He recalled: ‘About a year ago this bunch of Polish coke traffickers turned up in the village near me in Kent and started giving it large in all directions. They rented a farmhouse, a couple of Mercedes and a load of hookers and gave the impression they were made men. Then a gang of Russians I know vaguely got to hear about them.
‘Well, if there’s one thing the Russians don’t like it’s the Poles. They made it their business to run them out of town. These particular Russians employed a team of fruitcake Latvian ex-paratroopers as bodyguards and they charged up the driveway to the Poles’ farmhouse one night, sprayed it with bullets and then left a couple of firebombs behind for good measure. The Poles got the message and were never seen again.’
Bernie makes light of it all but there is a serious point to what he is saying. ‘I take the attitude that I can sit back and let them all wipe each other out. Then once the dust has settled maybe I’ll stroll back in and grab a few bob.’ Bernie says his main priority is to make sure his face doesn’t end up looking like he’s been in a car crash. ‘I’m what you might call a diplomat. I pride myself on not clashing with other villains. It just ain’t worth it.’
The following Saturday night I found myself in another of Bernie’s favourite watering holes, this time in the suburbs of south London. At least half a dozen of the customers reeked of criminality. Most of them were watching the footie on the telly in the corner of the Lounge Bar. Then, as evening drew in, they pulled out their sachets of coke and started getting hyped up.
‘They’re all it,’ said Bernie, as we sat in a corner of the bar. ‘That’s the biggest problem. No one can go out for a quiet pint no more. It’s gotta be a bottle of voddie and a packet of Charlie. No wonder there is such demand for the fuckin’ stuff. Everyone’s on it these days.’
As darkness fell and the chemicals kicked in, some of the villains flexed their muscles a bit and looked around to see who was watching them. The atmosphere in that pub in the south London suburbs was more akin to a scene from Goodfellas, with one particularly coked-up little character – who looked a bit like Joe Pesci – marching in and out of the gents virtually every two minutes to replenish his nostrils with white powder.
‘The only reason they don’t do it on the table is because you get one or two coppers in here as well,’ explained Bernie.
We were in this particular pub to meet Sergi, a ‘foreigner mate’ of Bernie’s who Bernie reckoned was a ‘a good example of a decent foreign operator, not like the rest of them’.
Sergi turned out to be a Ukrainian ‘businessman’ who’s lived in Kent for three years. He clearly adored Bernie and the two seemed close. ‘The trouble with you Brits is that you drink too much and you take too much cocaine,’ said Sergi.
Bernie, sitting next to him, laughed loudly. ‘I told you, didn’t I?’
Sergi continued: ‘Where I come from we can hold our drink and we don’t take drugs because then we are not in control.’
I soon discovered why Sergi was the only non-British man in the pub that night. It turned out that he employed half the gangsters in there to help him run his ‘businesses’.
He explained: ‘I like the Brits. I like your way of life. The loyalty. The humour. I don’t trust my countrymen, especially when they’re here in UK. They would kill you as soon as look at you if you had something they wanted.’
Sergi then went on to provide a revealing glance inside the foreign cocaine underworld in the south-east of England. ‘People like me see that there are way more opportunities here than in our home countries, so we come here. It is as simple as that.’
He went on: ‘You Brits think you live in such a civilised place with so little crime compared with other countries. Well, let me tell you here and now, it’s easier to run a cocaine business here than in my country. Less cops to bribe for starters!
‘You see, people have more money here and that means more opportunities for guys like me. But I am not a typical foreign criminal. I respect this country and I don’t want to turn it into a battlefield. I am afraid others are not as respectful as me.
‘Sure I sometimes have to make an example of my enemies. I don’t like doing it but in the long term it helps stop a lot of what I will call “unfortunate incidents”.’ Sergi refused to be drawn on exactly what ‘action’ he’d taken in the past, but suffice to say it must have resulted in someone being physically harmed.
Surely, I asked, the police are a problem? ‘As I said, the police cannot be bought so easily but’ – he shrugged – ‘there are some who will accept money.’
Sergi claims that one Kent detective asked if he could work for Sergi part-time while continuing to serve in the police. ‘I wasn’t surprised. He’d just got divorced and needed to earn more money in order to pay off his ex-wife. We all have these problems. But I was suspicious of this guy, so I turned down his offer. A few months later he helped bust another foreign gang. I had been right all along.’
Sergi believes the police can do little to stop the invasion of foreign criminals. ‘They don’t have the manpower or the resources to investigate every gang,’ explained Sergi. ‘It’s almost as if they’re happy for us to continue bringing money into the economy because it means a better life for a lot of people in this area. They need us here. It’s been like this for so long the whole place would collapse if criminals were not operating here.’
Both Bernie and Sergi claim many of the foreign cocaine gangs in the UK’s Home Counties are also involved in prostitution, robbery and fraud. ‘It’s not just cocaine. Sure the coke makes us most of our money but it brings with it other activities. I personally don’t like this. I want our streets to be clean and safe for our children and grandchildren to play on. Also, I want our banks to be good at not losing our money, eh?’ Sergi laughs and slaps his friend Bernie on the thigh.
They make an unlikely pair, but as I watched the interaction between them I realised that Bernie was probably working for Sergi these days, which kind of summed up the way that the UK’s criminal underworld has been changed by a lethal combination of cocaine and foreign criminals.
Further down the food chain are the old-fashioned cocaine dealers who have made a sizeable income from selling the drug to a select band of clients.
CHAPTER 32
TOMMY
Londoner Tommy, 59, has dealt cocaine for more than thirty years. He says he avoids snorting the drug himself but admits he has a serious hash habit. In his darkened basement flat near the bustling Portobello Road, in trendy Notting Hill, west London, Tommy carefully weighs out the cocaine that he always packs in special see-through plastic baggies with one twist, which have been his own unique calling card down the years. His customers include famous movie actors, TV stars, a couple of politicians and large numbers of London’s media set.
‘I’ve been in this game all my adult life. There aren’t many people who can say that,’ says Tommy, between drags on an enormous joint. ‘I grew up in the seventies when drugs were used far more openly than they are today. All my mates took [amphetamine] sulphate back then. It was like poor man’s coke. It burned your nose but you got a big kick out of it and, more importantly, it cost about ten quid a gram.’
Tommy was brought up in the Home Counties, went to a minor public school and was all set for a career in professional cricket until a car crash ended his sporting aspirations. ‘I had it all back then, or so I thought. I was being fast-tracked into Surrey Cricket Club. My teachers at school talked about me being a future England cap and I thought I was king of the world.
‘Then I was out with three mates one evening. We’d all got pissed up at a local pub and then scored some acid. The driver of the car was off his head when we all decided to go to Soho in the centre of London. Next thing I know we’re upside down on the side of a motorway and my hip is busted. That was the end of my life in a way. It would have all turned out very differently if that crash hasn’t happened.’
Tommy shrugs his shoulders and tries to smile as he recalls his c
hildhood but it’s clear (like so many people in the coke trade) that he wishes his life had taken a different path. ‘I got no one to blame but myself. I should have picked myself up after that car crash and got myself a proper job and a family and all the other shit everyone is expected to get. But it just didn’t work out that way.’
Tommy’s personal consumption of drugs spiralled completely out of control in his late teens and early twenties. ‘I ended up on heroin, which is no laughing matter. I was a mess. My parents had thrown me out and some of the time I was actually living on the street.’
After being arrested for being drunk and disorderly in London’s Regents Park, Tommy tried to take a swipe at a policeman and ended up being charged with assault. A six-month jail term followed and that’s where his life took another ominous turn. ‘Like so many people, I met professional criminals inside and by the time I got out I had three offers of jobs as a dealer.
‘Back then drug dealers would usually supply everything from hash to heroin, so I ended up selling to a wide variety of people. Funnily enough, I even managed to stay off the heroin, although I soon got myself a serious coke habit.’
That’s when Tommy got his first taste of heavy criminality. ‘I snorted a whole load of coke that was supposed to be sold to people. So when the guy who supplied me the coke on credit came looking for his money, I was seriously short of cash. He gave me a month to pay up and then sent a couple of his friends round to see me. I got seriously smashed up by them and decided on the spot that I was going to stop dealing and give the “real” world a try. Anything had to be better than looking over my shoulder every five minutes.’
Tommy talked his way into a job as a trainee journalist on a local newspaper. ‘The money was crap but for the first time in my life I felt as if I was actually doing something worthwhile. I was reporting on drug dealers at the local magistrates, chasing ambulances, writing up murders and all sorts of stuff like that. It was fascinating and I reckoned I’d found my real calling at last.’
Then Tommy was appointed crime reporter by the paper. ‘That was a laugh when you consider my background. I actually had to take coppers out for drinks every week to try and extract stories from them. It made me realise for the first time that they were just ordinary people like me trying to make a living.’
But back in the 1970s, a large number of police officers were not averse to the occasional bribe. ‘It was a different game back then. For starters you always had to pay for all their drinks. Then my paper started paying some of the plain-clothes lot the occasional fifty quid for information. One copper even offered to check out car registration plates in exchange for £50. He did the same when it came to tracing ex-directory phone numbers.’
Tommy says his journalism career seemed to be in the ascendant when he got especially friendly with a Detective Superintendent who was in charge of the local CID.
‘This guy was outrageous. He was always helping himself to everything from cash to drugs from crimes. All his staff knew what he was up to and many of them wanted me to expose him, but my paper was too scared in case he sued them. In any case, back then bent coppers were so commonplace most people ignored what they were up to.’
Tommy admits he became especially close to this one rogue senior officer. ‘We were kindred spirits, or so he kept telling me. He even knew about my criminal record but promised not to tell anyone. Trouble is, he was reeling me in, just like he reeled in criminals and turned them into informants, I suppose. He knew he had something over me and that gave him power and influence.’
One day Tommy got a call from the rogue cop. ‘He said he had a brilliant story for me and insisted I met him in a pub way out in the Surrey countryside. I didn’t hesitate to agree to the meeting ’cos I thought he might have a big story for me. It was the biggest mistake of my life.’
Tommy continued: ‘When I got to the pub, he was waiting in his car outside and beckoned me in the vehicle for a chat. I still didn’t smell a rat.’
Inside the car, the rogue cop produced a small see-through package containing white powder. ‘Of course I knew what it was straight away but I was shocked that a senior policeman would be handling it openly in a pub car park. Sure, I knew this officer was a bit crooked but handling drugs in front of a reporter was another ballgame altogether. Then he told me there was much more where this came from. He wanted me to sell it to some of my mates. It was only then it dawned on me that he was trying to set me up as his personal coke dealer.
‘The stupid thing is I instantly agreed to do it. I knew loads of people who’d buy it off me and, quite frankly, I needed the money. I was earning about £20 a week as a reporter on that local paper and I could barely afford the rent on my bedsit.’
So Tommy’s long and undistinguished career as a coke dealer was relaunched. ‘For the first few months I managed to hold down my job on the paper as well but then I started getting high on my own supply and, predictably, I began not showing up at the paper for work and they soon fired me.’
Out on his own, Tommy told the rogue cop he could sell twice the amount of coke he was getting at the time. ‘I decided I might as well set up shop as a proper, fulltime coke dealer. It was perfect. I got myself a nice top-floor flat in a quiet street and I even had my own free supply of coke to snort.’
But Tommy knew that in the long term he needed to find another supplier. ‘I didn’t trust the cop. I actually reckoned he’d either start blackmailing me or he’d simply shop me. No one would have believed my word against that of a senior police officer. So I stopped dealing for him about six months after losing my job on the paper and went out on my own. He was furious but I made sure he realised I’d try and take him down with me if anything happened to me.’
Tommy then moved into central London and began work as a fulltime, independent cocaine dealer. ‘It was the early 1980s and cocaine was hitting the club scene with a vengeance. I knew lots of people in TV and journalism and I soon had them queuing round the block to buy my coke.’
Tommy devised certain ‘rules and regulations’ back then which he has kept to ever since. ‘I never agree to meet a punter in the street. They have to come to my flat. There are CCTV cameras everywhere these days. Also, out on the street all it takes is one keen young copper on the beat and I’m nicked. I move flats at least once a year because it’s not good to be in one place for too long. Neighbours start to wonder why so many people are going in and out of your flat. They bump into strangers in the hallway and it makes them nervous and then they start complaining to landlords and stuff like that. Much better to keep on the move.’
Tommy, though, admits he’s got much grumpier with the onset of middle age. ‘I used to like going out to clubs and stuff but I’d never be carrying coke because you’re a sitting duck in such places. Trouble is, I’d then end up with punters coming back to my flat and then I couldn’t get rid of them. I’d rather stay home these days and let ’em come to me. But now I encourage them to come in and out. No hanging around.’
Tommy says he’s never once come close to being arrested since going ‘solo’ as a dealer. ‘I am so fuckin’ careful who I deal with. My suppliers have changed down the years but I always go through a middleman, so I don’t even know who the main supplier is. Much better that way. It means my name isn’t known in criminal circles and I don’t know their names, either.’
Tommy has one other golden rule when it comes to his actual customers. ‘I never encourage real criminals to buy coke from me. It’s asking for trouble. My stuff is always very good quality compared to most people’s but the last thing I want is some trigger-happy thug with a criminal record popping round to my house for a baggy and then deciding to get greedy.’
Tommy occasionally meets some of his customers socially but says he prefers not to mix business with pleasure on the whole. ‘It’s a tricky relationship because you think you’re friends with these punters and then the next thing you know they’re ignoring you in the street in front of their wives or girlfrie
nds because they don’t want them to know they’re on coke.’
These days Tommy spends most of his time inside his small rented apartment watching the cricket and the football on Sky TV. He says he now much prefers the mellow rush from a smoke of hash to the manic hit of a line of cocaine.
‘I learnt a lesson a long time ago about coke. It’s evil stuff. It pulls you in so badly that you don’t even realise you’re hooked when you are. And of course most of my regulars are professional people with serious careers yet they can operate on coke. You can get away with it but it’s still fucking you up. That makes it a bad drug in a sense because you don’t just take it to get high with your friends. You use it to get through the day and that is not good.’
Tommy manages to make his lifetime career as a coke dealer sound as ordinary as being a plumber or an electrician but surely, I ask, there must be a cocaine ‘Mister Big’ somewhere in the background despite his earlier protestations?
‘Of course I’ve met a few big players but I make it a rule never to buy directly from them. Sometimes they get a bit pissed off with my attitude but I insist that I will only buy my coke from a middleman for that very reason. I’m in the survival game and I’ve worked out a lot of the rules down the years. I make sure I never mix with them socially because otherwise, like that evil copper all those years ago, they’ll start owning me and that means I will have no control over when I want to work. I knew one dealer who was pressurised by a gang to keep selling fifty weeks of the year without a break. He was so scared he just did as they told him. That made him a money machine for the villains but a guy like that has no other life. I like to piss off on holiday sometimes without even telling my customers. It’s bloody funny when you get home to find all these nutty, desperate messages from punters going crazy ’cos they can’t get hold of me to score some coke.’
Cocaine Confidential Page 19
