Cocaine Confidential (21 page)

HJ added: ‘Cocaine undoubtedly drove me into criminality. I took it initially in order to infiltrate the gangsters and then bring them to justice. But coke got hold of me, turned me
into an addict and then I made an appalling choice. It was all down to me. There is no one else to blame and now that I have finally worked that out, I am much more at peace with what I did.

‘I am back with my family in relative safety. I haven't touched a drink in years, let alone been tempted to snort a line. I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones, though.'

But what about the characters who get sucked into the cocaine business when they have nowhere else to turn?

Joey doesn't look like your average urban street criminal. He's in his mid-fifties, vastly overweight and was once a well-known professional footballer with international caps to his name. But like so many sportsmen of yesteryear, Joey hit on hard times and now he works as a ‘runner' for one of Manchester's most ruthless coke barons.

‘I'm not proud of what I do but I need the money desperately,' explains Joey, in a soft, nervous voice. ‘Being a professional footballer doesn't really prepare you for the rest of your life and all the pitfalls which are out there.'

Joey tried his hand at coaching after retiring from the game back in the late 1980s. ‘But it didn't work out and I got fired three times from successive clubs. That's when football turned its back on me and I realised I had to stop relying on others to help me.'

The following ten years were, says Joey, ‘a complete disaster
zone'. He recalled: ‘My wife left me. I lost touch with my two kids and I spent much of that time either sleeping on friends' settees or snatching the odd night in a cheap hotel. I got a few low-paid jobs but they never lasted long. It was awful and in the end, not surprisingly, I couldn't pull in any more favours.'

He went on: ‘I remember one night I was in a pub supping a pint paid for with my last ten bob and these two guys came in and recognised me from my playing days. I hoped they'd just buy me a drink and be on their way but they stopped and chatted with me. Turned out both men were supporters of the biggest club I ever played for and they were shocked when I told them I was broke and virtually homeless.'

He went on: ‘They were like so many others, who always presume you earn so much money from football you never have to work again. But it just wasn't like that back in my day.'

The two men in the pub turned out to be relatives of one of Manchester's most powerful criminals. ‘Obviously these two didn't mention their background when I first met them but they assured me they had this rich and successful uncle, who might be able to put some work my way. Naturally, I was all ears.'

Within a couple of weeks, Joey was working fulltime as a ‘runner' for their uncle, who turned out to be a ruthless cocaine baron. ‘I didn't really have a choice. I needed to survive and, in any case, I wasn't dealing in the stuff. I simply agreed to run errands for this guy and he said he'd pay me
handsomely,' recalled Joey. ‘I know he got a kick from having a football star working for him but, frankly, I didn't care where the money came from as long as I earned some.'

Joey's experiences working as a runner for a coke gang provide a fascinating insight into the way that cocaine has pervaded all aspects of British life.

‘Coke is the stuff that fuels so much in the underworld as far as I can tell,' Joey told me. ‘Sure, a lot of villains do other “work” but it's coke that seems to be the main earner. They call it white gold in these parts and I can see why.'

Joey describes himself as an oddball who doesn't really fit into the underworld he is now part of.

‘For starters, I don't do drugs. But I think that's one of the reasons I got this job in the first place. The boss trusts me implicitly because he knows that, unlike most of his boys, I am not out of my head all the time. Alcohol is my poison of choice,' Joey went on. ‘I like a pint or three but drugs are off my radar. They are evil.'

Joey said he'd witnessed shootings, torture and blatant intimidation of witnesses in court cases during the time he'd worked for ‘the boss'. He recalled: ‘Listen, I don't really approve of a lot of what has been done but the victims are other criminals, so it's the price they have to pay.'

Then there are the ‘civilians' who find themselves indirectly linked to the cocaine wars in places like Manchester. ‘I've met judges, doctors, lawyers, the lot and they're all hooked on coke,' he asserted. ‘Before I started working for the boss, I thought only the poor and desperate took drugs,
not the rich and powerful. It's made me think differently about the whole question of drugs and whether they should be legalised. I mean, if everyone's up to it then what's the point in outlawing it?'

But Joey himself refuses to have anything to do with the actual drug: ‘As a runner for the boss I'm expected to do all his errands but I'd never sell coke to anyone. That's always someone else's job. I don't want the responsibility of it. One time, I heard that the footballer son of a pro I played with in the early days was buying coke from one of my boss's dealers. I went ballistic and asked him to stop his guy supplying the kid. He thought I was mad but at least he had the decency to stop flogging it to the lad after I had a word.'

Joey went on: ‘It's such a waste for a footballer – or any top sportsman for that matter – to get hooked on drugs. One day I even went round and saw this same kid and tried to persuade him to stop taking coke altogether. It was a mad thing to do because the boss would have probably fired me and had me beaten up for going round there. But I was that angry. Luckily he never found out.'

Joey's ‘duties' as a runner range from picking up his boss's kids from school to looking after his property empire – all paid for out of his multi-million-pound cocaine business.

‘This guy is loaded and the majority of his cash comes from cocaine. He left school at fourteen but he has a razor-sharp level of intelligence. In many ways he was better off not being a football star like I was, because it meant he could develop as an adult at a much faster pace.

‘I was scooped out of school at fifteen, fast-tracked into the first team and played my heart out for fifteen years before being dumped on the scrapheap in my early thirties. It destroyed my self-esteem and left me incapable of doing things for myself. The boss is the opposite. He taught himself everything but then he is always saying that “knowledge is power” and he's right. I have little real knowledge and even less power.'

Joey's insight into the world of the cocaine criminals also shows how the coke trade helps finance a vast range of ‘straight' businesses.

He explained: ‘The boss reckons that one day he'll ditch the coke business and concentrate on his property portfolio and other legitimate businesses that he's been able to purchase with his drugs cash. That's the dream for so many of these types of characters. They see themselves as breadwinners for the family. Many – like my boss – are workaholics determined to make their fortune by whatever means they can. In some ways their work ethic is admirable, even if the business of selling drugs is not.'

Joey reckons he'll see out another five years as a runner for the Boss ‘if I'm lucky'. He explained: ‘I'm a bit old for this game, to put it mildly. The boss saved me from the scrapheap, so I am grateful to him but I also recognise that one day my time will come and I'll have to walk away from all this.'

Others enjoy being immersed in this complex, deadly ‘business' so much that their entire world revolves around cocaine.

Colombian ‘businesswoman' Becki is based in London. She earns a fortune and lives a life of luxury, including renting a £5,000-a-week apartment. Oh, and there's a limo driver to take her to £100-a-head restaurants, as well as regular shopping trips to all the classic designer-clothes stores in the West End. You see, Becki's ‘job' for the past decade has been to organise the supply of vast shipments of Colombia's finest to many of the UK's most hardened criminals. And that cocaine has undoubtedly helped turn London into the coke-snorting capital city of the world.

Becki's transformation from a prim, naive teenage Colombian ‘cleaner' who arrived in London 25 years ago into a manicured, sophisticated 44-year-old drug baroness perfectly reflects how the top end of the cocaine business can transform someone's life. Becki insists to this day that she originally sought to escape Colombia because of its drugs and violence,
without a hint of irony in her voice. She married a Brit shortly after arriving in London and told him she had serious ambitions to be a lawyer.

But instead Becki has risen through the ranks to become a mega-powerful Colombian cartel ‘representative' in Europe. In the middle of all this, she even found time to marry for a second time, to a London-based Peruvian. The couple eventually had two children.

Becki's ‘career' within one of South America's most powerful cocaine cartels began in late 1998 when she was arrested for shoplifting in London. While in prison awaiting trial, Becki was recruited by a Colombian inmate to work as a ‘mule' for one of the cartels from her home city of Cali, then renowned as the world's biggest single producer of cocaine. Desperate for money, Becki – who was eventually only fined for shop-lifting – agreed to start smuggling cocaine into the UK.

Then the following year – 1999 – Becki was arrested in possession of a suitcase packed with cocaine at Bogotá's El Dorado airport. Many believe she was shopped by her second husband, who'd become very unhappy with his wife's connections to the cocaine industry and her regular visits back and forth between the UK and Colombia.

However, Becki served just nine months in prison in Bogotá after her cocaine cartel bosses persuaded authorities to give her a light sentence. They were also greatly impressed she hadn't informed on them.

Thanks to the British passport she got after her first marriage, Becki was soon back in London, where she began dating
a debonair Colombian cartel boss, renowned for his short temper and predilection for gaudy velvet jackets and Stetsons.

Becki was quickly ‘promoted' by the cartel chiefs to organise safe houses across London for illegal Colombian immigrants who were working on behalf of the cartel. Becki remained one step ahead of UK law enforcement by making sure her henchmen and teams of couriers moved to different addresses on virtually a weekly basis.

To those who met her at that time, Becki seemed a highly respectable member of the ever-growing Colombian community based in and around the Elephant and Castle area of south London. But it was reckoned that at least 20,000 illegal Colombians had slipped into the UK ‘underneath the radar' over the previous five years. Many had arrived in London as tourists and then simply ‘disappeared'. Others – like Becki more than ten years earlier – had immediately sought out Brits to marry.

In the summer of 2007 Becki was promoted to recruiter and master smuggler for the Cali cartel. That earned her the elevated title of
La Patrona
or, in English, ‘the lady boss'. By this time Becki was said to be raking in a salary of at least £30,000 a month.

She purchased three properties in London and even splashed out £100,000 on a Bentley as a birthday present for her Colombian lover. But she never lived in those properties, preferring to earn more income by renting them out while she lived in that £5,000-a-month penthouse.

Becki – standing just a shade over five feet when not in a pair of her favourite strappy platform shoes – then ‘invested' some of her fortune on the skills of a fashionable London cosmetic surgeon. She eventually spent many thousands of pounds on liposuction for her stomach and hips. She even had the wrinkles removed from under her eyes, and she couldn't resist getting her breasts enlarged either.

My introduction to Becki came through a veteran British criminal who'd known Becki for most of the time she'd been in London. He told me: ‘She's the real thing, mate. You'll see it in her eyes. Cold as stone but she's got balls that one, if you know what I mean.'

Becki insisted on meeting me in an expensive West End restaurant. She arrived with two ‘associates' who then peeled off towards the bar after she'd spotted me at a table.

I had been surprised Becki had even agreed to talk to me on the phone, let alone meet me in plain sight of the whole of London. Within moments of sitting down I found out why. ‘I was intrigued to meet you because you wrote about one of my friends in another of your books,' said Becki.

‘I could tell from the way you wrote about my friend that you actually knew something about this business. In any case, it's better you get your facts right, so here I am.'

Becki opened her Gucci handbag and took out a gold-plated iPhone and tapped something out. Moments later, she showed me a clip of myself giving a TV interview. ‘I also studied your website and you have the right attitude. Most journalists and writers simply condemn people like me
without trying to find out who we really are. But, you know? I'm just a businesswoman trying to make a good living for my family. I deal in a product that is in big demand. What is so wrong with that?'

For the next hour and a half, Becki and I covered everything from her commitment to family life to her hatred of taking cocaine, which she said she detested. ‘Listen, if I sold honey as a commodity that wouldn't mean I'd necessarily like it myself. I think in many ways I am more able to understand the emotional aspects of cocaine as a product because I don't take it. I step back from it and look on it purely as a business.'

Becki says she adores London and has no intention of ever returning to Colombia. ‘This is my home now. This is where I intend to stay. I like the British. They can laugh and they can cry. They understand the realities of this world much more than, say, the Americans.'