‘I feel so ashamed and terrified of what might happen to me. Even though I was involved for such a short time I dealt with some very serious criminals. They had connections to Colombians and Russians, and to people like Kenny Noye [a notorious gangland figure linked to the Brinks Mat gold and currently serving life for a brutal road rage murder on the M25]. They were not scared to have someone shot if he talked or stepped out of line. I don’t want that person to be me.’
The link between British organised crime and the business of drug-trafficking is relatively recent. Up until the mid-1970s the old-school criminals saw all drugs, even cannabis, as something to be avoided, the stuff of hippies and junkies. But as the decade came to a close, gangs of former armed robbers – many of whom had experienced cannabis in prison – began moving in on the scene and taking it over. Between 1977 and 1980 the amount of cannabis resin seized by British customs officials trebled.
One of the first to get involved in the trade was none other than George Francis, the armed robber and Brinks Mat gold handler, who was shot dead in May 2003. In late 1979, Francis was a prominent member of one of Britain’s first large-scale criminal drug-smuggling gangs. Specially converted containers were sent to a shoe factory in Pakistan, where millions of pounds of cannabis were hidden among legitimate goods and shipped back to the UK. The first four runs went like clockwork. Francis and other members of the gang began living the good life, buying cars, jewellery and making a show of lighting their cigars with twenty-pound notes in the south London pubs they frequented.
But when the fifth drug consignment arrived, Customs officers were watching. Lennie ‘Teddy Bear’ Watkins, driving a lorry filled with £2.5 million worth of cannabis, spotted the surveillance team, prompting Customs investigator Peter Bennett to move in to make the arrest. Watkins opted not to come quietly and promptly shot Bennett dead.
Watkins was sentenced to life and the rest of the gang were put on trial. Rather than spend time inside, Francis let it be known that he would pay £100,000 to anyone who could nobble the jury in his trial.
The contract was supposedly taken up by the A team, a notorious north London criminal clan, and turned out to be money well spent. At his first trial the jury failed to reach a verdict. At the retrial Francis was acquitted, even though several other members of the gang who had been faced with exactly the same evidence had pleaded guilty.
At the time Pakistan was the main source of cannabis coming to the UK, but shipping it in was a long and expensive high-risk process. The market didn’t really take off until the summer of 1978 when the Spanish government ended its hundred-year extradition treaty with Britain. Originally drawn up by Benjamin Disraeli with the specific intention of preventing British runaways finding sanctuary in the sun, the Spanish decided it was unworkable, paving the way for the birth of the infamous Costa del Crime.
Over the next three years more than a hundred of Britain’s most-wanted men beat a retreat to a luxurious exile. Few became homesick. The weather was warmer, the houses were bigger, the cars were always convertible and the police didn’t recognise you, let alone trouble you. There were British pubs selling British beer, restaurants serving double egg and bacon for breakfast, scampi and chips for lunch and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Sunday dinner. There was even a British tabloid paper linked to the
Sun.
The expats who weren’t ready for complete retirement also had an ace up their sleeves. With Morocco just a fast speedboat ride from the Costa del Sol, Spain soon became the biggest port of entry to Europe for North African hashish.
In the charmless town of Ketama, high in Morocco’s Rif mountains, growing cannabis, or
kif,
as it is known, is an industry that supports more than a million families. The area is renowned for its beauty but the soil is too harsh for wheat or olives. Cannabis, on the other hand, flourishes.
Fondly referred to by the locals as ‘green petrol’, the export of up to two thousand tonnes of
kif
per year earns Morocco around £2 billion a year in hard currency, albeit illegally. In 2001 the Moroccan government announced that it planned to eliminate all hashish production within seven years, but in Ketama there are few signs of any change, with cannabis plantations spreading as far as the eye can see. It is a business everyone wants to be in. Even the lowest grade pickers and weeders can earn thirty pounds a day in a country where the average weekly wage is less than fifteen.
But the real money is in exporting and trafficking. The Moroccan drugs barons, powerful landowners who control Ketama, quickly forged a close relationship with the British expat criminals.
At first the British took a purely financial interest, putting up money as a stake and doubling their investment in a matter of days. But then they started to get more involved. The biggest ‘firms’ employed Moroccan middle-men, who would haggle for a good price in the Rif mountains where the marijuana grows on discreet farms, hidden from prying eyes by cedar forests, or meet representatives of the growers in plush Tangiers hotels. There would also be a team of boatmen, drivers and heavies. Rarely would quantities of less than half a tonne be considered.
To stay one step ahead, the method of smuggling would be varied. Sometimes small boats would be used, sometimes panels of hashish would be stashed inside lorries in ‘friendly’ Moroccan warehouses. The vehicles would be loaded with perishable goods, such as oranges or fresh flowers, then sealed shut with Transport Internationale Routiere (TIR) bonds, which ensured they would speed through Customs checkpoints with little or no interference. Other teams would simply fly their consignments direct from the Rif to small airfields in quiet Spanish provinces while others would rely on visiting friends and relatives to strap a few kilos to their bodies and breeze through Customs with the holiday crowd.
By the early 1980s, there was an efficient, British-controlled cannabis-smuggling network moving approximately four tonnes of high-quality resin back to the UK each year. The local police had little chance of infiltrating the network – few of the firms hired Spaniards – and it took years for the investigations to make any progress. In the late 1990s, the trade was at its height and a kilo of cannabis resin was worth around £2200 in the UK.
Today, users have become more discerning. As Baz, a Manchester-based dealer who imports direct from Spain, says, ‘People are getting a lot choosier about what they want from a smoke. Ten years ago they were happy to take whatever was available. Now they’ll actually put in orders for certain brands, certain varieties, and if you don’t have what they’re looking for they’ll just go elsewhere. They’ve started to realise how good skunk can be and that’s why the price of resin has fallen so much.
‘There’s talk about them legalising it but that’s never gonna happen and even if it does, it still won’t affect me. If they legalise it, they’re going to have to tax it. If they do that, it means that people who buy in bulk on the black market will still be able to undercut the official price. Cigarettes and alcohol are legal, but people still make millions from smuggling them for just that reason. People seem to think that you can get rid of crime just by making something legal but that’s never been the case and it never will be.’
Baz has one more trick up his sleeve. He has formed an alliance with a group of local ‘home growers’ in the Salford area and gets some of his supplies direct from them.
Research carried out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2002 found there had been a sharp rise in domestic cultivation, particularly in home-grown cannabis for personal use. Most of the crop is produced hydroponically – without soil and using special lights and heaters for the best possible environment. The foundation found that yet another reason the price of imported cannabis had fallen was because for the first time the amount of domestically cultivated product had overtaken the level of imports.
Although growing plants are illegal, the paraphernalia that surrounds them, even the seeds (until they germinate), is not. With two hundred shops and several websites catering exclusively for those who want to grow their own, advice and equipment is always at hand. For an investment of just £500, it is possible to grow plants that will produce £1000 worth of high-quality cannabis every three months.
After putting in a request with Baz, I receive a phone call from David, one of his new suppliers: ‘It started because me and a few of my mates who like a smoke were getting fed up with the way our dealers were behaving. Everyone knows the price is going down, and every time we went round, they’d start putting us under pressure to try this or try that. We don’t want anything else, we just want to enjoy a nice smoke every now and then. This way we get to have weed without any of the hassle.
‘It’s a high-risk operation. We’re lucky because our room is based in a loft and we’ve got plenty of room for the lights and heaters. We’ve got about forty plants on the go at the moment and they’ll mature in a couple of weeks. The smells are a problem – it’s so distinctive that if someone happens to be walking past and the wind is going in the wrong direction, you’re fucked. We got some carbon filters in the other day and that seems to be helping a lot. But then there’s the heat and the lights. It’s pretty bright up there when everything is on so you have to make sure you don’t have any gaps in your roof tiles otherwise it looks like a fucking Christmas tree when they come on in the middle of the night.
‘But everyone I know who has ever been busted, it was because they got grassed up, no pun intended. They do stupid things at parties like passing joints and asking what people think because “a friend of a friend” grew it. That’s why it’s good having Baz around. We don’t have to go out and find customers, we just give him our excess and he gives us back the money. Very few people know what we’re doing.
‘Most of the time I feel like I’m wandering around with a stick up my arse. I don’t drink and drive, I help old ladies cross the street, I even pick up bits of litter. It’s mad. The thing is, though, you can’t be seen to be doing anything wrong. The last thing you want it to get picked up for something that gives the plod the chance to search your place.
‘In Amsterdam it’s legal to grow up to twelve plants as long as they’re only for your own personal use. It would be great if they would do something like that over here. All this cloak-and-dagger stuff, sometimes it’s exciting but most of the time it’s just a pain in the arse.’
Ironically the increasing market for home-grown cannabis has emerged at a time when cannabis being smuggled in from overseas is less likely to be intercepted than at any time in the past thirty years. Both Customs and Excise and the National Criminal Intelligence Service admit that, since the start of the new millennium, their efforts have been focused almost exclusively on Class A drugs. Large shipments are seized whenever they are found but all intelligence efforts have been redirected towards heroin, cocaine and ecstasy. Since the introduction of the new policy, cannabis seizures have fallen by almost half.
With more of the drug flooding into Britain than ever before, the price has also fallen dramatically, particularly in the case of resin. (By the time it was reclassified, the price of resin had fallen by around 60 per cent from the mid 1990s high.) For major traffickers, like the gang Martin worked for, this hasn’t been too much of a problem. They import in such vast quantities that sizeable profits are always guaranteed. Not so for the middle-ranking smugglers. Some are leaving resin aside to focus more on herbal varieties, which still command high prices, others are bringing in Class A drugs alongside their cannabis to maintain their level of income.
Some have found a more novel way to make up the difference: they are forsaking Morocco and tapping into a brand new source where rock-bottom prices mean they can enjoy profit margins as high as 4000 per cent. In many cases the new gangs are making more money than those trafficking cocaine and heroin.
Cannabis from South Africa and neighbouring countries is some of the most potent in the world and now accounts for the vast majority of seizures in the UK. In Britain, high quality ‘skunk’ cannabis sells for around £3500 a kilo. In South Africa the same product – known locally as
dagga
– can be bought for twenty pounds a kilo, less if bought in bulk. In some areas,
dagga
is said to be on sale for only forty pence a kilo.
The rapid growth of this market is creating overnight multimillionaires, who invest their new-found wealth in other areas of criminality. Those running the trade rely on a network of couriers to bring suitcase-sized loads of the drug to the UK, often via France, Germany and, in particular, Ireland.
During the summer of 2003, eight out of ten drug smugglers detained at Dublin International airport were South African. The gangs have since switched tactics and are flying into other airports. Customs officials at Birmingham have dealt with a string of cases involving South African couriers in recent months. Authorities in South Africa have also seized shipments bound for the West Midlands.
Most of the mules are white Afrikaners who have fallen on hard times. They are given a plane ticket and paid around five hundred pounds to carry a suitcase holding up to twenty-five kilos of marijuana. The drugs are wrapped in plastic and covered in coffee and carbon paper to avoid detection by sniffer dogs and X-ray machines. The couriers, usually women, are given telephone numbers to call on arrival in Dublin, then get tickets to complete their journeys to the UK.
One Garda detective told me, ‘A lot of what is going on involves testing out routes. Because the amount of money invested is low, the traffickers can afford to lose a shipment or two. The average amount the couriers carry is twenty-five kilos. That costs just five hundred pounds at the South African end, but is worth seventy-five thousand when it gets to the UK.’