by Neil Woods
When the Burgers pulled up in their jeep that morning I immediately threw open the door and slid into the back seat, not giving them the chance to get out and do my deal on the street. The two gangsters up front turned in irritated surprise, but I launched into a volley of, ‘Ah mate, mate – thanks for coming out –I just, like, need a bit y’know. Just a bit for the morning, y’know how it is.’
I talked fast, like any desperate, rattling junkie. They’d seen it all before and sold me my bag of smack.
I jumped out of the car and raced round the corner to where a forensics team was waiting to put my clothes in sterile evidence bags.
But, just as they were finishing bagging everything up, we got a radio from HQ. The car that had actually been used for the rape had been discovered burned out on an industrial estate outside of town. It was a grim moment. But if anything, it strengthened my resolve to let these bastards know that they couldn’t get away with it. As much as they might cover their tracks, I was going to put them away.
But that would take time and work; and once again, the painstaking, patient process of building a major case didn’t sit well with Gino.
The only word he understood was more: more buys, more evidence, more results, more feathers in his cap. As much as I explained that more evidence didn’t mean better evidence, he didn’t want to hear it. As the case dragged on, he hit the booze ever harder, and got ever more aggressive.
It got to the point where I was regularly faking phone calls and evidence runs, just to get him off my back. Each time felt worse than the last. I was the guy who would take the bullet if I weakened my cover by making too many buys. Why should I be having to pull fake deployments like a schoolkid in order to mollify my own Cover Officer – the guy whose sole job was meant to be to protect me?
Eventually I snapped. I’d been out on the streets for eight hours. I was exhausted and cold, thinking about the drive home and what might be waiting for me when I got there. And now Gino was on the phone telling me to stay out and make another buy that evening.
‘No Gino, I’m not doing it.’ I kept my voice calm, but firm.
‘Neil you have to bloody do it,’ he snapped back.
‘No. No I don’t. This is my assignment, and I’m coming in now.’
‘No, no, no! These are orders from the DI, Neil. He wants another buy today.’
‘Well, tell you what – you get the DI on the phone and he can tell me himself, yeah? Now listen – I’m coming in right now. You either come and pick me up, or I’ll get a taxi and bill it to EMSOU.’
The phone went dead. By the time I made it back to HQ in my cab, Gino was fuming. I could smell the beer on his breath.
‘What the fuck was that about?’ he stormed.
‘Gino, listen. I’m the guy out on the streets. It’s my call when to make a buy or when to come in. I just need your support on that, all right?’
‘No Neil, no!’ He was actually shouting now. ‘You need to learn how to fucking follow orders. I’m going to take this to bloody EMSOU.’
‘Well fucking take it to EMSOU,’ I replied flippantly, ‘I have a feeling they might just take my side over yours.’
‘Oh fuck you Neil. You know what your fucking problem is?’ He jabbed his finger into my chest. ‘You’re just not committed. You’ve just got no fucking commitment, Neil.’
This was too much. I could take people shouting at me – God knows I got plenty of that at home. But after the things I’d been through on this case – after the guns, the beatings, the death, the rape, the squalor – to be told I wasn’t committed was a bridge too far.
I squared up and hissed straight into his face. ‘Listen. I don’t know what your problem is – but why don’t you go out, get pissed, pick a fight and work it out with someone else?’ Then I turned and strode out of the room.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Gino did. He went out to a club, got raging drunk and picked a fight with the bouncer. He came off worse, and ended up repeatedly calling the guy a ‘fucking black bastard’. Someone reported him, and he was immediately suspended.
I never saw Gino again. I have no idea what happened to him, but his brand of cocky racist bullshit has no place in the police force. After all the madness, dysfunction and mistrust of the police I had experienced recently, it was reassuring to see the system actually working for once. His replacement was a woman named Natalie, who was as brilliant and responsive a Cover Officer as one could hope for.
This relief was quickly undercut when the entire regional police force was rocked by scandal. Johnno got busted with cocaine.
He had obviously developed a taste for the stuff, and had started buying significant quantities from the same people he had once investigated. He was sent to prison for a year, and – obviously – never worked in law enforcement again.
This arrest of an elite Drugs Squad officer threw the entire force into disarray. Suddenly everyone was under surveillance. Even my old mate Steve, the expert Level 1 undercover, almost lost his pension over a few crumbs of hash.
I felt awful for Johnno. He was an excellent cop. He’d been my observations officer on several deployments, and had shown more concern for my well-being than probably anyone else on the force. Did it make sense that his life should be ruined over snorting a few lines? The propaganda of the drugs war casts all users as inherently morally deficient. What did it say about that attitude if genuinely dedicated, talented cops were starting to use these substances that were supposedly only for ‘criminals’?
As the case moved on, things moved from the terrifying and dysfunctional to the downright surreal.
I had started wearing a wire with the Burger Bar Boys. I felt I had gained their trust enough that even D wouldn’t force me to strip at gunpoint again. EMSOU came through this time. I got a recording device about the size of a ten-pack of cigarettes, hooked up to a tiny pinhole camera.
Usually the Burgers ran a tight ship. They were careful on the phone and always on the lookout for police surveillance. This time however, when I swung open the car door I was hit by a solid wall of dank ganja smoke. My eyes immediately began to water as I peered through the haze to see Jackson, obviously high as the clouds, lolling in the back seat with flaming red eyes and a massive grin on his face.
‘Woody man… come in, man.’ I slid into the back, doing my best not to cough my lungs out as the gang continued to pass around a spliff about the size of a car exhaust.
‘What you wantin’, Woody man?’ asked Jackson, his voice slow and hoarse with smoke.
‘Uhh… I’ll take a two and one mate, if it’s cool?’ I replied, trying to work out if my camera was even going to pick up Jackson’s face through all the smoke.
‘Yeah man, it’s cool… it’s cool’. Moving in stoned slow motion, Jackson handed me the gear and took the cash.
The deal done, I moved to get out. But just as I was turning to open the door, Jackson grabbed my sleeve. I froze in dread, my mind flashing to the wire running up my torso.
‘Woody man,’ he began in a stoned slur, ‘Woody man… why dey call you Woody, man? Is it… is it because you look like Woody Allen, man?’
I almost lost control and burst into hysterics. I was a skinny, six-foot bloke from Derbyshire, currently dressed like an inner-city street junkie. It’s safe to say I didn’t look anything remotely like Woody Allen. And the fact that the most dangerous gangster in the South Midlands was even talking to me about Woody Allen was just bloody weird. Not to play into cultural stereotypes, but Jackson didn’t exactly come across as the Annie Hall type.
But I was getting a bit high myself off of all the smoke in the car. ‘Nah mate, it’s not that… I’ll tell you what it is, though.’
‘Yeah?’ replied Jackson, leaning forward, his face rapt with gurning fascination.
‘Well, you know the movie Toy Story, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ Jackson nodded enthusiastically.
‘Well, you know that bit where the kid takes Woody, the cowboy doll, an
d burns a hole in his forehead with the magnifying glass?’
‘Yeah, yeah… yeah… ’
‘Well, when I was like fourteen, I had skin cancer on my forehead, and they had to burn it away with a machine. And after that, all the other kids called me Woody, because I was like Woody from Toy Story with a burnt forehead.’
Jackson looked at me with an expression of profound, almost childlike sadness.
‘Aaah maaan,’ he murmured slowly, ‘that is rough… that is so rough, man… that is roooouuuughhhh.’ He trailed off into his own silent meditation on the tragic story. I thought he might burst into tears right there.
So, there I was with a multiple murderer and crack-lord of Northampton, looking at me with dewy-eyed sympathy for my imaginary teenage trauma. It was just too weird. I left him there lost in his trance, and raced back to HQ to check I’d got the whole episode on tape.
From around that score on though, things became easier with the Burgers. Maybe word had filtered down from Jackson not to fuck with me too much; anyway the constant threats and intimidation cooled off a little.
I saw my opportunity and began wearing the cameras in earnest, catching each and every one of them on tape selling me crack and heroin. I reintroduced Pat to the mix, and he managed to make some buys as well, corroborating and strengthening the evidence I gathered.
When the bust came down, we went through the city like wildfire – something like ninety-five arrests were made.
But the real prize was always the Burgers. On the day itself, I was assigned to do a buy-bust on D. It gave me extraordinary satisfaction to meet him in a downstairs car park, record the buy on camera, then just watch him drive away and listen for the screech of tyres and shouts of ‘Stop, police!’ from the street.
The Burgers all got eight or nine years apiece. To my mind they deserved even more. The drug dealing was the least of the brutalities they were involved in.
But as ever, fighting a war means collateral damage. To make the evidence against the Burger Bar Boys stick, every single one of my contacts had to get written into the story. They all got caught in the net.
On top of their previous charges, Angus and Sara got three and a half years each. Ellie, the addict sex worker who had already suffered so much, now had to add prison to her list of troubles. Even Joni, the Big Issue seller who had given me her last fiver, was arrested and found her small act of kindness used against her.
This was nothing I could take any pride in, but also nothing I could do to stop. The war machine was in motion, and I was just a tiny cog in the apparatus.
With EMSOU there were never any big celebratory drinks. Even when the operation was wrapped up my identity had to remain protected. So, Max, Natalie and I ended up at the pub doing a staff party, undercover-style.
They were both in backslapping mood. ‘You’ll get a Chief Constable’s Commendation for this Neil,’ Max said. I raised my eyebrows and sipped my pint in silence. Yep, another one to throw on the pile.
‘Come on Neil, cheer up,’ giggled Natalie, ‘you’ve just helped put a serious dent in the Northampton drug supply… for about seven minutes.’
I had to laugh at that one – old-fashioned police gallows humour at its best. But it was also the truth. Even as we ordered our rounds at the bar, a new set of gangsters would be rushing in to serve the market the Burgers had left open.
Later that night, though, as I sat on the sofa at home with a tin of lager, the joke kept replaying in my mind.
If this operation had been such a success, why did it feel so wrong? I thought back to Leicester and Nottingham and got the same sense of profound unease. Don’t get me wrong – I got a rush of anger every time I thought about the Burger Bar Boys, and what they had been able to get away with for so long. I still wanted to crush their horrible little empire with every fibre of my being.
But that was the thing. The guys I busted in Northampton were second-generation Burger Bar Boys. It had started with their fathers fighting for control of the drugs trade, and been passed to Jackson and his crew through their older brothers. The gang was set deep in the life of the Midlands and a new generation was already stepping in to take their place.
So, while I may have put a few of the gang away for a while, I had done absolutely nothing to address the situation that actually gave them their power. And along the way, I had made a lot of vulnerable lives even more unbearable.
As a cop fighting the drugs war, I was caught up in the arms race just like everyone else. Surely there had to be a better way? But if there was – at this point at least – I just couldn’t see it. What was there to do but to keep fighting, battle by bloody battle, and just accept that each one would cost a little more in brutality and human suffering than the last?
Even now, I wasn’t able to follow these doubts and questions to their inevitable conclusion. I wouldn’t be able to make that final leap until I had witnessed the endgame of the drugs war arms race with my own eyes.
And I saw it on the streets of Brighton.
CHAPTER 14
BRIGHTON
IN NORTHAMPTON I had seen the bloody trenches of the British War on Drugs. In Brighton I saw the dead zone.
When you walk the streets of any city there are two populations. There are those who pass through on their way to work, home, the shops, the pub, the station. Then there are the people of the street: the cleaners, the Big Issue sellers, the bin-men, the drug dealers, the buskers and, of course, the homeless. These are the ones for whom home and work are the streets. The people of the street can become invisible. You step over the beggars, you skirt around street cleaners – to you they are just vague shapes at the edge of your peripheral vision, abstract obstacles in the urban landscape. But they see you. They watch you go by, and they know that you are just a tourist in their world. The world of the street is always there, beating its rhythm all around us. It has its own rules, its own opportunities, its own dangers lurking in the shadows – which, most of the time, you won’t even realise are there.
By now I had become attuned to the world of the street. In any new town I immediately noticed the homeless, the addicts, the hustlers, the beggars. I could spot a junkie on the way to meet their dealer – I could tell when someone was trying to keep a lookout for the cops. Over time one becomes sensitive to the patterns, and can pick up the atmosphere just by walking around and noticing.
Brighton was rotten.
Within hours of starting to walk those streets I could tell something was deeply wrong in the homeless community. At this point it was just a sense – something in the way that people hurried past, something about how they avoided eye contact. It was as if every street person was carrying the same horrible secret, and they didn’t dare speak to anyone for fear they would let it slip.
There was something sick here, something profoundly different from anything I had seen, even in the squalor and violence of Northampton, Leicester or Nottingham. I returned to headquarters after that first walkabout deeply disturbed. Something was going on in this city – and I was going to uncover it.
Brighton police had been one of the first forces in the country to start running Level 2 operations, and had one of the UK’s most extensive covert policing programmes. Yet for the past year or so, they hadn’t managed to catch a single significant gangster. Having helped write the book on undercover tactics, I was invested. If something wasn’t working, I wanted to help fix it.
But there was something else that sparked my interest in this operation. Brighton had by far the highest rate of heroin overdoses in the UK. The previous year had seen fifty-four deaths – more than one a week. As a per-capita rate, that was shockingly higher than any other city in the country. With my growing empathy for vulnerable addicts, this was not a statistic I could turn my back on.
The first briefing was a nightmare.
Within minutes my impression formed that for all their supposed experience – and all the funding they’d received – these people seemed incapable of str
ucturing a targeted, intelligence-led investigation. From where I stood, I could see none of the EMSOU discipline and professionalism. Instead, all I felt were all the worst hallmarks of police culture gone wrong: arrogance, brash insensitivity, idiot machismo and the chasing of statistics over the welfare of victims.
The DI was a hulking blowhard who appeared to run his team like a pack of wolves, each one snapping at the others, trying to raise their place in the pecking order.
When I began asking questions about the city’s awful rate of heroin overdoses, one of the younger officers immediately chimed in, ‘Yeah, we had fifty-four last year. This year we’re already on thirty-six – fuckin’ hell, looks like we’re going to beat our own record!’
The room immediately erupted in raucous laughter and mocking high-fives. It only got worse from there. Every opportunity for a gag at the expense of a dead homeless person was exploited. The briefing fell apart in a storm of shitty jokes, as they all tried to out-banter each other.
Don’t get me wrong; I like cop humour – I’d held my own with Bomb Damage and the Derbyshire boys for years. But in Brighton it was something different. I felt the job was actually suffering because of this team’s internal squabbles.
The one solace was that at least I knew I’d been brought in to sort out this mess. I had been sent down as an expert troubleshooter, and if nothing else, it was clear that I was in charge of my own operation and they would respect the way I did things.
Or so I thought.
That consensus didn’t last beyond my first deployment on the street.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer number of homeless addicts in the city.
Brighton is usually thought of in terms of British seaside kitsch: Victorian piers and slot machines, stony beaches and the slate-grey sea, fish and chips and mushy peas. But those are the associations of the people who walk the streets on their way to warm, cosy homes. The people of the street view this city in a very different light.
