by Neil Woods
Henry laughed and shook his head in disbelief, but he was now obligated to arrest the whole crew and stuff them in the back of the van. None of this lot were dealers. They were just students on a night out, without even the street smarts to chuck their stash when a cop wasn’t looking. Now all eight of them would have possession convictions on their permanent records.
But the real shame of it is that, though I had him red-handed, we didn’t even put Shotgun away.
This was the first case in which I had to undertake a proper line-up identification parade. Shotgun’s solicitors insisted that because he was unusually tall, all eight potential suspects had to be sat on ridiculous little wooden school chairs, wearing identical blue boiler suits and hats. It made no difference whatsoever. I picked Shotgun out in seconds.
Then Jenny went in. She emerged wearing the most sheepish expression I’ve ever seen. ‘I don’t know which one he is,’ she muttered.
‘What are you talking about? Shotgun was sitting right there—’
‘No you don’t understand,’ she cut in, ‘I’ve never seen him before with my glasses on. In the club he was just kind of a big blurry mess.’
I was stupefied. Jenny hadn’t worn her glasses to the club, or even contact lenses. But there was nothing any of us could do. Failure to identify gave the CPS grounds to rule that a successful prosecution would not be likely, and they decided to drop all charges.
I knew that Shotgun was a truly dangerous character who needed to be taken off the streets. But he was able to go right back to dealing, only this time with a good deal of knowledge about how police undercover operations worked. Chances are he got even more vicious in response.
I ended up getting another Divisional Commendation for my role, but this was an infuriating end to the operation and no amount of backslapping from Command, or nights out clubbing on the police dime, could make up for it.
It also certainly wouldn’t be the last time I’d see a painstakingly planned and executed deployment come to absolutely nothing.
I was starting to adapt to the pressure of not being able to tell a soul about my undercover escapades. And one thing I was very careful not to do was mention to Sam that my new deployment largely revolved around dancing in clubs with a gorgeous blonde.
To me, things still didn’t seem right between us, but I tried to focus on the positives. Our little cottage had thick walls that allowed me to play music as loud as I liked, and Sam was doing well both in both her job and her degree. We often had friends over to open a few bottles of wine, and laugh into the wee hours.
As teenagers we had had naïve, romantic talks about one day getting married, but this time I asked her for real. A few months later, on 1 May 1993, we tied the knot at a lovely old church in Derbyshire.
So, newly married, we set about creating our family and finding a new house for us all to fill and grow into. It was an exciting time, but also a confusing one. I was wildly in love with Sam, but I could still feel a tension between us. Tempers would flare up, and it seemed like tiny incidents could spark days of trouble. When I was undercover, it was my instinct that kept me alive – I had to absolutely trust myself in every decision, move and thought. Yet in my personal life I found myself putting my intuition on mute. It’s horrible to feel that you can’t trust your own inner voice, particularly in your own home. But, once again, I tried to keep my head down and maintain my focus on the job at hand.
CHAPTER 5
CHESTERFIELD
BETWEEN UNDERCOVER JOBS I would be rotated back to ‘regular’ work as a uniformed police officer in Glossop – manning the response car, making arrests and wrestling with mountains of paperwork.
It created a very weird atmosphere around the station that I kept getting mysteriously called away, but was unable to tell anyone what I was doing. Other cops started looking at me strangely and I knew people were starting to whisper.
But it was the undercover operations that really excited me. It was obvious to me that this was where my talents lay.
It was also obvious to Jim Horner. He knew that when he sidled over and hopped up on the corner of my desk, I’d jump straight into whatever he had in mind, even if I had to do it on my rest days. Jim knew how to read people – it’s something you learn from decades as a cop. He could tell that I had that impulse – almost a compulsion – that I could never walk away from a job, never let a challenge go unanswered.
This time when Jim sauntered up with his mischievous grin, it was for a different type of operation. It was an undercover drugs sting like the others, but this time we weren’t even chasing drug dealers.
For months Chesterfield had been plagued by a string of domestic burglaries. The cops there knew who the culprit was, but despite a massive surveillance-led investigation they just couldn’t catch him. Most burglars work during the day when people are out, but this character, Billy Scheres, was burgling properties at night, with people asleep in their beds. It was only a matter of time before someone got hurt.
The Chesterfield guys had picked up intelligence that Billy was also heavily into amphetamine, and dealt a bit on the side to fund his own habit. If they couldn’t catch him for the burglaries, maybe I could go in undercover and bust him as an amphetamine dealer? One way or another, this guy needed to be taken off the street.
Once again, I began the operation by just observing. I was getting good at staying anonymous; becoming just another one of those invisibles you pass on the street every day but never notice. Shabby tracksuit, baseball cap pulled low over the eyes – you forget us the second you pass by.
Billy’s patterns were erratic, but there were people constantly in and out of his grotty low-rise council house. It was obvious he was running some kind of clandestine operation.
One of his customers in particular caught my eye. This guy would always stop on a park bench to drink a can of cider and smoke a cigarette before heading in to score. He was skinny like me, and seemed to combine the nervous twitchy disposition of the speed-head with an awkward sort of shyness. This was obviously no career criminal, just a loner who had partied too much, and got more into the powder than he ever intended.
I rocked up as he was glugging his way through his customary black tin of rotgut K Cider. ‘Sorry mate, got a light?’
He instinctively reached in his pocket, and I took the opportunity to sit down next to him.
‘Want one?’ I offered him a fag from my pack of Benson & Hedges. He gave me a look of gratitude, as if offering a tab was the sublime peak of human generosity. I knew I had him.
We smoked and chatted, and I casually asked him where he was off to. ‘Just goin’ round my mate Billy’s for a bit of whizz,’ he replied innocently.
‘Ah, mate – is that Brimington Billy from Ringwood Road? I’ve heard he does some wicked powder. I can only get shite where I am. Maybe I’ll pop down with you and get some myself.’
He nodded absent-mindedly, suspecting nothing.
‘Who the fuck is this?’ Billy was immediately on the defensive.
‘Ah mate,’ I stammered. ‘I just heard you did some really good powder, and I keep getting ripped off – I can only get shite.’
‘He’s all right Billy, he’s a good bloke,’ piped up my new friend from the park bench.
With that assurance Billy seemed to relax. We trooped through into his living room, and he quite happily chopped me out an eighth of speed then and there.
I made it back to HQ and we sent the gear down to the lab. It came back as 8.5% pure, which was right at the top end for the street-level retail market. But even an eighth – meaning 3.5 grams, or an eighth of an ounce – wasn’t nearly enough to put Billy away for any real time. Had it been crack or heroin then perhaps those small deals would have been sufficient, but with amphetamine we would need to get Billy to trade in far larger quantities.
So, I came up with a plan.
The first thing I needed to do was win Billy’s trust. I bought off him a few more times, hanging around his
living room as he paced up and down, speeding his nut off and bragging about the various hustles he pulled. He was a hard house and techno freak, and seemed impressed that I knew a fair bit about dance music and had been to some big nights at Progress and the Hacienda.
I still had to bluff my way through most of the drugs talk. At this stage I just mimicked stuff I’d picked up on the club scene. I’d heard someone say they liked a ‘candyflip’ – a mix of ecstasy and LSD – so I’d say, ‘Ah man, I did such a hardcore candyflip on the weekend, I was higher than the fucking sun, mate.’
I think Billy actually just liked having me around to smoke my cigarettes. I’d started smoking as an undercover prop – Want a fag, mate? is too good a conversation starter not to use. Gradually though, I’d become addicted, and was now only too happy to charge packs to the Drugs Squad account.
It very quickly became clear that Billy was an intensely unpleasant person, who would switch in an instant from hyperactively talkative to explosively threatening. Injecting amphetamine probably didn’t help.
By now I’d seen plenty of people swallow pills and snort powders. But the first time you sit in a cramped room watching someone cook a shot on a spoon and slide the needle into their vein – the powder fizzing into that weird bubbly goo, the little red flower of blood sucked back into the syringe before being slammed home – it’s a completely different order of intensity. Particularly when you’re an undercover cop, and the guy has a tendency to wave combat knives around, screaming about how he hates the pigs.
One of Billy’s habits was that as soon as he had shot his speed, he would load up a giant gravity bong, built from a bucket and a cut-in-half Evian bottle, and smoke a giant bowl of hash – ‘just to take the edge off the powder’. It was one thing for me to turn down the offer of sharing his needle – that was generally accepted among druggies – but refusing to smoke a bong with him would have blown my cover straight away. In the drugs world, weed is the universal solvent. To skip my turn on the bong would have immediately exposed me as a narc, or at best marked me out as a weirdo and aroused suspicion.
So, I took my turn. And I got absurdly high.
Gravity bongs are heavy artillery. You get a huge load of water-chilled smoke straight to your lungs, and you feel it immediately. No one on the Drugs Squad ever actually asked why I was giggling maniacally while filling out my evidence book, but I think they could have hazarded a guess.
Eventually, I figured I had gained Billy’s trust enough to start luring him into my plan. He had just smoked his bowl, and I figured he was in as open a mental space as he was ever going to be.
‘Hey Billy… I’ve got this mate, yeah, who deals at travelling parties, y’know, the raves and all that. He’s been let down by his usual guy. You reckon you could sort him out? He’s after a fair bit – could be some decent cash in it.’
At the mention of cash, Billy immediately perked up.
‘Oh aye, how much is he after then?’
‘He says he needs two kilos.’
‘Two fucking kilos?’ Billy exclaimed, a little too excited.
‘Yeah, see they take it to the parties and that’s where they cut it up, y’know.’
If Billy did have any suspicions, they were outweighed by greed. For a small-time hustler like him, this could be quite a tidy little deal. ‘Aye, I can do that. No bother, mate. I’ll sort it for next week.’
So, I had Billy on the hook. Now all I needed was someone to join the operation and pose as my supposed drug dealer mate. The best the Drugs Squad could come up with was Bomb Damage.
At first I was horrified. Bomb Damage had been a Derbyshire cop for fifteen years, and was fairly hard to miss. There was every chance his face was already known on the underworld drugs scene.
When I raised this point, Bomb Damage just glanced at an intelligence photo of Billy and dismissively growled, ‘Well, I don’t know him lad, what’re thou worried about?’
The rest of the team seemed to accept this, and scanning the room I realised that he probably was our only option. In this game you learn to work with what you’ve got.
I set the date with Billy, and drove Bomb Damage down to the car park where the arrest team had set up in advance. Billy approached the car and I slid out so he could hop into the front seat to do the deal. Through the open window I could still follow their conversation.
‘Listen mate, sorry, I could only get one kilo today, but I can do the other one next week – no bother.’ Billy was speaking in an absurdly fast, speed-addled garble.
Bomb Damage just smiled broadly, slapped him on the back and said, ‘Don’t worry yourself about it lad, we’ll sort it out.’
Of course Bomb Damage didn’t care about the missing kilo. He knew what was coming next.
Once again, two squad cars screeched up and a foot team pounced out of nowhere. Billy did a fair bit of screaming about how he’d kill every fucking pig there, but mercifully managed to control his bowels better than Bigga Williams had.
In the end, Billy got five years and the operation was deemed another significant success. But, while it was nice to get more backslaps and congratulatory pints from the team, this case actually presented me with some troubling questions.
When we sent that kilo of speed down to the lab, it came back as only 1% pure. Billy had obviously tried to run a scam. He’d taken his own usual stuff and cut it enough to make a kilo. He must have thought that trying to get two kilos out of it would be taking the piss, hence him only turning up with the one.
What that meant was that Billy wasn’t a real amphetamine dealer. He was just a low-rent burglar trying to turn a quick buck. More importantly, it was me who had lured him into the idea of selling wholesale to Bomb Damage. Had I not set that deal up, he would never have tried to punch above his weight. Truth be told, this was entrapment. I acted as an agent provocateur, tricking Billy into a crime he didn’t actually have the capability to commit. In the eyes of the law it made no difference that his gear was only 1% pure – he had sold a kilo. I expected his defence solicitor to tear that case to pieces in court. Billy wasn’t that lucky, and was advised to just plead guilty. The case never even went to trial.
On the other hand, the burglaries stopped overnight. Billy was a genuinely dangerous guy, and by taking him down I had protected many others from harm. I told myself that I just had to accept that sometimes fighting this fight meant punching below the belt. I picked up another official commendation and put the operation down as a sharp lesson: to get the job done, I’d occasionally need to colour outside the lines.
However, if this deployment had made me question the ethics of my work, the next mission would call into doubt the very competence of the team I was working with.
CHAPTER 6
CLOWNE
MIKE WAS A slippery fish.
The DS had been chasing him for years, but he had evaded countless arrests and beaten every charge they managed to throw at him. The previous year the squad had launched a major raid on Mike’s operation, only to have him execute a well-orchestrated emergency escape, dumping his stash into a mixture of water and Epsom salts, and kicking the contents all over the floor. Despite the obvious drug paraphernalia everywhere, the CPS ruled the evidence contaminated and wouldn’t take the case.
The DS lads took this personally. They regrouped and spent painstaking months gathering granite-hard, irrefutable evidence. Then, two days before the meticulously planned bust was set to go down, Mike was shot four times in an orchestrated gangland hit.
So, instead of arresting him, the Derbyshire Constabulary found themselves on twenty-four-hour guard duty as Mike lay in hospital, just in case the shooters decided to have another go. It was incredibly frustrating and a major drain on resources, not to mention all the boring night shifts guarding a hospital corridor.
The shooting made the news, leading to pressure from the regional higher-ups to solve the attempted murder and crack down on the criminal networks involved. A major intelligence operation
ensued, linking the shooting to a mob war Mike’s crew had been fighting with a Sheffield gangster known on the street as Hal.
Hal was another league of criminal altogether. This wasn’t some thug slinging crack on a council estate. He was a high-level operator, plugged into international narcotic supply networks, who knew how to keep his hands clean and evade police surveillance. The Sheffield cops had nothing on him.
They did know one thing, though – Hal had family in Clowne, a small town neighbouring Sheffield, and he sometimes used these people as assistants and runners.
So, it fell to me to avenge a drug dealer’s shooting. My mission was simply to go into Clowne and see if I could pick up any scraps of Intel that might form the basis of a proper investigation.
Clowne, like so many towns in the north, was an old coal village still reeling from the annihilation of the mining industry. And where coal had gone, alcohol and smack flooded in. An oppressive cloud of poverty and dereliction hung heavy in the air. I walked down street after street on which every business had long since been shuttered; the listless stupefied deadness ran deep. There were only three pubs left in town – and only one where even a low-level gangster would let himself be seen. So, I started hanging around, quietly nursing pints and letting myself get drawn into conversations.
For this operation I wasn’t posing as a street-level junkie. We were hunting serious gangsters. For these guys to even talk to me, I had to play a mid-level hustler, someone who might offer an opportunity. So, I threw together a slightly smarter set of charity shop clothes, and a whole new persona.
It’s easy enough to tell if someone is connected. I could scan the bar with a pint and a pack of B&H in front of me and decide in seconds who was worth watching. Getting a conversation started, however, was a different story. You can’t just barge into town and start asking about drug deals. Above all else, these operations required patience.
