Good Cop, Bad War

by Neil Woods

  This didn’t bode well at all.

  Carl’s squad had set up in Highfields, a rough part of central Leicester near the railway station, while Richard’s team maintained their positions in the equally run-down peripheral estates of Beaumont Leys.

  Highfields embodied the classic story of the post-industrial British provincial city. The area was constructed around endless rows of terraced Victorian red-brick houses, built for an urban workforce that no longer existed. As the middle classes had moved out to the suburbs after the Second World War, it had fallen into poverty, squalor and disrepair.

  By the time I was deployed, Highfields was in the grip of a profound crisis. The estates were flooded with crack and heroin, and openly run by the gangsters, who enforced order among the largely Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities through sheer terror and intimidation.

  The previous year, the local council had attempted to regenerate the area by blocking off several streets and building shiny new playgrounds for the local kids. Inevitably, the playgrounds were immediately turned into open-air drug markets, while the pedestrianised streets made it exponentially easier for the gangs to hide their activities from the police.

  From my first in character walk-through round the Highfields terraces I could sense the palpable atmosphere of fear and menace. People would just stand outside their doorways, staring at me in my homeless junkie guise with utter contempt – then flit back inside as soon as one of the local gang members swaggered by. No one spoke. No one made eye contact. Very young teenagers, kids really, would sprint past me from playground to playground, obviously carrying messages or product for the older dealers. Highfields wasn’t just a rough estate – it was occupied territory, completely controlled by the drug gangs.

  One of the brighter sparks on our squad was a guy named Sammy. He could play guitar, and had had the initiative to start busking in the city centre to establish his cover identity. I started building my own cover story by playing a fellow beggar/busker and harmonising with him on Beatles songs outside the shopping centre where the local homeless guys congregated.

  This was the perfect cover. It got our faces seen, and identified us as ‘of the street’, without us even having to volunteer any information. Besides, undercover narcs are hardly likely to be hanging around street corners doing ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ in perfect two-part harmony. I was amazed at how much money people actually threw down. If only all that cash wasn’t considered evidence for the investigation, Sammy and I could have been on to a decent little side-earner.

  The busking gave me the perfect opportunity to make first contact with the local scene. As soon as we had £20 in the hat, I would snatch it up and shuffle over to the homeless guys to ask where we could score. People were only too happy to make a call in return for a scrape of gear from my bag.

  But it was always them who made the score. I supplied the cash, but I was never allowed anywhere near a dealer. Any time I tried to get an introduction to an actual gangster I just hit a wall. All my techniques for working myself in towards dealers that had worked so well before now just met total refusal. Something had changed on the drug scene.

  So, I worked on building a relationship with one homeless guy named Tommy. After we’d scored together quite a few times, I casually asked, ‘Hey man, you reckon I could get your guy’s number? You weren’t about the other day when I needed something – and you know what it’s like.’

  Tommy gave a look of scathing disgust. ‘Nah mate, we don’t give no numbers.’

  ‘All right mate, sorry. Was just asking, like.’ I backed off, surprised at the anger in his response.

  ‘Oi, you see Shakey over there?’ Tommy cocked his head at one of the other beggars. ‘You know how he lost his eye? He gave someone his dealer’s number… the fucker took a screwdriver to his face.’

  Shakey had a massive scar covering the entire right side of his face. He wore an eyepatch, and had earned his nickname because he was always trembling somewhere between heroin withdrawal and delirium tremens from the booze.

  ‘You fucking serious?’ I gave a horrified gasp.

  ‘Yeah well there’s fucking cops everywhere isn’t there. They’re all fucking plain-clothes now – you go giving someone’s number out, next thing they’re selling to some cop, and they’re fucking busted. There’s fucking rules now, innit?’

  Then Tommy paused, his eyes narrowed. ‘How long you been round here for anyway?’

  I had fucked up. By asking for a dealer’s number I had revealed I didn’t know the rules. ‘Ahh mate,’ I stuttered, ‘I’m just down from Matlock. Different vibe up there, innit – the countryside’s a bit more chilled, y’know.’

  Tommy just sniffed and nodded, but from that moment on there was an air of suspicion around him. Suddenly I was being kept at arm’s length. This was a dead end. Tommy and his gang obviously operated by a new code. It would take a radically different approach to make contact with a dealer on my own.

  It was about ten days in that I first spotted Digsy.

  Sammy and I were busking our way towards £20, belting out ‘I Shot The Sheriff’ by Bob Marley – which I thought a good bit of gallows humour for a couple of undercover cops – when this new figure loped across the square.

  He was wearing box-fresh Nike trainers and a dazzling silver tracksuit with one leg rolled up, as if he was in some LA gang movie. The look was completed by cropped hair, big gold rings and two studs in his left ear. He immediately set himself apart from the scruffy homeless dropouts lolling on the shopping centre steps. But it was more than just the clothes. He moved with swagger, a fuck-you scally confidence that lent him an edge of real danger.

  One look at this guy and I could tell he was the real deal – a career dealer, not just some smackhead trying to finance his own habit. The way he dressed, the way he walked; everything about this guy screamed gangster.

  But I hesitated before making an approach. Tommy’s story about Shakey and the screwdriver was fresh in my mind. Gangsters weren’t just letting strangers walk up to them and ask to buy drugs any more. This was a new era – the old tactics wouldn’t cut it.

  But I also knew that if I didn’t start making progress, then this operation was dead on the ground. I needed to take a risk.

  ‘All right mate, haven’t seen you in ages.’ I walked straight up to him with a big smile on my face.

  Before he even had time to register that we had never met, I had lined myself up beside him as though we’d known each other for ever. ‘How’ve you been, mate?’

  For a split-second he threw me a skewed look – some deep centre in his brain must have registered that he had never laid eyes on me. But just as I was getting ready to be told to fuck off, or worse, he just sort of grinned and went, ‘Yeah mate, all right?’

  It’s amazing what a big smile and just enough confidence can do. Even gangsters have the same social reactions as anyone else, if approached in the right way. You just have to be fast enough with your patter and not give them enough time to think.

  ‘So… you still down with the Bs?’ I pressed my advantage, using the Leicester slang I’d picked up (B for brown).

  ‘Yeah – What you after? Just the one?’

  I felt relief wash over me. He’d bought it. I suppose for drug dealers, after a while all homeless smackheads must start to look the same. But I still needed to know if this was just a scally with an attitude, or a real gangster who walked around with individually weighed and wrapped product.

  ‘Actually mate, have you a got couple of point fours?’

  Now it was his turn to pause. He looked me up and down, obviously doubting whether anyone as scruffy and downbeat as I looked could afford that sort of weight.

  ‘That’s fifty quid, yeah. You got it?’

  ‘Yeah – no worries,’ I shot back, patting my pocket, ‘been a good day.’

  He jerked his head for me to follow, and led me towards a phone box. He placed two cellophane wraps onto the little metal shelf n
ext to the receiver, then came out and stood in the door, waiting for the money before allowing me in.

  Before he split I managed to get his mobile number and arranged to call him a few days later. This was the key. One unrecorded buy would have been useless. I needed to score a few more times to establish trust before moving on to recorded deals. I even managed to wheedle a name out of him. His street nickname, Digsy, wasn’t much to go on, but it was a start.

  Digsy’s wraps came back from the lab 80% pure. This was no street-level dope – it was gangster product.

  Carl and the EMSOU brass were completely thrilled. I’d achieved more in a few days than the entire operation had in over a month. But not everyone seemed excited – Richard from the Beaumont Leys team wasn’t happy that the Highfields squad was getting all the glory. I made a mental note to stay out of his way.

  The next day, Jim and Carl briefed us that from my description of Digsy, along with his street name, Intel had identified him as a genuinely nasty gangster, suspected of a string of violent incidents and connected to mobs in Birmingham and Moss Side. He instantly became our number one target, and the entire team’s highest priority.

  I managed to score off Digsy a few more times over the next couple of weeks. But just as I was getting ready to try out one of EMSOU’s new body cameras, he went cold. Suddenly all I got from him was, ‘I’m lying low for a bit, mate. Call in a few days, yeah.’

  I didn’t know what he meant by ‘lying low’, and I didn’t like it. Had I let something slip? Had he caught a rumour of undercover teams operating in Leicester? Was this just another example of dealers getting more and more paranoid? On the other hand, trouble had been kicking off between rival gangs in Leicester, and he could just as easily be genuinely keeping his head down out of fear of attack.

  The EMSOU brass were furious. There was considerable pressure on me to keep calling him day after day. I had to patiently explain that after three or four rebuffs it would have looked unrealistic. Any real junkie would have found a new dealer within a day or two. I didn’t forget Digsy though. It wouldn’t be till the very end of the operation that our paths would cross again and I would finally bring him down.

  I found these new developments deeply troubling. This operation just didn’t feel right. There was a gnawing feeling of uncertainty that I couldn’t put my finger on. In particular, the story Tommy had told me about Shakey getting mutilated by his dealer just for giving out a number kept playing and replaying in my mind.

  It was just so extreme. I always went into undercover operations in the full knowledge that if I blew my cover, I could end up dead or in hospital. But I was a cop and they were gangsters – it was all in the game. To take out one of your own customer’s eyes with a screwdriver just for handing out a phone number was an entirely different level of savagery. Over the eighteen months I’d been off chasing firearms as a detective, the rules of the undercover game had changed.

  Something felt fundamentally wrong about the whole Leicester operation, but no matter how much I turned things over in my mind, I couldn’t say what it was. From the moment I had set out on those streets there had been an unnameable sense of angst, which only intensified when Digsy suddenly went cold on me.

  The day I officially told Carl and Raj that I wasn’t calling Digsy again, I drove home in a deep funk. That evening I was on autopilot as I cooked the kids’ dinner, put them to bed and did my utmost to avoid anything that could set Sam off on a rampage. Right now I just didn’t think I could deal with that.

  After everyone had gone to bed, I needed a little time on my own, so I slumped on the couch with a can of Heineken. Just wanting to switch my brain off, I started absent-mindedly flipping through the channels on the TV.

  On Channel 4 there was some documentary on about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs disaster in the early 1960s. I sipped my beer vacantly as I watched black and white footage of Kennedy, Kissinger and Khrushchev pompously blabbing on about the potential nuclear annihilation of the human race.

  That’s when it hit me.

  In one moment, I made a realisation that would force me to reconsider every basic principle on which I had based my life thus far. In one flash, my entire perception of my work, and what it meant, was completely transformed. After this, nothing would be the same.

  People talk about the War on Drugs as if it was like the Second World War; one army against another – the dealers and the cops, the good guys and the bad guys, the defenders of society and the criminals. But that was bullshit. If the War on Drugs was a war at all, it was the Cold War. And, like the Cold War, it was a fucking arms race.

  Suddenly I understood why EMSOU had been put together. It wasn’t because our early undercover operations needed to do better; it was because we had done too well.

  We had used undercover tactics to send a whole generation of criminals to prison. But for gangsters, prison is just graduate school. It’s where they trade knowledge, streetcraft and intelligence. They’d figured our tactics out, and they were now responding in the only way available to them – by becoming more vicious and brutal.

  Even in my last few undercover ops before CID, chasing down Alec and Kyle, I had noticed things getting tougher. But I had put that down to us going after higher-level crooks. Now I realised, our targets hadn’t really changed; the criminals had just been learning.

  There was no other way this dynamic could play out. The police could become smarter and develop new tactics, and the only response for the gangsters was to get ever more savage – to instil more fear in potential witnesses, to stab out the eyes of customers who gave out their number. People were getting mutilated not for being informants, but just on the off chance they may have given a phone number to the wrong person.

  Just like the arms race between the Cold War superpowers, there was an inevitable, inexorable logic to this madness. There could only ever be more firepower, more missiles – or in this case, more police tactics, more brutality from the gangsters. But unlike the Cold War, we couldn’t sign treaties with our enemies. There was no potential whatsoever for de-escalation. Things could only ever spiral in one direction, towards violence and mayhem.

  I sipped my beer in horror as the black and white footage continued to flicker on the screen, and these thoughts chased each other pell-mell around my mind.

  These revelations shook me in a profound, seismic way. But sitting there on my sofa I didn’t know quite what to do with them. Perhaps I lacked the moral courage at that point to follow them through to their inevitable conclusion. Or perhaps I still defined myself through being a cop. I was still Neil who fought the good fight. I still had my mission, and I was going to complete it.

  I got up quietly, so as not to wake Sam and the kids, drained the rest of my beer, and crept my way upstairs in the half-light to rest for the fight ahead.

  With Digsy’s trail gone cold, there was nothing left to do but hit the streets once more and see what scraps I could pick up.

  This was how I met Ali.

  I first spotted him while busking with Sammy. He was a Big Issue seller who walked on crutches and set his main pitch directly across from where we did our Beatles numbers. He had addict written all over him, but I could see something more there as well. He was of Asian origin, but had grown up in Glasgow and spoke with a lilting west coast Scottish accent that instantly put a smile on your face. But it was more than that. Ali had a real energy. He would engage with passers-by, calling them by name, remembering little details about their lives and even teasing and flirting a little. He had that uniquely Glaswegian gift of the gab, and the charm of a true salesman. Needless to say, he did a roaring trade in Big Issues.

  I observed him for a few days, watching how other homeless people seemed to come to him for advice and help. In communities as harsh and intense as that of the inner-city homeless, there are often these characters, who are just that little bit smarter and more together, who come to act as elders for an entire street network. In Leicester, A
li was that guy. Of course, my first thought was that someone this plugged in could be just the link I needed to tap in to Leicester’s criminal gangs.

  I made my usual approach, shambling up and offering a bit of my score if he knew where to make the connection. Ali had obviously already scoped me busking. He recognised me as a fellow street hustler – a step above the other broken-down junkies on the street.

  I waited as Ali hobbled down a side street on his crutches to do the buy, making sure not to ask for his dealer’s number just yet. This was still a trust-building phase. I had a feeling Ali was the type who would introduce me carefully when the time was right.

  He returned and invited me back to his squat to cook up. I was led through the back alleys of Highfields to the abandoned industrial park where he squatted.

  I was struck by how clean and cosy Ali had managed to make the bleak, derelict factory space. He had the standard junkie mattress and sleeping bag set-up, but he also had his toothbrush and toothpaste neatly laid out by an old industrial sink, along with a kettle for tea and even a few pictures of his family Blu-tacked to the wall.

  In the opposite corner another homeless man was passed out on a sleeping bag. I recognised this guy as one of the beggars I had spotted around town. Later I would learn that this was Billy, a long-term junkie who Ali had taken under his wing. Billy was a hopeless case. He didn’t have Ali’s patter, charm or organisation to sell the Big Issue, so he just begged and shoplifted. The way Ali looked out for this broken-down character was a really touching display of care and camaraderie.

  Ali cooked up his shot. I spun a story that I was still cruising from my morning dose, and was going to save my part of the score for that evening when I’d be rattling. Ali accepted this as perfectly normal junkie logic. He slid the needle into his arm, pumped in the gear and leaned back in a warm junk haze.

  After his initial rush had faded, I made us some tea and soon he was spilling his guts, telling me his whole story.

  Ali had got involved in heroin in his late teens. In that era Glasgow was a city virtually synonymous with hard drugs, poverty and extreme violence. He had followed the depressingly standard path from casual use to addiction to minor dealing. Eventually his family kicked him out, and he had tried to get clean by moving down to London to escape his old life.