Gangbuster

by Peter Bleksley

  The swoop went off in the middle of the night with the helicopter flying low overhead illuminating the suspect car with huge searchlights from a height of just a few feet. The armed police vehicles boxed him in, slowing their speed all the time – 50mph, 40mph, 30mph, slower and slower running side by side, double-banked so he had absolutely nowhere to go. It was like Blackpool fucking illuminations, spectacular stuff.

  Medin actually turned supergrass after his arrest, gave up his accomplices, confessed his Mafia connections then became a resident informant and was housed by the police in a secure unit. His output was phenomenal and, through him, the police got to know a lot about the operations of the Mafia in the UK and organised crime in general. The informant who had originally tipped us off about that job was Peter McNeil, who I mentioned earlier and who later got shot in a gangland execution.

  We knew there were Mafia people operating here. It was considered a very lucrative market by the Mob. At that time in the early Nineties, the Italian authorities were trying to hammer the Mafiosa at home and judges and politicians were all having their cars blown up. They were looking to move their activities elsewhere. There were a lot of suspicions about a lot of people here, such as Italians living in central London, or discreetly and apparently respectably in the suburbs with wives and families who were turning over a lot of cash from invisible sources. The Yard intelligence boys were pretty certain it was the Mafia. Proving it was another thing.

  They were also using ever more sophisticated ways of smuggling drugs into Britain. In the Medin case, for instance, the gear had been brought into the country hidden inside the metal arms of JCBs. They were cutting them open, stuffing them full of Colombian cocaine then welding them together again before shipping them into the UK from Argentina. They weigh tons anyway, so who’s going to find the stuff in there? If we hadn’t had a good informant on that job, the gang would still be doing it today and for donkey’s years to come. I can’t imagine some Customs officer deciding on a random check on a JCB arm and finding it stuffed with dope.

  I think I’ve probably made it clear by now that the Customs and us didn’t always see eye to eye on many things, even though our paths crossed a lot and we were basically supposed to be doing the same job, i.e. hitting the drug-dealers.

  I remember on one occasion I had picked up, through an undercover operation, details of a clever scam for bringing in very large consignments of drugs. This gang had devised a special water-tight capsule which they were going to tow underwater behind their vessel on a wire. No drugs on the boat, nothing showing on the surface behind. If they were suddenly approached by a suspicious Customs cutter, they could just jettison the drug load and avoid detection. They had built-in, remotely-operated buoyancy aids, so if they had to ditch the load in an emergency they would record the spot – a good seaman can do that with pinpoint accuracy – then return when it was safe, trigger off the remote control to inflate the buoyancy aids, and retrieve the swag.

  I thought it was ingenious, cutting-edge technology on the drug scene. I went to the Customs because it was obviously a Customs job, a proposed importation, and told them all about it. I even took along a sketch of the submersible which I had asked one of the gang to draw for me. I’d told him I didn’t really understand how it would work and needed him to do a quick picture for me. In truth, I was after evidence. I told Customs that the smugglers had all the technology for the capsules in place and all they were looking for was a boat and a crew. I was planning to go along as a crewman and lay on a good seizure for the Customs boys. We’d done that sort of thing before, such as Operation Dash in the Atlantic. But the Customs bosses wouldn’t have anything to do with it. They told me to pull out and leave it alone.

  You can imagine how I slammed the fucking door as I walked out of that meeting. I went back to the Yard, called the Customs a bunch of wankers, went on the piss, and said I’d never work for them again. But, of course, I did because so many jobs were interlinked.

  On one job, a close colleague and I were monitoring a bloke coming back to the UK from Colombia via France. We knew he had six kilos of cocaine body-packed on him tight as a drum. Another bloke in the same ring was also travelling but they weren’t making any contact with each other. We had them under close surveillance from the moment they touched down at de Gaulle airport in Paris. Again, because it was an importation, we thought we had better tell the British Customs.

  The following morning, the police met up for a 5am briefing at Heathrow before the arrival of the plane. Customs, the bastards, had met at 4am and had got out a rummage crew ready to search the suspect’s plane before we could tag them. They just wanted to nick the bodies and the drugs. The police, on the other hand, had a major investigation under way to find out who was further down the chain of command here, and what the distribution network was, to follow it through to the dealers. Customs didn’t give a fuck. But we knew where the guy with the drugs was going when he arrived back in England and we knew some of the people who were pushing his gear, so we had masses of Old Bill ready, dotted all over London, so that when he went off with his parcel and handed it on, we could scoop up loads of people and take out the entire network.

  Well, we went fucking ballistic when the Customs told us what they intended to do. It got very heated. So, after a word with my bosses, my mate and I sneaked out of the office, went to a phone box and rang a pal in France and said, ‘The Customs are trying to shaft us on this one. Get the French to nick ’em before they take off.’ And they did. The French police got the seizure and the British Customs got fuck all. Our squad claimed all the credit for it. ‘We sold the job abroad … so what?’

  We walked out smiling but they were not amused. I’m afraid that was just an indication of how much conflict and lack of communal ambition there was between the two services. They are civil servants who are better dishing out the dole in my opinion.

  I remember one particularly stroppy boss I had losing his rag with the Customs chiefs after one particularly onerous briefing and told them, ‘I think the best thing you lot can do is stand around the coastline of Britain and hold hands, form a chain around the coastline, it’s about your best bet. You haven’t got the brains for anything else.’

  On another occasion a senior Customs official was trying to pull rank on the same DI. He said he wanted to remind him that his civil service grade was equivalent to that of a police superintendent. My boss turned round to him and said, ‘I’d like to remind you that, in the police, people of your grade do my photocopying.’

  Now rank never bothered me. I remained a detective constable all my working life and was happy with that. It was the job I loved, mixing it with real people, not climbing the ladder to the role of some pen-pusher-in-chief. People told me I should go for a higher rank but it meant taking a year off work, effectively, to study. As my school record shows, studying was not really my forte. I chose specialisation and never regretted it for a minute. I travelled the country, travelled the world – what the fuck did I want rank for? I had bundles of respect for what I did and that’s what mattered to me.

  17: pot luck

  If there was action going on, I wanted a slice of it. As far as I was concerned, it was a war out there and I was ready to take up battle positions whenever and wherever I was required. For my part, it was an underworld theatre of war with me as an actor playing the starring role of villain with a supporting cast of villains playing themselves. Heart-thumping, sweat-making stuff a lot of the time. There were moments of the most intense drama, of ludicrous black comedy, and always the constant battle of wits against some of the most fearsome crooks in the world who would happily break your skull with an iron bar if they knew what you were really up to.

  Some of our operations were stage-managed like major productions, with up to 50 officers, including yours truly, deployed against the enemy. I was in briefing rooms where the support units, surveillance, arrest squads, firearms and forensics, were jammed in so tight you could barely get a de
cent lungful of air. It was important on every mission that everyone in the back-up squads knew exactly what I looked like. As the commanding officers briefed the assembled troops I would be shoved forward for all to see, a long-haired oik in jeans and T-shirt looking, hopefully, indistinguishable from the villains we were about to nick.

  ‘This is our man on the inside. Whatever happens, don’t shoot the fucker.’ They’d all have a good look. Some would know me from old.

  ‘Good luck, Blex.’

  Some would be seeing you for the first time. You’d meet again months later and they would wonder why you hadn’t remembered their name. ‘You know, we met at the Clapham heroin bust briefing.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember,’ and you hadn’t got a clue who they were. This was the work that I loved, in the spotlight using every bit of guile I possessed to infiltrate the big criminal gang. The undercover man became the linchpin of so many busts. The success or failure of the operations depended time and time again on the quality of our performance. My CV should have read ‘Professional liar, Metropolitan Police, treachery my speciality. Available for all kinds of undercover operations.’ Perhaps it should have added, ‘Prepared to sacrifice home life, domestic life, all friends and family and mingle freely with the dregs of society in the pursuit of duty.’

  We’d only go in on undercovers if conventional methods of nicking the crooks had either failed or weren’t practical. It meant we were up against the top echelons of the criminal underworld most of the time, tough, ruthless bastards most of them who were going to become your mates, your pals, your drinking buddies, your drug-dealing cronies, as you systematically set them up for a bust at the hands of an awesome police raiding party storming out of the shadows. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet but I do take great pride in the testimony of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Simon Crawshaw when he supported a recommendation for me to get the Commissioner’s High Commendation, the Yard’s top award, in 1990. He wrote, ‘DC Bleksley, relying on his professional judgment, “entered the lions’ den” placing himself at great risk should his expertise fail. Mr Bleksley, in addition to being a very fine officer, is also a realist, who is well aware of the serious consequences if he was to be discovered, yet has volunteered and used his expertise to obtain results which otherwise could not be achieved. We are indeed fortunate to have officers of the calibre of Detective Constable Bleksley to call on.’

  I hope it will make my son, Bradley, proud of his dad one day. He’s 14 now and knows only that I did something a bit mysterious in the police force. I wore funny clothes and had long hair and stayed out a lot. I want him to know all about those fascinating years at the heart of crime fighting. I’ll tell you how he happened along against the odds, back in 1988.

  It was a wet Wednesday in March when I picked up an emergency call on my car radio as I drove home from Scotland Yard through south east London. It was an urgent request for help on a drugs bust. Another team from the Central Drugs Squad were about to smash their way into a flat in Plumstead and wanted to rip it apart in the search for a big cannabis haul. It was known to have been used by various members of a gang of marijuana dealers. Not strictly my patch, but drugs and villains just down the road, sounded like a piece of the action that was too good to miss. I spun the car round and my partner and I headed for the address. We were technically off duty by now but Plumstead wasn’t too far off our route.

  ‘ON WAY,’ I yelled over the radio, ‘with you in ten minutes.’

  Then there was another panic call as we screamed towards the address. ‘How far away are you now? We’ve got to go in right away.’

  ‘We’ll be there in five minutes,’ I told them. We arrived to find that the raid team had already steamed in with backing from the local uniform section and police dogs. They’d done serious GBH in the process to the front door and windows to gain entry. It looked a decent job and worth staying around for. We’d put the pint we’d been looking forward to on hold.

  My partner and I walked into the flat not knowing anything about the people who lived there or about the job. Nobody seemed to know very much. One team often didn’t seem to know what the other was working on, for security purposes. Even so it didn’t seem to be the best co-ordinated job in the world.

  So I said to a pal of mine who was running it, ‘What do you want us to do — search the bedroom?’ Bedrooms were always the best places to search; you find plenty of evidence, get an idea of the occupant’s private life and often find a good bit of humour at their expense.

  ‘Yeah, crack on,’ said my mate. My colleague and I went into the back bedroom and started rummaging about. Under the bed I found loads of letters written to a guy in prison and starting ‘Dear Richard …’ I went up to the guv’nor in charge, showed him the letters and said, ‘What’s the name of the geezer who lives here?’

  ‘It’s Richard Rowbottom,’ he said.

  ‘Do you mean Rowbotham,’ I said, emphasising the bit that sounded like Ian Botham.

  ‘Yeah, that’s him, do you know him?’

  Did I know him? ‘Oh, fuck,’ I said, ‘I certainly do.’

  This was none other than my then girlfriend’s elder brother. She’d warned me that he was a bit of scally, that he made loads of trips to Spain and had been a bit of a naughty boy in his younger days. I explained the situation to the guv’nor and he was as good as gold.

  ‘Do you want to stay or do you want to fuck off home and not be part of it?’ he said. I told him I’d started the search so I might as well carry on. I knew that any explanation to my girlfriend, Wendy, wasn’t going to be easy. She’d never believe in a million years it was just a coincidence that I was involved in busting her brother’s flat.

  I went back into the bedroom to carry on with the search. Then my eye caught an unmistakable photo pinned on the wall. It was my girlfriend. I couldn’t believe it. ‘Fuck my luck,’ I muttered as we rummaged through drawers and cupboards.

  The search yielded 20 kilos of good-quality cannabis, a decent old haul by any standards and a fair pointer as to why Richard had taken so many trips to Spain every year. Not for a tan. I said point-blank, ‘I’m not going to deal with him. Someone else will have to do the questioning.’ So I helped deal with a couple of the other bodies arrested in the swoop. I did the necessary, got them on the charge sheet, then later that night I phoned Wendy. This I was dreading.

  ‘We’ve got to meet up … urgent. We’ve got to have a chat,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.’

  She said, ‘It’s Richard, isn’t it?’ She’d put two and two together and was spot on.

  ‘Yeah, it is … where shall we meet?’

  We met up later and I explained the circumstances and how it had put me in such an invidious position. She was deeply upset, both for her brother and for us. She decided to go to the court the following day when Richard and his cronies made their first appearance, charged with drugs offences. Of course, he’d not told anybody apart from his brief. All of a sudden, he saw his sister there.

  ‘How the fuck did you know I was here?’ he said.

  She made up a cock-and-bull story, keeping my name well out of things, and he seemed happy with the explanation. Wendy and I agreed that she wouldn’t let any alleged misdemeanours of her brother’s spoil our relationship and that we would carry on seeing each other. I had to supply a confidential report detailing my involvement, which you had to do in any situation where you might be compromised. Wendy and I continued seeing each other right up to the date of his trial. I loved her and I didn’t want the Richard problem to spoil our relationship.

  I got up that morning, got dressed and went to court. She got up, got dressed and went to court via a different route. Then we were sitting outside the courtoom at Inner London Crown Court, together but apart, waiting for the case to start and expecting the worst. She’d already told him while he was on remand in prison that I’d been involved in the job leading to his arrest and he’d gone bananas. He believed that I h
ad been using Wendy in an undercover operation to get at him.

  As I walked into the court to give evidence, I had to pass just a few feet away from him in the dock. There was a hiss like gas escaping then he muttered, ‘You fucking bastard, you cunt, you dirtbag,’ and a whole stream of other obscenities. It was very, very unpleasant.

  I took the oath and stood there in the witness box to give evidence against one of the other defendants I had arrested. When I had finished I waited to be cross-examined by the defence counsel. The first question he asked was, ‘Is it true you are the current boyfriend of the sister of the accused Richard Rowbotham?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ at which point the judge’s glasses nearly fell off the end of his nose, the jury suddenly woke up and you could see the look on their faces saying, ‘Aye aye, this is going to be a bit lively.’ There was a buzz round the court. People were staggered by what they had just heard. The defence lawyer was desperately trying to link my relationship with Wendy to the arrest of her brother. I told the court over and over that I had nothing to do with Richard’s arrest or any kind of undercover operation. Although treachery was my profession I could say, hand on heart, that I hadn’t cruelly used the one I loved simply to effect the arrest of her brother. ‘This was just a million-to-one coincidence, a very unfortunate coincidence as it turned out,’ I told court. I wished it had never happened. It had caused a lot of heartache to Wendy and a lot of heartache to me.