how he worked, moving from one cop to another with more underworld information.

  The next morning I picked up my colleague, DS Bill Trimble, a pleasant, quiet, former long-serving uniformed officer, not the usual hard-nosed Yard DS you sometimes come across, and we were driving to meet Norris for breakfast to discuss the job. The radio was on and that’s when I heard it. When they gave his name, they’d got it slightly wrong – Maurice or something like that, but I knew.

  A couple of minutes later, my mobile rang and it was my boss DI Charlie Eubank and he said, ‘Blex, have you heard?’

  I said I’d just heard an item on the radio with the name slightly different but I was assuming it was our man.

  He said, ‘Yes, it’s him.’

  I said, ‘Well, best I don’t bother going to the café then. Norris won’t turn up now.’

  Bill, my colleague, was absolutely shell-shocked, aghast at the news. I literally saw the colour drain from his cheeks.

  That was the morning I coined the phrase ‘better dead than nicked’, because there had been a lot of suspicion about Norris’s dealings with informant handlers over the years. At one point, one trusted colleague and I were the only officers allowed to deal with him. A lot of people had been struck off the list of handlers because of suspicions they had been got at, backhanders going to and fro, palms greased. I can say, hand on heart, that I was saying that for other people’s benefit, because I’d heard the rumours and I was well aware of some of the shenanigans that were supposed to be going on. I said that if he’d been nicked with a huge great parcel of drugs, he would have sung like a canary taking everyone down with him, in the job or out of it, who had ever taken a drink off him. That’s the sort of person he was. There would have been no loyalty to anyone. He was a grass and he was always looking to cover his backside. He’d have taken everyone down with him to save his skin.

  Bill fell apart. I had to take him to my flat and give him a large brandy. He knew Norris well. In fact, he was due to collect some money off him over a betting coup that had come off over the weekend. Bill was a big greyhound man and he’d given Norris a tip and Norris had lumped on it large and he was going to give Bill a drink out of his winnings. Not corrupt, but possibly unwise in the circumstances.

  As Bill sat there ashen-faced, I said to him, ‘Come on, pull yourself together; he’s only a dirty stinking grass who’s got wiped out. It’s not anyone we’re going to grieve for.’

  But Bill was really, really upset. To me it was another reminder that you must never get to like these people, never get too close. Never kid yourself they are real friends. You can pretend to like them, but once you walk out that door you don’t have to carry it on.

  By the time Bill had regained his composure and we had arrived at the office, there was only one topic of conversation and a murder squad had already been set up. I expected the murder squad boys to be all over me like a nasty rash given the circumstances and my involvement with Norris over the years. After all, I’d spoken to him minutes before he’d been murdered, but to this very day nobody from that squad has ever asked me a single question, ever. Bill kept going to the murder squad almost on a daily basis like he’d lost a friend, giving them all sorts of theories. But I couldn’t give a fuck. Norris was dead, and I’d got other things to be doing. He’d given us some good information over the years, he’d introduced me to loads of criminal gangs so that I could infiltrate them posing as another crook, but he knew the risks.

  Rumours had been rife a long time before his death that there was a contract out on him, with a £15,000 price tag to do it quick and keep it neat.

  Months of intensive enquiries by the Yard uncovered the fact that the hit was carried out by a professional two-man team from the terrorist heartland of Belfast – Terry McCrory and John Green. London drug barons, possibly the ones he was about to grass up to me, paid the pair to travel over and carry out the execution. Norris was an easy target. He took no special precautions and seemed to think he was untouchable. The hit happened as he pulled up outside his home in Regency Square, Belvedere, in his flash four-wheel-drive jeep and stepped on to the pavement. The black-helmeted assassins zoomed up on their motorbike out of the dark. Norris started to run towards his front door. He knew the day had come. He was chased by one of the gunmen and was brought down with a single shot. His wife Debbie, who’d been inside with their three kids, ran out shouting, ‘Stop, please stop.’ The gunman took no heed and pumped several more shots into Norris. He died on a patch of grass beside the pavement, a huge pool of blood flooding out around him, with Debbie sobbing her heart out as he died. She was pregnant with twins at the time.

  I don’t know whether she knew about Dave’s informing, his philandering, or where he’d got his money. She loved him anyway. But informing had become like a drug to him. He was absolutely hooked on it, a serial grass who couldn’t stop. He got a real buzz out of it, always wanting to be around the police, and know the outcome of his tip-offs. His murder, I’m afraid, was as certain as night follows day.

  The two motorbike assassins and two accomplices are all serving life for Norris’s murder. Scotland Yard had at first denied that Norris was one of their paid informants, but several of the better-informed daily paper crime reporters knew it and used it in their headlines the day after the killing. The Yard were finally obliged to confirm it once the case came to trial.

  Norris was the second informant of mine to be murdered. I’m surprised there haven’t been more. They play a dangerous game. A grass called Peter McNeil put up a large cocaine importation job to us in which we nicked two guys with known and confirmed links with the Mafia. Any kind of grassing is perilous in the extreme, but double-crossing the Mafia is suicidal. We knew there would be a contract out on McNeil but it wasn’t until years later that anyone f
inally got to him; whether it was the Mob or not, I don’t know. McNeil was another who was almost blatant about his informing. He had this sort of laissez faire attitude towards it all and was another for whom his past was always going to catch up with him one day. He was shot as well. I never got to know exactly who did it, but you could have lined up the usual suspects from London to Llandudno.

  The fact that so few grasses end up dead is probably a tribute to the police witness protection schemes and the expertise they employ in putting would-be killers off the scent. A lot of time and thought is given to that. There was a time, while informants and supergrasses were big news in the national press, when people said that if the underworld crime bosses managed to bump off just one of them, it would be enough of a warning to stop any others turning informant. But in my experience the fear of assassination is considerably weaker than the lure of what they see as easy money from the police and a nice protection package for themslves. Far from diminishing, the number of informants, and above all, the quality of informants, has continued unabated over the years. They are crucial to keeping the lid on organised crime.

  If you were a gangster thinking of killing an informant, you’d need to be very sure of covering your tracks because you can be absolutely certain that the police are going to leave no stone unturned to find out who’s done it. The big boys probably think it’s not worth the risk of a life sentence for wiping out a heap of shit and simply write it off to experience. They’ll be more careful in future. I’ve never shed a tear for any misfortune that’s happened to any grass I’ve known. They play at Judas, they take the consequences.

  I’ve been severely warned off talking about David Norris by a senior Scotland Yard police officer. It was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that I shouldn’t drag all this up again. It’s always going to be a sensitive issue within the police force but I’m afraid the Norris incident is relevant and material to my life and I refuse to be gagged over it. Norris was a top-grade informant and his story is a first-class illustration of the level of informing the police now handle, as well as all its complexities, its dangers, and its consequences. Norris is dead, but there’ll be someone to fill his shoes.

  I have spent many hours with many informants of all colours and creeds, male and female. I treated every one of them with the utmost caution, fearful in the knowledge that there are a lot of Old Bill languishing in prison now because of inappropriate relationships with informers. You must never let the tail wag the dog, or be seduced into their clutches by the lure of easy money and a glamorous lifestyle. Discipline is the name of the game; discipline with yourself, an emotional detachment which allows you never to lose sight of the fact that you are doing a job on behalf of the British public who rely on you to sweep the sewers clean.

  The style of hit which took out Dave Norris was a classic gangland assassination which originated in Colombia among the feuding drugs cartels. Two men on a powerful bike, the pillion rider to do the hit, the driver skilled enough to be able to make an escape through even the most congested streets.

  I had many dealings with various factions of the Colombian drug trade as they targeted European markets in the Eighties. They had emerged as the most powerful and ruthless drugs suppliers anywhere in the world. They protected their empires ruthlessly, killing judges, lawyers, police and rivals with impunity. The US markets were saturated.

  The drug barons of Bogota set their sights on other outlets worldwide. They sent various people to Britain looking for fresh buyers, fixers and would-be dealers, to prepare the ground work for the huge surge in cocaine and heroin which was to follow up to epidemic proportions. The advance guard had no real UK base and were probably a little less careful than they would have been if they were established career criminals from this country. They put themselves out on a limb a little bit too often trying to make new contacts in the drug world. So they frequently came to our attention through the informer network. We were able to scoop up several Colombian-linked gangs before they could get established. But we were only stemming the tide if you look at the fantastic amount of cocaine that’s about in London and other parts of Britain today.

  Informants came out of the woodwork all the time. It could be from a number of sources; local cops, for example, executing a search warrant at somebody’s house, finding a load of gear, and that person then facing a hefty jail sentence and choosing to turn grass to bail themselves out of trouble. A confidential word would be passed on to the judge in court enabling him to know of how much assistance the suspect has been and hopefully get a lesser sentence. It could be an aggrieved fellow villain who wanted to level the score after he’d been had over by some other crook, so he came forward and volunteered information. It might be your established informants like Norris, motivated primarily by greed; it might be a local nick who’ve got someone a bit out of their league and want us to take over. Occasionally, you could have a cold caller come in off the street, walk in and say, ‘I want to talk to someone about so and so,’ and then you suddenly find you’ve a got a live runner out of nowhere. In every case, you get the necessary authorisation, submit the paperwork and go and check it out thoroughly.

  What you have to be most careful of in dealing with every informant is that they aren’t actually setting up a job just to get a police reward for informing. It’s the bread and butter of the investigation to get the ground work right. You have to be mindful at all times that you are dealing with the most treacherous dregs of society, and be aware of any potential scams that could leave you with egg on your face or worse. And there were occasions in which informants would be putting up work to you where they were trying to entice you to bend the rules, like saying, ‘I know that in Fred Bloggs’ deep freeze he’s got 10kg of cocaine. Can we go in and find five?’ They want five for themselves to make it a double-earner.

  I’ve had a job put up to me where my informant said there was £70,000 cash in a suspect’s home and he was inviting me to act as a legalised burglar to go in and nick the money. Part of it would go into the police report, the other into his back pocket. I told him to get lost. This was the tail wagging the dog and I didn’t want any part of it.

  * * *

  Because of my reputation in the world of undercover operations, I would get called to all parts of the country to assist in different inquiries. I and my colleagues were effectively on hire to any force that needed our expertise. Sometimes you would even be requested by name if you’d met someone on another job or they had received a recommendation from somebody who knew you. We had regular national training seminars at which undercovers from all over the country would meet for updates on techniques, exchange experiences and so on, so a network was formed through which you became known throughout the country as an expert in your field.

  Between regular covert assignments, I used to lecture to other forces both in Britain and abroad on training techniques for would-be undercover operatives. I was fortunate to be selected to go to the finest criminal investigation and intelligence unit in the world, at Quantico in Virginia, USA, where the FBI and American Drug Enforcement Agency share a joint headquarters, the very cutting edge in the worldwide fight against organised crime. I spent my time predominantly with the DEA and US Customs learning new aspects of detection and investigation. It was a rewarding and fascinating experience and a frightening insight into the sheer magnitude of the global drugs problem.

  At Quantico, we saw the DEA Operation Snowcap guys in training – a military unit to all intents and purposes – who were going down to Colombia to bomb drugs factories in pre-emptive strikes against the drugs cartels. Hard bastards every one of them. Tough, fit, totally committed to hitting back at the Colombian drug giants, and doing a great job.

  I remember Colin Baker, the ITN reporter, telling me once over a drink just what a lawless and terrifying place Colombia was. He’d been there only a few weeks earlier after some bombing incident or other during the drugs wars and had witnessed a motorbike team assassination which
was later copied in London for David Norris’s killing and several others.

  Apparently, one of the big gangs had targeted a rival dealer and had found someone who lived in a similar block and had a similar lifestyle. They’d watch for a while and if the similarities were close enough to the intended victim, they would hit the other poor bastard for practice. They’d take out a totally innocent bloke in a trial run. It never made me keen to visit Bogota. I don’t think the Yard would have allowed us to operate in Colombia anyway, for security reasons. They did have a certain regard for our safety. I limited my dealings with Colombians to Earl’s Court. There were enough to practise on, trickling in every year looking at the market place.

  The police play the financial dealings with informers very close to their chest; after all, it’s public money they are paying out to criminals. But I have been involved in several cases where five-figure sums have been handed over – £10,000 is not unique or even overly unusual. I had one very good informant – I’ll call him Sebastian to protect his real identity – who was so profilic he must have grassed up just about everyone he’d ever worked with over a ten-year period. Everything he was paid was salted away in a high-interest bank account and when he’d accumulated enough he set himself up in an antiques business, did very well at it and has never ever grassed up anyone since. He’s the exception – most just blow it on drink or drugs or flash motors.

  The money is always paid in cash by a senior officer. You’re never going to get a grass to accept a cheque, are you? Sometimes, an undercover operative like myself might be there to see the grass collect, if he chooses, but I normally avoided it like the plague. By then my job had been done, you’re out of it. Whatever amount of payment is due is normally set by a senior officer. You can nominate a figure if you think the information has been a bit special, but usually it’s out of your hands, and a good thing too. A senior officer, like a Deputy Assistant Commissioner or a Chief Superintendent, would count the cash out, the informant would stuff it in his pocket and then get a warning about not sharing it out with his police handler. They are the successful jobs. While the police actively encourage the recruitment of grasses they give you no back-up support or help if it all goes tits up. It is a sphere which is open to a lot of abuse, as there is a great deal of potential for having a swindle of one form or another with an informant. And much as the bosses love the good results, they are more than ready to jump on you like a ton of bricks if there is any suggestion of impropriety in relation to one.