by Neil Woods
When we took Bigga and Meshawn down, we took them down hard and fast.
This was to be my first buy-bust: we would take Bigga red-handed as he and I did the deal.
I waited on the corner for Bigga to roll up in his car. I handed over the money, he handed over the gear. Then, just as he was pulling away, three squad cars screeched out of nowhere, boxing him in. Simultaneously a foot squad sprinted up from round the corner.
In desperation, Bigga revved his engine and tried to ram one of the squad cars. He managed to dent its bumper, but ended up smashing up the entire front of his Merc.
At first Bigga seemed most upset about the damage to his motor. As they were snapping on the handcuffs, he kept moaning, ‘Oh… my fucking car,’ like a child who’s broken his favourite toy. But then, as Johnno was guiding Bigga towards the back of the squad car, he suddenly jumped back and screamed, ‘Oh God, no!’
The entire team snapped to attention, assuming some emergency, before Johnno continued, ‘Oh Christ, he’s only gone and shit himself!’
Apparently in the heat of the moment Bigga had let himself go. This was a guy who weighed in at around 250lbs, and lived almost exclusively on chicken shop junk food. By the time we arrived back at the nick, Johnno, who had had to ride in the back of the car with him, looked sick as a pig.
Bodily functions notwithstanding, Bigga ended up getting five years and Meshawn three and a half. Though of course, the most serious crime I had actually seen Meshawn commit – possession of a firearm – had never even been written up.
For me though, the real pay-off from the case came the evening after the bust. We were at the pub for a celebratory pint and Rob slapped me on the back. ‘Great bloody work, Woodsy, great bloody work.’ It wasn’t the compliment that stuck with me though, it was the Woodsy.
Most of the guys on the Drugs Squad went by a nickname. Rick Johnson was Johnno; Andy Maclean was Mac; and Jim Horner was always the Chief. It was only from the moment I became Woodsy that I felt I had really earned my place on the team.
This feeling was made official when later that evening Jim Horner pulled me aside. ‘Just so you know, you’ll be getting a Divisional Commendation for this operation.’
My eyes lit up, ‘Bloody hell! When do you think the ceremony will be?’ In my mind I was already inviting Sam and my parents, letting them see that maybe joining the police hadn’t been such a mad idealistic quest after all.
Jim gave me one of the raised-eyebrow looks that only he could pull off.
Of course – I was an undercover. There would be no ceremony. I’d get the handshake from Divisional Command, but it would be in a closed room with no camera flashes from the local press. I would never be able to tell a soul.
I may have earned a nickname – I may have even received a Divisional Commendation – but I would never really be accepted by the guys on the Drugs Squad until I had gone through my initiation.
It was an honour for any non-DS cop to get an invite to the notorious Drugs Squad Christmas party, and the guys told me to get to the bar early. This was meant to be a combined bash for the entire Chesterfield and Derby teams, with some detectives from other regional units down as well, but when I walked in all I could see was Bomb Damage.
His real name was Paul, but Bomb Damage seemed to fit. He was 6’4” and built like a tank with a beer belly. He was a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing local legend with a huge ginger beard and a booming Brian Blessed-type voice. He was originally from Doncaster and spoke exclusively in broad South Yorkshire slang. Beer was larrup, a woman was a gert, and to have a look was to ay a gleg.
Bomb Damage bought us a pint each, sank his in fifteen minutes, and burped, ‘Your round, lad.’ I got a couple more in. Fifteen minutes later Bomb Damage was back at the bar… and fifteen minutes after that his glass was empty again. ‘Your round, isn’t it?’ he demanded.
I had been there for less than an hour and was already four pints in. It was only then I realised this was a stitch-up. When Bomb Damage went out, he drank a pint every fifteen minutes, four per hour, all night long. That’s just how he was. I’d obviously been sent in early to see if I could hold my own.
‘Fuck off Bomb Damage, I need to last past nine o’clock tonight.’
Bomb Damage roared with laughter, knowing he’d been rumbled. ‘Well you can bloody buy me another one before you stop, lad.’
About an hour later the rest of the gang piled in. I got a slap on the back, ‘Still standing then, Neil?’
‘Yeah, I know what you’re up to, you bastards.’ The sniggers turned to guffaws and the night was on.
There were several women on the Drugs Squad, and many were excellent officers, but it was a lads’ culture. These guys drank, and drank hard. They would pull thirteen-hour shifts all week, then get smashed on beer all weekend. The nights usually started at the police station itself. In those days most stations had a subsidised bar, so the pints were cheap. The irony of a bunch of detectives busting drug dealers all day, then getting pissed out of their heads on government subsidised booze, didn’t sink in for me till years later.
That Christmas party was no different. The drink was flowing and the guys got raucous. One of the out-of-town detectives, obviously a hard-nut, got bevvied up enough to think it would be a good idea to take on Bomb Damage. Suddenly the whole room went quiet, as this guy bounced back and forth, throwing jabs at Bomb Damage’s shoulder. I assumed it was all a joke… until I saw Rob begin to move away.
‘They are just messing about, right?’ I whispered to Johnno, who just shrugged. It was well-known that Bomb Damage liked a fight. There was an infamous story of him going up to Glasgow to give evidence at a trial, but ending up getting arrested himself for battering some Scottish hard-man. He’d used his phone call from the cells to ring Jim Horner to get him off the hook.
In the end though, Bomb Damage just reached out his enormous bear-like hand, put it right over this guy’s face and pushed him down onto a chair. The whole place roared with laughter and the atmosphere relaxed again.
But later that night, when I was about fourteen pints in and we had inevitably ended up at the worst nightclub in town, I staggered up to Bomb Damage and clapped a hand on his shoulder. ‘All right mate, how you holding up?’
‘Fuck off,’ he hissed out of the corner of his mouth.
‘What?’ I asked, taken aback.
‘I’m eyeballing the bouncer. I’m gonna do the cunt. Fuck off.’
At that point Mac took me by the arm. ‘Come on mate – when he says to fuck off, it’s best to fuck off.’
We fucked off.
I don’t know if Bomb Damage ended up fighting that bouncer, but I didn’t see him for the rest of the night. What I do know is that this was considered completely normal behaviour. At the time, though, it was a serious eye-opener. I’d scraped up the wreckage from people being drunken idiots on the street; I hadn’t expected a bunch of veteran detectives to be those idiots. But, once again, this was just my own naïveté coming up against reality.
And, as much as I may have been a little shocked, I laughed as loud as anyone. These guys were fun. I was a young man like any other, and it was actually pretty liberating to learn that just because you were fighting the good fight, it didn’t mean you had to be a saint.
The tone of the whole outfit was set by the DI, Jim Horner, one of the last of the old-school rogues, but an amazing police officer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of drugs and criminal structures.
The guys on the Drugs Squad were wild, but they knew the job. Every one of them put their lives on the line, and they watched each other’s backs in a way I truly admired. It was a great feeling to actually be winning some respect from this gang. The fact that for a skinny lad I could hold my booze certainly helped.
If you want to run with the pack you have to become a dog.
And I was soon to get the chance for some police-sponsored hedonism of my own.
I was about to get paid to go clubbing.
&nbs
p; ‘OK Woodsy, here’s the job. We need you to infiltrate Progress.’
As strange as it may sound now, there was a period in the 1990s when Derby was considered the underground nightclub capital of northern England. And Progress was the night that put it there. Rated as the top dance club in Britain for two years running by Mixmag, every weekend Progress brought coachloads of people piling in from all over the country, and hosted every top DJ, from Pete Tong and Paul Oakenfold on down.
That meant pills. There were hundreds of thousands of pounds of ecstasy, speed and coke being traded in the clubs of Derby every night. There was no way the police could just stand by. But without a heavy-handed strategy of constant mass raids, it was impossible to gather usable evidence as to who was supplying the scene. So, someone had to get inside the clubs and make some buys.
This presented me with a real dilemma. I loved dance music. After my joyous, life-changing nights in Manchester, I had got heavily into all the jazz-driven, progressive drum and bass by people like LTJ Bukem, Adam F and Earl Grey. I would still occasionally drive up to see big acts like Orbital or Underworld at the Hacienda, and when Goldie released his Timeless album it blew my mind along with the rest of the country.
I didn’t take ecstasy, though I couldn’t pretend not to know that folk around me were wolfing it down. But somehow I couldn’t think of these people as criminals. I’d chased down career gangsters and violent street thugs. The hippy guy from my local record shop, and the girls with the Björk-style bobbles in their hair, flyering for the local clubs, just weren’t it.
As much as the idea of getting paid to go clubbing did appeal to me, if it meant busting a load of kids holding a couple of pills on a night out, I wanted no part in it. Regular police could sweep up enough unlucky students on meaningless possession charges. There was no call for an intense undercover operation.
Jim understood my point and took pains to reassure me that this was a serious, targeted investigation, not just an easy option to bump up the department’s statistics. He slid a photograph across his desk.
‘Neil, this chap’s name is Chaz – on the street he’s known as “Shotgun”. He’s called that because two years ago some security firm crossed him… so he found the boss, stuck a shotgun in his face and pulled the trigger. He got off on a technicality in court. This guy has a network of bouncers and dealers working for him, but no one will testify. All we know is that he works mainly out of Progress. Either we nail him, or we’ll have to shut the whole club down.’
I had a look over Shotgun’s record sheet, an impressively grim litany of assault and weapons charges, none of which had been made to stick. This definitely wasn’t one of my raver mates out for a dance on a Saturday night. Jim’s words also put things in a new perspective. While the ravers themselves may have been idealistic party kids, the gangsters supplying the drugs were hard-nosed, ruthless criminals. If anything, it was the criminals who threatened the dance scene more than the cops.
There was no question about who ran the scene in those days. Regardless of the club owner’s wishes, every major club had its own gang of dealers who had either taken over or paid off the security. Any rival caught dealing on their territory would be taken round the back for a beating or worse. The idealistic musicians, promoters and ravers never stood a chance – the sums of money involved were just too great. Even the Hacienda had been forced to close for a period in 1991 before reopening with massive new security restrictions. If this guy Shotgun was allowed to keep using Derby as his base, the same thing would happen not just to Progress, but to every decent club in the city. In the end, I agreed to infiltrate the dance scene in order to protect it from its own worst elements.
Everyone knew this deployment would be a bit different. There was no way we could get a camera in there, so I had to choose a partner to act as a verifying witness.
I picked a fellow cop called Jenny because not only was she sharp and professional, but she also knew quite a bit about dance music. I do also have to admit to thinking that when working a nightclub, it might be helpful to have a stunningly attractive woman onside. Even the roughest dealers can fall for a pretty face.
The only other condition I set was that we got to choose the nights we went in. Not even my idealistic notions about fighting the good fight were enough to get me to go to some awful handbag house night. So, Jenny and I started poring over club listings to check when the really good DJs were on.
We started with Danny Rampling, the founder of UK acid house himself. We booked our tickets courtesy of the Derbyshire Constabulary, and got ourselves ready for action.
Things didn’t get off to a great start.
At Manchester raves everyone wore trainers. It was common sense – this was acid house, not lounge jazz. But this Derby club was apparently making some half-arsed attempt to ‘smarten the place up a bit’ and had instituted a shirts and shoes policy. We got turned away at the door for being too scruffy. I had to jog round the corner to where Jim Horner and two other cops were waiting as a support team, and swap shoes with Jim. The whole gang roared with laughter. Even then I knew I would spend the next ten years having the piss taken out of me over this.
On our second attempt we actually made it in. And it was fantastic. The music was thumping soulful house, and the lighting rig was shooting a crazy neon rainbow across the room. The place was almost full, and the crowd of around 800 were bouncing around like jackrabbits.
I surveyed the scene from the dance floor, and fairly quickly worked out who was selling. They didn’t even make an effort to hide it. Shotgun himself was nowhere to be seen, but Jenny and I scored some pills off two of his runners with no fuss whatsoever. I did the exchange and palmed the baggie to Jenny, who immediately stuck it in her bra. This was totally unnecessary – you get searched on the way into a club, not on the way out – but she made sure to give the dealers a flirty bit of eye contact. It was a nice touch.
Then we went and had a dance to Danny Rampling. We eventually emerged from the club at 3 a.m., buzzing with excitement and covered in sweat.
‘Where the hell have you two been? We’ve been waiting here for hours!’ Jim Horner exploded.
‘Well Chief, it would have looked pretty suspect if we had just bought some pills then immediately buggered off. We’ve got to stay realistic, haven’t we?’
Jenny and I shared a smile over their shoulders. This had been our plan all along. There was no way we were going to a Danny Rampling night and not having a bit of fun. In fact, the only downside was that Jim wore a size nine shoe, and I was a ten and a half. After all that dancing in his boots, my feet were aching for days.
Our next time in, I spotted Shotgun in seconds. He was swaggering his way through the club as if he owned the place – which in a way he did. I motioned to Jenny and we followed him out to the club’s chill-out room, which ironically also served as his office.
It was surprisingly easy to get in with him. I just shuffled over like any other buzzed-up raver, and asked if he could do us some pills and whizz. He snatched my money, and I was told to wait in a corner. I kept my eye on him, actually managing to make a note of exactly which henchman he went to pick the gear up from. He then strode over and handed me the baggie. Instinctively, I glanced down at it.
His right hand immediately shot out, seizing my throat and violently pulling my face to within millimetres of his own. ‘Don’t you fucking look at that in here… You fuckin’ watch what you’re doing.’ His grip was like iron. I barely managed to nod my head as I frantically gasped for breath. He pushed me away roughly, spun on his heels and strode off.
My eye caught Jenny’s as we walked back out to the dance floor. In that moment we both realised that this operation wasn’t just an excuse to go out dancing; we were hunting a genuinely nasty character.
Over the next few months, I scored off Shotgun and his cronies several more times, and got to know just what a vicious little bully he was. I remember watching him giving orders to one of his runners. The
guy obviously couldn’t hear him amidst the noise of the club and kept leaning in. Without the slightest warning, Shotgun lashed out and split the guy’s ear wide open. Two bouncers, obviously working for Shotgun, were on the scene in seconds to scoop the guy up and drag him out through the back. The more I observed the arrogance and violence of Shotgun’s whole demeanour, the more positive I was that I had made absolutely the right choice in taking on this job.
But, as much as I was looking forward to busting him, the night we did our raid was actually a massive disappointment. Jenny and I knew the investigation was coming to an end and scoured the listings to get in one last good gig. When we saw the legendary techno DJ Tony De Vit on a flyer we decided there was no way we were missing that. I even briefed the team that absolutely no action was to be taken until at least halfway through de Vit’s set.
We went in and I scored a bag of pills off Shotgun, as planned. Then Jenny and I raced to the dance floor for one last whirl.
Tony De Vit stepped up to the decks and the entire crowd let out a roar. Then the lights slammed on, and the music cut out in a screech of feedback. Forty cops in hi-vis jackets stormed through both the front and back doors. The bastards had come in too early!
They went through the club like terriers, immediately picking out Shotgun and the other high-priority targets, then making everyone else line up for searches. Of course, to maintain our cover, we also had to go through the process of being searched and arrested so we were shunted out into the covered smoking area and lined up with everyone else.
I watched Henry from the Drugs Squad walk up to a group of eight young guys next to us and shout, ‘Oi you lot, hands in the air!’ He then had to do a few other searches, and it was at least fifteen minutes till he made it back to them. Each was found to be holding a couple of pills. Henry was incredulous, and actually asked them, ‘I’ve had my back turned for ages, why didn’t you just throw the drugs on the floor and pretend they weren’t yours?’ One of the guys looked up at him, and with absolute naïve sincerity replied, ‘Because you told us to keep our hands in the air.’
