Hitman, Gangsters, Cannibals and Me

by Donal Macintyre

  ‘This is Wayne’s town, not my town. I am a nobody,’ Scott lamented. ‘I’m a little piece of shit compared to Wayne – a very well-respected man.’ Indeed, Wayne was earning £250,000 a month from his illicit dealings and had all the trappings of the successful gangster: fancy cars, motorboats and a £90,000 watch on his wrist. ‘We talk about Wayne in terms of his empire,’ a drug squad officer had told me.

  Wayne was a man who got things done, and he got me my job as a bouncer. ‘This is Tony. He’ll be working with you,’ was all he had to say. Scott, Lee and Tony were my fellow bouncers, and I figured that they posed a greater threat to my safety than any drunk patron. Most of them were on gear of some sort and steroid use was rife. Another bouncer told me: ‘You know you are losing it when you lose your temper and you’re kind of enjoying it in a way and you wind yourself up and up. Do you do the same – you are winding yourself up and you are getting off on it?’

  ‘Yeah, I know exactly what you mean,’ I agreed, lying.

  ‘You know when your missus winds you up and for a split second I can see myself demolishing her. I try not to get violent with her. I say ‘try’. Sometimes, you are in bed and her skin touches you and you could just knee her out of bed, but you can’t,’ he said, explaining his steroid rage. The local steroid dealer worked at the club before I arrived but had to leave because he ‘battered someone’. Nice guys.

  There was a lot of stress involved in dealing with these people and keeping myself safely undercover. Sometimes the loneliness got to me. I would retreat to my flat with a tube of Pringles, crackers and some sandwich spread, and curl up on the sofa to hide from the stresses of the street. These moments would pass quickly, but they were an intense reminder that this was a oneman operation. My closest support was the production team in London and I would occasionally meet with producers from the Manchester office. But this simply wasn’t enough and weeks could pass without me seeing anyone. If I was an undercover policeman, I would have had support 24/7. Later, when I led undercover teams, I would do my best to ensure that they would never feel so isolated.

  * * * * *

  One Saturday morning, I was brought to a gym for a rite of passage that turned out to be much more than I had bargained for. I was supposedly going for some training with the lads, but the poorly-disguised sniggering when I arrived gave me the impression that I was in for something much more challenging.

  In fact, I was expected to step into the ring with a contender for the British heavyweight boxing title. I watched as monster after steroid-fuelled monster was bashed around by this Goliath. I had arrived at the gym with a mini camera in my bag and another in my t-shirt. I dashed off to the toilet to change and get rid of the t-shirt with the hidden camera. I had to take my bag with me, which looked a little odd, but I had no choice. I came back into the spit-and-sawdust gym, hoping that if I was killed in the ring, I would at least capture it all on the camera in my red sports bag. I placed the camera where it would get a clear shot of the entire ring, made a mental note of where to fall and went to get my punishment.

  The producer described what happened next as my finest nine minutes. I was pummelled to pieces. I hit the deck three times in each round and by the end of it, I didn’t know my real name, never mind my undercover one. I could barely lift myself off the ground, but when I did, it won me more brownie points with the boys. At least every time I crashed to the floor it was in line with my bag and the camera, so I had the shots and the producer was happy.

  This episode bought me street cred and earned me kudos with Wayne, too. ‘I heard you took a pounding,’ he said. ‘And I heard you kept getting up for more.’

  As I gained the trust of these people and got deeper into their world, I was discovering how the mechanics of the drugs underworld operated. The doormen decided who could sell drugs in the clubs. If you were found selling drugs without permission or without handing over a cut of the takings, you had a choice – either give them everything or be turned over to the Police. ‘Some [dealers] get a bit cocky, but we soon bring them down when we get our hands down their pants looking up their arsehole and that. They don’t like that,’ one of the bouncers told me. Eventually, I was able to demonstrate that everyone, from the lowliest drug couriers to those closest to Hardy, was making money out of the drug business. Evidence that directly linked Wayne to drug dealing was harder to come by, but eventually I got him on tape, conducting business.

  After months of skirting around the issue, I was confident enough to talk to him about drugs. I told him that a mate of mine could get some charlie from Amsterdam.

  ‘Would you be interested?’ I asked.

  ‘How pure?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Good stuff, about 90 per cent at £30,000 a kilo,’ I bluffed.

  ‘That is good,’ he said.

  ‘How much do you want?’

  ‘As much as you can get,’ he said.

  Hardy wouldn’t normally do business with someone like me, but after nine months, he considered me a friend, so he was willing to cross a boundary he otherwise would not have. This was the breakthrough I had been craving and it was all on camera. The long days and months circling this shark had finally paid off.

  * * * * *

  The shark had teeth but he did look after me and had taken me under his wing. As long as you weren’t his enemy, he could be very charming and likeable.

  Although he is not formally educated, Wayne is a smart man and occasionally he even revealed a spiritual streak.

  ‘I have been reading about Nostradamus. It’s frightening, mate. You don’t want to read it, mate; you don’t want to know. His prophesies about the future are terrifying,’ he told me. Although he didn’t know it, Wayne’s immediate future involved television stardom. After nearly a year in his company, I put away my gym kit and put on my reporter’s suit. I had changed uniform. I knew where Wayne was parking his car and I was ensconced in a van nearby with a TV crew. For a year he had known me as a pal and now I was about to reveal myself as his nemesis.

  ‘Mr Hardy, for the last year you have known me as Tony Hearns, but I am Donal MacIntyre, a World in Action reporter. Can you tell us how you earned your fortune over the last year, Mr Hardy?’ I asked him. His face dropped. He was visibly shaken. But he held his grin as he tried to fathom it all. At that moment, I was very glad he wasn’t armed.

  I packed my bags and left Nottingham immediately. Wayne fled to Jamaica and waited for the heat to die down. I had caused ructions in the city’s underworld: no one knew what they had said or could remember how much they had compromised themselves. All they knew was that all would be revealed in a two-part special on World in Action.

  When Wayne returned to the city, the Police stepped up the pressure and he was eventually jailed for three years after he was found with a load of cannabis in his car.

  If the documentary changed Wayne’s life, it certainly changed mine, too. Many underworld gangsters were upset by my investigation and as a result I ended up with a £50,000 price on my head and had to live under constant protection, continually looking over my shoulder. Both of us had got much more than we ever bargained for from Tony Hearns.

  * * * * *

  Ten years later, I felt driven to contact Wayne Hardy again. He had been on my mind for years. Why? Well, when you work undercover, there is a feeling that with every world you enter and with every identity you assume, you leave a little of yourself behind and take a little of your alias with you. You can’t spend a year as someone else and not be affected by it. And when you go to your twin’s wedding and forget your real name (which I did), you know that something is wrong.

  After working in so many fields and living so many roles, I had a fear that there was little of the real me left. I was having a real crisis of identity. I felt I was becoming the sum of the parts of my undercover roles and that my own identity was slipping away from me. I seemed to be caught halfway between the person I was and the people I had become, and that worried me. My drive to revisi
t my first major undercover target was an attempt to collect some of the pieces I had left behind.

  It was a kind of therapy for me, but not one that had been sanctioned by any psychologist or security expert. I was at the end of my undercover career and I think I needed some kind of resolution. I was willing to risk my life to get some peace of mind.

  Perhaps there was also an element of guilt – I knew that Wayne wasn’t all bad. Yes, he was a drug dealer and a criminal but he was also a loving son, a good brother, and a caring father. But reporting on these characteristics was outside my remit.

  The picture I had painted of Wayne in my investigation was rightly that of a criminal – but it wasn’t the whole story. The truth was, and is, that there is more to a man than just his criminal record and there is more to me than just my CV. He is not Attila the Hun, and I am not Judas Iscariot.

  After three years of trying to make contact, Wayne and I came face-to-face again, and this time I got to be myself. My producers had made inroads, but he was not keen on the idea of us getting together. However, following the death of his brother in a freak accident, he decided that a reunion might afford him some time to reflect on his life. The years of negotiations had paid off. When we finally met on camera, Wayne gave vent to his anger over my exposé a decade earlier.

  ‘You see you, you c**t? You don’t know how long I’ve waited to meet you – ten years! You come into my town and take the fucking piss out of me. I wanted to knock the fucking life out of you. You don’t know how close you was to getting a proper pasting.’ Actually, I had a fair idea of how close I came.

  A decade on, Wayne wanted to say that he was more than just a convicted drug dealer, that there was a different film to be made about him – one which would tell the story of the man rather than the gangster.

  Talking to him then gave me a unique insight into the aftermath of the investigation. My investigation ultimately cost him his liberty and nearly cost me my sanity but we had both done some growing up since then.

  ‘Time is a great healer but it’s not nice being put on film undercover. I mean I got surveillance, now I got coppers, Customs and now a fucking reporter – that’s all I need. My life was paranoid as it was – and then you,’ he said.

  We watched the World in Action documentary, Wayne’s World, in an effort to air the issues and put them behind us. He hadn’t seen the film since it had gone out and as he watched it, I could see the anger and pain that it caused him. He had trusted me and I had betrayed that trust. Whatever he was guilty of, the betrayal still affected him on a very human level. He winced as each sequence was shown and I began to worry about the fallout. The programme ended with my confrontation with him, when I revealed myself as a reporter who had spent a year fooling him so I could get my story. Wayne gave me a running commentary of those moments from his perspective. This is a side of the story you never hear and I was fascinated to know what was going on in his head.

  ‘My mind was racing. [I was thinking:] what is he? A copper? And then I saw the camera and I twigged. You got yourself into a situation and you were lucky to get out alive. It was reckless of your employers to put you there. One part of me was saying, “Whack him!” and the other was saying, “Get into the car and go.”’ Which is what he did.

  The meeting proved to me just how fortunate I was to get away from this situation unharmed. Luck is the most important commodity in my line of business, and Wayne’s too, I dare say.

  He surprised me as he opened up in spite of our history. This was new ground for both of us.

  Wayne revealed his most private thoughts about his family to me, and there were poignant echoes of the friendship that we had briefly shared 10 years previously.

  He said that although my investigation had upset his mother, Rita, she was pleased with one thing. ‘I don’t give a fuck what they say about you, son, but I brought up my sons proper. When they was filming you, at least when you opened the door, you wiped your feet,’ she had said. The vivacious 65-year-old has great charisma and it’s easy to see where Wayne gets his charm.

  I discovered that he is the father of a learning-disabled son, Jordan, who may not live into adulthood. He changes his nappies, does the school run and fervently defends his son’s rights.

  He told me about the recent tragic death of his brother, who fell in the way of a bin lorry on Trent Bridge and died in Wayne’s arms.

  He revealed the painful memory of the loss of his first child, Sunny, and his partner, who died while he was in prison. ‘She called me and said, “You know Sunny loves you.”’

  Later that evening the prison chaplain knocked on Wayne’s cell door. ‘I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. He sat me in my room and told me that she killed my daughter and then killed herself.’ Sunny was just 10 months old.

  Wayne is torn apart by the havoc his criminal career has wreaked on his family life. He professes to have left that career behind, and is now dealing in shares and currencies online. For the last five years he has had no serious convictions. Either he’s gone straight or got smarter.

  Kylie, his daughter whose education he had been so concerned about years earlier, is now addicted to heroin. She is working as a prostitute and has suffered rape and abuse as a result. If anything has rescued Wayne from a life of crime, it is her addiction. I got close to her, when Wayne accepted me as a friend again after our unlikely reunion.

  As the father of two girls, I cannot imagine the pain he has gone through watching Kylie descend into the hell of heroin. Today, it is touching to see how close they remain despite everything.

  ‘I may be a hypocrite, but heroin has changed this town. I should know how hard it is because my daughter is on it. Kylie has been in and out of prison for the last eight years. I have to admit that I bear some responsibility for this,’ With a deeply-felt anguish that I had never seen in him before, he revealed much more about the real Wayne than my year-long undercover exposé could ever have unveiled.

  ‘Sometimes, I am relieved when she is in prison, because I know she is not on the game, used and abused. I have a cross to bear for this life.’ He turned to Kylie and said. ‘If I wasn’t in prison, I could have been there for you.’

  ‘I couldn’t blame you. You just did your best for us,’ Kylie reassured him, and turning to me, she said: ‘He loves me so much.’

  Wayne has even paid for his daughter to attend The Priory to try to beat her addiction. She is on a methadone programme but is finding the going hard. At one point Wayne turned to the camera and spoke directly to the dealers: ‘If you are watching this, please don’t go up to my daughter with heroin or drugs, because if I find out who you are, I’ll chop your fucking hands off.’ And he meant every word.

  I am still touched that they opened their lives up to me like this. The more Wayne let me back into his world, the more I felt I was rebuilding my own in a way that I still don’t fully understand.

  This was a reconciliation that nobody had recommended. Betrayal, threats, humiliation and fear had been the legacy of our professional relationship, but we turned it around and, in the end, salvaged a friendship that is genuine. Only two men who had nothing to lose – who had done their worst to each other – could travel this road together. The brave decision was Wayne’s, and, despite the advice of those around him, he extended the hand of reconciliation.

  Today, I feel I could trust him with my life. Once the best of friends, and now the best of enemies.

  16

  TRIBE SWAP

  We were entertaining our new houseguests over tea and biscuits and their conversational gambits were proving to be somewhat unusual.

  ‘How much did you pay for your wife?’ Samuel asked me coolly.

  ‘I, er, well, I didn’t actually ... ’ I spluttered.

  ‘Do you mind if your husband has a baby with another woman?’ Christina asked my seven-months-pregnant wife, Ameera, who almost choked on her tea.

  ‘Who is the boss?’ asked Samuel, casting a knowing glance towards Amee
ra.

  I think it’s fair to say that these crocodile-hunting polygamists from the Pacific Island of Papua New Guinea would add a certain frisson to any polite Wimbledon soirée.

  Samuel and Christina are members of the 250-strong Insect Tribe of hunter-gatherers who are just a generation away from cannibalism. They hunt crocodiles with spears and stalk wild boar with bows and arrows. They speak their own language, Ngala, and worship their glassy-eyed totem of the praying mantis. Polygamy is accepted in the tribe and dowries are often, rather poetically, paid in seashells. One tribesman has 12 wives, and another is said to have 112 children scattered among several local villages.

  Family planning comes in the form of a potion, the manufacture of which involves spiders’ webs and numerous incantations to the ancestors of the tribe. They claim that it has a one hundred per cent success rate. I’m not too sure the incantations would leave me in the mood either.

  I first met the tribe in 2007, when I travelled the world to observe how ancient cultures and tribes were engaging with the ever-encroaching modern world. I spent time with the nomadic Bedouin of the Arabian Sands, the Sea Gypsies of Borneo and the llama traders of the Bolivian Andes. But it was the Insect Tribe that stole my travel-weary heart. I lived in their remote village of Swagup, ate their food, shared their homes and mined the secrets of their culture.

  I had arrived by canoe to a cacophony of noise and song. Everyone was painted with a kaleidoscope of colours and dressed with feathers and animal skins to represent the trees, mountains and the bird-spirits they worship. They welcomed me with a ‘sing sing’ – a celebration of the rain forest and jungle that is their home, their life, their everything. The witchdoctors and the village elders in ceremonial dress hailed me as a visiting head of state. A more welcoming people I have never met. They captivated me with their friendliness and generosity of spirit.