Gangbuster

by Peter Bleksley

  He was shell-shocked, absolutely fucking gobsmacked; he knew how close he’d been to taking a dip with a concrete overcoat or propping up a motorway bridge. What he did tell me sickened me to my boots – the gang had been tipped off about his undercover role by a senior officer at Scotland Yard who’d been paid a £50,000 bung in cash. It blew the whole fucking job right out of the water and put an officer in grave danger. That senior officer was never questioned, never arrested, never charged and has now left the force. He’s no doubt got a nice retirement home on the Costa with a fair bit of added bunce in his retirement kitty. But I wonder how his conscience is.

  12: robbing hoods

  I’ve got a scar on my face that serves as a permanent reminder always to expect the unexpected. The knife that sliced me just under my chin came within an inch of severing my windpipe or puncturing my jugular. It all happened in a split-second as we raided the headquarters of a drugs gang in Tooting, South London, when indecision almost proved fatal.

  I had been drafted into the job, not as the undercover man this time, but as back-up to a West Midlands undercover cop investigating a team of Indians suspected of dealing in heroin. I knew the squad was short of troops and volunteered my assistance. The uniformed senior officer running the job hadn’t had a lot of experience in covert work so I was there to offer him any expertise I could.

  The operation went like clockwork to start with; a police hit team moved in and scooped up two of the gang in the street as cash and drugs were exchanged. The heroin package was safely retrieved. So far so good. Premises had been identified during surveillance from where the dealers had been seen toing and froing. It needed checking, and quick.

  I suggested to the operational head, a lovely fella but new to this kind of job, that this was a place which had to be searched as a matter of some considerable urgency. In fact, I was pleading with him to get the placed turned over right away. ‘Let’s attack now,’ I said, ‘we know the villains have been in there, we mustn’t wait another minute. Let’s go now. Right now.’

  But he was still reluctant to launch a full-scale attack. ‘Let’s wait and see, let’s hold on a bit longer,’ he said.

  I knew what might have been going on in those premises. If somebody had been left in there, another member of the gang, he would be expecting his colleagues back by now with all the money. They’d gone off and done the deal as far as he was concerned, and should be coming back with the cash pretty soon to divvy it up. The longer we left the attack, I argued, the more likely anyone in there would start to get jittery. These were premises we should attack without a minute’s further delay.

  Under considerable pressure, I finally persuaded the operational head to allow us to move in. It was now a full half-hour since the bust had taken place. The dealers should have been back within ten minutes with the money. Anyone left in the flat could be getting severely twitchy.

  Without further delay, I led the assault up to the fortified front door. It was a flat over a shop and access was via a metal staircase to the rear. I went clunk, clunk up the dimly-lit stairway trying to make as little noise as possible. It was difficult on the metal stairs. I wanted to check out access, and decide what the best method of attack would be – kicking the door in, or if we’d got another Fort Knox on our hands then we’d have to withdraw to get battering equipment to storm in. I felt I could do it OK myself.

  Suddenly, the door flew open and … wallop! The flicker came at me with a knife and stabbed me in the neck just under my chin. It happened in a flash.

  I acted instinctively and reached out and grabbed him, dragged him out of the house and wrapped him over some metal railings on the walkway. I got hold of his hand and he was still clutching the knife, all covered in blood – my fucking blood. I was thinking, Oh shit I wonder how bad it is, and kept him pinned down until there were enough troops behind me to hold him and stop him doing any more damage with the knife. I’d exercised proper caution, but the bastard had still caught me unawares.

  I put my hand to my neck and it was pouring blood. I didn’t know whether this was it, the end of the line for P Bleksley, detective constable. I didn’t know whether the knife had cut the jugular or what untold damage he had done. He had really lunged at me, really hit me one. I reckon he had thought we were robbers on the stairs after the heroin money, shat himself and panicked.

  The wound was throbbing and the pain was getting worse. I was a bit in shock. I needed medical attention and I needed it quickly. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get in a retaliatory blow on my attacker but, as I sat down waiting for the ambulance to arrive, I could hear all these screams and wails coming from round the corner as they carted him off to the nick. If he got a pasting, I didn’t waste any sympathy on him.

  Because I didn’t know how bad the injury was, I didn’t want to breathe in and inhale any blood. Somebody had grabbed a scarf and wrapped it round the wound and I kept it pressed tight ’til the ambulance came and I went off to St George’s Hospital. They were on emergency standby at the A and E department because the message they’d got was that a policeman was coming in with a knife in his neck.

  The duty doctor, a somewhat hard-faced lady, took a look and said, ‘Oh, you’ll live, don’t panic. Just a few stitches.’ I was mightily relieved to hear that. The knife, which had a 6in double-edged blade, had fortunately hit me a glancing blow under my chin, ripping open a 2in gash. It could so easily have been another story. It gave me a severe bit of grief for several weeks and my face came up black and blue and the scar, on the underside of my left jaw, will be with me for life, a salutary reminder that you never know what’s round the next corner or behind the next door.

  The knifeman was charged with causing me grievous bodily harm with intent and sentenced to five years in jail. Ironically, the two other members of the heroin gang were acquitted at their trial of conspiracy to supply drugs. If my bloke had kept his cool and not gone for me like a madman, he’d probably have got off the drug-dealing as well. Tough, ain’t it?

  * * *

  I got my first taste of learning to expect the unexpected on my very first job with the Central Drugs Squad undercover division. And what a baptism of fire it turned out to be.

  It was 1985 and I had arrived at Scotland Yard bright-eyed and bushy tailed, the new kid on the block anxious to do well. I knew I had a vast amount to learn about the workings of Scotland Yard. It was all very well being a detective at a local police station, but now this was premier league. I was confronted by things I never even imagined the police did, let alone knew how they did them. It was a vast new arena to enter.

  The job carried a lot of kudos; I was a young man who had made it to a Scotland Yard squad at a relatively early age, 24, and I couldn’t wait for the action. It came after just three days.

  ‘Right,’ said the DI, ‘there’s an undercover job going down in Regent’s Park this afternoon and you are on it.’

  I sure was. I was briefed as to what the job was all about – so and so from the unit had infiltrated this massive drug network operating in central London and the gangsters were going to supply the officers with three or four kilos of heroin in the car park of Regent’s Park zoo and when the gear arrived we would all leap out and arrest the villains. I thought, Fuck me, this is real cops and robbers. There was a suspicion, said the boss, that some or all of the gang might have firearms, so caution at all times. There were going to be armed officers dotted about in various disguises, from road sweepers to porters and although I was firearms trained, I wouldn’t be carrying a weapon myself. It was the policy for an officer to go out unarmed on his first ever job for the squad.

  It was a biggish team going out on the operation and the plan was for most of them to be hidden away in a big bus, ostensibly an executive-style tourist coach visiting the zoo with a party of day-trippers. It had smoked glass windows for extra cover. We would all be lying hidden on the floor or upstairs out of sight of the gangsters or anybody else curious about our activities.


  Fuck me, I thought as we waited expectantly for the action to start, this is a rush. This was my initiation into the world of undercover operations. Pure excitement.

  I was crouching in the bus with the other officers, and I’d got my radio tuned into the events, listening to the commentary second by second, minute by minute, to what the baddies were doing, what the police were doing. We seemed to have the situation buttoned up tight. Then, all of a sudden, the shit hit the fucking fan.

  ‘ATTACK … ATTACK … ATTACK.’

  Events had suddenly gone haywire. The bad guys had decided that they were going to rob the undercover police, thinking they were a team of second division crooks, and blag the £70,000 that was supposed to be used to buy the drugs. What had prompted them to change tactics I don’t know, but I did discover that suspicions had crept in during a previous meeting between the two sides when the villains had asked an undercover woman detective to take her bra off as they checked her out for hidden devices like a mini tape recorder or transmitter, and she had refused. Her modesty had decreed that she stayed fully clothed. I think the gang probably went away from that meeting thinking, Well, she won’t get her tits out, that’s a bit iffy, a bit prudish for a drug-dealer looking at a £70,000 trade. They probably thought they’d be an easy touch and decided to roll them instead.

  The gang approached the undercover police team, two men and the woman, sitting in their car at the appointed meeting place in Regent’s Park. Suddenly one of them produced a plastic squeezy bottle and sprayed ammonia directly in the face of the driver through the window. They opened the boot, grabbed the £70,000 and legged it. This hadn’t been anticipated at all, a huge chunk of the Commissioner’s cash being robbed from his own police officers.

  We all poured out of the bus and various other strategic hiding places and stormed into action. There was absolute fucking bedlam. The injured driver was lying on the ground clutching his face and screaming in agony thinking he’d been blinded; the four villains had all scarpered in different directions; the police were panicking because the bag with £70,000 in it had vanished; and people were legging it all over the show in complete chaos. I was in the thick of it, just loving it. This was what I’d joined the cops for. I was young, fit and mega keen and I soon caught up with one of the villains bolting away from the car park, past the zoo visitors, mums, dads, kids and tourists. I got to within a few feet of him as he headed for some trees and bushes, low-level cover for him, where he probably hoped to hide. I was gaining on him stride by stride. Then he turned and levelled a gun at me. He hissed, ‘Fuck off, you bastard,’ and I thought, Shit, he’s going to shoot me. But I’d got up such a head of steam and was travelling like an Olympic fucking sprinter so there was no way I could stop. I ducked to one side and just carried right on straight at him. He could see I wasn’t going to stop and started running again, and then – crunch – I hit him with an almighty fucking bang and sent him crashing to the deck. He slammed down like a sack of King Edwards. That was it, he was nicked.

  Firearms officers examined the gun and it turned out to be a loaded .22 pistol, a lower-calibre gun but quite deadly enough to have killed me from that range. That was my first day in action with the undercover unit.

  I learned a lot in a very short space of time. It was a wonderful education for me in my chosen career, but sadly it involved another officer receiving serious injuries to his eyes. It was painful but there was no lasting damage done. He received treatment at Moorfields Eye Hospital but was later able to resume his police duties after a period of sick leave.

  The police squad were also fortuitous in not having to suffer the massive embarrassment of having to admit to losing the £70,000. The tabloids would have loved that. The cash was recovered from under a tarpaulin inside the zoo where one of the villains had slung the bag as he legged it. He’d seen the opportunity to dump it as he fled and obviously hoped to return later in the dead of night to retrieve it. But there was bedlam for a while. Once the crooks had been handcuffed and bundled off to be charged, there was a collossal fucking panic to find the missing seventy grand. People were looking everywhere. Blokes were running round for about 20 minutes shouting, ‘Find the money, find that fucking money.’ After it had been found and some sort of normality had returned, I remember the DI who ran the job, Mark Leyton, saying at the debriefing, ‘Gentlemen, today is the day that I discovered adrenalin runs down your leg.’ That did sum it up for all of us. And Mark Leyton, of course, had been looking at the prospect of his entire career ending in humiliation if the £70,000 had not been recovered.

  The whole incident taught me that things are never black and white and if Sod’s Law can strike when you least expect it, then it will.

  I sat drinking a few pints with a pal later that night and I said, ‘I can do this undercover stuff, and no fucker is ever going to rob me.’ I just couldn’t wait to go undercover myself. It wasn’t very long coming, just a matter of days. They wanted someone to volunteer for a drug infiltration and my hand shot up like an Exocet missile.

  In the years that followed, I worked all over the UK and abroad, often with female police officers in undercover roles, and I can’t praise them enough for their skill and courage. It could be an arduous enough job for experienced male officers; for some of the female officers, it could sometimes be nightmarish. I wasn’t surprised, for instance, to hear that the girl who went undercover in the Rachel Nickell murder investigation in Wimbledon was forced to retire because of stress. I knew Lizzie James, although that wasn’t her real name, and had every admiration for her abilities. To ask her to go undercover and befriend the man suspected of the murder, Colin Stagg, must have tested her emotional capabilities to the limit. I know she was deeply upset when the case was thrown out at the Old Bailey and the undercover ‘honey trap’ was branded reprehensible by the judge. I’m glad she’s now got a decent damages pay-off from Scotland Yard.

  Another female detective I worked with – we’ll call her Diane because that was the undercover name she normally used – travelled with me to Darlington in Durham on a drugs job, pretending to be my courier, taking the money up north and bringing the heroin back down south to London. It was a job we’d been asked to do by the local police who’d been tipped off about an Asian gang dealing smack in a big way – or big, at least, by their standards – and wanted an experienced undercover unit to go in and do a buy of half a kilo of heroin. In London, we probably wouldn’t have rated half a kilo a major job. To a provincial force it was a serious and worrying element in an upsurge of drug-related crime. So it was ‘call in the Yard’ and Diane and I headed north by train.

  The trade had been arranged to take place at Darlington railway station. Normally, stations were a good place to meet and conduct drug deals because of the volume of people who would be about and you could mingle with the crowd. They also had left-luggage lockers for stashing drugs or money. That was, of course, until the advent of wall-to-wall CCTV cameras which is so prevalent in all public places now. I believe the statistics suggest that an individual can be picked up on a CCTV camera over 200 times in a normal working day. But that’s now. In the Eighties, there weren’t nearly so many, and a station was still a good, sensible place for doing criminal business.

  We settled into our seats for the Darlington trip, coffee and sandwiches to hand and Diane keeping a wary eye on £16,000 in a case. I was met at the other end by one of the heroin dealers by the name of Mushi – or ‘Mushy Peas’ as we called him – and we started the transaction with me acting the big-shot dealer from up the Smoke and Diane as my gangster’s moll. Then there was the usual hiccup – the drug parcel was not there yet, we’d have to sit and wait, blah blah. The times I’d heard that.

  Almost at once, Mushi was alerted by a bloke standing on the opposite platform. He took a second look then ducked out of sight and asked me, ‘Do you know that geezer over there?’ He pointed out a guy in jeans and a casual jacket standing there apparently just minding his own business and
waiting for a train.

  ‘No, don’t know him from Adam,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I fucking do,’ he replied, ‘he’s Old Bill. I know that for sure because he trains in a gym in Middlesbrough where I train.’

  I could see the alarm bells ringing in his head. He insisted we left the station and I had to tell Diane to stay put in the buffet with the money. I wasn’t too happy about it but she was cool with the situation. We went out of the station and walked about a bit doing a lot of anti-surveillance around the neighbouring streets ensuring that neither of us was being followed. Mushi seemed satisfied everything was OK and the gear finally arrived on the plot. By that time, thankfully, the bloke on the opposite platform had disappeared and Mushi assumed he’d just been waiting for a train. But he was, in fact, one of the surveillance team put in by the local police to back Diane and me up. It was either a stroke of luck, or a canny move on his part, that he’d disappeared off the plot when the time came to do the deal or it wouldn’t have gone down and everyone’s time would have been wasted. He must have realised that if he just stood there and trains came and went, he was going to stick out like a sore thumb so he’d backed off.