Cocaine Confidential (22 page)

But
, I ask,
are you safe here? Does your ‘job' make you a target for other cocaine gangsters?
Becki looked into my eyes with a very serious expression on her face. ‘Safe? Of course I am safe. I do not do anything bad to other people. I operate within the company I represent. We do not steal from our competitors and we do not expect them to steal from us.'

Yes
, I probe,
but would you ‘take out' an opponent if he was threatening your safety and your liberty?
‘Of course there are times when things have to be done to protect the business. But we are serious people, not cocaine-snorting gangsters
like Tony Soprano. We know how to behave and how to get the best from our workforce.'

So why is Becki based in London?
‘Oh, I'm sure you know the answer to that one yourself,' she replies. ‘The UK is now the biggest market in Europe for our product. You Brits take a lot of cocaine and we can get the highest prices right here in London. It is always best to have a representative in every country where our business is successful.'

Are there ever moments when Becki has to ‘take measures' against her own staff?

‘Everything in this business is kept as low key as possible. We do not want to alert the wrong sort of people to our activities. That is the way it is. If there are problems we try to deal with those problems quietly and efficiently. If someone has to pay for their mistakes then that is done discreetly. Sure, we have to sometimes send out a message to others not to break our company rules but thankfully those incidents are very rare.'

Becki tried to switch the conversation to more mundane subjects, such as the high cost of living in London. ‘It costs a lot of money to live here and we have to factor in all those sorts of expenses when we are costing up our product for the UK and European markets. It's so expensive here I sometimes wonder how anyone still has money to spend on our product! But then I found out long ago that products like ours take priority with most users. They usually always find a way to afford to buy some, however little they are earning.'

A few moments later, one of Becki's muscle-bound associates – who'd been sitting at the bar watching us throughout lunch – appeared by her side and whispered something in her ear. Becki nodded and grimaced.

‘I'm sorry, it is time for me to go. I wish you well with your book but please make sure you represent my opinions accurately,' she said very coolly.

‘Of course I will,' I replied.

Within seconds, Becki had walked out of the restaurant and was getting into the back of a black chauffeur-driven Mercedes, which had been parked outside for the entire lunch. As it glided off into the busy Central London traffic, Becki turned and glanced in my direction. It looked a bit like a threatening grimace but then again it might have been nothing of the sort.

I gathered together the rest of Becki's life history from veteran British criminal Georgie, who had introduced us in the first place. ‘She's a tough nut, that one,' said Georgie. ‘D'you know, they say she once had a bloke topped just for being rude to her boyfriend in a nightclub. This kid was another Colombian and he ended up in a dustbin on a council estate in Islington. She's a heavyweight operator. No doubt about it.'

La Patrona
Becki wasn't answering her mobile phone when I tried to reach her the following day to thank her for coming to lunch with me.

Georgie later told me that the mobile she had used that day would have been thrown away and replaced every 24
hours as part of her attempt to ensure that law enforcement could not track her movements.

‘You'll never hear from her again. She was playin' with you but now she's probably decided you're a bit close to home, so she's gonna avoid you like the plague from now on.'

A couple of weeks later, I saw
La Patrona
swaggering confidently down a small side street in Soho, central London. She was on the phone and smoking a cigarette at the same time. For a split second she looked up at me but her eyes tilted downwards almost immediately.

As Georgie would later tell me: ‘That's the way it is with characters like Becki. You don't exist to her any more. She's got far more important fish to fry, old son.'

But what about the so-called ‘Cocaine Soldiers', the characters who bring the product onto these shores?

Ken is not your average UK cocaine trafficker by anyone's standards. In the ‘real world' he is a fisherman who works out of a small, under-used fishing port in the south of England. Trouble is, there isn't much call for the sort of catches he used to pride himself on, so he ‘subsidises' his income with a catch of cocaine at least once a month. And it's not something he's particularly proud of.

‘I come from a long line of fishermen,' says Ken. ‘My great-grandfather died at sea in a storm. My boat was handed down to me by my dad and his dad had a similar one before him and my great-grandfather started this all before the beginning of the First World War. That's how far back my fishing gene goes,' says Ken. ‘They'd all turn in their graves if they knew how I made ends meet these days.'

Ken claims he's transported ‘big loads' of coke over the past ten years on behalf of a gang of British cocaine
traffickers. The value of those shipments must be worth at least tens of millions of pounds but Ken's share was a drop in the ocean in comparison.

‘I try not to think about the money those bastards are making thanks to me,' says Ken. ‘I also try not to think about the damage drugs do to people but I feel as if I have no choice in the matter. Supporting my family is my main priority.'

Ken explains his monthly ‘pick-up' of cocaine: ‘I get a call about three or four days before to say that it's on and where I am to take the boat for the pick-up. It's never the same spot twice. These guys are professionals and they know that the customs people are always trying to work out regular patterns, which might lead them to a drug haul.

‘Anyway, I usually get a bit twitchy after that first call because it's a reality check in a sense. It means I'm about to risk my livelihood and my freedom in order to earn some much needed extra cash. But that doesn't make it any easier to deal with in my head. I know I'm breaking the law and I
never
do that in the rest of my life. I am actually a very straight, law-abiding person.

‘D'you know, I don't even drink, let alone take drugs when I am home. I hate taking risks with my health and I try to impress that upon my children because I want them to live a long and healthy life.

‘Anyway, usually, I get another mobile call confirming the arrangements for the pick-up about five or six hours before I set sail, as sometimes the weather can delay things. The pick-ups always happen in daylight because it's much less
suspicious than working at night when the customs people expect the bad people to be out getting up to no good.'

Ken sounds uncomfortable even speaking about his ‘other life' as a cocaine smuggler. ‘I'm not proud of what I do. I wish there was some other way to support my family but there isn't. Anyhow, I set sail solo from where my boat is kept. It's a tiny vessel with a small wheelhouse and I sail her solo with no crew.'

Ken says he believes that many of his fellow fishermen at the port do similar drugs runs but these men rarely admit to each other what they are up to. ‘It's better not to talk to people about all this. All it takes is one big mouth in the pub and the next thing you know the long arm of the law comes knocking.

‘I usually follow some scribbled-down map references given to me by the man at the other end of the phone. I never know exactly what to expect. It could be a buoy with a package attached to it or it might be a bigger vessel or even a small cargo ship. It varies and to be frank about it, I try my hardest not to look anyone in the eye as the exchange takes place.

‘I don't want to know who these characters are and I'm sure they feel the same way about me. It's never a very big package and it's usually in a waterproof holdall, which I sling somewhere safe for the journey back home.'

Ken pauses for breath. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot: there are occasions when they drop it by mini-parachute. That's a lot more hairy, I can tell you. I always feel a bit insecure when
a small plane comes hurtling along about fifty feet above the water. There is something quite sinister about it and I always have this moment of wondering if I am sailing into a trap.'

He continues: ‘One time I got a call on my mobile after I'd got to the pick-up point to tell me the job was off. I was well pissed off but they paid me £2,000 anyway, so I didn't complain.'

Ken says he's never once been searched by law enforcement officials at sea. ‘I guess my activities are monitored regularly and I must have passed all the basic “tests” because they've never even tried to board my boat in all the years I've been doing this.'

The strip of southern coastline that Ken ‘fishes' from is a traditional fishing area and he reckons that's one of the main reasons why his activities have never flagged him up. ‘It's also the main reason why I got approached to do this work in the first place.'

Ken believes his ‘straight' approach to life has also made him more trusted by the coke traffickers he works for. ‘Yeah, at first they seemed a bit bemused by my attitude towards life but I reckon it made them feel more secure about me. I've heard of other fishermen round these parts who've got into taking cocaine themselves and then started shouting their mouths off. Not good.'

Once back on shore, Ken places the bag filled with cocaine in the garage of his home and waits for a knock on the door.

‘They're very discreet. It's always the same guy who comes
round and he never shows up late at night. My wife thinks he's a mate of mine who borrows some of my fishing tackle and that's the way I intend to keep it.'

The same man hands Ken an envelope with his fee. He explained: ‘It's usually £5,000. I know it's not much considering the risks I take but it's regular money and without it, I'd be in deep financial trouble.'

But how did a man with no criminal connections get involved in the cocaine business? ‘This is going to sound so stupid but I was painting the hull of my boat one afternoon and this bloke came up and engaged me in conversation. He didn't give away any clues about what he was up to, except to say that he might have some “extra work” for me after I mentioned how hard it was to make a decent living from catching fish.

‘I thought nothing of it at first. Then the same guy appeared a week later and asked me if I was prepared to pick up a package, no questions asked. I was pretty fed up at the time. The overdraft at the bank was massive. I was in arrears on our mortgage repayments and I couldn't even afford to get my car mended when it broke down. So I said okay. I remember thinking what an idiot I was at the time, but I gave this bloke my word I'd do it. He cleverly advanced me £2,000 then and there on the spot. I was astonished but I knew the moment he put that money in my hand that I needed to get more of where that came from.

‘The stupid thing is that the bloke could have been anyone; he might even have been a policeman trying to trap me. But
I was so broke and so low at that time I would have accepted the money from just about anyone.'

Ken believes that the biggest risks come from the criminals he is dealing with. ‘All it needs is for the police to get hold of a mobile phone with my number on it and I could be in big trouble. It's pretty obvious what I've been up to once they discover I am a fisherman with my own boat.'

But for the time being, Ken says, he intends to keep working for the traffickers. ‘Just so long as they don't try and make me work more than once a month. That's my golden rule and I reckon that's part of the reason why I've never been nicked. I've told them straight that I won't do it more than once a month and they seem to have accepted that.'

Meanwhile Ken continues to carefully cultivate the image of a hard-up fisherman going about his business. ‘I keep the boat looking scruffy. I drive a battered ten-year-old car and I make sure that no one gets a whiff of my extra “salary”.'

He goes on: ‘I can't defend what I do but I do now sympathise more with the poor people who get caught up in the drugs world. There are fishermen all over the world struggling to make a living, so it's not surprising that some of them succumb to temptation and do a bit of smuggling on the side, is it?'

It's reckoned that ‘civilian' coke smugglers like Ken are a lot more prevalent in the UK than we realise. He has a simple reaction when I put that to him: ‘Plucking a bag filled with cocaine off another boat is still probably the safest way to
bring the stuff onto these shores. We're an island and nothing will change that.'

But then Ken is not the only one to have been sucked into the cocaine smuggling game simply because he needed the money …

Like so many ex-servicemen, soldier Steve found himself jobless and drifting through life without any real direction after three ‘very lively' tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then he and another war vet decided to set up an air transport business to move cocaine between Europe and the UK.

‘Basically, we were bored,' says Steve. ‘We'd spent the best part of ten years on high alert in every sense of the word. It was all such an anticlimax to get back to the UK. The army just doesn't prepare you for the “come down”. It's intense and sends you spiralling into depression and hopelessness. We decided we had to do something exciting.'

The first step towards becoming a drugs trafficker was when Steve's ‘partner' splashed out £2,000 on flying lessons for both of them. Then they bought a single-engine aircraft with a £30,000 bank loan, knowing it would be perfect for
transporting drugs from the Netherlands and France into the south-east of England.