Gangbuster

by Peter Bleksley

  I didn’t sleep too well that night. There was too much going on in my head. Phantom assassins, untrustworthy friends, women trouble. I woke up next morning, took a long hard look at myself in the mirror and said, ‘You need help … you need fucking help … urgent.’

  I sent another pal round to see my mate I’d smashed up to say sorry, ask him not to call the police and to say I was straight off round to the doctor’s for treatment.

  Perhaps I should have seen it coming. Only a few months earlier, I had fucked up badly on a job in Manchester, a job that would normally have been a piece of cake.

  I’d been called in by one of the out-of-town offices of the National Crime Squad who had an informant giving them a lead into a gang of cocaine and cannabis dealers on Manchester’s Moss Side, a district rife with gang warfare and savage murders. The informant was totally different to the usual run of snouts I had dealt with, a bit of a country bumpkin, but that didn’t make his information any the less valid.

  I met up with him in turnip territory in Norfolk after he’d talked to the National Crime Squad and we got on OK. His info looked good and we set off for Moss Side ready to get stuck in. He was going to introduce me to a geezer who was ready to supply large quantities of cocaine or cannabis, whatever I wanted. We did the usual, got our background stories together, tested ourselves, checked each other. The five-hour journey up the motorway became a sort of classroom lesson on how to con a drugs gang and get out alive. I kept him on his toes, made sure he’d remembered what we’d rehearsed. Some of the informants were not the brightest people in the world and it was vital we’d got our act together. He was going to introduce me as a London drug-dealer, my tried and tested cover yet again, and we were going to do a £3,000 buy as a taster for bigger things in the future.

  We arrived in Moss Side, inner-city decay at its worst, parked the car up, did the usual, but the geezer wasn’t there so we were sent to the pub to wait. They left us for an hour, and came and spied on us a bit to see if they liked the look of us. Depending on your performance there, and it is a performance, you’re summoned up to see the main man. We were led through the back of this pet shop, and talk about a run-down, shitty street in Moss Side — there were a couple of half-dead canaries and a moth-eaten parrot for sale but it was obviously a cover for drug-dealing. As I was taken out the back there were faces everywhere looking at me: they were all in on it. We really were in the heart of bandit territory. I went up the stairs at the back of the shop to a small office and there was a geezer sitting in a chair with a fucking 9mm pistol smack bang in front of him. I went through the door and he picked up the gun and pointed it first at me, ‘Right, you sit there,’ and then at the informant, ‘You sit there.’ I thought we were in trouble. I went right against all my better judgement. In all those years of being undercover, I should have known, should have turned round and said, ‘Fuck you, pal,’ and walked away from it. I thought I knew my stuff. I should have said I wasn’t dealing with some arsehole waving a gun. But no, I went ahead.

  I analysed it time and time again afterwards. Now I know it was because I wasn’t well, I wasn’t myself, I had completely lost my sense of judgement.

  Anyway, I didn’t know then that I was cracking up. It’s not something you ever want to consider. So I stupidly decided to carry on negotiating a drug deal with a gun-waving maniac. And he was a fucking nutter. Aged about 50, local Manchester accent and built like a bulldog. And if we were talking mental illness at that stage, he would have left me standing. He would suddenly go off in long rambling statements in the middle of a conversation, about why we couldn’t do the trade, this, that and the other. Not much of it made any sense. He was a horrible fucker, and I mean a really horrible fucker. Again, I had committed a cardinal sin in undercover work — I had taken a dislike to him. I’d let my personal emotions get in the way of the job. So now my motive to get him nicked was because I disliked him. That was wrong, and foolish. You’ve lost it when you do that.

  We carried on with the deal despite my intense dislike of the man and agreed that the only way we could talk about him supplying big quantities of drugs, like hundreds of kilos of puff and kilo upon kilo of cocaine was to start with a trial purchase, a tester. He offered me a kilo of puff. Well, he didn’t exactly offer me, he told me exactly what was going down. Then he told me there would be an ounce of cocaine as well. The coke was about a grand and the puff about £1,800. The bastard was charging me street prices instead of wholesale prices. But I agreed to it and thought I could persuade the management to spend that amount of money to put him in the frame on bigger deals later on. This fucker did need nicking as far as I was concerned, and I wasn’t too fussed how I did it. But the operation was becoming fatally flawed by now because I was riding a grudge.

  We arranged to make a meet and do the trade a few days later at a service station on the M6 just outside Manchester. I pulled a colleague out from the squad to act as my driver. As we arrived, I could see the place was heaving with opposition. I could pick them out; I’d developed a technique over the years to spot the wrong ’uns. I’d just look around and see them immediately. You weigh up the enemy before you start the trade. Again, I should have pulled out. The cards were stacked against us. We were horrendously out-numbered. The fuckers could have done what they liked to us. But still I went ahead. I went in and met nutty bollocks and he made a very distinct point of letting me know he still had the shooter on him. He was sitting there in the café area with this lunatic henchman of his beside him. These were not business people, they were thugs and robbers, men of violence. No fucking business acumen whatsoever. Lo and behold, against the odds, we did a transaction. He handed me an ounce of cocaine and kilo of cannabis. Only it wasn’t. They’d dummied up some parcels to make it look like coke and puff. I just took them. I was so keen to get out of there I didn’t test the gear in my usual way.

  There was an underpass there and they followed us in; they had people plotted up at each end, and I became convinced we were going to be shot. I thought they were going to rob us for the three grand and leave us for dead. It seemed a lot of trouble for a miserly £3,000 in drug-deal terms, but the main man was so unpredictable and so frightening that I really wouldn’t have put it past him. The atmosphere got increasingly threatening. I got hold of the parcels, gave them a quick feel and said, ‘Yeah, seems OK,’ and handed them the money my colleague had in the car plotted up close by. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I slung the parcels in the car and got in myself and told my driver to get the hell out of it. If I’d been myself I’d have carried out quick tests on the gear. Then, of course, I’d have been calling their bluff. And I honestly don’t think I’d be here today to tell the tale.

  ‘Look, mate, who are you trying to con?’ wouldn’t have gone down a bundle. Perhaps fate was on my side that day after all.

  I opened up the parcels on the way back to the debriefing and said, ‘We’ve been had. This isn’t proper gear.’ The young kid I had driving for me said, ‘Oh shit, I hope this doesn’t rub off on my undercover career.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ I said, ‘I’ve made the mistake. It’s nothing to do with you.’ I said it was one small slip in a ten-year career of undercover work in which I had seized drugs worth millions of pounds. I’d take it on the chin if there was a problem.

  But I didn’t reckon I’d be slaughtered over one cock-up, losing three grand, among my many successes. I explained to the operational bosses that we’d been had and suggested we just left it at that. We had to leave it at that. I couldn’t go back into them for a second time. They’d know I was a patsy (stooge) and it wouldn’t work. The Manchester mob was probably happy that they’d had a couple of Londoners over for three grand and would leave it at that. I supplied the local CID with all the intelligence I could and said the main man definitely did need looking at. With that I exited stage right and headed for home.

  It was the last undercover operation of that nature I ever went out on. The storm clouds
were gathering over the career I loved. The dreadful toll of my double life was beginning to manifest itself in bouts of irrational behaviour and marred perceptions about my own infallability.

  I was under a lot of strain, living full time under a moody name after the Mafia death threat, moving home for the same reason, negative equity as a result, love life falling apart, but I thought I could handle it all. I’d built up this reputation at work as the iron man who could handle anything and I’d ended up believing my own publicity. Realistically I was having to cope with it myself because the Old Bill had never done this with one of their own before — here’s your new identity, live it. It was a ground-breaking development. They’d done it for witnesses and supergrasses under threat through the witness protection programme, but not for another copper. There wasn’t a familar procedure to go through. Now it was having serious detrimental effects on my work and my home life.

  To give credit where it’s due, my boss at SO10, Commander Roy Ramm, a greatly respected senior officer at Scotland Yard, was shrewd enough to notice there was a problem in the autumn of 1993, five months after my forced move.

  ‘Bleksley is clearly showing signs of the strain of trying to resolve the situation,’ he wrote in a confidential report which came into my hands. But the big white chiefs at the Yard did nothing. Anyone with half a brain would have said, ‘What are we doing about it?’ if they had read Roy Ramm’s report. This invisible threat from the Mafia was doing my head in, and it was compounded by my workload and my domestic problems. It was all slowly churning away, my brain was doing overtime, my stress levels running on overdrive. By 1994, when I went back to my house and stuck the key in the door, I wasn’t returning to a home. I was walking into living yet another life, swapping one false identity with another, an actor changing roles after the matinee performance. It wasn’t like I was kicking my shoes off, putting on the telly and having a nice cup of tea, made up for the night, girlfriend on one arm and remote control in the other, resting up after a hard day’s work. That’s what I needed to get things straight in my head. It wasn’t happening. I’d become very difficult to live with, I know that now. The strain I was under was taken out on the person nearest and dearest. I had become a horror to live with, a horror to be around.

  It all came to a head when I came home one night, stuck my head round the kitchen door and saw my girlfriend downing the last of what I thought was red wine in a pint glass. I thought, What the fuck’s she doing drinking pints of red wine? then she slammed the glass down and I saw the residue of powder in the bottom. She’d got 48 paracetamol tablets, crushed them up and tried to kill herself with an overdose. I rang her sisters, who lived nearby, and they came over and rushed her into Bromley Hospital. I went along as well. My conscience was pricked even though I’d been such a monster to her.

  They gave her a solution which made her vomit up the tablets and she was OK. But as I was waiting in there, feeling deeply chastened, nurses came up to me and said, ‘Oh, who are you?’

  ‘I’m the boyfriend‚’ I replied. You can imagine the reception. Everyone who walked past gave me that sort of stare that said I was little better than pond life. Her sisters took her home that night and I went back to my house with the song ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ blaring out of the radio. I stupidly thought to myself, Perhaps they will now she’s out of my hair, that’s how arrogant I’d become, blaming her, not myself — but little did I know that things would only get a great deal worse. On the following Monday, I was back at work, the attempted suicide of my girlfriend adding to the pressures, but with me carrying on work with no apparent problems and still clocking up some notable successes. My performance level was not being affected, and I was still holding it together as far as the squad was concerned.

  Then came the fatal trip to Manchester, followed by the unforgivable attack on my pal, which finally told me that it was all over in the world of undercover policing for Peter Bleksey. It was time to throw in the towel and seek medical help.

  There were many dark days to come. Arrangements were made by the Yard to admit me to a private psychiatric hospital in Ticehurst in Sussex. I was referred to an eminent psychiatrist called Gordon Turnbull, famed for having debriefed the British pilots downed in the Gulf War and straightening their heads out. After the first consultation, he recommended that I should take a holiday from work. My symptoms were like the stressed-out Gulf pilots, he reckoned, and a nice golfing holiday in Scotland would soon put me on the road to recovery.

  I enjoyed the golf; a couple of pals came up to stay with me, and we had a few drinks. But the demons were still there. I was signed off work for an indefinite period and Dr Turnbull agreed that it might be beneficial if I went to college. I signed on to do an access course at Greenwich University which would bring me up to entry standard and allow me to do a degree course afterwards, in psychology of all things. My employers were happy with this, and the eminent Dr Turnbull was happy as well.

  Fucking psychology? I was off my trolley. I was fucking ill. I was a danger to other people. The runaway train was out of control. I should have been hospitalised by now, but that didn’t happen.

  So I signed on for college. I moved out of my home and began living as Peter Bleksley once again. The doctor agreed that I had been too many different people for too long and it was time to return to basics. I went from Peter Bleksley, undercover detective, to Peter Bleksley, mature student of psychology, and not surprisingly my health continued in a downward spiral to the detriment of all those who had the misfortune to be around me at the time. My behaviour became more and more unpredictable, irrational and anti-social. People began to distance themselves from me. Superman had broken down and there was nothing to fix him. No one knew what to do.

  Finally, there was no alternative but to admit me to Ticehurst Hospital as an in-patient. I discharged myself after two days. I was still freaking out, so two mates took me to Greenwich District Hospital. I was in there for three-and-a-half weeks and showing signs of improvement. The NHS doctors and nurses were fantastic, spending hours probing the deepest recesses of the mind and treating me with a marvellous drug called Stelazine which really worked. I knew I would never be able to resume my undercover career but now there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

  I make no excuse for dealing with my illness in some depth because I feel it is important to the police service in general that much closer scrutiny is given to the health of all officers working in the more strenuous areas of the force.

  It had been generally mooted before my breakdown that perhaps it would be a good idea if all undercover officers saw a psychiatrist or psychologist every six months to make sure they were handling the pressures. Lo and behold, overnight almost, the programme was brought into operation and remains there to this day. But it was too late for me. I felt the force had been negligent, and that I deserved some compensation for this mental torture I had been through and sought help from the Police Federation to sue the Met for damages. Substantial damages were being won for officers subjected to far less damaging conditions than mine, with some WPCs winning huge sums for sexual harrassment and what have you. The Federation solicitors told me in May 1996 that basically I didn’t have a case. I was dumbfounded. Their arguments didn’t stack up. I wasn’t one for giving up, never had been, so I said ‘Bollocks’, and went to a little old firm of local solicitors called Cattermoles in Welling which had been recommended by a friend, sat down with one of the partners, Richard Lewis, to explain my position and he said, ‘I feel confident you have a case. I’ll be more than willing to take it on. But you need a barrister and it will be expensive‚’ he said.

  Scotland Yard adopted their usual delaying tactics, a sort of economic Mexican stand-off until you crumble through lack of money, Richard Lewis suggested I ask the Police Federation lawyers to reconsider. They got counsel’s advice and were then told, ‘Actually Mr Bleksley does have a case.’ It was an amazing U-turn which left the Fed solicitors with egg on their faces bu
t me feeling that at last I was on the road to getting justice.

  The solicitor appointed to handle the case told me from the start that it was going to be a long, messy, tough fight. I said ‘OK, let’s go for it. I believe in what I’m doing.’

  I had been warned it wouldn’t be easy and it wasn’t. Months and months, then years, of paperwork, seeing this psychiatrist then that psychiatrist, obtaining the opinions of employment consultants to calculate the potential loss of earnings which related to the size of the claim. It was extremely wearing, but I was determined to press on.

  In August 1996, I returned to work, an office-bound job with shortened hours. Most of the squad were pleased to see me back. They’d known me in my heyday, respected me and no one gave me grief. I wasn’t stigmatised, but there was plenty of piss-taking.

  ‘Here comes the nutter,’ and all that sort of thing, very light-hearted. A lot of the people there knew it could happen to them. I responded by acting a bit bonkers, feeding the birds with stale bread and talking to the trees. It was all a bit of a laugh and I was getting better all the time. I felt a bit guilty drawing a salary on one hand and suing the Met on the other, but I felt it had to be done as much for me as for anyone who might find themselves in the same boat in later years.

  * * *

  I’ve thought long and hard about what I should say and what I shouldn’t say in this book. I want it to be an accurate record of a remarkable chapter in my life. I don’t want it to be a tirade against Scotland Yard, although there are areas of bitterness that will never diminish. I left, a sick man, after more than 20 years in the police, the vast majority of which was spent doing high-octane frighteningly dangerous work. All of this finally drained my mental resources. My reward: £10,000 in compensation. Less than six months’ pay at the height of my prowess. I learned many secrets about Scotland Yard, and I learned of many shameful secrets of fellow officers.