Gangbuster

by Peter Bleksley

  In the middle of all this, I had to nip round the back of the premises and make contact with the arrest and search squads to warn them that when they hit the restaurant premises, they had to be careful because the doorman was armed with a shooter. I was conscious all the time that they would have seen us come out of the restaurant and, once they had floored Hamid, would say, ‘That’s where he came from, the deal must have happened there,’ and hit the premises running. I had to tell them to watch out. The bouncer might mistake them for robbers and start giving them some.

  I managed to get a word of warning to them in time and they stormed the premises without incident. They didn’t find any more drugs down there, which was a disappointment, because we had thought our kilo parcel was one of many that had come out of a store and that was possibly the premises for keeping a great deal more gear. But it wasn’t; they just used it for individual transactions and a place for doing the negotiations. The doorman was nicked for illegal possession of a firearm and sent to prison. The drug-dealers also ended up inside. A good result that could so easily have turned very nasty.

  * * *

  Shooters were always a part of my life undercover, for good and for bad. Good when they were looking after my interests, bad when they were in the hands of dangerous villains. So when we had an informant go to the police at one North London nick with a tip about a geezer claiming to be part of a firm of gangland armourers, we were doubly interested and yours truly landed the job.

  The informant said these hoodlums had access to unlimited weapons and could supply anything you wanted. So I got briefed up for a big, big weapons job with loads of armed cops on stand-by as back-up. So I went in as a dodgy arms buyer and met them to see what was on offer, thinking in my mind of Uzi machine pistols, AK47s, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, it quickly transpired that our informant had been more than a little imaginative in his description. Far from being international arms dealers to the underworld, they were a team of two-bit burglars who’d done a job and picked up a pump-action shotgun. Just the one gun.

  I had to start thinking about what to do now about this big undercover operation that had been started in anticipation of a big result and was now tin pot. What should I do about this one and only gun on their ‘for sale’ list? I decided the best thing to do was to buy the poxy thing for £500 and get it off the streets. It was an on-the-spot decision and seemed the best solution all round. We probably wouldn’t even prosecute them for it to preserve the undercover involvement and the informant, but the gun had to be binned.

  First, I had to go through the whole rigmarole of testing it, chatting to the villains just to make sure there weren’t any other shooters about, that sort of thing. As a registered shot I knew pistols but I wasn’t all that familiar with sawn-off, pump-action shotguns. I needed to look proficient to kid even this ragged mob that I was a genuine gun expert. I knew you could blow your fingers off if you weren’t really careful.

  So I went to the police firearms unit and told them I was doing this undercover job and could they teach me how to load and unload a pump-action and how many types were there and what was the best way to use them. I needed to be seen to be proficient with them in front of villains. They were happy to help, so I went along to the armoury and they showed me how to load and unload, load and unload over and over until I was doing it like it was second nature. Then I let a few off to see what it was like, blasting shit out of some targets.

  My next step was to go out with one of the burglars to the wilds of Hertfordshire to test the gun for real. He was only a kid, in his twenties, I suppose, and then we met up with one of his mates and went to this field which was littered with half-a-dozen derelict motors. Of course, I needed to know if the gun worked. He said indignantly, ‘I’ll show you if it fucking works.’ He loaded it up and started pumping rounds into the cars. Doors were having fucking great holes blown in them, every window that was left, BANG, we’d have a pop at that. We’d been in the pub all afternoon and we were all a bit pissed.

  ‘Do you want a go?’

  ‘Bloody right.’

  And there I was blowing holes in these fucking motors. Flying glass everywhere, Ford Escort shrapnel in the air. What was I going to do, say ‘No’?

  There were a few people I wouldn’t have minded having a shot at! It was what the geezers would have expected me to do. And it was bloody good fun.

  So I bought the gun, slung it in the back of my car, returned to base and said, ‘Look, these are not really great armourers, they haven’t got access to zillions of firearms, your informant has been prone to a bit of exaggeration, I’m afraid. I’ve bought the only one they’d got on offer and there’s a £500 hole in the expenses.’ I didn’t mention the holes I’d made in the motors in the course of my enquiries. The gun was forensically tested to see if it could be linked with any unsolved crimes, but it was clean. Then it was destroyed. Off the streets for good.

  * * *

  If variety is the spice of life, then variety certainly spiced up my career as an undercover cop. You never knew what was coming up next. Although I became an acknowledged expert in drugs, I was happy to tackle any operation of any nature to the best of my ability. One of the longest I did involved me posing as the manager of a transport company warehouse in Thurrock, Essex, to nail a gang of cannabis smugglers. It was the nearest thing to a nine-to-five job I’d had. I’d drive there every day through the Dartford Tunnel and clock on like the rest of the staff. I was full-time undercover, lunch breaks and all. I had a sort of managerial post, in the office, but, of course, I had to muck in and help when necessary to keep my cover. We had all the props in there – trucks, forklifts, all that kind of stuff – it looked like a proper bona fide company. We were looking to arrest members of a cannabis ring bringing the gear into Britain in furniture lorries through the docks at Dover, so we needed someone to be at the warehouse full-time so they got to know the face. You never knew when members of the gang might pop in to suss things out. They wanted to use it as a transit station between imports of hash and a distribution network in this country. So it was important we had continuity at the premises, and that they’d see a face they could trust. The firm were bringing in large quantities of puff hidden in furniture and household goods so cleverly they were beating the Customs blokes at Dover on every run.

  They would bring the stuff to the warehouse, unload, and I would look after it until their other transport arrived to move the goods onward to the dealer network. You would never know, looking at the furniture, that it was anything but innocent. The cannabis resin had been so carefully built into chairs, sofas, three-piece suites, washing machines and so on; a few kilos here, a few kilos there, but when it was all added up, it was a nice earner. They were bringing over the contents of people’s houses who were moving to or returning to England, so there were all sorts of places for concealment of drugs. Of course, the owners never knew their precious property had been opened up and abused in that way.

  The gang just thought I was a bent warehouse manager who would be paid handsomely to keep his mouth shut. What the villains didn’t know, of course, was that the depot had been bugged to catch every movement in and out and every conversation. They’d come in and deposit each load and then disappear. I’d be told that so and so would be there to collect it in an hour. And that’s when I started earning my money.

  The premises were fully rigged up with video and audio equipment, but we still needed to know if there really were drugs inside the various items of furniture, and where they were stuffed. I’d have to open it all up, find the drugs and put them on show to photograph it for evidence for the eventual court case. The driver would only play the innocent and say, ‘I’ve only got some furniture on board, mate,’ if he was pulled, so we needed to know that the drugs were definitely in there. I’d have an engineer available who would help me dismantle the settee or whatever, get the hash out, get a photographer in to take photos, and stick everything back exactly as it was. This took a gr
eat deal of skill. Our man needed to be able to replace everything in such a professional way that it wouldn’t be noticed. He’d stick settees back in place, replace the backs on washing machines and other domestic appliances, and get it all sorted so it didn’t look as though it had been tampered with. He’d have earned a fortune with MFI.

  Once that was done and looking ship-shape, I’d sit and wait for the next lorries to arrive to move the stuff on. This was the beauty of it being a police job, and not a Customs job. Although technically it was an importation, we could keep it running and nick the entire network, not just the drivers bringing it through the docks. We knew it was going to keep on coming in and, if we acted half-blind about it, pretended we didn’t know and Customs didn’t happen to get lucky and make a seizure, it would enable us to take out a very big distribution network if left to our own devices.

  When the mainland crooks came to pick it up and load it all back on another lorry, we’d have a chat, and I’d try to embroil the driver in a conversation in which he would implicate himself.

  ‘Ooh, that’s a heavy sofa, ha ha ha …’ I’d say, in the hope he might say something that would drop him in it, along the lines of, ‘You’ll never guess what’s in there, mate.’ Sometimes they couldn’t resist telling you.

  ‘What, wacky baccy? You’re kidding.’

  They’d also go to other premises where they’d start to dismantle the settees and other items themselves. We’d get these wired up as well and you’d hear them meet up with the gang chiefs and get excited about it all. They found it very difficult not to go and fawn over the drugs parcel, to be a part of it, to look at it. This was holiday money they were looking at – ‘Hawaii, here we come.’

  We started nicking members of the distribution ring over a 100-mile radius after following various vehicles to various addresses and setting up observations in garages, warehouses, wherever the drop was. The Old Bill would steam in and scoop them up and the beauty was that, when it got to court, the evidence would start at the point of arrest: ‘At such and such a time on such and such a day I was observing premises at … this man turned up, I saw him unload …’ It was stand alone evidence and once again we could preserve the overall undercover operation and our source of information. I would still be intact at the Thurrock warehouse waiting for the next lot to arrive. Nobody ever twigged.

  I think, at the end of the day, about half-a-dozen people were nicked, there was some sort of family link among the gang, but some were left free to protect the operation. They didn’t know it, but they were living on borrowed time. There was always tomorrow once we knew who they were. We’d be back.

  The operation lasted about six months and I came out of it knowing a darn sight more about the transport system than when I started. I’d had to gen myself up on transport policy, lorries, HGVs, tachometers, fuel prices, motorway links, all that sort of stuff, because people would be coming in all day talking to you about it and you couldn’t afford to look like some incompetent idiot. They’d soon become suspicious of you. It helped if you kept saying Norbert Detrassangle a lot!

  I had a couple of mates with HGV licences and I picked their brains to get a quick lesson in the transport business. It was all playing roles, being an actor in a black comedy half the time, stopping yourself from getting killed by some nutter or other. Preparing your act properly and professionally was the art of the undercover business.

  I had a legitimate pal at that time who ran a market stall. Sometimes, at weekends he couldn’t make it so I would go in and do his stall for him. Just a favour for a mate. I’d go to work at Eltham Sunday market, set my stall up, get all the gear out and wait for the punters. I was a weekend stall-holder. Terrific, it was on-the-job training. Once I’d done that a few times, I knew what being a stallholder was all about. And I used that cover quite often when I went out and met the bad guys. I’d been there, done it and got the T-shirt, so I knew what I was talking about. I knew who the ‘Toby’ was, the guy who collects the rents, I knew the market jargon, how to haggle a deal, all the little bits and pieces you pick up. The only thing I would ever make up if I was using that cover was the fact that my mate was actually selling pot pourri and pot pourri oils. Now that wasn’t exactly the hardest thing to have been doing if you were going out and buying heroin and cocaine, so I said I dealt in nicked antiques and bric-à-brac. You couldn’t afford to look a bit of a poofter with some of the geezers I ended up dealing with.

  But that, strangely, is where my undercover career all started. It was back in the early Eighties, I was in CID at Kensington, and working with an informant who was gay. No problem. He put up some information about a gay antiques dealer in Fulham who was dealing in LSD. Now, officially, Fulham was part of a neighbouring manor and, going strictly by the book we should have passed the job over to them. But there had been a lot of rivalry between different police stations and we were very loath to give this job away. We went out and obtained a search warrant to turn over his premises. He lived in a flat above his business premises. Our informant was insistent that the guy would only deal with other gays, and the code word to use to get drugs was ‘stamps’.

  The informant assured us we could set up a deal over the phone, using the code word, but said that the person who picked up the stuff must look obviously gay or there would be no deal. So I phoned up the fella, a very flamboyant member of the gay community, and said, ‘Got any stamps?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Right, I’ll be round this afternoon, about two o’clock.’

  ‘Yes, see you then,’ he lisped.

  So there we were, a bunch of young, relatively inexperienced detectives flying by the seat of our pants and wondering where to go next, making it up as we went along. Who’s going to do the buy? All eyes were on me. OK, I say, I’m game.

  Now we were going to need some money for the transaction. Bearing in mind this was before the introduction of the undercover unit as we know it now and the capacity to draw police funds for such an operation, we turned to our own devices. We knew that a lot of LSD could be concealed in a very small space, such as on blotting paper, and we needed to buy a substantial amount to prove he was a dealer of some calibre. So we all went to our hole-in-the-wall bank cashpoints, got a few quid out and everybody lent it to me so that it looked as if I’d got a bit of a wad. Talk about Keystone Cops. But these were early days in my undercover career. It was my case, my informant, I was keen to do it, so it fell upon me to be the gay boy who did the buy. At the time, I was boxing for the police so I was as fit as a butcher’s dog and didn’t carry an ounce of fat. I put on my tightest pair of faded jeans, went to Marks and Spencers and bought a string vest, which was all the rage at the time, heavily slicked my hair back with gel, wore a couple of leather wrist bands I’d bought from Kensington market (again, de rigeur) and got dressed up in the bogs. When the CID lads saw me they just pissed themselves laughing. They were in hysterics. So I slipped a heavy coat on in the height of summer and slunk out of the back door of the nick to go about my business, hoping no one else would see me. I arrived at the geezer’s flat in Fulham, by then rid of the coat, and as directed by him I hadn’t gone into the shop but round the back way, if you’ll pardon the expression, and crept up the metal steps outside the back of the flat. I got to the flat door and found it open. I rapped on the door. ‘Hello?’

  No answer.

  I thought I might as well walk in. He knew I was coming. I was still calling out as I went inside.

  I looked in one room, a bedroom, and there suspended from the ceiling was a full body harness. It was the sort of thing used for sado-masochistic games. I was thinking, Uh oh, was this a very clever idea? Eventually, he heard me from the shop and he came tottering up the internal stairs. We met at the top of the stairs, he looked me up and down and said, ‘Oh, my, you do work out, don’t you?’

  I said, ‘Well, yeah, yeah, I do, but I’ve got a boyfriend and all that, so can we just get on with the business?’

  He s
eemed a bit put out that I wasn’t interested in a bit of hanky panky but said, ‘OK, then.’ He disappeared off for a few minutes then came back with a huge sheet of LSD tabs. He lisped, ‘And how many would you like?’

  At that moment I pulled out my warrant card and said, ‘All of ’em, ’cos you’re nicked.’

  With that, he threw his hands in the air and promptly collapsed on the sofa in a dead faint. I slapped him round the face a bit to bring him round and he went into a real drama queen number. ‘Oh my God, I can’t go to prison, I’d never survive.’

  By then, the other lads were thumping their way up the stairs after I’d shouted, ‘Come on, then,’ and he was nicked and the flat searched. They found about 500 doses of LSD – a lot of trips which could have had horrific side-effects for the users. He went to court and pleaded guilty. There wasn’t much else he could do in the circumstances. And lo and behold, when he was given a four-year stretch, we got the histrionics again and he fainted in the dock. In my book, another award-winning performance. But the operation gave me a taste for undercover work that was to last another ten years, a dress rehearsal for what became a life of professional deception.

  16: shadow of the godfather

  He looked like a tourist enjoying the sights of London. But I knew he was here on more sinister business. And I knew who his bosses were back home in Italy … the Mafia.