I’d take the samples to the Metropolitan Police lab for testing. That was the official procedure. It was a time-consuming rigmarole of making out paperwork, sealing the drugs in a special bag, entering it into the register, filling in the details, and constantly looking at your watch all the time in case you’re not going to get back for your meet. You really didn’t want to be doing this. You are doing a covert operation; you don’t necessarily want anybody at the lab to know who you are and you don’t want the time-wasting.
The problem was, they were scientists through and through. And, of course, they adopted a very scientific standpoint to everything. That was all very well and good and I appreciate that was the way they had to do things, but for the practicalities of an undercover drugs operation it could be a nightmare. And sometimes it was necessary to side-step the rigid formalities of the world of science and do of bit of DIY drug research which would tell me exactly what I needed to know. If I had a gramme of cocaine, I could walk into my own kitchen with a bit of bicarb and a drop of water, wash it up and bring it down to base cocaine to tell me what purity I was dealing with. I could do that in one minute. If I went to the laboratory, they’d say, ‘Oh well, it takes several hours for us to do our standard procedures for drug testing,’ and they only get you a purity banding – between 30 and 50 per cent or 40 and 60 per cent, which was far from precise. That was useless to me. I’d got the bad guy sitting waiting somewhere, thinking I’ll be back in two hours to tell him how I rated the gear. I couldn’t have risked blowing job after job through delays, so I managed to get the lab boys to give me a quick banding test instead of the precise analysis which would have given me down to 97.3 per cent purity, for example, which was about as good as it gets. Even that took a lot of persuading. They didn’t understand the urgency of it, though there was one scientist there called Jim Cowie, a lovely fella who was on our side and who sympathised with the predicaments we found ourselves in from a practical point of view and tried to help. But, of course, he had the hierachy above him who were still very constraining and there were endless arguments with some of the scientists. I would say, ‘Look, I need this done urgently,’ and they would say, ‘It’s going to take hours and hours,’ and I’d say, ‘Why don’t you let me do it here? I’ll show you a test that will tell me what I want to know in a matter of minutes.’ They’d say, ‘How can you do that?’ I’d say, ‘Easy – I’ll mix three parts coke to one part bicarb, mix it up, moisten it, microwave it for 30 seconds and wallop … that’s how it is.’ ‘Oh yes,’ they’d say, ‘all right, we can see how that would work but if there are artificial caines in there – ligocaine, procaine, this, that and the other as opposed to cocaine – your test would not be so precise, would it?’
Well, I had to accept that, but if I was a fucking bona fide drug-dealer my test wouldn’t need to be that fucking scientific.
This was the mentality I had to fight against all the time. It wasn’t helpful to anyone out there trying to catch drug-dealers, which was our sole priority. It was so bloody frustrating. At times, I used to feel I was banging my head against a brick wall. We did our best but sometimes just had to bypass the system. The bureaucracy and the dogmatic scientific standpoint, which they frequently could not be shifted from, put up too many difficulties and too many barriers. So we frequently had to resort to doing it ourselves.
Then we’d get problems like testing a sample of cannabis we’d picked up. You can tell it’s cannabis OK by warming it up a bit, have a sniff, have a crumble, but how do you know if it’s any good? Cannabis is one of the drugs where the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or in the puffing as the case may be. Books have been written on the cannabis varieties; there’s dozens of different resins – slates, soaps, Afghan, Thai, Moroccan black, herbal (any number of different types of herbal) – I mean, you had to know them all. And to know it, you had to try it.
Because the lab were then confronted with a new set of circumstances, a new type of copper doing a new type of operation, they could make life difficult. They always seemed to look at you as though you were doing something utterly and totally wrong; these long-haired, hippy-looking undercover chappies are not what policemen used to be. We were supposed to be on the same side but we were often worlds apart. Their attitude was, ‘My God, you’re going out buying drugs. You’re in the police; you’re supposed to be going out and arresting people for having drugs.’ That’s the attitude that existed.
So we had no choice if we were going to get results. We’d utilise the scientific facilities if it was convenient, otherwise we’d go off and do what we had to do with our own inventiveness. If that meant putting together a joint and smoking it, that’s what we did. Hands on work. Practical puffing. We weren’t doing it at the Yard, of course, not all nipping into the gents for a joint. You can imagine them seeing some spaced-out cop and saying, ‘We know what squad he’s in.’ We were more discreet, but I remember going into the Yard canteen after one testing session and having a fit of the uncontrollable giggles as we demolished the dish of the day.
It’s fair to say at that stage I was probably the most knowledgeable drugs officer in Britain. I became an expert in all types of illegal drugs, from smack to magic mushrooms. I’d had some drugs grounding in America, sampled coke in California. I’d spent my adolescence in South London where drugs were freely available, affording me real-life experience of the burgeoning drug culture which helped equip me better to hit back at the drug barons invading Britain with ruthless determination. I made it my business to know drugs because it was my business to know drugs. I had to know what I was doing at all times. People would ring me up from within the police and say something like, ‘We’ve had a strange parcel down here we’ve not seen before. Can you get over and have a look. It might be of some use to you.’ If I thought it might help with my drugs education or broaden my knowledge in some way, then I would.
I remember when Thai sticks were first found in this country, I had a call from a pal asking me if I wanted to have a look. I’d go over and sneak in through the back way at the nick where the stuff was all bagged up. My pals would say, ‘Have a look at this.’ I’d say, ‘Terrific, we’ve not seen that before,’ or maybe we hadn’t seen it for some time and it was useful to know it was back on the streets. I’d ask the officers to ask the bloke they’d found it on where he’d got it, where it came from, anything that would serve to increase my knowledge of the drugs scene worldwide.
Drugs is such a trend-orientated thing; today’s hot drug will be passé tomorrow so you needed to keep on the ball as to what was new, what was in and what was out. I used to read publications worldwide relating to drugs, everything I could lay my hands on. You can never know enough on the subject. Although my relationship with the laboratory wasn’t exactly brilliant, I used to go to their library where they had various books which had been seized in raids giving details of drug production, drug cultivation, drug usage. These had been confiscated by police in various operations and eventually found their way through the system into the laboratory library, and I used to avail myself of that as often as possible to help me stay at the cutting edge.
One of the books that became the ‘bible’ of drugs officers was called The Cocaine Tester’s Handbook, by the American High Priest of drug culture Adam Gottlieb, who also wrote The Pleasures of Cocaine and works about cannabis. I’ve still got copies of these books and I find them as illuminating, and in some respects as frightening, as on the day I first leafed through them in the Eighties. They treat cocaine and hash almost with reverence. Though, to be fair, Gottlieb does state that the objective of his works was to ‘convey the impartial facts of the uses and abuses’ of cocaine and not simply to promote its use by all and sundry. Make what you like of the following extract, written in the mid-Seventies on the West Coast of America:
We are living in an age of decadence. It cannot be avoided. It is an inevitable part of history and progress. The everyday demands of survival have slackened. Illusory moral val
ues are in a state of rapid collapse. Leisure and luxury are becoming more and more abundant, and this abundance no longer permeates only the upper crust, where it usually resides, but is seeping downwards through the middle and lower classes.
For many who nurture hopes for the future of our world, decadence is a frightening word. It conjures visions of the final days of civilisation blackened by distorted orgies and a sick disregard for life ending in the deglorification of Greece, the collapse of Rome and the angelic or extraterrestrial destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Decadence seems always to be the prelude to a fall. But then isn’t the fall harder the higher we climb? It may be that decadence is merely one of the highest states of civilisation and that its dangers lie only in its vertiginous altitudes.
It is the author’s personal philosophy that if there be any teleological purpose (evidence of design or purpose in nature) to man’s existence on earth and in his power to progress, it is that he should achieve a successful form of decadence and learn to live in harmony with it. The life-game then would be, at least in part, to sustain a decadent situation for as long as one might expect any civilisation to last, and perhaps longer. Such an accomplishment requires a great amount of self-knowledge and the ability to keep positive and negative forces in balance. It is not the author’s intent to probe in depth the philosophy of decadence at this time, even though he has many profound notions on the subject. The thought is suggested here because cocaine is so much a part of the New Decadance and, like decadence itself, can either elevate or destroy us, depending entirely upon which we permit it to do … The path of cocaine as it stands in the streets of today offers dangers not only inherent in the pharmacology itself, but in the bizarre assortment of adulterants which are added to it by black-market middlemen. This is what happens when a popular substance is made illegal. We have lived this nightmare before and we still have not learned.
This book contains information on the nature of cocaine, how to use it, not abuse it, what substances are used to cut it, what the dangers and drawbacks of the various cuts are and, in some cases, how to remove the cuts and purify the cocaine by a relatively simple kitchen procedure. At some date in the near future, it is hoped these chapters on cuts will become obsolete or merely of historical interest. This could only happen if cocaine is legalised and its purity controlled as is that of other foods, beverages and drugs that are commercially available. The sooner this happens, the better, because the Golden Age of Decadence towards which we are inevitably moving can succeed without disaster only in an atmosphere of freedom, knowledge, and respect for the lifestyles of others.
From my many years involvement in drug investigation, I suppose Mr Gottlieb might have a point. But I guess he’s never had to deal with the greedy scum who trade in coke and other drugs and play Russian roulette with people’s lives in the process. Or perhaps he’s never seen some broken and paranoid coke user who has lost everything through addiction. I have, and all I wanted to do was bust the bastards who made it possible.
To that end, I became the main lecturer in drug detection and usage in the Eighties and Nineties as well as going out on hundreds of undercover busts myself. But what I realised very quickly at the drug seminars was that it was a virtually pointless exercise because I wasn’t allowed any real drugs in my tuition programme. I needed the drugs to be able to educate the police students fully, to show them exactly what to do. So I went to the police laboratory and asked them kindly to supply me with a quantity of the various drugs I needed on the training courses – for example, two grammes of cocaine, a gramme of heroin, five grammes of cannabis (resin, herbal or both), an Ecstasy tablet, an LSD tab, and so on and so forth. But such was the bureaucracy of the laboratory and their failure to grasp the fact that they weren’t going to get it all back neatly packaged, led them to pull the shutters down and say they wouldn’t supply me. They still had this air of suspicion about covert operations. ‘Oh, those two bags of cocaine will be £120 in their pockets or they’ll be out of their brains by Tuesday.’ That’s what they seemed to be implying.
Where did that leave me? I had my own credibility to think of. I couldn’t stand up in front of a class of trainee drugs investigators and give what was basically a fucking useless lecture with no practicalities – that was pointless. So what did I do? I ‘acquired’ my drugs – nicked, borrowed, whatever was necessary. I didn’t give a shit. If some of my mates had pulled off a job involving cannabis and there was an eighth or a sixteenth of a gramme of puff lying about, or a bit of coke that could be unaccounted for and would be invaluable for my training purposes, then it would mysteriously disappear. No paperwork, no hassle, just a nod and a wink and I had the material I needed for the lecture room.
I often wondered what would have happened if I’d been searched walking out of the nick with a pocketful of stolen drugs.
‘Training purposes? Tell that to the beak.’
I had to get the drugs through my own resourcefulness because the system forced me to. We weren’t about to go partying on it. It was all for legitimate purposes. But I had a wry smile when I drove through the gates of Hendon to lecture undercovers about illegal drugs when I had a pocketful of drugs myself, obtained illegally. Thankfully, the management on the course took a more enlightened view. They knew, or at least suspected, what I was doing, but turned a blind eye because they knew their students were benefiting from it. There are still a lot of good undercover cops out there today using the benefits gleaned from my nicked gear. But Christ knows what might have happened if I’d had an accident on the way to Hendon and been rendered unconscious. They’d have carted me off to casualty and cut my trousers off to find a stash of dope and they’d say, ‘No wonder he’s had an accident.’
* * *
My training reputation had spread far and wide and I like to think I was playing a significant part in hammering the drugs gangs. For instance, I had a call from the Belgian police asking me to lecture their undercover operatives on the latest techniques.
They couldn’t have organised it better: I had my requisition translated and when I walked into the lecture room there it was, all the drugs and paraphernalia I required neatly laid out for me. The Belgian students had the best possible assistance to make the lecture a success. It was entirely different from having to beg, borrow and steal it on my home ground. I was treated like a lord, listened to with great respect and, when the lecture was over, all the remnants were scooped up and any losses caused by demonstrating drug uses and so forth were written off by the senior officer in charge. No fuss, no problems.
Our courses in London became almost legendary – once I’d sorted out my lack of drug samples – and forces throughout Britain sent trainees to us to gain undercover expertise, from county drugs squads, from Regional Crime Squads, inner cities, wherever there was a need to equip officers for covert work. A lot of forces, though, fell into the trap of selecting the wrong sort of people for the job: ‘Oh, he looks the sort who’d be a drug dealer … eyes too close together.’ They were selecting people merely on the cosmetics of the job. But at the end of the day, what someone looked like was irrelevent. Some of the best undercover officers I’ve known look the straightest guys in the world, but once they were in role they were brilliant. It’s what comes out of your mouth, how you act, what you know, at the end of the day that is the crux of whether or not you are a good undercover cop. They recruited a number of black guys to start with in the belief that they would suit the job, but a lot of them just weren’t up to it. They were a danger to themselves, let alone anyone else working with them.
One training course I went on ended up with me being nicknamed ‘The Great Provider’. I was chosen for a place on an undercover training course organised by Greater Manchester Police, a force with a good reputation for being at the cutting edge of training techniques. I travelled up to Manchester in 1993 to take part in the course, partly as an observer, partly as a participant, with the aim of taking back anything we could utilise in the Met or gi
ving my expertise as and when required to other students. Manchester’s VO2 Covert Operations Unit had built up a good reputation. Where they were doing things which would be of use to me, I’d take it back to London.
One night they took us out on the piss, then out for a curry and it was getting towards two in the morning. Something made me start to smell a rat, just by looking at the other instructors. I thought they had definitely got something up their sleeve. We got back to the training centre at about half-past two in the morning and I was ready for kip. I hadn’t been in bed very long when bang, bang, bang, the door was nearly knocked off its hinges.
‘GET UP, GET UP, GET DRESSED,’ someone yelled. ‘You’ve got 20 minutes to make it to the lecture room.’
We’d only had a couple of hours’ sleep; some were really hungover, and some of us had paced ourselves a bit. We were all frog-marched into the lecture room, strip-searched and relieved of everything except the clothes we stood up in – cash, credit cards, keys, mobile phones, pens, watches, everything was taken. We were all frog-marched out again and stuck in the back of a blacked-out Ford Transit van. We had no idea where we were going. We were driven off not knowing what direction we were travelling in and, after about an hour-and-a-half, they started dropping us off one by one. At one point, I knew we were at Leeds–Bradford Airport because I could hear the noise of aircraft. I was crossing my fingers I’d get tossed out there; what a terrific place to get turned out. Every facility there.
Gangbuster Page 13