Gangbuster

by Peter Bleksley

  I wasn’t that lucky. In the end, I was the last to get dropped off, down a dirt track in the middle of nowhere. As I was hauled out of the back of the van, I was given typed instructions saying, ‘You must not break the law apart from begging,’ and with 20p sellotaped to it. That was your survival kit for the day – 20p. I had to get ten business cards from the village where they had dropped me – Burley-under-Wharfdale in Yorkshire – some hypodermic needles from a needle exchange at a Manchester hospital and make a phone call to base at a specific time for further instructions from our taskmasters.

  I thought, What a load of bollocks. If they were looking for a bit of initiative to help me through, then I’d oblige them. There I was, an out-and-out townie, looking like a sore thumb at 6.30am with poxy instructions in my hand saying not to break the law. Sod that. I had a quick look up and down the village street, saw my breakfast in the shape of a nice pint of milk standing on the doorstep of the local solicitor’s office. Wallop, it went down a treat. I didn’t take their only pint of milk – they had two – so no one had to miss their morning cuppa. Then I found myself a nice bench in the local churchyard and had a snooze for an hour. What else was I going to do in the back of beyond?

  I woke up and there was a geezer walking through the churchyard smoking a fag.

  ‘Excuse me, mate, I couldn’t ponce a fag off you, could I?’

  He looked half-scared to death. I think he thought he was about to be mugged.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, very nervously, ‘have a couple, have three or four.’ Then he toddled off looking mightily relieved he hadn’t been hit over the head and robbed of his wallet.

  Getting the ten business cards from the village businesses wasn’t a problem. I said my parents were moving there and I was getting information about local shops and services. Getting to Manchester, which was fucking miles away, might be more of a challenge. What should I do? I’d got a bit of a reputation for thinking on my feet, so now was the time to prove it. I had a mate who’d met a girl on holiday a couple of years earlier and had a passionate fling with her. I knew she lived not far from Manchester. So as the church clock was striking eight, I found a phone box and called my mate, reversing the charges. I told him where I was.

  ‘That girl, Linda, you met on holiday … she lives round here somewhere doesn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, she does.’

  ‘Have you got a number for her?’

  ‘Yes, yes, but what the fuck are you doing? You’re supposed to be away on a course. What’s going on, Blex?’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you about it when I get back to London.’

  He flicked through his personal phone numbers and read out Linda’s. I scrawled it down on a piece of paper with a pen I borrowed off a woman walking past. Contact with anyone you knew was supposed to be strictly forbidden. That was made clear from the start. But I thought, Fuck this for a game of soldiers.

  I dialled the operator and asked for a transfer charge call to Linda’s number. I kept my fingers crossed as it rang. No one answered. I gave it another 30 seconds, then a sleepy voice said, ‘Hello?’ She recognised me from our couple of brief meetings and accepted the call. I’d phoned at what I thought was a reasonable hour.

  ‘Hello, Blex. What on earth are you calling for at this time of day?’ she said.

  I didn’t know, of course, but she’s been out clubbing until 6.00am and had had only a couple of hours in bed. I said, ‘Lin, if ever I needed a friend, now is the time.’

  She lived in the posh part of Cheshire, in Wilmslow, where all the footballers have their mansions. Her parents were pretty well heeled and I knew she had a car of her own. With all the powers of persuasion I could muster, I managed to talk her into getting out of her comfortable warm bed and driving the 40 miles to where I was. She arrived at about 11.30am and picked me up from a pub car park on the main road which I knew she couldn’t miss. I’d spent the time waiting for her dossing in the beer garden in the sun. I don’t think it was quite what the instructors envisaged any of us to be doing. They thought we’d be slogging it on foot or bumming lifts on lorries.

  Anyway, Linda’s little Fiat Panda swung into the car park like a vision. I gave her a little welcome hug and explained what was going on. She thought it was hysterical. She thought it was great that I’d stuck two fingers up at their boy scout course and said, ‘Great, I’m game for the rest of the day.’

  We headed off for Manchester and she got petrol for the car and bought me a welcome egg and tomato sandwich. Then she cashed a cheque and gave me £15. Joy of joys, I was solvent again. Then it was back to her parents’ home where she cooked a nice spaghetti lunch which I washed down with some cool beers from the fridge. I was made up. I didn’t want to be smug but I couldn’t help thinking about those other poor sods out there with their 20ps all trying to get back home from some remote location, all playing the white man in their blistered feet. Lin drove me into the centre of Manchester to fulfil the task of acquiring some needles. I said, ‘Don’t take me right up to the hospital; drop me half-a-mile away. They are bound to be watching to see if anyone’s cheating.’

  Any breach of regulations, even with this fiasco, would have led to instant dismissal from the course. I’d probably never work undercover again, and I’d be blacklisted because I’d let the side down. My guv’nors at SO10 would not have been amused. It was a risk I was prepared to take. I crept into the hospital through a side entrance and got the hypodermics by saying that I’d just moved to Manchester from London with my girlfriend and was trying to wean her off heroin but she’d gone back on it.

  Mission accomplished, I said goodbye to the lovely Lin. Then I had a couple of hours to kill. I was way ahead of schedule and didn’t have to ring in for further instructions until 7.00pm. It started to rain, as it tends to in Manchester, so I retired to the shelter of a Coral’s betting shop. I thought I’d look at the greyhound meetings from Catford and Walthamstow showing on the SIS screens. There was a beast I liked the sound of in the 3.17. I put a cautious £1 on to win. I knew I couldn’t afford to lose too much of what cash I’d got. It romped in at 4–1. I picked another dog a couple of races later, got all brave and stuck £2 on to win. Another £7 winnings. My modest kitty had now swollen to £25. Another £2 bet and I’d picked a loser. One more try and I’m back on target with £2 on a 3–1 shot which won in a photo-finish. That’s it, £30 up and I was away to meet my other valiant soldiers.

  I found the phone box from which I had to ring in for my next set of instructions. The instructors no doubt expected to see me exhausted, bedraggled, broke and starving. Well, I’m not, guys. I’ve had a lovely day, got a decent lunch in my stomach and £30 in my pocket. My orders now were to go to a rendezvous point where I would meet up with the others.

  Well, I’ve never seen such a sorry sight in all my life. They all looked tired, drained and knackered, one had blisters on his feet where he’d walked about 35 miles, others had bleeding feet, and they looked totally pissed off. One guy told me about the joy he had felt when he’d found half a Big Mac in a bin and had scavenged it for his lunch. I stood there thinking, Poor sods. What has it all been about? We were all training to be undercover operators, not win a Duke of Edinburgh gold award. Its relevence at that point in time seemed nil. But they hadn’t finished yet. They gave us instructions to conduct a surveillance operation on some ‘suspects’ in a nearby pub and report back on our findings. That could have shafted everyone. How would they carry out a surveillance inside a boozer when they hadn’t got tuppence between them for a pint? Some had managed to beg a couple of quid for food during the day but only had pennies left. Undaunted we set off for the pub. As we neared it, I turned to them one by one, handed them a couple of quid so they could order up a pint and some peanuts and carry out the surveillance exercise to the satisfaction of the instructors and without some stroppy barman saying, ‘You can’t sit in here if you’re not buying a drink.’

  The final stunt of that bizarr
e day was to make all ten of us, mainly police but with a couple of Customs guys, walk back on foot to the training centre through the gloom and the rain. It was about two miles; we’d been up since the crack of dawn and they were taking great delight in driving past in their police cars giving us a load of stick out of the windows. It was a pretty dismal band of adventurers – dismal bar one. I was still as fresh as a daisy at the end of the day’s exertions. I was able to keep morale up with a bit of Cockney banter as we trudged back to base. As we neared the training centre, where I knew everyone would be waiting, I said, ‘Right, we are all going to present a united front and fuck ’em.’ They had tried to break our spirits and I wasn’t having any of that, even though my own spirits weren’t even cracked let alone broken. In we went, heads held high, as though we did this every week without batting an eyelid.

  The Customs blokes were extremely pissed off with the whole thing. They could see no point in it at all. Most of the cops were equally baffled by the merits of what seemed to most a complete waste of time and effort.

  ‘Stay cool,’ I urged, ‘don’t let them think Big Brother has won the day.’

  We agreed to put it down to experience, and perhaps not be available when the next course came up.

  Finally, I had to explain to the instructors how I was able to provide everyone with a couple of quid for the pub drinks and where I had got it from when I started the day with a mere 20p piece. I couldn’t tell them the truth. So I contrived this elaborate story about a person I had confronted and had asked to borrow money from. I said I’d given him moody details, claimed I’d been on the piss all night and lost my wallet and that I’d promise to send back every penny when I got home. He’d taken a shine to me and handed over a tenner. With that, I said, I’d had a flutter and got the rest of the cash in winnings. Pure initiative. I didn’t dare tell anyone about Linda, of course, because I didn’t know any of them that well and there was a danger of getting grassed up and dispatched back to Scotland Yard in shame.

  The guy who ran the course, Harry Mercer, laid on a bit of a party after the final debriefing. He listened politely to individual stories of survival, how people had begged and borrowed to get back to base. Then he said to the assembled group, ‘Of course, when you got back to Manchester you met with The Great Provider, didn’t you?’ I knew he was suspicious. But he also knew he was dealing with a professional liar. But I wasn’t about to cough the truth.

  As soon as I got back to London, I sent a cheque and a big thank you card to Lin in Wilmslow. To this day, we still exchange Christmas cards. She was my cracker when I needed her.

  11: steam cleaned

  ‘You want how much?’ The guv’nor was aghast. ‘At least £350,000,’ I said. ‘You know, just over a third of a million.’

  We were dealing with the crème de la crème of international criminals and only big bucks would snare the big players. I needed the cash to tee up a potential cocaine deal worth millions. This was a high-flying international organisation who brokered every type of valuable commodity in any part of the world. Valuable stolen art works and multi-national counterfeit currency already featured in their portfolio of crime. Now they were in the blue-chip drugs business. Wall-to-wall cocaine, up to 30 kilos a time in regular consignments. And they had an Amsterdam-based banker to launder their proceeds through undetectable channels designed to baffle even the most astute of investigators.

  The gang had already been under scrutiny by another undercover team who were interested in their activities on the art world black market. Paintings had been stolen to order and were being offered to unscrupulous collectors all over the world. They had been busy, too, printing and circulating fake notes in half-a-dozen currencies. Once drugs entered the equation, a separate covert inquiry was decided upon. That’s when I met The Dutchman – smooth, cultured, knowledgeable, a true cosmopolitan crook.

  The undercovers who had already infiltrated certain areas of the gang’s activities knew who was likely to be drafted into the operation to move the drugs investigation forward. They had painted a colourful but not unflattering picture of the London dealer who would be interested in buying big parcels of coke.

  ‘He’s a bit lairy, but he knows what he’s doing. And he’s very security conscious.’

  They’d more or less taken it for granted that I’d be the drugs expert nominated for the job and they were right.

  The Dutchman – urbane, educated and fluent in English and three other languages – originated from Amsterdam but had lived in London for several years. We were introduced in a bar in north-west London. He sipped cognac, I downed a pint. He was easy to deal with. A refreshing change from the inner-city scumbags I rubbed shoulders with so much of the time. We were soon talking cocaine deals as casually as if we were discussing a shipment of tinned tomatoes as we strolled across Hampstead Heath keeping clear of prying eyes or over-attentive ears. His people, he said, would be in a position to supply me with enough cocaine to keep London’s snorters happy for years.

  ‘How much do you want? I can get 20 or 30 kilos at a time,’ he said.

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  We got down to the fine print of where and when.

  ‘You must first meet my business partner,’ he said, ‘I think you will like him. Then you can show us that you have the money ready.’

  The scene was set. The Dutchman was happily anticipating a brand-new venture. I reported back to base that we were now in a go situation and I would need to draw at least £350,000 cash from the Commissioner’s vaults. The raised eyebrows soon lowered as I explained what a major league operation we had latched on to.

  ‘OK, Blex, let’s go for it.’

  First, I needed to rent a decent flat where I could set up a meet with the crooks to show them the money. I needed it to look like my everyday home. I carted over boxes of my own possessions, photos and knick-knacks to place around the rooms to give it that lived-in look. And the technical boys were briefed to get in there and wire it up before the start of business.

  The Dutchman’s business partner, a well-dressed type who could have arrived from a City of London stockbrokers but had flown in from Amsterdam specially for the meeting, was courteous and businesslike.

  ‘Hello, Peter, it’s nice to do business with you. I understand you can handle large quantities of the merchandise.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if it is of the right quality I can take as much as you can get.’

  ‘Good, we can get plenty. Have you got the money ready?’

  We drove to my rented flat in a West London block by a circuitous route that would have left them mystified about its exact location. I back-tracked, I ducked down side-roads. I stopped, reversed and turned around, all anti-surveillance tactics I’d learned at SO10. They’d been told I was security conscious, and I was proving the point.

  ‘I need to be sure there is no one on your tail,’ I told them, ‘cops or otherwise.’

  They looked suitably impressed. I’d taken the BMW twice round the plot when I suddenly pulled up and said, ‘We’re here,’ and ushered them towards the door. I let myself in, nodding to a neighbour on the way as if I’d been living there for years. I undid the double security locks and we went inside. I pretended to carry out an electronic scan to check whether the place could have been bugged. Joke, really, I knew it had. I made a phone call on my mobile to summon a couple of undercover guys who were acting as my minders – really hard-looking, fucking great giants of men. These were part of my team, I told the Dutchmen. They were certainly the sort of tasty blokes you wouldn’t mind having around if there was a problem.

  ‘You can’t be too sure these days,’ I said. ‘A lot of people are getting robbed.’

  The Dutchmen were suitably impressed. I saw them look at each other and nod as if to say, ‘This guy knows what he’s doing.’

  I pulled a black travelling hold-all from a cupboard in the bedroom and unzipped it in front of my Dutch visitors. The guy who’d just flown in fingered thr
ough the notes, testing them like he might know a thing or two about counterfeit currency.

  ‘Yes, these are good, Peter. How much have you got?’

  ‘There is £350,000 there and more where that came from.’

  There were more nods of approval and handshakes before we parted. ‘It is good, Peter. We will see you tomorrow for some business. In Amsterdam.’

  This was all happening in the middle of the afternoon in West London and they were making plans to meet me at the Hilton Hotel at Schipol Airport at 9.00am the next day. You can’t say, ‘Sorry, but I can’t make it.’ And you certainly can’t say, ‘Er, sorry, I’m on surveillance duty in Woking tomorrow …’ You’ve just got to go with the flow. It was back to the Yard as quickly as possible to seek authorisation for the trip from a senior officer. I needed to liaise with our Dutch counterparts, to tell them I’d be working on their patch in the morning, and put all the logistics of the operation into motion. I’d already got a false passport and documentation in the bogus name I was using, Peter Mitchell, company director. It was part of the standard SO10 undercover kit.

  I spent the rest of the day, until after 11.00pm that night, sorting out plane tickets and putting the final details together for the venture into enemy territory.

  I was at the City of London Airport at the crack of dawn, buzzing. I strode through the terminal, Financial Times under my arm, looking every inch the British businessman off to Holland on a routine business trip. Inside my briefcase I had headed notepaper, letters, invoices, all the paraphernalia I needed to back up my cover. Nothing was left to chance in these hazardous exploits.

  I didn’t catch the flight the Dutchmen would have expected me to. I needed to be there earlier. There was work to be done. I caught the earliest plane I could. I needed first to contact the Dutch police. They were required to give me their official list of rules and regulations that would govern my investigative activities on Dutch soil. It was all laid down by magistrates and had to be adhered to or consent would be withdrawn. I went early because I thought the bad guys might have spotters out looking for me on the planned 8.55am arrival. I needed to slip through earlier unnoticed, liaise with the Dutch police then meet up with the Dutch gangsters in the bar of the Hilton. It was a race against time.