by V E Rooney
Newspaper articles have eagerly speculated on the true size of her wealth, with figures ranging from £6 million to a staggering £350 million, accumulated through years of carefully planned and executed deals arranged with organised crime rings both in the UK and around the world.
While UK law enforcement agencies have made some progress in tracking down and retrieving criminal assets linked to Reynolds, it is estimated that much of her wealth remains hidden in hundreds of secretive offshore bank accounts, property deals and in a labyrinth of seemingly respectable businesses both in the UK and abroad. Although law enforcement agencies claim her conviction is a crippling blow to the UK’s drugs trade, sources within both the Police and HM Customs & Excise tell me it is unlikely the full extent and locations of her assets will ever be traced.
So far, Reynolds has served two years of her sentence. She has always protested her innocence, claiming that she was the victim of a set-up and that in effect, the other members of the drug smuggling gang used her as a classic ‘patsy’. She also is keen to emphasise that until her conviction for the Venezuela drugs plot, she had never been arrested for any previous misdemeanours. To all intents and purposes, in her own words, she was “cleaner than a nun’s knickers”.
However, sources within law enforcement agencies scoff at these claims of innocence, saying that Reynolds was the mastermind behind several large-scale drugs deals which flooded the UK with cocaine, amphetamines, Ecstasy and hashish; that she was incredibly successful in covering her tracks; and that it was only through the sloppy behaviour of some of her criminal associates that her involvement in the Venezuela plot was discovered at all. Reynolds appealed against her conviction twice - on both occasions her appeals were rejected.
Through her legal team, Reynolds has consistently refused to speak to journalists about the Venezuela plot or her background. Crime authors are told in no uncertain terms that their attempts at securing an audience with her in the hope of releasing a blockbuster ‘true crime’ book are futile and to leave her in peace.
Reynolds refuses any attempt by others to gain an insight into her mind because, according to her legal team, she does not wish to feed the media feeding frenzy surrounding her. As her solicitor, Robert Yeoman, tells me: “All Alison wants to do is concentrate her efforts on overturning her conviction and clearing her name. Her time is taken up with studying legal documents and case files and she does not want to be distracted by prurient interests.”
So, it is with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation that I make the journey to Holloway today. Why has Reynolds had a sudden change of heart, after staunchly refusing for so long to divulge any details about her life or the Venezuela drugs plot?
After undergoing a full-scale search by prison officers, I am led through a long corridor into the prison’s high-security wing. Although there are few female prisoners detained in this section of the prison, which is reserved for the most violent and unstable of Holloway’s inmates, the authorities have classed Reynolds as a ‘Restricted Status’ prisoner, similar to the ‘Category A’ designation for male prisoners deemed most violent or at risk of escape. As such, she is housed in this section of the prison, although she is allowed to mix with other inmates during recreation periods and feeding times. I am told that it will be Reynolds and myself – along with two prison guards - in the wing’s visiting room, a large space which contains one table, two chairs on opposite sides of the table, and two chairs at the rear of the room for her accompanying guards.
As I sit down at the table to await Reynolds’ entrance, I notice CCTV cameras placed in each corner of the room. The prison authorities have also allowed me to use a tape recorder for my conversations with Reynolds, although whether Reynolds herself will permit me to record her comments remains to be seen.
The far end of the room comprises a floor-to-ceiling stretch of iron bars, with another set of bars beyond that, which encloses a corridor leading off to the left, where presumably Reynolds’ cell is located. As I place my materials onto the table – pens, notebooks, tape recorder, and a folder containing newspaper clippings, case files and my own notes on Reynolds - I hear the automated gate in the rear set of bars sliding open. A female prison officer appears and steps through the open gate. Behind her, I get my first glimpse of Reynolds, who is handcuffed to another female officer alongside her.
She is 5ft 4in with a slight build and long dark brown hair scooped back in a ponytail. She is wearing navy blue denim jeans, a blue hooded top and a pair of scuffed trainers. At first glance, she looks like a fresh-faced student, much younger than her 26 years. As she waits for the second automated gate to open, she does not look at me, instead appearing to gaze around the room. It is only when the prison officer escorts her to the table that she makes eye contact with me and there is a brief smile on her face as she waits for the officer to unshackle her so that Reynolds can sit down opposite me. Without prompting, Reynolds places her hands on the table in front of her so that the officer can re-attach her handcuffs and lock them to a metal clasp embedded in the centre of the table. As the prison officer retreats to the right corner behind me, the other prison officer looks at the security camera above her, signalling to the watching control room to close the automated gates. The officer then takes position in the opposite left corner of the room behind Reynolds.
At close quarters, Reynolds does not appear to have aged at all from the mug shot which was released by Police following her arrest, in which she stared impassively at the camera, expressionless and impenetrable, giving nothing away as to her state of mind at the time. She does not wear make-up and has pale skin and dark brown eyes, which are clear and alert.
Before I can introduce myself, Reynolds raises her right hand up from the table in a handshake gesture, although her handcuffs do not allow her much leeway. “I’d introduce myself but…” she says in her unmistakable Liverpool accent. I should disclose at this point that I am also from the Liverpool area myself, and I am somewhat curious to find out if that is part of the reason why Reynolds has agreed to talk with me. I shake her hand and nod at her.
“Hi, Alison. Nice to meet you. Thanks very much for meeting with me today.”
“Well, it’s not like I had anything else to do. Although Cagney and Lacey here do their best to keep me entertained,” she says in a friendly, familiar tone, gesturing to the prison officers. “Isn’t that right, girls?” I look behind me to see the officer near to me rolling her eyes and smiling.
At this point, I admit that I have not exactly planned how our conversations will ensue. Although I have hundreds of questions I want to put to Reynolds, I am somewhat wrong-footed by her affable opening gambit.
“So you got the gist from my brief, yeah?” she says, referring to the stipulations laid down by her solicitor as part of the conditions of our meetings. These include her right to demand that I delete anything she says from my notes, which may incriminate her or potentially harm her bid to have her conviction overturned. Upon my completion of the paper transcripts of our conversations, I must also send these to her legal team for her approval.
“Yes. Crystal clear. And you’re OK with me using this?” I say, pointing to the tape recorder.
“Sound, yeah. And you’ll get me copies of the tapes as well, right?”
“Of course. Not a problem.”
“Cool.”
As I open my folder to bring out my notes, I attempt to phrase my first question to her. “So, you…”
“So whereabouts in Liverpool are you from?” she says, jumping in and leaning forward with a quizzical expression.
“I’m actually from Formby myself,” I say, referring to the seaside town a few miles up the coast from Liverpool.
“Oh, posh girl, eh? Very nice,” Reynolds says in a bright, slightly sarcastic manner.
“Not posh at all,” I laugh. “Not the bit by the beach. Further down. The rough bit of Formby.”
“Oh, please,” she says with a smile. “That’s like saying you come
from the rough bit of Monte Carlo.”
Reynolds’ manner is affable enough and she gives no indication of being reluctant to talk to me, although people I have spoken to in preparation for my meeting with her tell me that she is adept at shutting down any avenue of conversation that she doesn’t want to explore. As the northern colloquialism says so aptly, she is also rumoured to be adept at ‘taking the piss’, as much out of herself as anyone else.
“You’ve done well for yourself, haven’t you? Working as a journalist down south and all that. When did you move to London?” she says, looking at me as she adjusts herself in her seat.
“Er…about 12 years ago now,” I say.
“I don’t think I could live in London,” she says, wrinkling her nose at me. “Well, I know that I do now, if you know what I mean. Didn’t have much choice in that,” she says, looking around the room. “Too busy for me down here. Too many people, too noisy, too much going on. It always did my head in coming down here.”
“Well, yeah, it’s frenetic sometimes. The tube, the crowds,” I say. I’m not sure if Reynolds is trying to put herself at ease with this small talk or whether she’s trying to establish some kind of rapport with her interviewer. It’s usually the other way round, with the interviewer trying to coax answers out of the interviewee.
“But,” I continue, “if you want to work in journalism, you’ve got to go where the work is, haven’t you?”
“You do indeed. And not just in journalism,” she says, smiling and winking at me as she sits back in her chair.
As our conversation continues, Reynolds’ manner is friendly, engaging and at times effervescent and cheeky, like a schoolgirl trying to outwit her teacher. I am not sure what I was expecting from the UK’s most notorious and feared drug dealer. Someone more reserved and standoffish, perhaps, with a demeanour to match her guarded reputation. Not this rather impish woman sat in front of me.
Those who have come into contact with Reynolds over the years describe her as being both incredibly articulate and eloquent and yet at the same time the council estate girl with a firm grasp of street slang and colloquialisms, equally comfortable talking to a “working class scally” like herself or a sophisticated foreign banker or businessman on their own terms. Some say that it was this adaptability and her ability to be something of a chameleon when the occasion required it that underpinned her rise to be such a successful drug smuggler.
Reynolds and I have agreed to meet on three occasions, this initial meeting included, so that she can give me a full and frank overview of herself and her criminal career. I admit to her that I am puzzled as to why she has decided to open up, and to me in particular.
By way of explanation, I am not a crime journalist by trade and have never written anything that could remotely be related to Reynolds. My journalistic field of focus is the banking industry, covering financial services, mergers and acquisitions and new payment technology. Although some of my articles have appeared in the national press, I am certainly not well known in the world of journalism.
“I’m not trying to get you to stroke my ego here,” I say, “but there are hundreds of journalists and authors from all over the world who have begged you to tell your story to them, and who can do a much better job of it than I can. Why me?”
Reynolds purses her lips into a half-smile and shrugs. “I read some of your stuff while I was on remand. That article you did on how those French bankers were funnelling money through corporate card accounts and pocketing the readies? That was fucking boss. Cheeky bastards, weren’t they?”
“Not as cheeky as being a multi-millionaire drug smuggler,” I say, raising an eyebrow at her.
“Ooh. Touché, madam,” she says, smirking at me. “Yeah, well anyway…my brief is up the wall with all these journalists and writers phoning up every day wanting an exclusive. Pisses me right off, it does. Doesn’t matter how many times he tells them to fuck off, they keep coming. And I’ve read some of these fucking true crime books. Load of shit, they are, all these twats bigging themselves up. Like any proper crime lord is gonna spill the beans like that. Well, OK, Howard Marks, respect to him because it’s kind of hard for him to get back in the game, know what I mean? Everyone knows who he is now. Poor bastard may as well go work in Tesco’s. Anyway…I don’t like those kinds of books. Too sensationalist, know what I mean? All about the guns, the girls, blowing people’s heads off and what have you, describing everything in gory detail. They’re just wank fodder for wannabe crims,” she says, leaning back in her chair and stretching her legs out under the side of the table. “Whereas your stuff is a bit more…you know…”
“Dry? Boring? Clinical?” I say, hoping to convey enough humour in my voice.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she says, leaning forward with an earnest expression on her face. “No, it’s professional. Objective. You cover all the details, not just the salacious bits to grab people’s attention. I like that,” she says, nodding at me. “I reckon you build the skeleton of the story and I can flesh it out with muscle, do you get me?”
“I think so,” I say, peering at her before scrutinising my notes. “I write all the boring stuff and you describe the exciting stuff?”
“Works for me if it works for you,” she says, a wide grin spreading on her face. “And anyway, I figured what with you being from up north as well, I wouldn’t have to keep explaining Scouse, you know? I don’t wanna be stopping and starting all the time trying to explain words like busies or brewsties, know what I mean?”
“I think the important question for me right now,” I say, looking at her, “is why you contacted me when you’ve spent so long fending off requests from other people. I have to admit, I was aware of who you are because of the media coverage but I didn’t have any interest in or experience of covering anything like that. Why, out of the blue, do you want to tell your story now?”
Reynolds pauses for the first time in our conversation before answering. She looks down at her hands on the table for a few moments. Briefly, she scratches at the skin underneath the metal clasps of her handcuffs. She takes a deep breath and then returns her eyes up to mine.
“The timing isn’t important right now. Do you want my side of the story or not?”
2. ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
Before I begin to drill into Reynolds’ background, it is necessary to paint a picture of the environment in which she grew up. After much of Liverpool was flattened by the Luftwaffe in World War II, town planners had the noble idea of taking tenants from the inner city slums and bombed-out wrecks and re-homing them on the outskirts of the city.
Vast tracts of farmland were duly purchased from the local squires, on which arose new local authority estate developments that were the cutting edge of urban design – tower blocks and maisonettes. These new estates were meant to bind the community together in a new form of social cohesion, bringing together people from different areas, elevating the downtrodden working classes into the respectable working classes, all happily mingling together, tending each other’s gardens, looking out for each other’s kids and providing a model for post-war living.
The suburb of Kirkby, on the northeast boundary of Liverpool, became one of these experimental new towns. Kirkby as a settlement has existed since Anglo-Saxon times, and was also visited by Vikings from Denmark sometime during the eighth century (the name Kirkby derives from the Old Danish for “church town”). Over the centuries, it gradually evolved from farmland into a spattering of small rural Lancashire dwellings and eventually into a fully-fledged town in the new metropolitan borough of Knowsley in the new metropolitan county of Merseyside, which was established in 1974.
During the 1950s and 1960s, architects and council executives admired their estate blueprints, envisioning how their ideas dovetailed neatly with new social and political demands for better housing. The waiting tenants would swoon at the newly-constructed gleaming tower blocks and compact-yet-comfortable prefab maisonette blocks, imagining where to put their new fu
rniture, hanging out their washing above freshly-laid lawns, chatting cheerily with their new neighbours and rolling their eyes as their kids whizzed around the block on their shiny new bikes. Everyone coming together in a post-modern urban utopia and forming the kind of friendly neighbourhood community where everyone looks out for each other and everyone knows each other’s business.
Perhaps it was an oversight on the part of the planners, but what they neglected to pay attention to was that if you take the poorest and the most marginalised inhabitants of any urban population centre and deposit them elsewhere, they won’t magically reinvent themselves as model citizens and hoist themselves up to join the aspiring upper working class. They’ll still just be the poorest and most marginalised but with new buildings in new areas.
Fast forward thirty years later from those optimistic post-war times, and Kirkby is just another vast concrete council estate surrounded on all sides by countless industrial factories and units and large tracts of concrete wastelands where factories once stood. According to Reynolds, these wastelands served as impromptu playgrounds where gangs of kids would derive hours of fun by climbing over asbestos-ridden crumbling walls, crawling through burnt-out machinery pits, and “kicking the shit out of whatever was still standing when they weren’t setting fire to piles of rubbish.”
She paints a rather bleak picture of her early habitat. “I’m sure my estate must have looked impressive when first built, all fresh plaster and red bricks and smooth newly-tarmaced straight roads, but by the time I arrived in 1973, it had obviously not worn well. We lived on the top floor in a four-storey block of maisonettes – me, Mum, Dad, and a gorgeous white West Highland terrier puppy, Snowy.
“Our block was one of four in a square, each overlooking a small grass reservation in the middle. My earliest memories of the maisonette were when I was about three, and I was looking out on our veranda at the rear of the building through the rusted wrought iron railings and wondering when I could go and play in the jungle. It hadn’t meant to be a jungle of course. What had started out as a neat shared garden area at the back of the maisonettes had, through years of neglect, turned into a vast square of weeds, rubbish and scattered patches of blackened soil, the remnants of Guy Fawkes bonfires and bonfires just for the sake of having bonfires. For kids growing up there, bonfires were what you did when your football had been punctured or when the telly was broken, or when the telly was taken back by the hire purchase people.”
