Gangbuster

by Peter Bleksley

  It was July 1991 and the police had been tipped off that a leading criminal figure, on the run from justice in Italy, had arrived in the UK with the specific intention of setting up a major drugs network and was looking for buyers to handle large quantities of cocaine, heroin and other narcotics. He was known to be an organised-crime figure and to have a serious criminal record back home.

  The job had been landed by one of the area drug squads but was considered too hot to handle in the light of the Mafia involvement. The call for specialist assistance came in to the Undercover Unit at the Yard. Drugs and Mafia? Step forward Detective Bleksley. I was dispatched to join the area squad with the aim of infiltrating this sinister Italian – known only to me as Bruno – and smashing his drugs operation before it got off the ground and before we found ourselves flooded with Mafia drugs and Mafia hoodlums.

  I had first to be sure that the area squad was up to providing the sort of high-quality back-up that would obviously be needed in view of the quality target we were after. Fortunately, I knew a couple of the blokes on the squad and had worked with them before so I knew they had some pretty sharp operators up there, people with previous experience of undercover jobs with major targets. And once we’d had a couple of briefings to discuss our game plan, I knew they were more than capable of handling a job this size. In other circumstances, they might have been forced to hand the whole job over to a higher squad like Central Drugs, but with COG involved and some solid blokes on the home team, we were set to go.

  I met up with the informant, usual old game, and I was told the Italian suspect I was about to meet didn’t speak much English. I don’t know one fucking word of Italian after ‘spaghetti bolognaise’ so I went back to the undercover unit and requested an Italian-speaking officer to be drafted in to help me. They searched through police personnel records and came up with a girl who could speak the lingo. This suited me fine because she could always pose as my girlfriend. She was pretty inexperienced in this sort of work but was mainly going to be there as a translator. With a little bit of coaching and a little bit of persuasion she agreed to be my side-kick.

  She arrived looking every inch the part on the evening of Tuesday, 23 July and we set off for Shelley’s Wine Bar in Albemarle Street in the West End. We ordered a couple of drinks and I played the pinball machine while we waited for the informant and our Mafiosi mate to arrive.

  Within ten minutes, they were there. The informant introduced me to Bruno, our target, and a most unlikely-looking Mafia hood. He was about 5ft 9in tall, aged around 45, slim, short grey hair, a distinctive lazy right eye and casually dressed in jeans, T-shirt and red cardigan. More like a favourite uncle enjoying a night out than a fugitive drug-runner. But I’d known too often in this game that appearances can be deceptive.

  Bruno and the informant asked for drinks but were told the bar had closed. So we all went upstairs to Shelley’s Pub, where the bar was still open, bought drinks all round and sat down. Like a lot of self-respecting villains Bruno didn’t want to talk business in front of my ‘girlfriend’. He didn’t want to talk to her and didn’t want her to be privy to any of our conversations. It was a case of ‘don’t involve your women in your criminal activities’, a code which a lot of crooks abide by and which I have a lot of respect for. Consequently, she’d only been there a matter of minutes when she was banished to the ladies.

  When she came back, I said Bruno had asked that she shouldn’t be present while we discussed business. She acted a bit put out, not too much but pouty enough to be convincing. She had a brief conversation with Bruno in Italian and as a result moved to another table 10ft away and out of earshot. I said, ‘Right, if you’re happy now, let’s get down to business. I gather you’ve got some powder on offer. What have you got and what’s the price?’

  I had to get by as best I could on the language front. Luckily, his English wasn’t that dire and I tried to keep my vocabulary as simple as possible so there wouldn’t be any confusion. The informant knew some Italian and was able to translate if we hit a problem. He spoke to Bruno and the Italian said to me, ‘Coke, £45,000 a kilo, heroin same price.’ That was way too high.

  I said, ‘Is this geezer real? What sort of mug does he think I am, or is he just taking the piss? Forty-five grand, no way.’

  This sent the Mafia man and my informant into a heated debate for several minutes. Then the informant said, ‘It has got to be that price because it is such high-quality merchandise and because this is a first-time deal.’

  Bruno said the heroin was available immediately but the cocaine hadn’t reached the UK yet. I had set my stall as a cocaine buyer and it would have looked a bit sussy if I’d changed my mind and said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll have the heroin anyway.’ If you started chopping and changing you could lose your credibility and he could start smelling a rat. I had to resist the chance of a big heroin seizure there and then and knock the deal back, albeit reluctantly. I said no thanks, I’d stick out for the cocaine, but I’d have a word with a bloke who could shift the heroin. But Bruno wasn’t budging on his prices. If I had been a real drug-dealer, my profit margins would have been ridiculously small, even with cutting the gear. His prices were exorbitant even for top-grade gear. I said to the informant, ‘You tell him he’s in London now, not Rome or Milan or wherever. We do things our way over here. Either he gets sensible or the deal is off.’

  I knew I was chancing my arm a bit, but I had to be realistic. At his price it worked out at £45 a gramme and the street price then was only £60 a gramme. There wasn’t a dealer in town who would have touched it with those profit margins, even with Bruno’s assurances that it was 90 per cent pure coke and each kilo could be cut to make a kilo-and-a-half at street price. I think I must have taken a brave pill that morning because then I found myself getting Bolshie with a Mafia drug dealer and telling him how fucking pissed off I was with his prices.

  Bruno seemed to have got a bit more grasp of English all of a sudden. ‘I try to tell you story,’ he said. ‘Our operation have got stuff here. We not pay for it yet. So we have to charge high price to get more over. Will not get here unless we pay some money to them.’

  I said, ‘So how does that affect me? That’s your problem not mine. If you’ve got the gear here, you can’t expect to charge those prices to pay for your operation. You’ll never sell it.’

  Bruno replied, ‘We have sell some. Only want two or three customers and then in six months everything OK and you can have 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 kilo a time of what you want.’

  This was big-time stuff by any standards. We were talking millions of pounds here.

  ‘Are you saying,’ I asked Bruno, ‘if I pay this high price now you will guarantee everything I want afterwards?’

  He sure would, he said and went even further, promising to show us exactly how the drugs were brought into the country and how his operation worked.

  ‘You will be very happy,’ he said. He said that if I shifted some of the heroin for him he would share some of the profits with me.

  I asked him why he didn’t just bring down the price of his cocaine and share some of those profits with me. I was getting pretty pissed off so I said through the informant, ‘Either he gets sensible or I’m out of here.’ I was really calling his bluff.

  I got up from the table, acting sort of humpy, and went and bought some more drinks. Then we had a chat about women, Italy, Italian football, and so on. Then Bruno cracked. The bluff had paid off. He agreed to a trial purchase of half a kilo of cocaine for £22,500 with regular supplies of 2 kilos a week at a much cheaper price to follow. Bruno wanted me to buy more but I said I wouldn’t know what demand there was until I’d seen it, tried it and let my customers have some.

  ‘I do for you any amount,’ he said, ‘all 90 per cent.’

  He agreed to supply the trial package in a couple of weeks. And he was still keen to move his heroin. ‘I do that now, you see,’ he repeated for about the third time.

  ‘Yes,’ I said ‘I’m not deaf
.’

  We returned to more touristy lines of conversation like holidays, golf, racing, fucking and fighting and then said our goodbyes. The scene was set; the trap was laid. I beckoned my ‘girlfriend’ over and we strolled out into the night hand in hand. Her part was over.

  Mine was now moving into top gear. I tried to persuade the management that this was a case that would justify buying the first consignment, without arresting Bruno, and setting him up for 10 or 20 kilos or even more in the future. But they were always a bit suspicious of us, cops working undercover. There’s got to be some sort of wheeze going on. They said no, that we’d have to take him first time up. They knew, of course, through Interpol, that he was high on the Italian wanted list and the sooner he was banged up and then deported, the better. I was keyed up and ready to go over the next few days expecting Bruno’s call on my mobile to set a time and place for the hand-over. Nothing. It was a full two months before he surfaced again. Not unusual with professional criminals. It was often a waiting game.

  It was on a Friday evening in late September when I met him again at Shelley’s with our informant. I shook his hand, bought us drinks and said to him, ‘I was wondering if I’d ever see you again.’

  He said he’d had problems but it was all sorted now. ‘You OK?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’m fine, but it’s a good job I don’t rely on you to make a living from or I’d be skint.’

  It fell on stony ground and the informant had to translate the slang. Bruno declared that our cocaine was now on site and the trial half-kilo could be delivered the next day.

  ‘How do you know I haven’t found another source?’ I asked a bit cheekily.

  ‘But you here, must be good reason you want Bruno give you best coke,’ he replied.

  ‘I might just have a friend interested in the heroin,’ I told him.

  ‘Have you?’ he said, spotting a chance to make a nice few quid from the smack.

  ‘Let’s deal with the coke first,’ I said.

  He wanted to arrange the hand-over next day but I said, ‘That’s no good, I’m busy’. I needed more time to set up the operation. So we agreed on the following day, a Sunday, to meet by the petrol station near the Kensington Hilton Hotel at 11.00am. Not a day of rest for drug-dealers or undercover cops! He said we would go to a safe house nearby for the exchange. He said he would bring a sample of the heroin he was so keen to get rid of to my supposed mate, free of charge. ‘Very generous,’ I said sarcastically as we parted.

  I turned up at the Hilton Hotel sharp at 11.00am on the Sunday with £22,250 of the Commissioner’s cash in a nearby car and a fellow undercover officer at the wheel. There was plenty of cover nearby from the back-up teams. They knew it was another roving plot and we might go anywhere. I saw Bruno waiting outside holding an umbrella. It was a dark, overcast day with frequent showers and we had both taken brollies. He said, ‘Have you got the money?’

  ‘Yes, nearby.’

  Why hadn’t I got it with me, he wanted to know.

  “Cos I’m not taking my dough into some strange place and getting robbed, that’s why. Bring me the parcel and I’ll bring the money.’

  He didn’t look too happy as we walked into Russell Road, which consisted of a lot of big, old Victorian houses, and he led me up the stairs to the communal front door which he opened with a key and we went up to flat number 8, right at the top. He unlocked that and we were in a bed-sitter. I had no idea what I might be walking into. All the time, I was looking for possible escape routes, a skylight or whatever; your bottle is screaming, taking chunks out of your underpants, and you are guarding your back without showing a glimmer of concern.

  I saw another Italian standing there who looked like a Mafia hoodlum straight out of Central Casting – swarthy, black moustache, balding, slim, eyes darting everywhere. He produced a Boots carrier bag which he handed to Bruno, who put it down on the kitchen table. Then he took out two bags, heavily bound in masking tape, each containing a quarter kilo of cocaine, the archetypal packaging for powder.

  ‘Now get the money,’ he said.

  ‘Hold up, behave yourself,’ I said, ‘not ’til I’ve looked in one of them. Open one up.’

  Bruno got some newspaper and laid it on the kitchen table. Bruno gave one of the packages to the other geezer and laid the other on top of the paper.

  ‘Oh no, not that one, the other,’ I said.

  Bruno swapped them over and put my rejected one in the Boots bag. Then he took a knife from the other bloke and started cutting away at the masking tape. Now I was thinking about the other officers coming in afterwards looking for evidence and Bruno was playing nicely into our hands. Every time he ripped off a bit of tape, his fingerprints went on it and he slung it in the bin. When the police came in on a search later, which they would to cover my involvement, there would be perfectly legitimate evidence in the bin. I offered to help him to make sure my dabs would be on the tape as well as further corroboration if I was called to give evidence. If they said it was all fictitious and made up, then I could prove I was there. It was a matter of thinking on your feet all the time.

  Once the masking tape was off, there was clingfilm to undo. This is how the dealers protect the powder; layers and layers of the stuff because you don’t want bags bursting or losing the gear when someone makes a cut to sample it. As we were stripping the packaging away, some brown powder fell on the paper. I looked quizzical, though I had a shrewd notion what it was.

  ‘Pepper, to put the dogs off the scent,’ said Bruno. Yes, I’d guessed right.

  Once all the clingfilm was off I saw a white plastic bag with ‘Holland’ marked on it, no doubt where this consignment was coming from. Bruno opened a final bag and showed me a lump of white powder. I knew instantly it was top quality. When it comes in a lump, it’s always uncut and high grade. I smelt it and tasted it and knew it was the pukka gear. So now I had seen evidence galore piling up in the bin, tape, clingfilm, even the newspaper, all handled by both men. Slowly but surely I was nailing the bastards to the floor, and neither of them knew it.

  I told them I wouldn’t bother weighing the coke because if it was light I’d know exactly where to come for revenge. I could see the flat was lived in on a regular basis. The second Itie said, ‘That won’t happen. You’ll see it’s all there when you come to weigh it.’

  I turned to him and said, ‘Thank you, but I wasn’t really talking to you.’

  He said, ‘It’s OK, I promise.’ The second geezer then proceeded to re-wrap the coke plus a sample of heroin which he thought would interest my other pals in the drug trade. Lovely, a bit of smack in with the Charlie, that’ll go down well when it reaches court.

  That was it, deal done, and Bruno and me walked down the stairs and into the street. As we strolled back towards the Hilton to pick up the cash to pay for the gear, Bruno was buzzing with enthusiasm for our new-found business relationship. ‘Today we start great things, is so?’ he said, in his broken English, beaming. You prat, I thought, the only great thing you’ve got to look forward to is seven years inside, minimum. And then I gave the pre-arranged signal for the hidden police team to break cover and move in for the kill. I shoved my rolled-up umbrella under my left arm, waited a few seconds and saw them swarming towards us from all directions. Hairy-arsed rozzers in black combat gear and Glock 9mm pistols decending from every which way. I was on my toes and away. Mr Mafia man never knew what hit him.

  I was a bit worried that I’d had to leave the informant behind in the flat at Bruno’s insistence. It was the Mafioso style of things. There was no choice. He stays here till we get the money, they insisted. Either that or no trade. But the risk assessment had been made at the start of the operation and my bosses considered that the snout must have needed his payoff so desperately that he was happy to be on the plot when the job went down. His decision. He wasn’t my problem at the end of the day. It was up to my superiors to deal with. You always tried to extract the informant when you could but thi
s was one where it couldn’t be done. If I’d kicked up a fuss about him coming with me it could have fucked it all up. These are on-the-hoof decisions you have to make while your brain is doused in adrenalin and you just hope you get it more right than wrong. When it’s a case of ensuring your own escape from an ambush situation like that, to make it look like you really are a villain, you always have the upper hand. You know it’s going to happen, so you’re ready to exit stage left. The bad guy is taken completely by surprise. Most of the sensible back up boys will make what appears to be a genuine effort to catch you but you either out-run them or disappear or whatever. On this occasion I was a bit pissed off because I’d taken my treasured golfing umbrella – I hadn’t had it very long and it matched my golf bag and this, that and the other – and when the first of the pursuing coppers came at me I larrupped him with it and it went ‘twang’ and shredded in front of my eyes. I really loved that umbrella and I thought, Now, why the fuck did you do that? Anyway they very kindly replaced the broken brolly … with a lost property job that had been lying round the squad office for the last six months. Their resources didn’t stretch to a new one.

  But they were well happy with the result. Not only did we get the cocaine package, the search team found another 6 kilos of high-grade heroin worth about £220,000 skilfully hidden in the flat. Bruno hadn’t been kidding about his smack supplies. He got a lengthy jail sentence with a recommendation that he be returned to Italy to face a load of other serious charges there. The other geezer got a lighter sentence. It was another two scumbags off the streets, another bid to set up a multi-million-pound drug network foiled. There was no doubt at the end of the day that Bruno and his cronies had the capacity to flood Britain with the quantity of drugs they had talked about, according to highly-placed sources on the international drug scene, and what we’d seen was truly the tip of a very large iceberg.

  These two were characteristic of the increasing Mafia involvement in the British drug scene, and other areas of organised crime. When I was with the Central Drug Squad we arrested a big leaguer called David Medin who was a known and very active Mafiosa member, in connection with 33 kilos of cocaine, then the largest land seizure of coke ever made in Britain. It was one of the most dramatic jobs I’d ever been on. I wasn’t undercover but went along as one of the appointed firearms officers because we knew there was a big chance of the suspects being tooled up in view of the value of the gear. We had men up in a helicopter to intercept the villains’ car on the M11 and we had police ‘gunships’, cars with armed officers aboard placed along the motorway.