by Tim Newark
Abd el-Ati fled into the desert, leaving his followers to their fate. The bandit leader’s brother, two cousins and four other Arabs were cornered by the avenging Sudanese sergeant major and his troops and were all shot dead. The only prisoners taken alive were ten camels carrying fifty kilos of hashish and seven Mauser rifles. That night, the police dined on camel steaks cooked over the split wooden saddles of the dead smugglers.
It was these tough Sudanese that Russell rode with, learning colloquial Arabic and everything there was to know about smuggling. In later years, fearing armed clashes with police camel patrols, some smugglers used more cunning methods to get past them. In the Sinai, Syrian camels are known to grow fine silky hair on their humps that is then clipped off in the summer and sold. One alert Sudanese police officer noted that an Arab was too reluctant to sell him the fine wool off his camel’s hump. So, having his assistant cover the Arab with a rifle, he investigated the camel to find that slabs of hashish had been fixed to the hump and the long hair glued over it. On other occasions, hashish was stored in tin canisters force-fed to camels and lodged in their stomachs. The unfortunate animals were slaughtered on arrival in Egypt.
Russell learned much from his years in the desert, but if he was to progress he had to tackle crime in the great urban centres. He became an assistant-commandant in the vice-ridden port of Alexandria and was then transferred to Cairo. In 1917, at the age of 38, he took over from Harvey Pasha to become Commandant of the Cairo Police, a position he held for the next three decades. He became known as Russell Pasha – taking up the Ottoman title granted to senior dignitaries such as governors and generals.
Ever keen to take to the streets to learn what was really going on in his precinct, Russell first became aware of a new threat to the security of Cairo during the First World War:
I did a lot of night prowling in those days and knew by heart my way about the slums where the roughs and the cackling laughter of the hashish dens were by now giving place to the emaciated shadows of heroin addicts slinking about round the offal bins.
Cocaine made its first appearance in Cairo in 1916, followed later by heroin. At first, there was little Russell could do about it, as possession of such drugs only carried a fine of one Egyptian pound or a week’s imprisonment. The main source of heroin in Cairo was a respectable chemist, who sold it to a queue of wealthy young Egyptians, their carriages waiting outside. The price of heroin was low, costing a few shillings a shot, and a few contractors even paid their labourers in heroin. It was a wise move as the habit spread over the next decade, ensnaring the poor as well as the rich.
‘About 1928 I began to realise that something was happening which was producing a new slum population in Cairo,’ reported Russell. ‘For the first time we heard of the method of intravenous injection of heroin and soon came across its victims. Within a short time we found a new element in our Bulaq slums.’
The tough labourers who came from the Upper Nile to take up seasonal work usually made up the inhabitants of the Bulaq, but Russell found pale, wrecked figures lying about the lanes, some well educated, even speaking English, blaming heroin addiction for their impoverished condition. They survived by begging or stealing enough money for their next shot, scavenging food from bins outside restaurants and hotels. Soon the corpses started piling up, but they weren’t from heroin overdoses. They were from malaria – passed on from one addict to another by sharing a needle infected by a malaria carrier.
Stricter anti-drugs legislation was passed in 1925, raising the fine for possession and trafficking to £E100 or one year in prison. Higher fines meant the price of heroin rose from £E120 to £E300 per kilo – and yet the numbers of addicts was increasing. By the end of the year, fines had rocketed to £E1,000 and five years’ imprisonment. Such a profitable market with increased risk meant that it became more and more attractive to organised crime. It alone could provide the investment and the muscle to protect it. Russell wasn’t the only one to note the impact of their intervention.
‘I have to inform you that the Alexandria Police made a further raid last night on a drug den owned by a Cypriot where a large number of persons, including a blind boy of 15, were captured in the act of sniffing cocaine.’ The report came from the Ministry of the Interior in Cairo in November 1928. The information they got from that raid led them to visit a flat owned by a Cypriot.
The man fired several shots at White Bey and Borai Eff of the Criminal Investigation Department as they were ascending the stairs. The Police were checked for a time but eventually rushed the apartment and seized the Cypriot who had reloaded his pistol.
A large quantity of drugs was discovered, tossed down an airventilation shaft.
‘In view of the desperate attitude of these Cypriot drug traffickers who have now on three occasions used firearms against the Police,’ concluded the report, ‘I have authorised the Alexandria Police to carry out their raids armed and, if necessary, to return fire.’
News of the increased level of violence, plus an alarming estimation that put the level of addiction as high as half a million Egyptians out of a population of 14 million, meant that this was a national problem that needed serious attention. The Egyptian Prime Minister turned to Russell Pasha as his senior law-enforcer.
At the beginning of 1929, Russell was appointed head of a new organisation called the Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau. He was given a budget of £E10,000 and recruited his own specialised staff of investigators. His mission was to root out the major traffickers and make their task so difficult that the price of heroin and cocaine would rise so high as to put it out of reach of the average Egyptian worker.
But who were the big dealers? Where did they come from and how could you get to them? It was a whole new industry that Russell and his investigators had to get to grips with very quickly and its network would eventually span the globe. It was at this point that help came from behind a desk in Whitehall back in London.
Sir Malcolm Delevingne was an unlikely drugs-busting hero. At the age of 61 in 1929, he had led the quiet but diligent life of a civil servant. Taking a First Class Honours in Classics at Trinity College, Oxford, he had worked his way up from private secretary to become the Deputy Permanent Undersecretary of State. The highlight of his life had been attending international conferences on labour regulation in Europe.
It was a largely uneventful career, but behind this calm and controlled exterior was a passion to help people less fortunate than himself. In his private life, he became actively involved in raising money for the Barnardo’s charity devoted to orphan children. He also made it his business to become an expert on the new scourge of illicit drugs. Indeed, it was Delevingne who drafted the legislation in 1916 that made cocaine and opium illegal in the UK. When Russell needed help with the bigger picture, he turned to Sir Malcolm.
‘I corresponded with him freely,’ recalled Russell, ‘sending him confidential copies of our seized reports and taking his advice as to the handling of complicated international cases.’
In fact, Delevingne had already been on the case the year before Russell headed his new bureau. Pulling together all the information gathered by British imperial representatives abroad and Special Branch police officers at Scotland Yard, he sent a memorandum full of fascinating facts to the British Residency in Cairo. Just as Russell had learned that Greek merchants were behind the export of hashish to Egypt, so Delevingne revealed that they now had an active involvement in the trade of ‘white drugs’ in the Mediterranean.
Leonidas T. Melissaratos was actually born in Russia, in Odessa, but married a Greek woman and, most importantly, acquired a Greek passport. As a Russian, however, he was drawn to opportunities in the new town of Harbin, founded in north-east China as an outpost for the Trans-Siberian Express. As civil war raged in Russia and the communists took over, so White Russians fled to Harbin and turned it into a busy cosmopolitan metropolis – fast becoming the biggest Russian settlement outside Russia. The Chinese established their brewin
g and textile industries there, and citizens of Harbin boasted they got the latest French fashions before anywhere else in the Far East.
From Harbin, Melissaratos made regular visits to Shanghai. From there, in the summer of 1922, he travelled to Greece via France. He also spent some time in the port of Hamburg, Germany. To the casual observer, it could have been that the Russian with a Greek name was simply enjoying a lengthy sojourn abroad, catching up on European culture. In reality, he was putting together an international drugstrafficking ring.
His business partner was Theodore S. Loverdos, a true Greek from Cephalonia. It was his movements of cash that put more meat on the bone. Before he left Shanghai in spring 1926, he purchased through the Chinese branch of a Belgian bank 14 money drafts for a total of £3,500, quite a substantial amount in those days. Ten of these drafts were cashed in Switzerland and four in Athens.
The profitable set-up began to unravel when Melissaratos was arrested in Hamburg and charged with trafficking narcotics between Germany and China. In the course of his examination, he claimed to be representing an export firm based in New York. Due to insufficient evidence, Melissaratos was acquitted and skipped off out of Weimar Germany to Riga in Latvia and, no doubt, many other countries not documented in his passport.
‘According to the depositions made by witnesses in the [Hamburg] case,’ noted Delevingne, ‘Melissaratos appeared as the real organiser and director of the illicit trade in stupefying drugs. It was also ascertained [from an American witness] that Melissaratos actively devoted himself to the placing of prohibited drugs on the Chinese markets and that these drugs originated from a Swiss factory. The forwarding of these drugs was then effected through the medium of Thomas Cook & Son under the guise of travellers’ baggage or indeed of diplomatic baggage and the contents were declared to be powder of alabaster.’
This was all very fascinating, thought Russell, but how did this apply to Egypt? Delevingne delved further. British detectives had pieced together a bigger network in which Melissaratos was just one player. They included a Greek called George Tatayo, a Turk from Crete and an unnamed Egyptian. All based in Germany, their principal business was selling narcotics to France. Tatayo was known to have bought a large consignment of morphia and cocaine produced in a factory in Stuttgart and forwarded it to Basle in Switzerland. Their headquarters were said to be in Cairo.
In the meantime, Theodore Loverdos had married a Russian woman in Shanghai and moved to Athens, where he bought a beautiful house for two million drachmas. Part of this money had come from a deal in which he persuaded an American to invest $10,000 in shipping morphia from Germany to Shanghai. In a further twist, he informed the Shanghai customs officers of the shipment to cover his own involvement in the deal, pocketing at least $4,000 and leaving the poor American without any profit.
Melissaratos and Loverdos thrived for the best part of a decade, but then pushed it too far. Cockily, in December 1927, they dispatched two parcels containing four kilos of heroin from Greece to the Greek Consulate at Alexandria in Egypt. Whether this meant they had a compliant agent within the Greek Consulate, or that they were the unknowing recipients of it, is not known. But the Egyptian customs seized the packets and the embarrassed Greek authorities were forced to imprison Melissaratos and Loverdos for a year.
Russell and the British authorities in Egypt read Delevingne’s report with increasing anger. International traffickers saw the Egyptians as a soft touch and were happy to flood their country with drugs. What also came out of this was the role of legitimate Western European manufacturers of narcotics – mainly in Switzerland, Germany and France – who produced drugs intended for medical use from raw opium from Asia, but were happy to see vast amounts of this white powder disappear into the black market.
‘It seems to me that the people who make and supply these drugs in Europe, chiefly, I understand, Swiss and German,’ said Egypt’s supreme judge, ‘are the worst scoundrels of all, and that the League of Nations should be urged to further exertions.’
In a letter to the British Consulate-General in Alexandria, the supreme judge suggested an even more controversial course of action.
I have sometimes wondered whether we ought not to try and get the Egyptians to help from the moral side. Suppose His Excellency would see Sheikh Mustafa El Maraghi the Head of the El Azhar and ask him whether it would not be possible to get his Sheikhs and Mosque preachers to denounce the drug taking habit as destruction to mind and soul and as forbidden by Islam; I think he would probably help and it might create sounder public opinion.
‘There is perhaps some risk,’ he added, ‘of ignorant preachers and malicious newspapers representing the drug traffic as due to the British occupation, but ought we not to run this risk?’
Russell thought not, preferring to make this an international crusade by approaching the League of Nations. The problem was that Egypt was not a member of the League. While Russell awaited the necessary legislation for this, he turned his attention to cracking down on the foreign dealers on home territory. Here, he hit another problem. For centuries, foreign traders had been protected from exploitation by Egyptian rulers by a set of privileges called the Capitulations. This made sense when it was a medieval merchant avoiding some terrible arbitrary punishment from a Turkish governor – but in the modern world, it was being used as a shield by drugs barons who claimed their foreign nationality exempted them from the full strength of Egyptian law.
‘Had it not been for the protection that the foreign trafficker derived from [the Capitulations],’ said Russell, ‘the narcotic problem in Egypt would never have reached the magnitude it did.’
Russell got round this by visiting every major foreign embassy and getting their agreement to allow their nationals to be put on trial in Egyptian courts under the same law facing nationals. As a result, Russell obtained expulsion orders against 334 European traffickers in three years.
As Russell’s bureau began to have an impact on the amount of heroin coming into Egypt, there was an incentive for native farmers to grow their own opium, despite a ban on its cultivation imposed in 1926. Clever farmers got round this by hiding patches of opium poppies inside larger fields of six-foot-tall bean plants. It was simply not worth the efforts of Egyptian police to wade through these hundreds of acres of beans, but Russell was one step ahead of them. He instructed the fledgling Egyptian Army Air Force to fly over the fields. That way, they could clearly see the little patches of grey-green opium poppies tipped with pale mauve flowers in a sea of dark-green beans.
Sometimes Russell’s campaign revealed tales of desperately poor dealers trying to make their stash of heroin stretch a little bit further. One old woman lived in the Khalifa district near a cemetery housing the ancient tombs of the Mamluks. When the police got a tip-off and raided her house, they found her grinding a substance to a fine powder in a pestle to mix with her heroin, so that the local quarrymen could sniff it up their noses. On closer inspection, the substance turned out to be fragments of human skulls scavenged from the nearby cemetery.
Some villagers outside Cairo were so desperate to break their addiction to heroin that they pretended they had been bitten by dogs infected with rabies. The cure for this was so painful that it removed any desire for them to take heroin. Once word of this miracle cure got out, one enterprising village barber fitted a dead dog’s jawbones with a steel spring to mimic the marks of being bitten by a mad dog.
Sweeping up big and smaller dealers, Russell’s operation was beginning to slow the white drugs epidemic in Egypt, but he knew that the best way to smash it was to hit the major international traffickers. To do this, he needed to get some leads. His first real break came with the arrest of an Armenian carpet seller called Zakarian. Breaking down under interrogation, Zakarian fingered his chief carrier, who was bringing in large consignments from a factory in Switzerland. Russell dispatched one of his assistants to Basle, who, with the help of the Swiss police, uncovered a link with an even larger factory in France suppl
ying narcotics. An examination of bank drafts between Zakarian and the Swiss factory revealed substantial individual transactions of £16,000 and £26,000. These would be dwarfed by the sums of money going to the French manufacturer.
‘I realised that we were up against a vast and rich international organisation of the most formidable nature,’ said Russell, ‘with the prospect before us of having to fight huge political and financial interests.’
Arriving in France, Russell’s agent discovered that the Paris factory had exported 7,500 kilos – or seven and a half tons – of narcotics in the previous four years. The League of Nations had estimated that the annual requirement of all legitimate medical and scientific institutions in the world was 2,000 kilos and that just this one French manufacturer had shifted 4,350 kilos of heroin in a year. Although European laws had been introduced to restrict the movement of dangerous drugs, the legislation had been so tightly worded that similar drugs under different trade names could pass unhindered. Also, as far as the authorities in France were concerned, so long as the narcotics were exported out of their country, they didn’t care where they ended up.
The international situation was further complicated by drugs barons using Egypt as a transit point for narcotic shipments elsewhere. One devious plan involved two Japanese and an Armenian setting up the Oriental Products Company in Istanbul. The British Embassy in Turkey tipped off Egyptian customs that the Armenian was arriving in Alexandria by steamer. Customs officers searched his baggage but found nothing. It was only when they turned over his cabin that they found 43 kilos of hashish. The Armenian was arrested. Shortly afterwards, a Japanese gentleman came forward, offering to pay any sum to get his colleague released.
The Japanese was promptly arrested too, but then the Japanese Consul in Alexandria revealed that he was friendly with the arrested man and produced a letter from the Japanese Embassy in Istanbul, clearing their trading company of any wrongdoing. Clearly, this was bigger than just the traffickers involved.
