‘We were flying along and I was absolutely terrified. Syd was trying to work out where we were but the GPS was playing up. He reset it to read the depth of the water rather than location so he could try to work out how close we were but somehow he fucked it up. The whole screen went blank.
‘So there we are in the pitch black with no guidance system, totally fucking lost and with a boat that’s pissing away fuel going round and round in circles. Then Syd perked up and pointed to some poxy little light he could see in the distance. He said it was definitely Clacton pier, or maybe Walton pier, and that he knew where we were, probably. Either way, he reckoned we were only four miles from the coast. I was just gearing myself up to feel a bit more confident when, right on cue, the engine died and we ran out of fuel completely.
‘We switched to the reserve tank but that was empty too. We primed the carbs on the engine by hand and it started up, went about fifty yards and then stopped again. We kept on doing it and I had to rock the boat from side to side – the last thing I wanted to do – to try to get the last remaining splashes of fuel into the pipes.
‘Then Syd managed to get the GPS working again. I don’t know what he did. I don’t even think he knew what he did. I just heard him say, “Fuck me, it’s working again,” and at last we were going in the right direction. We had to kangaroo hop all the way with the engine firing and dying every few yards, but when we got about half a mile from the spot where Jack was, we realised it was just about shallow enough for me to get out and push the boat to the shore. So I did.
‘I’d never been so happy to see Jack as I was when I saw him sitting on the beach waiting for us. I could have kissed him. He helped us drag the boat up to his Range Rover and we started unloading the drugs.’
It was to be Jason’s last trip. Syd hooked up with a new partner – a petty criminal called Russell and found a new, more profitable route. There, cars would drive down to Spain where, using his contacts, Russell was able to buy cannabis for just £750 per kilo. (Cannabis, like all drugs, gets cheaper the closer you get to the source country. Falling prices mean that today, bringing it over from Amsterdam is barely worthwhile. The extra risk of bringing it all the way from Spain, or better yet Morocco, produces a far higher return.) The three cars would then head back north in convoy. The drugs would be in the middle car and the other two vehicles would be spaced out, one a mile or so ahead and the other a mile or so behind. That way, if either car thought they saw anything suspicious or that they were being followed, they could radio the middle car and give them a chance to change the route or dump the drugs.
‘The really clever part was that Russell’s gang included a couple of women,’ says Jason. ‘Rather than a bunch of single blokes travelling on their own, which always looks suspicious, each car in the convoy looked like a couple off on their holidays. The cars would come up through France and then Belgium where the drugs would be driven up to the beach at Blankenberg and Syd would meet them on his boat.
‘It sounded good but by then I was glad I was out of it. Customs had been watching them and they all ended up getting nicked. I’d left it alone just in time.’
Jason’s experience of cannabis-smuggling as something of a
Boy’s Own
adventure is typical of the way many see what is by far the most popular drug on the planet.
Derived from
Cannabis sativa,
a plant related to nettles and the hop that is believed to have originated in India, cannabis still grows wild in many parts of the world reaching heights of up to five metres and flowering between late summer and mid-autumn. It is the leaves and flower heads that contain delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive chemical component; however, THC potency varies considerably. The average for resin is between two and eight per cent while herbal ‘skunk’ or ‘sinsemillia’ can have as high a content as 24 per cent. Cannabis oil, distilled from resin and rarely seen in the UK, contains up to 70 per cent THC. (The stem of the plant provides hemp, a fibrous substance that was, and continues to be, used to make ropes and sails. Low-THC varieties of cannabis used to be widely grown throughout England: both Hampstead in north London and Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire were named after the acres of hemp fields that for years were cultivated there.)
Cultivation dates back thousands of years. The first written accounts of cannabis use can be found in Chinese records dating from 2800
BC
. However, experts widely accept that cannabis was being used for medical, recreational and religious purposes for thousands of years before that, relieving the pain of childbirth in Roman Palestine and putting a smile on the face of Greek philosophers.
When it first came to Britain in the nineteenth century, and was sold by an Oxford Street pharmacist, one of its benefits, recorded in the
Lancet,
was ‘restoring the appetite which had been lost by chronic opium drinking’. Although it was made illegal in 1928, its popularity has grown ever since. Thanks to advances in genetic engineering and careful blending of brands, the average cannabis joint available today is around ten times stronger than those that were being passed around in the 1960s.
This increase in strength has led to an increase in associated health problems. Although most cannabis-users find the drug helps them to relax and chill out, others find themselves feeling paranoid, or, worse, violent and aggressive. An American study of 268 murderers showed that almost a quarter of them had been under the influence of cannabis when they committed their crimes and that many claimed they would not have killed had it not been that their inhibitions were lowered by the drug. In Britain the president of the Coroners Society has declared that cannabis is increasingly the factor behind deaths recorded as accidents or suicides. He estimates that in 2003, cannabis was a significant contributory factor in about ten out of 100 deaths with which he dealt.
Cannabis consumption has been linked to depression, paranoia and other mental-health problems. But any health problems linked to cannabis pale alongside those caused by alcohol and tobacco. For this reason the Government has bowed to pressure from the pro-cannabis lobby and, in January 2004, reclassified the drug from Class B to Class C. Although supply and trafficking remain illegal, possession for personal use is no longer an offence for which the police can make an arrest.
Britain now has the highest rate of use in Europe and the annual market is worth at least £1 billion. There are an estimated 1.5 million regular cannabis smokers in Britain, spending around £800 a year each on their drugs. Another 1.5 million count themselves ‘occasional’ users and the numbers of both are steadily growing. Beloved of ageing hippies, rebellious teenagers, and the middle-aged – men and women with equal enthusiasm – it is the only drug that truly transcends generations, with many households where parents and children share the same stash.
Most regular users obtain their supplies from small neighbourhood dealers, who often conduct their business from their own living rooms, or directly from friends, all of which adds to the sense that smoking cannabis has little to do with organised crime.
This could not be further from the truth.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Martin agrees to talk only on condition that I do not use his real name and say nothing about his current location other than that it is a high-security British prison. A well-spoken, middle-aged businessman, he recently allowed his greed to get the better of him when he dabbled his toe in the waters of high-level cannabis smuggling. Within a few weeks he found himself working alongside some of the most notorious villains in the UK and, following a police bust, is now in fear of his life.
‘I’d been working in the import/export business but all legitimate. I was doing okay but not as well as I’d have liked, and word must have got out to a friend of a friend who suggested a way I might make a lot more money.
‘Initially I thought they were talking about cigarettes but I soon found out the truth. If it had been anything other than cannabis I would never have got involved. I’d smoked a bit of dope when I was younger, mainly during my student years, and had this romantic notion that the people in charge of bringing the stuff into the country were all a bit like Howard Marks – well-educated, well-groomed sorts with hippie tendencies, who felt it was part of their mission in life to help people to chill out. I guess it might have been like that once, but it certainly isn’t any more.
‘The people I was working for threw me right in at the deep end. I was working for gangs in Nottingham, Cardiff, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, London, Kent and Southampton. They were big-time dealers ordering hundreds of kilos at a time.
‘I collected the money for these shipments and arranged for it to be sent back to the leaders of the gang who were in Spain and Gibraltar. I guess I always knewthat somewhere up the supply chain cannabis was big business, but the scale of it astonished me. In the space of a few weeks I had dealt with more than £75 million.
‘I’d fallen in with one of ten or so gangs operating at the top level. They were bringing in twenty tonnes of cannabis each month and could bring in a further ton of cocaine or heroin at the same time. It took only three weeks of involvement for me to realise I was in way over my head and that I had to be out, but by then it was too late.’
Following a tip-off, officers from Customs and the National Crime Squad followed one of the gang’s lorries and raided it as it pulled into a shopping centre in Southampton. They found three tonnes of high-quality cannabis resin. Martin was arrested soon afterwards – more than £700,000 in cash was found at his home – and that was when his problems really began.
‘A lot of people got arrested but, as is always the way, the main organisers had managed to get away clean. I’d never been in trouble with the police before. As soon as they locked me in the cell I had pretty much decided the best thing was to plead guilty. They had made it pretty clear in the initial interview that they had all the evidence they needed against me. It had all taken place in such a short period of time that I hadn’t had a chance to get rid of any paperwork or anything.
‘But everyone else in the gang was pleading not guilty. I didn’t think it was going to be a problem – I wasn’t planning on saying anything – but they didn’t see it that way. Because my plea was different the police took me to court separately from everyone else. When I got up into the dock I had a quick look around the public gallery to see if my friends and family were there. They were, but so was another man. He was the chief bodyguard of the man who was at the head of the gang, one of those who had got away. I’ll never forget the look he gave me. His eyes were so cold, so dead. I felt like I was going to pass out.
‘Once I’d been sentenced, officers from the National Crime Squad came to see me in prison to see if I could tell them anything. They wanted to know about large quantities of Class A drugs that the gang had been bringing in. They said they knew I had been working for some extremely serious people, and that if I helped them, they could arrange a huge reduction in my sentence. I told them I had nothing to say, but they told me to think about it and that they would come back.
‘A few days later I was told that my solicitor had come to see me. I was surprised – I wasn’t expecting him – but made my way down to the meeting room anyway. When I arrived I saw that it wasn’t my solicitor, it was the solicitor of the leader of the gang. He got straight to the point. He knew all about my meeting – I have no idea how – and said that if I talked to the police, I would get a bullet in the head. He said that he’d be keeping an eye on me during my time in prison and that he’d been authorised to send me a little money every now and then.
‘He knew so much about what had been said it was almost as if he’d been sitting in the room when I had the meeting. He even knew the number of my prison cell. By the time the meeting was over I was a nervous wreck. I became completely paranoid. I felt I couldn’t trust anyone. I felt the only way I could possibly be safe was if I cooperated with the police and got them to agree to protect me. I knew the gang I was dealing with had a great deal of power, I just didn’t realise how much I had underestimated them.
‘The police said they could only help if I made a statement against the gang leader, which I did. They then began discussing proposals for placing me in the witness-protection programme and moving me to a special prison unit where I would be beyond the reach of the gang. They said they would make inquiries and get back to me.
‘Two weeks later I had another legal visit and this time I was astounded to see a solicitor for one of the other members of the gang waiting for me. I had never met the man before but I had seen him making his way in and out of the visit room. He had a reputation for dealing only with wealthy, guilty criminals and almost always managing to get them off. My day went from bad to worse. He explained that he had seen the transcripts of the interview I had given to the police and wanted to know what I was planning.
‘At that moment the prison staff came in and explained that I had been shown into the wrong room by mistake. A few doors down, the officers from the National Crime Squad were waiting for me. They explained that a Customs officer had been arrested for corruption and that they suspected he may have been passing information about me onto members of the criminal gang. They were concerned, distraught, saying it was the first time anything like this had ever happened to them. I was absolutely terrified, too terrified even to tell them what the solicitor in the other room had told me.
‘The police said that for my own safety I was immediately being moved to another prison and that they would have to carry out the interviews once again. This time I refused point-blank.
‘I know that I am being watched. Prison is not a safe place to be and I will be here for at least ten more years. Not a day goes by that I don’t worry about being maimed or killed. Even though I never gave evidence against anyone in the gang, they know I once said that I would. I’m going to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.