Empire of Crime

by Tim Newark

  Lieutenant-Colonel Roos-Keppel maintained his strong police role on the North-West Frontier throughout the First World War. In 1920, the man who had done so much to reveal the international network of gun smuggling retired and journeyed back to London. But away from the bandit gangs and the frontier people he understood so well, he was bored and felt his life was meaningless. Within a year of his retirement, he was dead from a combination of heart trouble and bronchitis. He was just 55 years old. The Times claimed the ‘strain of 30 years of responsible work in the trying climate of the borderland and amid constant danger had broken down his fine physique’. But those who knew him well believed it was the removal from that harsh terrain that had killed him.

  ‘In the Pathan social and political world,’ said Olaf Caroe, ‘he detected in some sense the realisation in practice of a way of life that not only appealed to him but touched some inner spring of conviction, even of passion.’ His home was with the Pathans of the North-West Frontier and that is where he should have ended his life.

  Roos-Keppel’s talent for plotting a map of international gun smuggling revealed a new kind of foe faced by the British Empire. Using global trade routes – frequently established and guarded by imperial forces – criminal gangs were now able to transport illicit goods between Asia and Europe with increasing success and escalating profits. Nowhere would this be clearer than in the burgeoning underworld business of narcotics, bringing the hedonistic habits of the Far East to the streets of the imperial homeland.

  3

  THE TRAGIC MISS CARLETON

  ONE AUGUST EVENING IN 1918, William Gibson – a 36-year-old partner in an Australian shipping company – strolled out of the underground station at Baker Street and visited a lady friend in a flat at Portman Mansions. He had just travelled back from Chinatown, at the time located in Limehouse in the heart of London’s dockland, carrying a little packet containing white powder. In the woman’s flat, he ‘cooked up’ the mixture and injected it into his arm. He told her it helped him get over his alcoholism. The next morning, Gibson was found dead in his bed. He had choked on his own vomit. A postmortem discovered that he had been poisoned by an overdose of morphine derived from opium. A jury returned a verdict of ‘death from misadventure’.

  Later that same month, a Chinese man was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment with hard labour and recommended for expulsion from the country as an undesirable for managing a notorious opium den in London’s East End.

  These were relatively minor affairs, but four months later the link between dangerous drugs and London’s Chinatown would explode into the public’s consciousness with a headlining case. It was the end point of an illicit drugs network that stretched all the way back to Britain’s imperial possessions in the Far East.

  Twenty-two-year-old Miss Billie Carleton was a successful West End actress when she attended the Victory Ball at the Albert Hall on 27 November 1918. It celebrated the end of the First World War and was an attempt to bring a little piece of glamour back to wartime London. In the early hours, she returned to her apartment in Savoy Court Mansions, buzzing with excitement about moving to Paris or America, possibly starring in movies. A few hours later, she died in bed from cocaine poisoning. The tragic case became a popular sensation when she was linked to drug-fuelled Dover Street orgies, where the actress was said to have smoked opium and sniffed cocaine. In just a few months, she had apparently spent over £4,000 on these drugs.

  Described in the press as a ‘frail beauty’ and ‘delicate’, an ‘actress of charm and intelligence’, Carleton – whose real name was Florence Leonora Stewart – had appeared the day before her fatal overdose in two performances of Freedom of the Seas, a light-hearted play at the Haymarket Theatre. At some point that day, she had ordered by telephone a little gold box, which arrived at her apartment containing white powder, ‘like sugar’, said her maid.

  Billie’s friend Reggie de Veulle had designed her dress for the Victory Ball and accompanied her for the evening. In the lavatory at the ball, a friend bumped into the dressmaker and he said, ‘I am going to take a “sniff ” of cocaine.’ At the inquest following Carleton’s death, it was revealed that de Veulle and Carleton regularly visited a flat in Notting Hill Gate, where they bought heroin and cocaine from an Egyptian man. Another witness went further:

  One night Miss Carleton asked me to take her down to Chinatown. It was about 1 or 2 in the morning when we started. We returned about 6 o’clock. When she got back she was very ill. I went down smoking opium with Miss Carleton. It cost between £5 and £10, and she and I shared.

  ‘Once Miss Carleton came into my dressing room very heavily “doped” at the Prince of Wales’s,’ said a fellow actress. ‘I said “What’s the meaning of this? You promised me not to take that stuff!” She said “If you knew how difficult it is to resist when it is brought to me.” I asked who brought it and she replied “Reggie de Veulle.”’

  Mr and Mrs de Veulle lived in Dover Street and Reggie’s wife was jealous of his close friendship with the West End starlet. The day after the inquest into Carleton’s death was adjourned, Ada Song Ping You was arrested. A 28-year-old Scotswoman married to a Chinese man living in Limehouse, she was charged with preparing opium for smoking at the Dover Street address. When police raided her home, they found two revolvers and all the paraphernalia needed for smoking opium.

  On being sentenced to prison with hard labour for five months, Ada admitted to preparing opium at de Veulle’s Dover Street flat one night in September 1918. After dinner, around 10 p.m., de Veulle’s halfdozen guests moved to the drawing room, where they placed cushions and pillows on the floor. Taking off their clothes, the men put on pyjamas and the women wore chiffon nightgowns. They then sat in a circle while Ada prepared opium for them. Using a little paraffin lamp, she heated pellets of opium. Extracting portions of the opium with a hypodermic needle, she placed them in the bowl of a pipe for the guests to hand round and smoke. Billie Carleton turned up late at the party, coming straight from her performance at the theatre, and disrobed to join the rest.

  When Reggie de Veulle’s maid was asked to give evidence at the inquest, he had threatened her. ‘If you give me away,’ he told her, ‘I will see your baby starving, and I will get your separation allowance stopped.’ When the maid was asked about the amount of money that Billie Carleton gave de Veulle, she was clear: ‘He received a lot of money. I thought it was for her dresses. I used to get £2 or £3 from time to time from Miss Carleton for Mr de Veulle in bank notes … The £2 was given to me for shopping. I have been to Notting Hill Gate to get cocaine.’

  Finally, 38-year-old Reggie de Veulle took to the stand. He had had to leave his Dover Street flat because of being hounded by the press, who then followed him from one hotel to another. He admitted taking a little cocaine himself but denied supplying it to Carleton. Point-blank he denied all the accusations by the string of witnesses, claiming on one occasion that he and Billie had jokingly pretended to take drugs, using white face powder, just to alarm one of their actress friends.

  When the inquest was resumed in January 1919, the coroner summed up the case, saying that Billie Carleton had died from an overdose of cocaine administered by herself, that she had had no intention of committing suicide and that the drug was supplied to her by de Veulle. As a consequence, de Veulle was culpable of manslaughter and was arrested on the spot in court. At the subsequent trial, de Veulle was acquitted of manslaughter but was found guilty of conspiring with Ada Song Ping You to procure cocaine.

  In de Veulle’s defence, his lawyer said he doubted ‘whether people accustomed to taking drugs thought they were doing anything very grave, because it was only since the war that cocaine and opium had been prohibited drugs. Until then drug-taking was not a crime. It might have been a moral sin, but it was not a crime.’

  The lawyer was referring to a regulation in the Defence of the Realm Act that forbade the possession of opium and cocaine. Passed in May 1916, it came in response to increased
drug abuse by soldiers, who bought the substances from prostitutes and street dealers. The authorities feared it would lead to the deteriorating health of the army. Opium was also being obtained from doctors by men hoping to ‘dope’ themselves in order to fail medical examinations for the army. A year later, the prohibition was extended to civilians.

  Sentencing de Veulle to eight months in prison, the judge concluded: ‘Traffic in the deadly drug is a most pernicious thing. It leads to sordid, depraved, and disgusting practices. There is evidence in this case that, following the practice of this habit are disease, depravity, crime, insanity, despair and death.’

  A month after the trial, a sapper in the Royal Engineers was charged with attempting to administer cocaine by way of a woman’s beer in a Westminster pub. The sapper said he had bought the cocaine by mistake in German East Africa. Discovering what it was, when he came back to England, he claimed he had shown the bottle to the woman in question, saying that if she ‘knew any friends of Billie Carleton, they could do some business’. The sapper was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

  The tragic Billie Carleton became the prototype of the thrill-seeking celebrity drugs casualty that would be typical of the twentieth century. But there was another kind of victim, one that drew attention because of its proximity to the Great War.

  Ex-officer Eric Goodwin was found dead in a London townhouse in Hallam Street, near Portman Square, in January 1922. He had died from an overdose of heroin, as a result of an addiction to narcotics first acquired on the Western Front.

  ‘He had got the habit after he had been given it following his wounds in France,’ his doctor said. ‘He acquired the craving for [morphia], and he told me how he used to strive to get it.’

  To buy some heroin, Goodwin had contacted a black music hall artist, who took him to the Hallam Street house of another ‘coloured’ show business friend called Eddie Manning, an infamous dealer. There, said the music hall artist, ‘Goodwin asked for a spoon and put it in some white powder, to which he added water. He then put a match under the spoon and when it was hot inserted some of the liquid into his arm with a hypodermic syringe.’

  It was around midnight and he seemed OK, asking only for a glass of milk, said the music hall artist. But then he began breathing heavily. The next morning Goodwin appeared to be sleeping but was in fact dead.

  ‘The War brought about a change,’ concluded Sir Malcolm Delevingne, the British government’s expert on dangerous drugs and author of the Defence of the Realm Act regulation covering them. ‘The controls that were instituted over international trade threw light on the extent and nature of the traffic in the drugs. The stress and strains of war led to a spread of drug-taking both among the troops and among the civilian populations, which caused serious apprehensions.’

  Having for so long considered the problem of drug-taking as something that only happened abroad – afflicting far-flung peoples, principally the Chinese – the addiction was now coming home to haunt the streets of the imperial capital. The trade routes that had comfortably carried it across exotic seas to foreign markets were now being used to bring it back to England. Having made its possession illegal, it was up to the police to discover exactly who was bringing this poison onto their shores.

  Won Tip first sailed into Liverpool around 1897, working as a fireman on a steamer ship, keeping the boiler loaded with coal. It was a tough, horrible job and, as soon as he could, he jumped ship and settled in England. From 1904, he served in a shop selling groceries to the Chinese immigrant population in Birkenhead on the west bank of the River Mersey, opposite the city of Liverpool. He was 32 years old, ambitious and hard-working, and he soon took over the management of the shop, plus a boarding house nearby.

  Won Tip specialised in recruiting Chinese crewmen for Liverpool shipping companies, putting them up at his boarding house, and so successful was he at this business that he opened up a second lodging house for Chinese sailors. Selling his grocery store in 1916, he concentrated on this far more lucrative side of his business. Or so it seemed …

  Won Tip’s Chinese wife died in 1899, but he had an eye for the ladies and fathered at least one illegitimate child. He married an English woman with a child from a previous relationship. When she died, Won Tip adopted the boy as his own and sent him to a private school. He then married another English woman and together they had three children.

  Whether it was the influence of alcohol or the necessity of handling tough people in a rough community, in 1907 Won Tip started to fall out with the law. On several occasions, he was arrested for threatening behaviour and grievous bodily harm, but on almost all occasions he was discharged. In 1915, he was convicted for helping his wife give false information on one of their boarding houses. Facing three months’ hard labour and a recommendation for deportation, he appealed against the conviction and had it quashed. Just two months later, he was arrested for threatening to kill someone, but again got off. He appeared to have a surprising ability to avoid punishment.

  Up to 1915, Won Tip had told the authorities he came from China, but, with the threat of deportation hanging over him, he changed his family history, saying he came from Hong Kong, thereby qualifying as a British subject.

  As with many Chinese living in England, he had made a lucrative sideline out of processing opium for his fellow Asian smokers. Until the Defence of the Realm Act in 1916, this had not been illegal and was carried on quite openly in the Chinese quarter of Liverpool, as well as in London.

  Won Tip had built three furnaces in the basement of his boarding house and kept two Chinese men busy producing opium in small sixounce copper tins that could be hermetically sealed – the purpose being that they could be thrown into the sea and later retrieved.

  It was at this stage that Chief Inspector H. Burgess of the Liverpool City Police became involved.

  ‘Although it was no offence to prepare opium or smoke it in this country [up to 1916],’ explained Burgess, ‘it was, however, a very serious matter in some foreign countries, principally the United States of America, China and in many of our Dominions, but owing to it not being an offence here, Chinamen flocked from everywhere to Liverpool, which became the centre of this trade, and it was from here they exported this drug all over the world.’

  The prepared opium was concealed in the small copper pots produced by Won Tip and smuggled aboard ships. When the ships approached a foreign port, the Chinese smugglers threw the sealed pots into the sea and had them collected by accomplices in rowing boats, who fished them out of the water. The owners of the shipping companies could be fined as much as £10,000 if the illicit trade was discovered and did everything they could to prevent the traffic, but more often than not they failed.

  Come 1916, Burgess sent a report to the Home Office recommending the deportation of these traffickers as non-desirable aliens. The government acted promptly and in May of that year issued deportation orders against prominent Chinese smugglers. Won Tip managed to avoid the initial purge by pulling down his Birkenhead furnaces, but he carried on trading more surreptitiously. Later in the year, however, he was served with a deportation order and conveyed to Walton Prison.

  Having accumulated some considerable wealth over the years, Won Tip hired a top Liverpool lawyer to put his case in the High Court. The lawyer argued successfully that there was no proof to rebut Won Tip’s claims that he was born in Hong Kong and so was a British subject. The deportation order was withdrawn and Won Tip went back to his business.

  Burgess was frustrated and pursued the line of inquiry to the Governor of Hong Kong, who studied the documents produced by Won Tip. He declared that they were false and that he was not born in the colony. But this process had taken three years; the Home Office felt too much time had passed since his appearance in the High Court to issue a fresh deportation order. Besides, Won Tip, it appeared, had turned over a new leaf. He was even informing the authorities about drug dealers in his community.

  Burgess was not so easi
ly convinced, saying he was betraying ‘persons in opposition to him with a view of getting them out of his way’.

  ‘Since that time,’ wrote the Liverpool Chief Inspector, ‘his general conduct has been good. Although the police have suspected him of running and financing gaming houses and opium dens, we have not been able to obtain any evidence against him.’ In 1925, he was informed that the untouchable Won Tip and his family had suddenly left for China.

  It was with great satisfaction, then, that Burgess received news two years later that Won Tip was in actual fact living on the Continent in Antwerp and was up to his old business. On the surface, he was engaged in supplying Chinese crewmen to the Liverpool shipping firm Branch Line, but secretly he was running an opium den in a Chinese restaurant in the Belgian port and trafficking drugs back to Britain.

  On 8 April 1927, information was received by the Metropolitan Police Special Branch in London that a large quantity of opium had been smuggled on board the SS Cedar Branch by its Chinese crew. It was originally destined for Leith, the port of Edinburgh in Scotland, but word had got through that there was a shortage of opium in London and the illicit cargo was to be dropped off on the way. When the police arrived to search the ship in the London docks, they were disappointed to find nothing on board of any interest.

  Shortly afterwards, 11 Chinese drug traffickers were expelled from Antwerp. The information about them had come from Won Tip and a fellow Cantonese restaurateur who had, most helpfully, been assisting a Special Branch officer based in Belgium. ‘Both are well known to me,’ said the officer, ‘and during the last nine months of the period I was stationed at Brussels gave me considerable assistance in dealing with the smuggling of narcotics to Great Britain and the smuggling of narcotics and arms to India and the Far East.’