by Neil Woods
The Derby force was fed up. Kevin was on bail for two counts of GBH, but he had a long history of intimidating witnesses and beating charges in court. This time they were taking no chances. He was involved in all sorts of criminality, from moving stolen goods to acting as a thug-for-hire for local gangsters. But of course, the most profitable sideline was drugs.
There was no question of a prolonged investigation – this lot were too dangerous.
My mission was to get into the pub where Kevin held court, and make one buy-bust as the final nail in his coffin on top of the other charges.
In our briefing we decided that a woman’s presence might take the edge off the testosterone-ridden atmosphere, so I chose one of my brightest, toughest students from Wakefield, Ann Williamson, as a partner.
From the second we walked into that pub I knew this was going to be a grind. Kevin and his gang were hanging out on some benches in a covered smoking area. There were about seven of them, all bruisers kitted out in Ben Sherman and Stone Island, with that swaggering menace of men who reckon they’re the hardest squad in the pub.
On this job I didn’t have months to get my face known, or random junkies I could bribe into an introduction. We had one shot at this – we had to make it count.
Ann and I skirted the edge of the beer garden, nursing a couple of drinks and waiting for a space. After perhaps an hour, a couple of lads left the little table next to Kevin and his crew. We moved in immediately.
There followed another hour of awkwardly miming a conversation with Ann, while keeping my ears glued to Kevin’s conversation. I just needed an in – some line or phrase that could conceivably allow me to jump in and try to set up a deal.
Finally, just as things were beginning to get really quite uncomfortable, I caught Kevin turning to a mate and saying ‘Yeah no worries – I’ve got loads of trips.’
It wasn’t much, but it was the only chance we were going to get.
I leaned over and quietly called across, ‘Oi mate, did I hear you say you had trips? I’d have a couple of those if you’ve got some going.’
The entire crew fell silent. Kevin turned to look at me as if I was something he had just scraped off his shoe. ‘You talking to me? You fucking come here if you’re talking to me.’
I stood up and shuffled over, trying not to meet anyone’s eye. The second I was within range Kevin leapt to his feet and slammed me against the wall, his hand tight round my throat.
‘If you’re a fucking cop,’ he hissed into my ear, ‘then I’ve got something sharp here, just for your fucking face.’
‘Mate – sorry. Don’t worry about it, y’know.’
Kevin stared straight through me, his hand like iron round my throat. I could see the colour drain out of his lip as the adrenaline surged through his body. The grip round my windpipe tightened further.
‘If you’re a cop, I will kill you,’ he seethed.
‘Mate I’m not—’
‘No,’ he cut me off. ‘I will fucking kill you.’
He gave my windpipe a final sharp squeeze, then loosened his grip. ‘Now, how many do you fucking want?’
‘Umm… maybe four, if it’s all right?’ I gasped for breath.
‘Twenty quid,’ Kevin snorted, as if I wasn’t even worth his time.
He opened his wallet and tore four tabs of acid off a sheet of around thirty. Then he very deliberately held out his hand and dropped them on the floor so that I had to scrabble around his mates’ feet on my hands and knees. The whole crew erupted in raucous laughter.
I shuffled back to my table a little shell-shocked, sat down and raised my eyes at Ann. She gave the signal to the boys outside.
Two teams of cops in full uniform body armour exploded through the front and back doors, tearing through the place like a hurricane.
Kevin was on his feet in a second, squaring up to fight his way out. He never got the chance. A riot squad officer caught him from his blind side, dropping him with a brutal sucker punch.
This is very unusual. Police are trained to take someone down with a grapple to cause minimum damage – but Kevin lived for violence, they weren’t going to risk him smashing a bottle or pulling a blade.
The entire Lunatic Fringe crew were pulled through the wreckage of the pub and shoved into the vans outside. There was no way he could intimidate his way out of this charge. He got three and a half years.
That bust felt good. Kevin was probably the most thuggishly aggressive target I’d had to deal with yet.
The next operation was the diametric opposite. They were sending me after the hippies.
The intelligence unit had picked up chatter about an upcoming gathering being thrown by one of the sound systems that set up free parties across the UK. The word was that a few higher-level dealers would be coming through from Nottingham to shift their gear.
I would be working with Cate Doyle, who had joined the force at the same time as me, made CID in three years and was known as something of a prodigy. As with the nightclub job in Derby, I would make the score and Cate would act as corroborating witness.
Usually these gatherings would be set in a field or wood somewhere but, November in the Midlands not being ideal for outdoor parties, this rave was being held in a huge room above a pub in Chesterfield.
We walked into a flood of psychedelic lasers, lava lamps and bouncing dreadlocks. Things were just starting to pick up, and people were whirling away to thumping trance music.
Finding drugs wasn’t exactly a challenge. Cate and I just walked up to the first person we saw rolling a spliff and asked if they had any pills.
‘Yeah, I’ve got a few. But you should wait for my mate to come down later on, he’s got way better stuff than me.’
Cate and I exchanged a confused glance. Professional drug dealers aren’t known for recommending their competition. ‘Ummm OK… how much you want for those ones you’ve got?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no man, you can just have them.’ He smiled, stretching out his palm to offer us a couple each.
Cate immediately jumped in. ‘You know what? Maybe we’ll wait for your friend to come down – no sense in overdoing it. Thanks though. Have a wicked night, yeah.’
I understood exactly what she was doing. If we accepted those pills, we would have to include them as evidence, and this dreadlocked kid would legally be considered a dealer.
As we continued walking around the party it became more and more obvious that there were no real gangsters here. These folks may all have been high as kites, but they weren’t criminals in any meaningful sense of the word. I began to feel very uncomfortable about the entire mission. I had joined the force to fight against hardened gangsters, not a bunch of techno crusties leading their pet dogs around on strings.
Just as I was getting quite concerned about all this, Cate turned to me and simply declared, ‘I’m not fucking doing it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look, there’s no bad guys from Nottingham here. It’s just a bunch of kids. I’m not gathering evidence on these people.’
I was in complete agreement, but we still had a problem. We couldn’t just leave – the brass needed to see that we had been there at least a few hours.
‘So, what do you want to do then?’
‘Well, let’s get stoned and dance a lot.’
I almost dropped my pint. ‘You what?’
‘Yeah, let’s score a bit of grass and a bit of hash, and have a dance. If any gangsters do show up, we can gather evidence, but otherwise… fuck it.’
So that’s exactly what we did. I went and got some nice Thai stick and Moroccan resin, and Cate rolled a big hash-on-grass spliff. Then we danced our arses off to Detroit-influenced soulful techno and some banging hard house. I would never have done this on my own, but the fact that it was Cate’s idea somehow made it all right to just let go.
And of course no gangsters showed up. This was the friendliest, most unthreatening little gathering one could imagine, and I have absolutely no
regrets about the decision we made.
Cate and I stumbled out at about 4 a.m., and found our backup team huddled in their van drinking tea. We wrote up our evidence while giggling like naughty schoolkids, but made it absolutely clear to the Intel unit that hounding this lot of free party hippies was a massive misallocation of resources.
It was Johnno who first saw the danger. ‘Umm, Chief, don’t you think it’s a bit dodgy for Neil to be doing another undercover job in Derby? He’s worked this town already, his face is known.’
Deep down I knew it was a bad idea as well. But, by that point I would have taken on any mission just to get away from DI McAllister. Compared to his constant hounding, chasing a bunch of smack dealers in Derby seemed like a break.
My partner for this operation was Patrick Shaw. I had spotted Pat as a uniformed cop, and personally recommended him for the undercover course. He was ex-military, so it was a fair bet that he could handle himself. But it was more than that. Pat was sharp. He could improvise and bullshit like no one else I’ve ever seen. There wasn’t a line you could fire at him without getting a stinging verbal hand-grenade straight back. In many ways his brash, confrontational style was the opposite of my own, but my instincts told me he was made for undercover work, and I had trained him myself.
Derby had a growing heroin problem. Deaths from overdoses and related crimes were soaring, and the force there was overwhelmed. We had no specific targets, but were just meant to go in and see what we could learn about the town’s drug supply.
Pat and I figured we needed a calling card, something to raise us above the other junkies. I had a look through the Seized Property locker at the station and found several huge boxes of stolen rolling tobacco. So, we reinvented ourselves as small-time smugglers with a taste for smack, bringing in tobacco from France and buying heroin.
As it turned out, there was quite a market for cheap tobacco. We hung around dodgy pubs, doing a roaring trade, and quickly made a string of contacts. That’s how we met Eddie Glass.
Eddie was a small-time crook with an iron in every fire going. He fancied himself a bit of a Midlands Scarface, buying and selling coke and heroin, and talking a big game about the heavy gangsters he knew. He and Pat hit it off immediately. Pat was a natural at playing the wheeler-dealer smuggler – which allowed me to be the quiet sidekick, keeping my mouth shut and my eyes open. Through Eddie we got to know a whole range of mid-level heroin dealers, and began doing regular buys to work our way up the food chain.
It was here that Pat’s cocky, mischievous side started to show. Like most of the country at the time, Pat was obsessed with the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. We used to listen to the soundtrack on the way in to deployments. I’d sing along with the James Brown songs, Pat would do the film quotes from memory in his over-the-top mockney accent.
Then, one morning we were haggling over some smack with a couple of rough Jamaican guys Eddie had put us in touch with. Pat managed to talk them into selling us five bags for the price of four. As we took the gear, he turned to me and, doing his full Lock, Stock voice, went, ‘It’s a steal, it’s a deal, it’s the sale of the fucking century.’ It took every atom of self-control I had not to burst into laughter and completely blow our cover right there.
Not to be outdone though, the next time we were walking away, having just scored a half-T off another dealer, I turned and mugged, ‘Mate, can I just say… It’s been emotional.’ This time it was Pat’s turn to almost lose his cool.
That’s why I liked Pat. He was completely fearless, and he brought out my own reckless, mischievous side.
Occasionally though, he could get carried away.
Through Eddie Glass we’d arranged a meeting with a serious West Indian cartel. This was a big step up for all of us, and we knew it could lead into some heavy international networks. But as soon as we sat down, Pat launched into some story about how he wanted 2,000 pills because he knew a guy from the army who could smuggle them into Cyprus and sell them around the clubs of Ayia Napa. He’d obviously worked out this line in advance, and was quite pleased with it. But he was breaking the golden rule of undercover work – never volunteer your cover story, always make the other guy drag it out of you.
I could see the guys’ faces instantly sour. I frantically tried to catch Pat’s eye, but he was off on one, babbling about the club scene in Cyprus and his mates in the forces who could move anything in and out.
After about three minutes, one of the gangsters just turned and said, ‘Nah… listen mate, dis ain’t for us.’ There was no explicit threat, but the tone was severe. He was ending the conversation then and there.
As we walked out to the car, one of them grabbed Eddie Glass by the arm and pulled him aside. Without even bothering to wait till we were out of earshot he leaned in: ‘Oi Glassy, see dem two – they’re old bill, mate. You don’t want to hang around with them.’ As we climbed into the car I could just hear Eddie going, ‘Nah mate, I know these guys, they’re all right, seriously.’ Pat and I exchanged a look, and got out of there as fast as possible. There was nothing to say; we all made mistakes in those days.
It made little difference in any case – my part in this mission was about to dramatically unravel.
Pat and I were walking through a dreary, low-rise council estate in Allenton, back where I had lived during my initial training. A few streets ahead a small group of guys was approaching from the opposite direction. As they got closer I began to recognise a certain swagger in the way one of this crew walked, something about the way he cocked his head as he spoke into his mobile. But I just couldn’t place him. One second passed, then another. The group got closer. Then it hit me. It was bloody Carlo, Bigga Williams’ lieutenant, who had sold me the stone during my second undercover job in Derby.
Carlo hadn’t spotted me. He was still a block away and distracted by his phone. If he saw me, I was a dead man. Everyone knew Bigga had been taken down in an undercover sting, and Carlo would remember the guy who busted his boss.
There was no time to walk away or even give Pat a warning. I just spun round and hurled myself over the nearest garden hedge.
I landed with a thud at the feet of a middle-aged housewife hanging up her washing. She gave a start and almost screamed. Quick as lightning, I put my finger to my lips with a pleading expression. She must have read in my eyes that something serious was going on, as she gave me a quick nod and deliberately began fiddling with her washing again. I lay there, hidden by the hedge, until I heard Carlo’s voice, still talking into his phone as he passed by. Then I picked myself up, brushed off the mud and leaves, gave the wifey a grateful wink and let myself out the gate.
There was no way I could continue this operation. If Carlo had recognised me, then Pat and I could both have been killed. As much as I would have loved to have seen Eddie Glass and the other crooks we were dealing with get taken down, my face was just too well known. All it would take was the wrong person to catch a glimpse of me and put a whisper in someone’s ear.
In any case, I knew Pat had the brass to carry on solo, and eventually he did bring in quite a few busts off the investigation.
The only other positive outcome was that even the higher-ups on the Drugs Squad had to admit we’d pushed things too far. It became a protocol that no undercover should work the same town twice. It’s always nice, and all too rare, when common sense and national law enforcement policy actually coincide.
A clique of heavy-hitting Moss Side gangsters had moved into Glossop, turning the town into a way station for drugs flowing into Manchester. This had drawn the interest of rival Mancunian mobs, and suddenly the small town had become the centre of a vicious turf war.
Eventually someone ended up getting shot in a local nightclub, the press got hold of the story and the brass were finally forced to take action.
Having learned my lesson in Derby, there was no way I could go back into the field in Glossop. But no one else had the experience, so the Drugs Squad brought me in behind the
scenes, to help organise and direct the operation. Jim Horner took me aside to ask my advice on what had gone wrong on previous investigations, and how we might do better.
I jumped at the chance to set a few things right. First off, as we were going to be working in nightclubs again, I insisted on properly manned and well-positioned observation points to monitor entrances and exits.
Most importantly though, I thought it was insane that we never monitored and triangulated our suspects’ phone calls. The technology was available. If an undercover managed to get a dealer’s mobile number, surely we should be talking to the phone company to see who they had been calling.
Almost to my surprise, the bosses agreed to everything. I was asking for some expensive stuff here. For them to give the OK, the case must be serious.
I assembled a special unit, including Jenny from my previous nightclub job, Cate Doyle and a couple of guys from the training course, Ron Haines and Dom Green.
The clubs of Glossop had turned into such an open drugs market that the investigation was given the codename Operation Betta, named for the shop Bettabuys on Coronation Street.
The undercover group went in and quickly gathered a wealth of information on who was moving gear through the town. Thanks to the more extensive observation posts, we developed an archive of photographs of the gangsters who controlled the town’s underworld. I began using my evenings and rest days to help the team sift through the evidence.
Knowing that I was bit of an encyclopaedia, the guys on the Derbyshire squad liked to quiz me about drugs. Eventually the conversation turned to khat, the stimulant that is chewed all over East Africa, and which at the time was still officially legal in the UK.
I didn’t think much of it until the evening of the bust itself, when a DS involved in the operation shouted over to me, ‘’Ey up Woodsy, why don’t you drive past Manchester and pick us all up some of that khat stuff you were talking about?’
